[murphcid]

A friend has one, and decided that he did not like it (not fast enough, not as good as his current WinTel system, he wants a dual-core, etc), so he has offered to sell it to me. He will add the 30" monitor. It has 48 gb of ram, and he is going to put a 1 tb SSD into the system. What I want to know are the following things:

1) Are there any USB 3.0 add on cards that work with the Mac Pro 2009?
2) How do you open the DVD drive?
3) Is it compatible with my Macbook Pro running Sierra? Will my programs/apps sync?
4) Should I tell him no thanks, and get a newer model, maybe a 2011+?
5) Or should I just get an iMac?

Everything is in great shape, he just got it a week ago for $900 (inlcuding the monitor), and is offering it to me at the same price. I will be able to get it in April ($$$$ save up).

[bamf-hacker]

IMHO $900 for a 2009 MBP regardless of the RAM and storage is high. I would save your money and get a newer one. Apple will at some point stop providing updates to newer OS's on older machines and that 2009 is pretty close.

[murphcid]

Sorry, I should have been clear, that also includes the 30" monitor. I am wanting to flash the firmware to 5.1 so that I can update to Sierra. I will also add a 1tb SSD in place of the original hard drive.

IMHO $900 for a 2009 MBP regardless of the RAM and storage is high. I would save your money and get a newer one. Apple will at some point stop providing updates to newer OS's on older machines and that 2009 is pretty close.

[Matty]

Would have to agree with @bamf-hacker, I personally wouldn't pay $900 for a Mac Pro thats 8 year old. While it may have ludicrous amount of RAM and a very large SSD, the GPU is still 8 years old. So i personally would spend a couple extra bucks and pick up a 21.5" iMac from 2015 on sale somewhere and upgrade the HDD to a SSD but with all that being said, if you really want it and you love it, then its well worth the price of smiling everyday while using it