At one point when the Mac Pro first came out, I drafted an article about why the Mac Pro was a better deal than the iMac for the poweruser home consumer. Yes, of course Mac Pros are worth it for professionals, but for the home user–even one who likes to really put his computer through its paces–is a Mac Pro worth the added investment?

Half-way through the article, I started realizing that it really may not be. Well, where’s the beef? What does a poweruser care about?

Processing power. Yes, the Mac Pro’s Xeon is better than the Intel Core 2 Duo. Now, forget about the 8-core Mac Pro. Unless money is immaterial to you, its ridiculous price tag makes the Mac Pro irrelevant for a consumer purchase discussion. That said, the Mac Pro has 4 cores, whereas the iMac has 2 cores. Nevertheless, a 2.66GHz Mac Pro’s overall benchmark of 299 competes with 2.16GHz iMac getting an overall benchmark of 245 and a 2.33GHz iMac at 259.

That seems significant, doesn’t it? Maybe. The zip archive benchmark took 2:01 on the Mac Pro, 2:15 and 2:22 on the iMacs; an MP3 encoding took 0:48 on the Mac Pro, 0:56 and 1:03 on the iMacs; the game ran at 91FPS on the Mac Pro, 74FPS and 83FPS on the iMacs. Those are certainly real differences. But be realistic. The zip took all 3 Macs two minutes. The encoding took all 3 Macs about a minute. We’re obsessing over seconds. And both computers played the game at over 60FPS. Many would argue that the magical 60FPS mark is all that really matters.

Disagree? Well, bear with me until we get to pricing.

Graphics Card. The Mac Pro comes standard with the Nvidia GeForce 7300GT 256MB. This is the same card in the high-end 24-inch iMac (albeit 128MB), and the mid-range iMacs have the decent ATI Radeon X1600. If you’re BIG into gaming, I suppose this would matter a bit. If you are a casual gamer or don’t do the amazing absolute latest and greatest games (I raise my hand on both counts), then the iMacs are absolutely adequate. But if it does matter to you, both cards let you upgrade to their 256MB equivalents.

Memory. Both Macs come with 1GB standard. The iMac maxes at 3GB. I’m sorry, that is more than adequate for a home consumer, even a poweruser. A home consumer buying a machine that can do 16GB of RAM but only using 1GB-3GB is like buying a mansion and never using 75% of the rooms. Furthermore, the Mac Pro RAM is more costly. Upgrading to 2GB costs $299 on a Mac Pro but only $175 on the iMac.

Storage. I used to think this was a big point. The Mac Pro’s four internal SATA bays, with drive mirroring, means fast fast FAST! I was discussing this with a person I work with, and he mentioned that he was mirroring some external drives for the same purpose. Okay. So a couple external drives take a bit of desk space, but so does a huge Mac Pro tower.

Misc. Time for each opponent to pull out his unique powerup. Mac Pros have PCI Express slots. But most home users never use them. Both come with a standard keyboard and mouse, but the iMac comes with Wi-fi and Bluetooth as a standard option whereas the Mac Pro tacks on another $79 for those features.

So, let’s do the cage match. In one corner, we have the 2.66GHz Mac Pro (bench 299), with 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, Wi-fi/Bluetooth, and a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display. In the other corner, a 24-inch 2.16GHz iMac (bench 245), with 2GB RAM, 250GB HD, Wi-fi/Bluetooth. To be fair, we’ll upgrade the graphics card to 256MB ($125) to match the Mac Pro.

What’s the final “score”? The 24-inch 2.16GHz iMac weighs in at $2,299. The 2.66GHz Mac Pro with 23-inch display weighs in at a whopping $3,776. How valuable are those few extra seconds for MP3 encoding now? Are they worth $1,477 dollars?

Do you feel like I skewed the numbers a bit in favor of my point? Well, there is some wiggle room. But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

In favor of the Mac Pro:

1. I could save a few hundred dollars on a non-Apple monitor, to save some money on the Mac Pro. But to be fair, pick a high-quality model. Perhaps the Dell 24″ LCD. Pricegrabber is currently showing $585 which shaves $315 from the Mac Pro price.
2. You can upgrade the iMac to 2.33GHz for an additional $250. This brings the iMac and Mac Pro to a slightly closer speed comparison.

