Apple

It's as clear as it gets in the Apple rumor business that if you're in the market for one of the company's iMacs, it's probably worth waiting a few weeks.

March came in like a lion, and could go out with an iMac.

(Credit: CNET)

Several rumors flew across the Internet over the weekend and Monday, hurled by World of Apple and others, that Apple is finally gearing up for the long-awaited refresh of its all-in-one iMac desktop sometime later this month. Such an overhaul is long overdue in the minds of many Apple watchers, who have been hearing about a potential iMac refresh since last November.

Surprisingly, few details are available about what changes Apple is planning to make to the iMac, which could suggest that the changes will be under the hood rather than design-related. The Nvidia integrated graphics chipsets used in last October's MacBook refresh are a decent bet, perhaps combined with the 9600M discrete graphics card as Apple did with the MacBook Pro.

Maynard Um of UBS put out a research note Monday saying that one sure bet for the new systems are Intel's Nehalem processors. The server version of those chips is scheduled to be out relatively soon, which means Apple will probably also have a new high-end Mac Pro soon, as OSX86 contributor Netkas (via Ars Technica) has uncovered.

The Mac Pro might smell funny, but Apple says there's no evidence that smell is harmful.

(Credit: Apple)

Claims that Apple's Mac Pros emit benzene are being denied by the company.

A French newspaper called Libération.fr published the results of a study by a researcher at France's INERIS claiming that odors stemming from certain Mac Pros are the result of benzene emissions. Complaints have surfaced in the past about some sort of weird odor coming from Mac Pros, but it was thought the odor was related to small strips of plastic or material around the heatsink on the processor, depending on where you looked.

The study claims that the benzene fumes won't kill you immediately or anything, but could cause health problems such as leukemia over time. Apple, however, told Macworld it has found no evidence of benzene emissions from the Mac Pro, although it continues to look into the issue.

Apple and Nvidia are finally shipping a graphics card for owners of older Mac Pros who felt left out in the cold in January.

When Apple introduced the newest version of the Mac Pro in January, it offered Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT graphics card as an upgrade option on those systems. Owners of older Mac Pros, however, were miffed that Apple said the cards would only work with the latest Mac Pro generation, because firmware in the card could only support the PCI Express 2.0 standard unveiled with the new Mac Pros.

The thing is, those cards were supposed to be backwards-compatible with older PCI Express standards. Many were irate that Apple appeared to be forcing them to buy a new Mac Pro to get the 8800 GT, but Nvidia said it would release an upgrade kit in due time. And it's now available on Apple's site for $279.

Correction 5:30 p.m. PST: This blog initially mischaracterized the nature of the unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server Leopard that comes with a new Apple Xserve. It allows purchasers to connect an unlimited number of clients to that server.

Apple got a little business out of the way before next week's Macworld extravaganza, announcing new versions of the Mac Pro and Xserve to go along with new Intel chips.

These systems are very high-end computers, designed for heavy work rather than organizing photos of your latest trip to St. Louis. Both the Mac Pro and the Xserve are available with two of Intel's Xeon 5400 series quad-core processors, and come with loads of memory and other performance-oriented features, like RAID hard drives.

This is Apple's latest Mac Pro, unveiled Tuesday. Click for more pictures of it and the latest Xserve.

(Credit: Apple)

Apple's Mac business has expanded quite a bit over the past year or so, but creative professionals are still the base of that support and these are two products were designed for them, according to David Moody, vice president of Mac product marketing. Very few businesses have standardized on Mac OS X Server in the server room, and therefore the market for the Xserve is somewhat limited. Still, smaller shops that want to have a Mac OS X environment front to back, as well as educational customers, are key Xserve customers.

The Mac Pro is a little different, as it represents the most powerful computer Apple can put together, and is a favorite of graphics professionals that need tons of horsepower. It's also one of the few Apple products for which there are dozens of configuration options; most other Mac products have just three or four choices for combinations of processor, memory, and storage.

Those choices extend to graphics, where Mac Pro customers can select the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card as the standard option, or add a few weeks to their ship times if they prefer Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT or Quadro FX 5600. Even though those products are already available, Moody said Apple needed a few more weeks to make them available for the Mac Pro.

The standard price for the Mac Pro is $2,799, and that includes two quad-core Xeon processors, 2GBs of memory, and a 320-GB hard drive. You can add to that very quickly with some of the configure-to-order options; an additional 2GBs of memory will cost you $500.

If you know what you're doing, you can probably save a lot of money by selecting the standard configuration and adding your own components in after the system arrives. The newest Mac Pro uses the same chassis as the previous generation, which makes it very easy to get into the guts of the system and add memory or storage as desired.

A Xserve will set you back $2,999 in the standard configuration, which comes with only a single quad-core Xeon processor and 2GBs of memory. It does come with an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Leopard, meaning that if you buy an Xserve you can upgrade all the Macs in your shop to Leopard for free. Update 5:30 p.m. PST: Wishful thinking, as several readers pointed out below. An Apple representative confirmed the unlimited license allows you to connect as many clients as you like to the Xserve, not to suddenly get a bunch of Macs in the office up and running on Leopard.

So, cross off two rumors from the list of potential Macworld keynote announcements. These products are definitely the kind of thing that would get lost in any potential news about slim new notebooks, iPhones, or movie rentals, some of the early bets on the Macworld announcement schedule, which makes it a little easier to understand why they came out this week.