After what has seemed to so many of us like an eternity, the wait for the Nehalem Xeon Mac Pros is finally over. When Macworld 2009 passed without any i7 or Nehalem Xeon announcement, I was worried that it would be a while before the dual-socket boards would be released. But Apple finally came through with eight cores, hyper-threading, and a speedy new frontside bus to make us masters of the deadline. It's safe to say that not everyone needs (or can afford) these new eight-core machines, but I've done some serious high-end grind-work to see what sort of user might be able to justify tossing his pocketbook into the juicer for this potential monster.

Our review would have been up a week earlier but I originally received a bad machine that crashed repeatedly and then refused to boot. Fortunately, it looks like this is far from common from the lack of "hey, I got a dud too" posts on Apple's Mac Pro 2009 forum. The second machine is doing fine—he's able to stay up without crashing and he's even got my smile.

Test machines

8-core Nehalem Xeon Mac Pro 2.66 GHz

12GB RAM/14GB RAM test configs

AMD Radeon 4870/Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 test configs

Mac OS X 10.5.6

8-core Penryn Xeon Mac Pro 2.8 GHz (early 2008)

14 GB RAM

Nvidia Quadro FX 5600/Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT test configs

Mac OS X 10.5.6

The Greener Out-of-Box Experience

You've probably noticed Apple's new-found love of green. Their ads and new hardware are all touting the reduction in PCBs and other harmful materials, all of which is intended to keep them off of Greenpeace's naughty list. Say what you will about Greenpeace dogging Apple the way they did, but it's clear that consumers care about the environment. If Apple's going to retain their position as a computer for those who care about more than pinching a few pennies, then they are going to need all the bragging rights they can get. The new Mac Pro box reflects this position:

Yes, it looks beat up.

The old Mac Pro boxes were much sleeker due to the matte-laminated exterior (which makes black ink look like it's outer space), but this finish made the box unrecyclable so it's been ditched. I'm personally happy to see that a company as design-centric as Apple can do away with the wasteful consumer-coddling and let the product speak for itself. But I do think they could have picked a better color than white, because it's clearly a dirt magnet. As any art director will tell you, green is not an option, so it's hard to say what's better. Maybe they thought natural cardboard would conjure horrifying images of the days of Gil Amelio.

Once you open the box though, the tree planting party is over—the giant hunks of styrofoam remain. I can understand that it's going to be a lot trickier to replace these, considering the 60lb weight of the machine. Hey, maybe we just found a second use for all those disposable chopsticks? The surprise could be what flavor your Mac shows up covered in ("Mom, I got a Teriyaki Pro!") Call me, Apple.

The outside of the Nehalem Mac Pro has the same dimensions as the older, Penryn Xeon-based machines. It features the same number of USB 2 ports (three on the back and two on the front), but in place of Firewire 400 ports, there are now Firewire 800 ports, for a total of four Firewire 800 ports and no Firewire 400 ones. A lot of people seem to be up in arms about this latter move, but I'm still on the fence about it. On one hand, I'd rather have more high-speed ports available to me, but on the other hand, I have to buy a whole new round of adapters:

Firewire 800 to 4-pin cable for DV capture. $15 you never wanted to spend.

I think that three Firewire 800 ports and one 400 port would have been the sweet spot. I'm sure that once Apple reads this, they'll change the machine accordingly.

No Blu-ray burner

This could have been the first generation of Mac Pros to debut with Blu-ray burners, but it looks like we'll have to wait some more. The BD write speeds are finally out of glacial territory, burning support is in Adobe Encore and Toast, and HDCP is supported on Apple's video cards and monitors, so it's currently Apple that's the hold-up. Price is likely the issue, but that shouldn't stop this from being a custom config option. As it is, there still isn't a compatible player, and OS X lacks support for Blu-ray video, so the missing hardware is only half the problem. I'm guessing that Blu-ray software support is going to debut with Snow Leopard, since it involves writing 64-bit drivers for the devices and DRM. The good news is that the Mac Pros still sport an empty 5.25" drive slot, so adding a Blu-ray drive in the future will be easy.

With that said, the included 18X DVD burner is nice, but loud when spinning up. It isn't Xbox 360 loud when playing DVDs though, just when reading at the max 18X speed.