If you want truly awful bang-for-buck, try the Mac Pro, it's hilariously overpriced for such an old machine. The CPU had to be swapped out because Intel stopped making the original ones.
On gazelle my Mac Pro (which is basically identical to the top of the line one you can buy now), gets you about ~$550. In other words, no one should be buying this thing new.
If you have foolishly built a Mac app that does any kind of number crunching, your choices are the newest Mac Pro at whatever absurd price Apple asks or breaking the law with a hackintosh.
Apple has been making moves that look like abandoning the Mac Pro for a while now. It's been three years where the only upgrade has been a chip update forced on them because Intel stopped making the old ones.
If you're thinking of making a video processing app or scientific computing app or any other app that really likes a lot of CPU you should plan your Mac version with a generic unix back end and communicate over the network. Apple is not supporting the market, anymore.
I guess that applies to anyone who wants something other than a phone or tablet. Unfortunately all the other manufacturers have abandoned the mid-range desktop and laptop PC markets even more thoroughly than Apple. I'm still amazed no one else but Apple sold a laptop with an acceptable screen at all for four straight years until 2012.
You might actually be better off getting a Mac Mini or Macbook Pro Retina for those apps, unless they are GPU or RAM bound. If I recall correctly, both these machines outperform the Mac Pro in terms of CPU now.
Well, there's going to be a major update of the Mac Pro this year, widely presumed to be something more than a mere upgrade of the internals.
It's difficult to explain the continued use of outdated chips over the past few years, especially after they discontinued the XServe and told everyone to use the Mac Pro instead.
I suppose the Gruber-esque answer is that Apple (especially under Steve Jobs) wants to present an elegant vision of what computing should be, every product a work of art with considerable mass market appeal. The Mac Pro is basically indistinguishable from a bulky 90s tower PC, and very few people actually need it.
It's a decidedly unsexy product. Apple is not Dell or Lenovo, they make very few products and they make a very big deal out of each one of them. The Mac Pro is an unfortunate necessity that they cannot reasonably discontinue. But it's not a product that Apple really wants to make.
Here's my theory. Apple has made its reputation in the 90s with the film/graphics/illustration market, and that's where the Power Mac/Mac Pro was a critical product. Once the switch to Intel was made and laptops started catching up in speed/GPU power, less people needed a fixed tower just for Photoshop/After Effects/Maya, they just put those apps on a laptop. Moreover, the professional market is always smaller than the consumer market, and consumers don't want desktops, so Apple just went where the money is.
They got rid of Xserve and they'll likely get rid of the Mac Pro if demand falls significantly.
A lot of that market has already defected to Windows for the price/performance improvements, except for Final Cut users. If you're running Adobe CS, you don't need a Mac, and Mac OS X has relatively few advantages over Windows 7 for pro work.
The line I hear is "I'd rather be using a Mac, but...."
It's true that Apple tends to fit high-end Core chips in notebooks, but last year's Core i7-3770K still gives you step up in performance over this year's Retina MBP. And for pro users, time is money.
