I stopped by my Apple Store (Pioneer Place Mall, Portland OR) on my lunch break to see if they had any new Mac Pros (the desktops Apple announced and shipped this week) in I could pop open and take a look at.
There’s a discussion on one of the tech boards I read about the Mac Pros. I wanted to see if I could resolve the issue with a visit to the store to see one in person.
They have built-in hard drive sleds that don’t use cables – just slide the drive in and it plugs into a card in the back of the drive bay. Cool, but that means you’re stuck with the bus they provide. What if you wanted to put in an internal RAID of SCSI cards? Or had some older non-SATA drives to use?
The discussion was based off pictures posted on the web. Some folk were saying that the plugs for the drives was on the motherboard and that there’d be no room to get alternate cables in there.
Others thought that the plugs were on separate riser cards that could be removed without taking a Dremel to the mobo.
I wanted to provide some actual observational data to the discussion. Plus, ogle the sexy hardware.
…sadly, that was not to be. It was a busy lunchtime, and for some reason there was only one sales person the floor. The sales girl (not a Genius – there’s only a few of those in the store and they were all busy behind the bar) started to pop the only floor model they had open (a 2.66 GHz), realized it didn’t have the protective plastic cover like the G5s did, and then closed it back up because she didn’t want to run it while it was open.
She then pulled up the web page for the Mac Pro and pointed to the pretty pictures.
“Um, I’ve seen the web page. I just need to take a look inside” I said.
“Oh, well, we can’t do that without shutting it down” she said. I was kinda frustrated. She was cute – a redhead. My weakness. But I didn’t want to flirt with her, I wanted to see the sexy computer.
“Well, why don’t we shut it down?” The look on her face told me that she was looking for an appropriately customer-service-y way to say “no”.
“You can’t shut it down?” I asked one last time.
“…not really” she said.
So, sorry I have nothing to report. As a side note, is there some actual technical reason they can’t shut down the floor computers? Like they’re configured to automatically power back up or something? Wouldn’t that be easy enough to disable in System Prefs?