Loose cables and electronics are bad. In electronics as sophisticated as computers, they can cause really odd behavior!

My wife’s Mac Mini was exhibiting odd behavior, namely, sporadic loss of sound. The internal speaker would suddenly become unavailable to the operating system. Furthermore, the speakers did have a slight hum when they were plugged into the Mac Mini. I had opened the Mac Mini up a couple times to upgrade the RAM, so I figured I must have inadvertently pulled the audio line. A few months later, the Mac Mini just outright refused to start up. I’d push the power button, I could hear it power on, but there was no startup chime and no boot-up. I figured the Mac had finally died, but I naturally wasn’t going to give up on it without an autopsy.

If you’ve ever looked at a tutorial on opening the Mac Mini, you know it isn’t the worst thing ever, but it definitely is more complicated than opening, say, a Mac Pro, or really any tower computer. One of the challenges is separating the top chassis, since it is connected with a few cables. One of these is a ribbon in the back, and this ribbon is what was giving me trouble. Take a look at the photo below.

As you can see, the connector was actually in the open position, so the ribbon was sitting loosely in the connector, sporadically losing its connection and wreaking havoc on the system. The ribbon must have eventually pulled away enough so that the computer couldn’t start up at all.

Here’s the ribbon properly inserted and the connector closed shut:

The Mac started fine after that, and it hasn’t had any startup or sound problems since.

Like I have done in the past, I am declaring radio silence today. I will not be check my feeds, look at any Apple news sites, or check my personal email until I can view Apple’s video stream of the WWDC keynote. 

You can view the MacRumors WWDC 2008 Spoiler Free news page if you want to do the same.

AppleInsider, please be gentle. Stop playing with my heart! I’ve only been waiting for a new computer for many months now. Refusing to get burned by buying a new Mac after it has been out for awhile, I waited and waited for a new revamp to the Mac Pro line. Who knew it would go without a redesign for such an abnormally long time?

Well, now I have been feeling like I’d rather have an iMac because the price/performance ratio just doesn’t seem worth it anymore, even for a power user. With huge iMac screen sizes and affordable external RAID devices for fast hard drive access, my last motivating reasons for a Mac Pro have died. But the iMacs have been hanging around without a redesign for abnormally long as well.

And now you say they might finally get a redesign, and what’s more, it might happen in the summer and I don’t even have to wait until MacWorld in January?

Why do I continue to let the rumor sites play with my emotions? I am very excited.

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.