Last week, I attended a press event in Los Angeles hosted by Hewlett-Packard's workstation business unit. Hewlett-Packard was preparing for this week's announcement of three new Z-series workstation models: the Z400, Z600, and Z800.
HP briefed the reporters and analysts with all the key details of the products (the speeds and feeds, as we say), took us to visit a couple of HP's key customers in the area, and hosted presentations by software partners and more customers.
The new HP Z-Series workstations.
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)The workstations are very nice, especially the Z600 and Z800: high-quality dual-processor systems based on Intel's newest Xeon 5500-series processors with specific adaptations to distinguish them from ordinary PCs. Even the Z400, though based on a more basic PC-like design, uses a single Xeon processor and provides two 16-lane PCI Express Gen2 slots.
The customer visits were well chosen: one at BMW Designworks and another at DreamWorks, the movie studio that just released Monsters vs. Aliens.
BMW Designworks actually assisted with the industrial design of the new HP workstations. They're handsome machines, but not exactly pretty--certainly not in the way Apple's Mac Pro is.
More importantly, however, the HP-BMW design is functionally superior. In about the same case size as the Mac Pro, HP's Z800 has room for more RAM, more expansion cards, and more disk drives. BMW also worked handles into the design, and they work better than Apple's.
The difference in RAM is quite substantial. It isn't just about the slots (eight in the Mac Pro, twelve in the Z800)--but even more in the fact that HP supports 16GB dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs), while Apple's machine goes only up to 4GB per slot. That's 192GB for the HP and 32GB for the Mac.
To be fair, HP is merely promising to offer 16GB DIMMs by the end of 2009; you can't get them today. Apple rarely preannounces anything, so it's possible that the Mac Pro will support more RAM by then, but HP's advantage in slot count should keep it on top.
More RAM can often give more performance than a faster CPU, especially in memory-hungry engineering applications. If the software overflows the physical memory and must start using virtual memory, performance can plummet.
These are very nice machines. But they're also expensive. The Z800 starts at less than $2,000 (actually a good bit cheaper than the Mac Pro's entry price), but most buyers will aim higher. In fact, it's no big deal to spend $10,000 or more on a high-end workstation.
Does that seem like a lot of money to spend on a PC for business use at a time when many businesses are struggling? Quite the opposite, I think.
The truth is, the cost of a superior PC is almost trivial, compared with the value it can generate in the hands of a highly skilled designer.
HP tried to make this point in its presentations at the event, but it was very conservative in its figures. First, it assumed that the total cost per employee (including salary, benefits, office space, management overhead, etc.) was just $60 per hour, which is very low. Second, it shouldn't have been using a cost model at all!
The more useful basis for this analysis is revenue per employee, which can easily exceed $250 per hour for the kind of workers who can make effective use of a high-price workstation.
For an employee generating this kind of value, a $10,000 workstation justifies its purchase remarkably quickly. Even if the employee's productivity improves just 10 percent, the payback period is a mere 10 weeks.
It's worth thinking about what it takes to generate a 10 percent improvement in overall productivity. It isn't just a matter of computer performance, but performance helps. These new HP workstations are much faster than the older models, due to the combination of the faster CPUs, faster and more RAM, and a new generation of professional graphics cards from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI.
Performance relates to productivity, in terms of how much time the user spends waiting for the computer, so that's what to look for. Assuming that the software is working as well as it can, and the user's work habits are reasonable, processing delays for engineering visualizations, animation previews, circuit simulations, and similar tasks can really add up.
So it's no surprise to me that there's still a market for pricey dual-processor workstations.
What does surprise me is that there aren't more companies trying to rebuild the market for super high-end workstations.
SGI, in its glory days, used to be able to sell some pretty amazing machines for professional users. I have an SGI Octane workstation that originally sold for over $50,000. That seems like crazy money, but even a $50,000 workstation in the right hands could still pay for itself in less than a year, a reasonable return on investment.
Alas, SGI went bankrupt again this week and then promptly sold itself to Rackable Systems for $25 million plus the assumption of SGI's debts.
I'm sad that SGI is gone, but it wasn't the workstation business that killed the company, and the numbers show that market niche still exists. HP could occupy that niche, if it chose, as could any company that makes four- and eight-processor servers, which share most of the same engineering issues.
Some small companies, such as Boxx Technologies (which I wrote about last summer in "Boxx fills in for a failing SGI") and HPC Systems, make bigger workstations, but both of these vendors' product lines are stuck with AMD Opteron processors at the moment, which are no longer performance-competitive with the new Xeons.
Later this year, new multiprocessor-capable Xeon processors will arrive that could reinvigorate the super-workstation market, and I hope that some of these companies step up to the challenge. I believe that there's some good money to be made there, and the rest of the world economy will benefit at the same time.
As usual, there were many specific rumors about what Steve Jobs would be announcing at MacWorld Expo this week. Several were reasonably credible, but Apple runs a tight ship; there's really no way to be sure what will come out at any given show.
The MacBook Air is remarkably thin and stylish, but it isn't for everyone.
