From Garbage can to glorified cheese grater and all for a mere $50K

[PJCarroll]

A fully spec'd new MacPro is going to be close to 50K and up.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/06/03/maxed-out-mac-pro-cost-estimate/

Definitely time for a price to performance battle.  Thoughts.

[Mira Yurizaki]

It's a workstation targeted to the professional market. Of course there's going to be a markup.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

It's a workstation targeted to the professional market. Of course there's going to be a markup.

It's Apple. Of course there's going to be a markup.

[jdubya421]

At my work I have something similar sitting on my desk. A Xeon with 12C/24T and 1TB of RAM. It cost like 47k retail and I am sure my company paid a bit less. 50k for 1.5TB of RAM is seriously not that outrageous. These machines are not targeted for people who want to game or even do heavy loads as a hobby. This new iMac is going up against HP Z series and Dell Precision 7920, which can both be made 50k or more. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

10 minutes ago, Sauron said:

It's Apple. Of course there's going to be a markup.

You should check out Dell. They're charging $45,000 from one of the Precision 7920 configs for 1.5TB of DDR4-2666 ECC RAM.

[Theguywhobea]

4 minutes ago, jdubya421 said:

At my work I have something similar sitting on my desk. A Xeon with 12C/24T and 1TB of RAM. It cost like 47k retail and I am sure my company paid a bit less. 50k for 1.5TB of RAM is seriously not that outrageous. These machines are not targeted for people who want to game or even do heavy loads as a hobby. This new iMac is going up against HP Z series and Dell Precision 7920, which can both be made 50k or more. 

What do you do for work that you benefit from having 1TB of RAM? Not sarcasm, I'm actually genuinely interested in this.

[Ein0r]

What do you use such an expensive machine for in the first place? Movie editing? Animation?

[jdubya421]

4 minutes ago, Theguywhobea said:

What do you do for work that you benefit from having 1TB of RAM? Not sarcasm, I'm actually genuinely interested in this.

I work in handset chip design and the simulations I run daily use over 700GB of RAM. I use a program called HFSS by ANSYS to do EM simulations. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, Theguywhobea said:

What do you do for work that you benefit from having 1TB of RAM? Not sarcasm, I'm actually genuinely interested in this.

That fast scratchpad memory.

1 minute ago, Ein0r said:

What do you use such an expensive machine for in the first place? Movie editing? Animation?

That's Apple's typical target audience. But whether or not someone actually needs a maxed out configuration is another thing. But keep in mind, for many businesses time is money. A more expensive machine may perform fast enough to save enough time, and thus money, than a cheaper machine will in the long term.

 

Also businesses are often notoriously slow to upgrade their computers. So buying the highest performing thing now will save them from having to upgrade more frequently.

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

You should check out Dell. They're charging $45,000 from one of the Precision 7920 configs for 1.5TB of DDR4-2666 ECC RAM.

That's already 10% cheaper and the gap widens considerably with the lower end configurations.

3 minutes ago, Ein0r said:

Movie editing? Animation?

Some of both, though I would argue the diminishing returns don't really warrant this sort of machine in any circumstance. Also high core count xeons in 2019? cmonbruh

 

Realistically pretty much nobody is going to buy the maxed out configuration, they just offer it because they have nothing to lose by doing so. The 1.5TB ram support is more geared towards future upgrades than being maxed out right now and so are other features - and also simply because the CPU supports it, so why shouldn't the motherboard?

 

And of course different people have different needs, some may need maxed out graphics and some may need all the ram available - not necessarily both.

4 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

That fast scratchpad memory.

I don't think it makes a significant difference beyond 30gb or so... also loading 1TB of data into it every boot would be slow even with the fastest ssd raid possible.

7 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Also businesses are often notoriously slow to upgrade their computers. So buying the highest performing thing now will save them from having to upgrade more frequently.

Those businesses won't be touching a first gen machine anyway - and generally companies that drop 50k on a single machine tend to have a faster upgrade loop and a smaller staff, I can't imagine dropping more than a million on hardware every time you upgrade would be sustainable for the vast majority of companies.

[jdubya421]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's already 10% cheaper and the gap widens considerably with the lower end configurations.

 

The Dell precision with a similar processor (28C) and RAM (1.5TB) is 60k with no extra options. 

[Theguywhobea]

14 minutes ago, jdubya421 said:

I work in handset chip design and the simulations I run daily use over 700GB of RAM. I use a program called HFSS by ANSYS to do EM simulations. 

Damn that sounds pretty cool, thanks for sharing!

[Mira Yurizaki]

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's already 10% cheaper and the gap widens considerably with the lower end configurations.

$45,000 for just the RAM. Not the entire machine. Go build one yourself.

 

EDIT: Also I tried building lower end configurations. Most of them are approaching $5,000 for similar core count, RAM capacity, and storage sizes, and they lack a second video card which is going to push the price closer to $6,000.

 

Quote

Those businesses won't be touching a first gen machine anyway - and generally companies that drop 50k on a single machine tend to have a faster upgrade loop and a smaller staff, I can't imagine dropping more than a million on hardware every time you upgrade would be sustainable for the vast majority of companies.

