Those Mac Pros are going to be expensive

http://www.marco.org/2013/08/10/ivy-bridge-ep-prices

by mh_ • 13 years ago

36 43 13 years ago

fsckin• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure Intel gives Apple a huge discount vs. the retail prices that AnandTech posted.

Is it newsworthy that Mac Pros will be expensive? They have always been >$1000 more expensive than a comparable PC.

People who care about the price difference will run a Hackintosh. If you have more money than sense (or time, patience, etc) then the Mac Pro is a pretty sweet machine.

joevandyk• 13 years ago

He's saying these will be more expensive than usual. That is newsworthy.

zdw2• 13 years ago

They have always been >$1000 more expensive than a comparable PC.

Depends what you view as comparable. The price delta between a Mac Pro and a HP or Dell workstation with Xeon CPU's and ECC Ram is usually far under $1000 for comparable base models.

atonse• 13 years ago

These are truly professional workstations. The kinds of customers that actually "need" a Mac Pro, are spending way, way more on salaries than on equipment, for this to make a huge difference.

All this is assuming, of course, that the new Mac Pros live up to the hype and provide those amazing performance gains. (Hardware AND software)

minor_nitwit• 13 years ago

Any evidence of software gains from OSX?

Hardware is hardware, so the pretty Mac Pro box isn't worth much, when the same hardware is available elsewhere. Perhaps it makes the employees feel more important at work. That said, a couple of days ago, HN had an article with evidence that the more you make your employees feel like the company is on the edge of collapse - the better they'll perform.

rsynnott7• 13 years ago

Intel rarely gives substantial discounts to OEMs on CPUs (except or things like the ultrabooks, where a substantial discount was given).

cremnob• 13 years ago

They're being assembled in the US and it's a product for a niche market, of course it's going to be expensive.

samspenc• 13 years ago

So is the Moto X, and it seems to me there's a small price delta compared to Samsung's S4 and HTC's One, but not that much. Given that its only final assembly in the USA, and not 100% made in the USA, not sure if being made in the USA would affect costs by that large a factor.

rsynnott7• 13 years ago

Yeah; for this, certainty, the US issue wouldn't be very relevant. Intel charging OEMs up to 3k for the processors will be more of an issue.

zdw2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the new Mac Pro only allowed 115W TDP CPUs - they could provide 4/6/8/10/12 core models all under that speed.

I'm willing to bet that Apple won't even bother with the 4-core models, unless they want to hit a very low price point.

On the opposite, insanity side of things, I could easily see a >$10k Mac Pro with 12 cores, 128GB of RAM, 4TB of SSD, and 12GB of VRAM.

bodyfour• 13 years ago

Every time a new Mac Pro model comes out everybody seems to do the same thing: goes to store.apple.com, spec out everything to the maximum, and gawk at the giant price tag.

It's amazing to think how as recently as the 90s it was completely normal to spend $20K+ on a Sun or SGI workstation to plop on an engineers desk. Now spending that type of money requires effort, and you'll end up with a machine with a quarter terabyte of RAM, four 30" monitors, etc.

Computers are so damn cheap.

ynniv• 13 years ago

In 1992 Apple sold a computer that started at $16,500 modern (2013) dollars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIfx. The Lisa was a probably a failure because it started at $23,500 modern dollars, which was a lot compared to the original Macintosh's $5,600 modern dollars.

You used to have to really want access to a computer. Today's computers are a mighty bargain.

sag47• 13 years ago

He's using crappy metrics. It depends on the instruction set architecture being used because a better ISA trumps more GHz.

wmf• 13 years ago

All Macs (and all competing workstations) use pretty much the same architecture (Ivy Bridge or Haswell).

ggreer• 13 years ago

That's not a problem in this case. All of the CPUs listed have the same Ivy Bridge cores, just different numbers of them running at different speeds.

If there's one thing Marco missed, it's that the larger L3 cache will help some single-threaded workloads run faster on the higher-end Xeons.

pearjuice4• 13 years ago

Does it matter? This Marco guy will buy anything with an Apple logo anyway - and sprout tweetable one-liners about how good and revolutionary said products are. I don't see why his articles are cross-posted here anyway, it is just fanboyism and praise. Nothing worth discussing. Here come the downvotes.

icarus_drowning• 13 years ago

Well at least you expect the downvotes. Which leads me to wonder why you thought this comment would be informative and helpful in the first place.

pearjuice4• 13 years ago

It is a friendly reminder which few are willing to accept or able to publicly acknowledge.

coolnow• 13 years ago

Controversial comments will always be downvoted (hence, being defined as controversial).

rsynnott7• 13 years ago

This is the same Marco Arment who has spent the last three or so years complaining about the state of the Mac Pro, yes?

antidaily• 13 years ago

Best HN comment I've read in a while.