(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)At the beginning of the year, based on the better rumors and some discounting of existing Mac products, I was pretty sure we'd see four things: new Mac Pro workstations, a refresh of the MacBook Pro line with Blu-ray optical drives and Intel 45nm processors, minor improvements for the iPhone, and a new subnotebook.
New Mac Pro configurations were announced a week before the show-- minor updates, but significant for the professional audience. We got the new subnotebook, the MacBook Air, this week. The iPhone and iPod got only some software tweaks. There was nothing new for the MacBook Pro family.
But that's okay. I'll keep waiting for a better iPhone, and I'm still sure there'll be Blu-ray equipped MacBook Pro models before long.
In the meantime, the MacBook Air is worth a closer look.
The first thing to understand about this machine is that it's aimed at a relatively small market. Apple made a series of design decisions that limit the audience for the Air, but for those potential buyers who aren't turned off by these choices, the Air is the best machine on the market.
If you're not part of the target audience, though, the Air might look like a poor choice. To quote a friend of mine, Mac book author Brian Tiemann, "Is it just me, or is this a ridiculously overpriced, feature-poor, and generally useless pig of an idea?" Honestly, I can see where he's coming from. I think he just doesn't see where the Air is coming from.
Let's list the obvious objections:
- Non-expandable RAM.
- Small hard disk.
- No optical drive.
- Non-removable battery.
- Peripheral interfaces limited to one USB port and one monitor output.
- High price for the included features ($1,799 and up).
Start with 100 million potential buyers and go down the list. Most will get past the first two points, but the lack of an internal optical drive will turn away a lot of people. The fixed battery is a big problem for a lot of people, and still more folks won't accept the limited I/O options. If you care about any of these things, the Air doesn't look like a good value for money. By the time you reach the end of the list, only a few people will still be paying attention.
But once they look at the Air, those remaining candidates may be quickly won over. It's so thin! The case is so cleverly curvy that it's actually deceptive. Visually it looks thinner than a fashion magazine, but in fact it's three-quarters as thick as a regular MacBook Pro, at least at the back edge. At the front edge it's thinner, but it doesn't taper smoothly down to 0.16" (4mm) as Jobs claimed in his speech. That edge actually hangs in air almost half an inch off the desk. (I didn't bring one of my digital calipers to the Expo, but I do intend to measure a real machine when I get the chance.)
It's too thin for a removable battery; the Air's battery is a lithium-polymer pack just a few millimeters thick spread across the full width of the machine under the palm rests and trackpad. (If you need longer battery life, you'll need an external battery such as the PPS-118 Portable Power Station from Battery Geek. There aren't many other options for MacBooks because of Apple's proprietary MagSafe magnetic power connector.)
The Air is also too thin for a conventional motherboard with sockets for the processor, memory, network interface, and other configurable options. The Air's processor, chipset, and memory are all soldered down on a board about three by six inches that sits to one side below the keyboard. The 80GB hard disk or optional solid-state disk ($999 extra for 16GB less space!) sits beside it. And that's all that's down there; that's all there's room for.
Apple says the Air is the thinnest laptop on the market, and I think that's true. I checked the websites for some notably thin notebooks including the Toshiba Portégé R500, the Sharp Actius MM20, and the Sony VGN-X505; all are thicker. (But most are lighter, and the R500 has an internal optical drive, so I'd have to say Toshiba deserves similar praise for the sophistication of its mechanical engineering.)
Also, the Air is faster than any physically comparable ultraportable, and probably offers better battery life when comparing the standard batteries. It doesn't have the performance of a full-size notebook, but at 1.6 GHz or (for $300 more) 1.8 GHz, it's plenty fast enough for Mac OS X or (if you prefer) Windows Vista.
And while you would inevitably run into bandwidth limitations, that one USB port can be connected through a hub to multiple devices-- flash drives, external hard disks, external Ethernet adapters, even additional external displays using the DisplayLink standard.
There are a lot of small notebooks on the market that sell pretty well. Dell's Latitude D430, for example, is the same weight as the Air, has the same display resolution (on a slightly smaller screen), has all the usual I/O ports and expandability, and it's a good bit cheaper. It's a decent-looking machine, but it makes no sacrifices to style.
By comparison, the MacBook Air looks like it's from a different planet, a more advanced civilization. It's like that because it's missing all of the functionality that forces the Dell machine to look relatively clunky-- all the connectors, buttons, and lights that make it more usable, all the latches and screws that make it expandable. The Air has almost none of that stuff, but while that makes it irrelevant to most people, the Air's clean, thin lines make it uniquely attractive for others.
If I was a Hollywood studio executive, a New York art-gallery owner, or an editor of one of those fashion magazines, there's just no other computer I'd want to use. I'm not any of these things, of course; very few people are. But do understand: there are people who are exceptionally style-conscious for personal and professional reasons, and the MacBook Air was designed for these people.
There are also people who wouldn't use an internal optical drive or an Ethernet cable or an Option GT Max 3.6 Express HSDPA wireless WAN adapter anyway. For these people, simplicity is a positive advantage. The Air is a complete computer; it just isn't designed to be the center of a complex computer system.
If all you need is a display, a keyboard, and a WiFi interface, and you don't mind paying a slight premium for high style, maybe the MacBook Air is for you, too.
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