It is only fair to note a discrepancy in the iMac arrangement:

1. Very likely, you may not care about the 256MB upgrade for the iMac’s video card. Axe it. That saves us $125.
2. You could argue that getting a smaller LCD would significantly lower the price of the Mac Pro. But the same is true for the iMac: Going from 24-inch to 20-inch drops the iMac price $500 dollars! This probably gives the iMac a slight advantage, because you won’t find a quality 20-inch monitor for the Mac Pro for that much less. But the iMac is going to be generous and just consider the smaller-monitor argument disqualified.

My favorable Mac Pro adjustments closed the gap by $565, but the iMac savings opened it by $125 again. That makes the Mac Pro expense sit at $1,037 ahead of the iMac.

Again: Are a few extra seconds of encoding or zipping, or a few extra FPS, worth $1,000? Bear in mind that both of these configurations would produce super-fast, deluxe systems bearing 24-inch monitors. You are paying a thousand bucks for the capability of extensive future expansion. Expansion that you likely will not need within the life of your Mac, especially if you apply the $1,000 toward replacing your iMac with a newer model sooner than you would be able to replace your Mac Pro.

The obvious skewing factor is if you already have a great, large LCD. However, even if you have a display currently but would like to upgrade to a nicer one, the iMac seems to be a real powerhouse that could double as a fine time to make that display upgrade for an incredibly competitive price/performance ratio in comparison to the hefty Mac Pro.

I seem to always forget this, so hopefully blogging about it will help me remember and serve as a future reference.

We're using labels to line up form elements like so:

No problem. Everything looks great. Now I'll take that same concept but add some disparity in the heights of the label and the content. For this example, let's use a <div> with multiline content. Let's put borders around the content areas so that we can see what's going on.

Here is the HTML:

Some CSS like this might work:

That should produce something like this:

Oh my. That's not the effect I was shooting for. But look at the green borders of the inner divs. They aren't next to the floated label like I'd expect; they are on top of it, but their content still flows around the floated label, which is why the first example above with the text fields looks fine, but this multiline div reveals the actual behavior the div has when it sits below a floating element.

Right around now is when I'm cursing floats and dreaming of the days of table-based layouts. This behavior is actually intentional though, and once you understand it, it isn't hard to work with. Like the Float Basics page on Floatutorial points out:

A floated box is laid out according to the normal flow, then taken out of the flow and shifted to the left or right as far as possible. Content can flow down the right side of a left-floated box and down the left side of a right-floated box.

That explanation makes the behavior make perfect sense. The label is taken out of the flow, and thus the <div> sits on top of it. Once you understand that, it is easy to see that a left margin or padding will take care of the div's alignment.

This change:

Produces the desired effect:

The final result, without the borders:

If my hands are on the keyboard, a new tab is just a Ctrl-T away.

When my hand is on the mouse, a middle-click on a link will open that link in a new tab. Great, very convenient. What about opening a new tab to enter a new URL? I just learned that double-clicking on the blank space in the tab area will open a new blank tab! How convenient is that?

Before, I would right-click on the tab area and click "New Tab". This double-click is much more convenient when your hands aren't already on the keyboard.

The first Mac I personally bought (in college) was an iMac DV Special Edition. Although it looks a bit aged now, that original iMac G3 design was awesome. The iMac G4 was even more gorgeous, with a great flat panel display. I feel this is the most beautiful Mac ever designed. I feel so strongly about this that I sold my iMac G3 and bought an iMac G4 back when the iMac G5 was already out, just because I wanted one of these beauties (it isn't used as my primary, or even secondary, machine). I don't know if I'll ever be able to bring myself to get rid of it.

This brings me to my point, though. Despite the fact that I've owned 2 of the 3 iMac designs, I have an aversion against the existing iMac design: The Jay Leno chin! What is UP with that big chin, which is only accentuated by the way the monitor swivels up and down??

Hark! AppleInsider says: Apple's next-generation iMacs to add a touch of grace! The iMac has always been somewhat of a feature canvas for Apple's artistic prowess in its design. Apple dominates in the laptop market for its excellent design that features beauty as well as usability and efficiency. But desktop machines are much easier to work with because size isn't emphasized as heavily. With every revision of the iMac, even the Jay Leno design, Apple has progressively put its superior portable design expertise to use, resulting in sleek and beautiful desktop designs.

The Jay Leno iMac didn't appeal to me. But now as I prepare to replace my primary Mac, the prospect of a new and exciting iMac design has reenergized my interest in the iMac. And according to AppleInsider, I might get my wish as early as WWDC.