Dear Friends,

Happy 2014! We have got sub-zero temperatures and snow to start off the year here in the Green (er..white) Mountains. I had to remind Taylor to take down the snowflakes from the windows down in our Key West store, since it would not occur to us normally because we just have to look out the window to see a lot of snow.

Thank you for keeping my team busy during the holidays! We posted some good numbers for this season and more importantly this drove our 1% gifting to the Vermont Foodbank, Manchester Animal Shelter and Key West SPCA. We all feel very good about the opportunity to help these worthy organizations this year.

I saw an interesting comparison today of the new Mac Pro versus the HP Z420 and the Lenovo S30. These are all high-end professional machines using the same Intel Xeon E5-1620 v2 processor and similar configurations. While most people consider Apple the BMW of computers, this analysis showed that a similarly equipped professional machine was considerably less expensive from Apple while having some significant advantages. The most obvious is the extraordinary futuristic design of the Mac Pro versus that same-old, same old big box design of the PCs.

Other advantages to the Mac Pro are the 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports and support for 802.11AC and, oh yeah, did I say design? The Mac Pro occupies just over 744 cubic inches while both of the PCs are well over 2150 cubic inches. Then, when you look at the prices for entry-level models of each, the Mac Pro has nearly a $1000 advantage coming in at $3248 with AppleCare with the HP and Lenovo each at around $4300. That analysis does not even get into the other advantages of the Mac Pro, namely the fact that it runs Mac OS X with all of its security and performance advantages.

We haven’t gotten our hands on a Mac Pro, yet, but Hapy is over at his desk using the configurator, trying to figure out which Mac Pro will adorn his desk once they are available.