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A week before Macworld, Apple released hardware updates for their Mac Pro and Xserve products, while I wont be covering the Xserve updates I have to say that they look strong. In the other hand the Mac Pro is the best machine I’ve ever seen and the fastest Mac ever -Apple said.

I’m very impressed with the technology behind this machine and definitely understand why Apple went with Intel for processing power. Not even AMD is getting close to the specs these new Intel Xeon chips have, up to 3.2 GHz Quad Core processors capable of managing 32GB of Memory, these specs are hard to match.

After reading the specs in detail and reading what the industry and bloggers are saying around the web, it looks like the Mac Pro still lacks some features people were expecting to see. The first one, a Blu-ray player option, Apple is a supporter of the Blu-ray format yet no one has seen anything Apple related with support for any HD format.

Apple 23 inch and 30 inch displays are advertise as HD capable and that’s it, no word on whether drives will be an addition on future dates and this drives people crazy (me on the one hand.) I personally think that they are long due to these offering and I can’t simply understand what the delay is.

Did anyone notice that Bluetooth is not an option anymore? WiFi is! This is very weird, the previous model had an optional WiFi-Bluetooth ad on for $99 USD, the new models have integrated Bluetooth and an optional WiFi Extreme card for $49 USD.

One thing I don’t understand, if you can stick up to 4TB why would anyone need a raid card that cost $800 USD to manage a raid on your Mac Pro. Is this true for all flavors of raid (0, 1, 5, and 10) I guess I’m missing something here, my experience with raid arrays is not enough to understand this.

With this new release, Apple included Memory running at 800MHz, which is nice to know that Apple is finally implementing this speed on their memory line. Almost all current processors have a system bus of 800MHz, maybe by Macworld 2008 we have iMacs, MacBook and MacBook Pro running same type of memory.

The addition of the NVIDIA 8800 GT makes this Mac the best choice for many people, let’s not forget that there is another optional graphics card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory, which is killer. If you are thinking on gaming, me too.

Finally, reading Apple’s website I notice something interesting, Apple advertise the Mac Pro as a 1600MHz dual independent frontside bus couple with the 64bit architecture capable of a processing power bandwidth of 25.6GB a second. At this rate, you can manage lots of application and files at the same time on one of these systems, making you the most productive guy/gal on earth.

When traveling with you laptop you may want to consider a wireless mouse, there are many options in the market but one advantage a Mac user have is that every new MacBook or MacBook Pro comes with Bluetooth integrated. These makes the selection of a mouse easier since the reliability of a Bluetooth mouse seems to be better than a plain wireless remote.

Apple Inc offers a Bluetooth mouse, the Apple wireless Mighty Mouse is a Bluetooth mouse that offers great functionality and matches with the elegance that a Mac laptop has. On the downside you have the price, the Apple wireless Mighty Mouse goes for about $69.00 USD, some complaints also points to bad reception from you Mac, bad quality craftsmanship, and poor battery life after a year.

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Most of us have heard of Bluetooth because of our phones, Bluetooth headsets provide us with the ability to place and receive calls hands free providing us with the ability to multitask while on a call. However, Bluetooth goes beyond just that, there’s a number of consumer electronics and industrial devices that make use of this technology. And, just last quarter the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the specification for the new revision of this technology, Bluetooth 2.1 soon to be released will bring better pairing abilities and lower power consumption.

Among the devices that uses the Bluetooth technology we have keyboard, mouse, phones, PDA’s, etc. Since Bluetooth is a low power, low cost technology is easy to implement on almost any device. Interference is not an issue with Bluetooth since it works on a radio spectrum that is open, unlicensed, and hardly used by any other technology. The short range data transfer is works great but is not as short as people would think, operating range can be set depending on necessity from 3 feet to 300 feet approximately, and is able to handle up to 3Mbps of data.

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