Congratulations! That's a pretty great find.
Looks like it was rackmounted at one point, so must've been a server.
Hot on the tail of the discontinuation of the XServe in 2009, both the Mac mini and the Mac Pro gained more emphasized server configurations. If I remember correctly, without just going to look, the Radeon 5770 was the video card they put in the Mac Pro server. Because, you know, a 100-watt video card is a totally efficient piece to use in a server. I suspect the reasoning was that it didn't really require any physical re-tooling on Apple's part at all.
The idea at the time, as far as I can tell, was that few people were buying xserves for reasons where it really made sense to have an xserve, or they were buying only one xserve. So either racking some minis or some Mac Pros (or using a Mac Pro deskside) was going to make more sense, and it was going to cost Apple less to build.
The one bummer about Westmere (especially for a dev box) is that you want more RAM, and RAM for that platform is expensive (but really this will probably apply to any big server or workstation with ECC RAM). 16-gig sticks for my westmere server are at about $113 now, and that's as low as I've ever seen it.
Yeah. The aforementioned MacBooks are teacher laptops. We were looking for inexpensive ways to upgrade them and make them useful, and I discovered that they can actually go up to16GBs of RAM (which is nuts). We settled on 8GBs and a 256GB SSD. You wouldn't know they're still Core 2 Duo machines.
16 gigs of RAM on a Core2Duo laptop you say? Have you tested and confirmed this works? I was recently looking into bigger RAM upgrades for one of my old Core2Duo machines, and would find it super intriguing if it worked. Perhaps I should buy my Mac mini an upgrade and just pop it into the ThinkPad to see what happens.
Anyway, I'd like to know how to bypass that video card check, so I can enjoy Metal, should I upgrade to 10.11 (I'm sticking to 10.9 for as long as I can).
In addition to the fact that Apple stopped patching known critical vulnerabilities in 10.9 well before the release of 10.11, it's worth upgrading to 10.11 because so far it has been faster and more reliable than any previous version of Mac OS X I've ever used on all hardware Iv'e used it on, including the "Late 2007" MacBook pro. It has even produced a visible speed-up in things like launching apps on demo computers in stores.
I expect to do similar upgrades with our 2012-2015 MacBook Pros. All the other models are integrated RAM & HDD, and that looks to be the future.
2012-2015?
Are you still buying the 2012/Ivy Bridge 13-inch MacBook Pro? It is one of the weirder machines in Apple's lineup, if only because you can still pop the bottom off and little if anything is soldered. At my place of work (US public higher ed), there's really no effort put into upgrading older hardware, because it still costs more in support time and parts than buying newer systems outright, and with Apple both making OS X finally bearable with just 8 gigs of RAM In 10.11, and with most modern machines coming with SSDs (for cheaper than the 2012 MBP13 costs, new) we're just enforcing a five year lifecycle for anything with any importance.
Unless K12 remains completely destitute, the idea of an institution-wide program of upgrading machines from 2009 seems totally unfathomable to me.
It's really interesting to read about the institutional purchase of machines that appears to be geared toward exactly that. Do you do the purchasing, or the machines simply come from up on high? I'd be interested in hearing more about that.