dman3• 13 years ago

Last thanksgiving I bought a Dell T5600 for lesser than the retail price of the two 8 core Xeons that were in it. Its very likely that OEM's get very different pricing from Intel as compared to retail.

rsynnott7• 13 years ago

That may just have been disposal of obsolete Xeons (Nehalem?) Intel does not traiditonally give big OEM discounts; their whole business model is based on vast margins.

dman3• 13 years ago

Nope the chips were not Nehalem. They were E5-2650 Sandy Bridge. The whole box was for 2200 bucks at the time. Theyre still going for ~1000 each now.

ihsw• 13 years ago

Server CPU retail prices don't age very well at all, it's not uncommon to see server CPUs retain the same price even until two generations later. Newegg et al will keep the prices sky-high -- even in the face of plummeting sales -- and then discontinue the product line due to "lack of interest."

It's absolutely appalling.

So, to address your point, as another poster has mentioned you probably had previous-generation CPUs. OEMs get relatively generous discounts at the end of product lifecycles so as to encourage gargantuan purchase orders, and consumers don't see such discounts ever.

dman3• 13 years ago

See my response to the other poster.

lquist• 13 years ago

This is exactly the price point they should be at. The majority of people buying these desktops are professionals and they are willing to pay big prices for performance.

simonh• 13 years ago

No mention of the GPUs that are likely to be the real drivers of performance in these machines viA opencl and cuda.

bparsons• 13 years ago

What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be achieved on a $1500-1800 PC?

If you work for a film studio, then I can understand blowing 3 grand on a machine. But most folks I know are buying these to run photoshop and illustrator, then claiming that a PC simply would not do. My POS laptop runs these programs fine, and my $750 new PC box runs them like lightning.

pearjuice4• 13 years ago

What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be achieved on a $1500-1800 PC?

They aesthetically please the eye in clean, minimalist offices.

sixbrx• 13 years ago

Which $1500 PC? This sounds interesting.

drivingmenuts• 13 years ago

What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be achieved on a $1500-1800 PC?

Running OS X with (mostly) no major issues. Given that most software is available for at least two operating systems, it's really down to choice these days. Sometimes, sentimentality and/or perceived value overrides rationality. I'm pretty sure this is OK and not a major flaw in humanity, most of the time.

Bootcamping - go ahead, try that on a Windows box. I Bootcamp into Win 8 and OS X. After a few driver updates, Windows 8 performs flawlessly (aside from, you know, being Windows 8). If I really felt like it, I'd run Linux as a third option, but it's way more convenient to run it as a VM.

People get way to wound up about the hardware/OS choices that other people make. Really, aside from having to do support for them, it should probably only be about as controversial as hair length.

YellowRex• 13 years ago

A top-spec Mac Mini is pretty beastly at $1500. I have no doubt it would chew up and spit out the vast majority of workstation use cases. 2.6 GHz Quad-core i7, 16 GB RAM, SSD.

The only thing I can possibly imagine would be some seriously high-end 3D rendering or massively parallel simulation software.

To the OPs point, there is zero reason to get the Mac Pro over even a Mac Mini.

Seems like there's a hole in Apple's lineup. You can't get a discrete GPU without a monitor attached (iMac) or spending >$3000. Not that it matters much for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. which are not GPU-parallelizable anyway. At least not yet.

patman812• 13 years ago

Marco estimates an entry price of $3,500. Any guess what a Retina Display will add to that?

rsynnott7• 13 years ago

Asus currently makes a 30" 4k display for about 3500. Doubt it'll be much below that for a year or so.

patman812• 13 years ago

A 25" 4k display should work nice with HiDPI mode in OS X and $1.999 would look nice on the price tag. That's my guess. But when will it ship?

KVFinn• 13 years ago

I stopped building and overclocking systems many years ago. Too old for that shit, etc etc. But the funny things is...

CPU improvements have been so stagnant on the high end. Suddenly getting a 40% clock increase out of a chip isn't just a way to save money, it gets you the equivalent of a multiple generation leap.

A friend has a mid-range ($300 I think) Intel chip, now approaching 3 years old, but running at 4.5 GHz and it is STILL notably faster than even the most expensive Haswell part sold right now. Particularly in single threaded it crushes. Those 10% efficiency improvements each chip rev are nice, but they can't come close to a massive clock speed jump like that.

SO weirdly enough now I'm considering overclocking a self-built system because you can't just wait a year and buy a regular system that is as fast anymore.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

Oh my god. If I have to tolerate months of Mac Pro speculation on the front page before they're released, I think I might go mental.

I understand why people like to speculate. It can be fun. But I don't understand so much why people like to publish their speculation, and even less why people would upvote it.

Those Mac Pros are going to be expensive

Related Stories