I would imagine the higher upfront cost to get everything up to speed is seen as a better path for a large enough company. Changing out hardware means downtime to verify the system still works and resolving issues that may arise. By at least sticking with what the system builder gave you, you know more or less that it's going to work after the initial verification.

Edited June 5, 2019 by Mira Yurizaki

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, jdubya421 said:

The Dell precision with a similar processor (28C) and RAM (1.5TB) is 60k with no extra options. 

 

Just now, Mira Yurizaki said:

$45,000 for just the RAM. Not the entire machine. Go build one yourself.

I never said Dell was a champion of value but yeah obviously enterprise prebuilts aren't very good deals unless you don't have a choice.

2 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I would imagine the higher upfront cost to get everything up to speed is seen as a better path for a large enough company. Changing out hardware means downtime to verify the system still works and resolving issues that may arise. By at least sticking with what the system builder gave you, you know more or less that it's going to work after the initial verification.

Hence why companies don't have much of a choice. For a self employed professional though? Not even close to being worth the asking price.

 

Still, editing/animation companies generally tend to be small enough that machines can be upgraded or tweaked on an individual basis if need be - I know a local company with ~30 employees that literally commissioned a hackintosh because the trash can mac pro wasn't up to snuff.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

I never said Dell was a champion of value but yeah obviously enterprise prebuilts aren't very good deals unless you don't have a choice.

So why are you picking on Apple when their competition is just as bad?

[Sauron]

5 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

So why are you picking on Apple when their competition is just as bad?

If two things are bad and one of them is brought up am I not allowed to say it's bad?

[Princess Luna]

1 hour ago, PJCarroll said:

  Thoughts.

It's more about whether you want to be part of the Apple ecosystem or not... really.

 

Trying to compare pricing vs hardware performance on a 1:1 scale here with a DYI Windows machine is not 100% valid mind set given there's more to it, Apple brought a valid product for those who want said high end product on the Apple ecosystem and that's it.

 

If you prefer a Windows DYI like I do and would always build it myself solely because I dislike Apple ecosystem then that's fine... people will afford a premium (if there's one to begin with) for the Apple ecosystem if they genuinely like it.

[jdubya421]

What I think people are missing is that this computer (again, along with the Dell and HP equivalents) aren't meant for your average consumer or even your high end consumer. These are meant for professionals who will absolutely utilize the performance available to them. Yes, sure you can build custom computers for cheaper and some companies might do this (some people in my company have custom built computers), but for companies that don't want to do that this is a great option. People bawk at the price and think that it is outrageous, but for the performance it really isn't. I speak from my experience that my computer that is tens of thousands of dollars is used to generate millions of dollars of revenue. 

[bellabichon]

2 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

You should check out Dell. They're charging $45,000 from one of the Precision 7920 configs for 1.5TB of DDR4-2666 ECC RAM.

You should check out Apple. They're charging $999 for a monitor stand.

[Drak3]

2 minutes ago, bellabichon said:

You should check out Apple. They're charging $999 for a monitor stand.

Irrelevant. The topic is regarding the Mac Pro, not the XDR monitor.

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, Princess Luna said:

It's more about whether you want to be part of the Apple ecosystem or not... really.

 

Trying to compare pricing vs hardware performance on a 1:1 scale here with a DYI Windows machine is not 100% valid mind set given there's more to it, Apple brought a valid product for those who want said high end product on the Apple ecosystem and that's it.

 

If you prefer a Windows DYI like I do and would always build it myself solely because I dislike Apple ecosystem then that's fine... people will afford a premium (if there's one to begin with) for the Apple ecosystem if they genuinely like it.

 

There really isn't an ecosystem when you are talking desktops/workstations per se.  The whole apple ecosystem kinda only applies to ios where it is locked to their app store.

 

For workstations of this magnitude it almost isn't even about the OS's, it's purely about if the system do what I need and is it appropriately priced? 

 

About the only consideration I could see between mac and windows in a workstation was if you wanted to run external Nvidia GPU's.

 

EDIT: too many really's in my post, in my defense I was trying to give a "per se" explanation.  

[bellabichon]

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

Irrelevant. The topic is regarding the Mac Pro, not the XDR monitor.

Oh golly gee! My joke wasn't relevant to the discussion? I'll just go ahead and delete my account I guess!

[Drak3]

Just now, bellabichon said:

My joke

I wouldn't call that a joke.

 

And we have someone said something to the affect of 'Specifically Apple!!1!' and then later go 'I didn't say specifically Apple!!1!,' so some of us aren't going to assume someone is being not serious unless they signify it.

[Evanair]

I don't find the price that outrageous. It's a niche market, and apple stepped up the the plate with what appears to be a quality product at a reasonable price (compaired to other items of the same spec)

 

The real question will be how does Mac OS work under these conditions with high end hardware and does the software take advantage of it.  It'll take some testing, but that's where the difference can be made.

 

Some arguments about 10 to 20 percent price differences, but if the turn around time is decreased by a similar amount, then it's justified.

[Arika]

as much as i dislike Apple, this product isn't for consumers, so i don't know why people are going absolutely insane over it.