A maxed-out Mac Pro will cost you $53,000 – without display

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/12/10/a-maxed-out-mac-pro-will-cost-you-53000----without-display

by jquery • 7 years ago

31 36 7 years ago

vondur2• 7 years ago

Apple's completely crazy with the pricing for the new Mac Pro. $6000 for an 8 core Xeon with a Radeon 580x is a mid range machine nowadays thanks to AMD and the Ryzen/Threadripper CPU's. The old towers were far more reasonably priced. Unless you are really tied some Apple specific app, I can't imagine justifying purchasing one of these machines.

Kirby643• 7 years ago

Ultimately, if you really need something that supports 1.5TB of RAM or a 28 core Xeon, you're going to get in the same realm as Apple's pricing even if you build it yourself.

The $6k cost includes a ton of built-in cost for the fancy case, the server grade motherboard, and fancy power supply/cooling system.

As far as I'm aware, you're not even capable of building a Threadripper platform with that much RAM... because you're limited to 8 DIMM slots? There's a few things on the horizon that might address that (namely, 256GB DIMMs), but I'm not sure those are released yet... and I bet they cost a lot more than 128GB DIMMs.

Not saying it's not overpriced... but Dell et al. probably will gouge you just as much if you try to build a Xeon workstation.

Hopefully Threadripper drives down the Intel pricing even on the server side, cause as of right now it's just crazy.

gizmo686• 7 years ago

No one who needs a machine that supports 1.5TB of ram is going to buy one that comes with only 32GB. Same for CPU. Charging someone for support for the high end, even if they only use the low end doesn't seem to make sense.

If it is actually an issue of unit cost, sell a lower-end base. If it is to recoup development costs, find a way to price discriminate.

Otherwise, you are charging low end users for functionaility that they will literally never use.

washadjeffmad• 7 years ago

Just buy AMD, the higher performance, less expensive option. Dell will configure TR4 workstations if you ask.

Intel is HP in the 2000s. They're not going to right themselves gracefully or intact.

rhinoceraptor• 7 years ago

If you compare spec for spec with actual server/workstation grade hardware, the price premium is small or non-existant.

Once you leave the consumer grade category, the prices go way up. Xeons, server motherboards and ECC are not cheap.

This is an actual pro level workstation for video and audio. It's not a consumer or even developer desktop. And relative to those markets, it's priced competitively. For example, a basic RED camera setup will run you at least $20-30k, easily.

sneak4• 7 years ago

I did this with every high end pro Mac since I was about eight years old. I still have the B&W G3/Cinema Display posters in storage, though I never actually had one.

A couple years ago, I finally got to a place where I could do that and then click Buy. My main workstation is a big black 18 core iMac Pro with an asston of ram, and I love it dearly. It was $15k or so, and I used it to earn well over 20x that during the year I bought it—it was a relatively small expense.

Shake it if you got it.

imagetic2• 7 years ago

What on earth do you do that made you $300,000 and required that kind of hardware? nobody I know outside Hollywood makes that kind of money in media/graphics work.

snowwrestler• 7 years ago

That's full time work with 2 weeks vacation at $150/hour, which is a typical mid-high freelancer rate in my experience.

sneak4• 7 years ago

Nothing I do requires that level of hardware; 100% of what I do could be done on a Raspberry Pi, it would just take a lot longer and be a lot more frustrating. A $300 beater (or even a $3000 reliable used car) and an $80k BMW will both get you from A to B.

I provide security, software/architecture design, and product consulting to small businesses; I have been making and breaking web and web-adjacent applications for 20 years.

It’s super nice not waiting (as much) on one’s computer. The additional RAM is the most important part.

NicoJuicy4• 7 years ago

50x ROI would seem more impressive.

Shake it, if you got it

sneak4• 7 years ago

Well, I got another year and a half (and counting) out of it after the year in which I bought it, and eBay says it’s still worth at least 50% of what I paid for it, so I think the final ROI is TBD.

_Codemonkeyism• 7 years ago

I only have an 8 core iMac Pro worth 6k and to be frank, it crashes sometimes, it sometimes shows the beach ball and overall it's ok but I would have thought I'd get more for the price (compared to the MacBooks etc. I had over the last 15 years).

esotericn• 7 years ago

For $53K I'd imagine you can get yourself a better machine and a software developer to hackintosh it for you and provide support. :P

poulsbohemian• 7 years ago

Bloomberg had essentially the same article (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-10/apple-s-n...), clearly intended to provoke shock at the price. While at the base level it feels a bit pricy, for example in comparison to the base iMac Pro, on the other end of the spectrum if you need 28 cores and >1TB of ram... if you need that kind of capacity, then chances are you can afford it.

jrace• 7 years ago

We just spec'd it out to $73k CDN

paggle• 7 years ago

If you do the same on dell.com, hp.com, etc. you will get a similar price or higher.

blacksmith_tb• 7 years ago

I thought that might be hyperbole, but I just configured an HP Z8[1] that cost $63K without trying too hard.

1: https://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/z8.html

thdrdt• 7 years ago

Yep, it is absolutely non news. And you could even call Apple's prices competitive.

Try a high end Dell with 3TB of RAM: way above $110,000

And if the screen is comparible to reference screens from Sony you can call the screen extremely cheap.

Edit: but I would go for HP or Dell. Better support and much easier to upgrade hardware to keep your system up to date.

NicoJuicy4• 7 years ago

64 gb ddr5 ram, decent Ryzen+video card, 512 gb SSD and 2TB will lose you 1600$-1800$.

I wouldn't know why I would ever consider a Mac

jbverschoor• 7 years ago

what about 1.5tb ram?

ohiovr2• 7 years ago

What would you do with a terabyte of ram on a mac?

imagetic2• 7 years ago

A base model isn't the best investment, and the only thing that really makes it special is the vega II and afterburner cards which pushes the build to the $11-13k range. That's a lot of money for a rig without a monitor or storage.

anaisbetts• 7 years ago

Imagine spending all of that money, and at the end of the day you end up with a monitorless computer running macOS, the mind reels

Kirby643• 7 years ago

People do that all the time with servers because they don't expect to have a monitor with it. When you're in the $53k price bracket, another few grand for a monitor (or, few hundred, depending on what you want) isn't remarkable.

As others have noted, you can price a HP or Dell workstation PC for the same price. And guess what? No bundled monitor.

nyc640• 7 years ago

Apparently as of 2 years ago, 1 stick of 128GB RAM from Crucial could cost $4,000[1] if purchased on its own, so at 12 sticks of 128GB RAM maybe this is a relative bargain compared to building it yourself? Of course at the lower end, it's not really competitive at all.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/this-single-128gb-of-ddr4-ram-from-c...

sdinsn• 7 years ago

Nowadays you can find 128GB for < $1k. And that's the retail price, not the wholesale price.

llampx• 7 years ago

It's extremely unlikely that you'll find ram cheaper from an OEM than buying direct or retail.

faraday2211• 7 years ago

The base models are an absolute scam. You get far better specs with far less money (the gap is way bigger than usual for apple). The higher spec models are pretty good tho.

A maxed-out Mac Pro will cost you $53,000 – without display

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