Apple is misundertanding the "pro" market

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

That's just so stupid and a gross misunderstanding. In the professional market, every penny counts.

It's literally your job (or the job of the purchasing office) to save money and keep the costs down.

Yes, you can happily spend an unholy amount of money on professional equipment if there's no real alternative

because you will move the cost on the client. But if there's a significantly cheaper yet valid alternative, you are

practically forced to switch, because otherwise, you will lose competitivity and be pushed out of the market.

So I wanted to touch up on this part in particular.

 

This sort of thinking isn't exactly the best business sense either. If every penny literally counts, this also creeps into how well you treat your employees. Look at Walmart for instance, they have a reputation of doing everything they can to pay nothing more than the minimum required by law. And what you have is a place that's really crappy to work for. And if you want to take this a step further and finding "cheaper alternatives", you could outsource your work to a place where labor compensation makes US minimum wage look like a salary for the 1%. And often times, the quality is affected.

 

But outside of that, here's another thing. Cheaper equipment, even if it's of decent quality, likely isn't going to hold up to the rigors of the professional work environment where the thing needs to be able to work no matter where you go. If the equipment goes down, that means the employees aren't working. Employees not working means they're not generating value for the company. If the employee is salaried, they're being paid regardless if there's something to do or not. And if the equipment is vital to whatever it is the company is doing, downtime can mean multiple employees are not working. All that adds up really quickly such that it invalidates whatever savings you made on the initial cost.

 

5 minutes ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

That's what is sitting under my desk also. But that's not a "uber pro". It's a medium range workstation. 2000$ after discount? Depend on the vido card.
Quite different from 5000$. Also tens is quite different from houndreds. Not many companies have hundreds of engineers I reckon.

Not every company does, but that doesn't invalidate my answer to your inquiry.

[D13H4RD]

I'll just say this.

 

If you're looking at the Mac Pro and think "THIS SHIT IS MASSIVELY OVERPRICED", well, you're not the target market of the Mac Pro. In fact, it targets an extremely specific audience that's extremely tiny and typically only buy very high-end specialized equipment with special requirements.

[SenKa]

I could very easily justify myself buying a midrange Mac Pro. Say... 12c, 64GB RAM, Vega II, Afterburner Card. I am a video editor, and I whole heartedly prefer macOS and Final Cut Pro. I currently edit 1080p/60 video, because if I try and push anymore it will melt my poor Macbook.

 

I used to edit on the OG Mac Pro, a fully spec'd out version. That belonged to the school I was in at the time, and I miss it every day. Mind you, back in those days we were only editing 1080p/60... It handled it perfectly. I could export a video and fire up Photoshop/AE to make whatever pictures and visual effects, it was amazing! I can't do that on my MacBook. Could I do that on a top spec MBP for ~3k less? Probably. But it is a less powerful device.

 

Will I probably still buy a top spec MBP over the Mac Pro, so I can have a better laptop for uni and a mobile editing workstation that doesn't sound quite as much like a jet under load? Yes.

 

The price Apple wants is 100% justifiable. I know I could build a TR system cheaper, but I don't have the time to faff with hackintoshing.

[HarryNyquist]

16 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

I'll just say this.

 

If you're looking at the Mac Pro and think "THIS SHIT IS MASSIVELY OVERPRICED", well, you're not the target market of the Mac Pro. In fact, it targets an extremely specific audience that's extremely tiny and typically only buy very high-end specialized equipment with special requirements.

Exactly. This is geared at the same industry of people who bought the SGI workstations back in the day.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

30 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

So I wanted to touch up on this part in particular.

 

This sort of thinking isn't exactly the best business sense either. If every penny literally counts, this also creeps into how well you treat your employees. Look at Walmart for instance, they have a reputation of doing everything they can to pay nothing more than the minimum required by law. And what you have is a place that's really crappy to work for. And if you want to take this a step further and finding "cheaper alternatives", you could outsource your work to a place where labor compensation makes US minimum wage look like a salary for the 1%. And often times, the quality is affected.

 

I'm not arguing cheaping out in anything and bulding a business by being the cheaper on the market. I'm just saying that in a professional environment every cost is accounted, scrutinized and must stand to reason.

Quote

But outside of that, here's another thing. Cheaper equipment, even if it's of decent quality, likely isn't going to hold up to the rigors of the professional work environment where the thing needs to be able to work no matter where you go. If the equipment goes down, that means the employees aren't working. Employees not working means they're not generating value for the company. If the employee is salaried, they're being paid regardless if there's something to do or not. And if the equipment is vital to whatever it is the company is doing, downtime can mean multiple employees are not working. All that adds up really quickly such that it invalidates whatever savings you made on the initial cost.

I'm not comparing prices to second hand chinese ripoff. I'm considering equivalent product by (possibly more) respectable high end suppliers

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Not every company does, but that doesn't invalidate my answer to your inquiry.

It kinda does. I'm saying that apple doesn't offer meaningful discounts on ten units. I don't know if they do on hundreds, but that's hardly relevant for most of the market

26 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

I'll just say this.

 

If you're looking at the Mac Pro and think "THIS SHIT IS MASSIVELY OVERPRICED", well, you're not the target market of the Mac Pro. In fact, it targets an extremely specific audience that's extremely tiny and typically only buy very high-end specialized equipment with special requirements.

Oh God, this sentence. Listen, you don't have any idea on what my job is. More relevant, I never claimed that I'm the target audience for this. I'm a Linux guy mostly, so meh.

 

But many of my clients and suppliers are the target audience. Sound engineers, video producers, cinema guys. I can tell you that many are fleeing apple as fast as they can for years and this new products won't invert this trend.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 minutes ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

I'm not arguing cheaping out in anything and bulding a business by being the cheaper on the market. I'm just saying that in a professional environment every cost is accounted, scrutinized and must stand to reason.

Okay, so if your employees want something fancy, can justify it, and it still generates revenue in the end, what's the problem?

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I'm not comparing prices to second hand chinese ripoff. I'm considering equivalent product by (possibly more) respectable high end suppliers

Where did I say "second hand chinese ripoff"?

 

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It kinda does. I'm saying that apple doesn't offer meaningful discounts on ten units. I don't know if they do on hundreds, but that's hardly relevant for most of the market

I don't think 10 units counts as a "bulk order" for most companies. Plus from what it sounds like, at least for some system builders, you have to have a corporate account with them to even get access to some of these deals. I'm pretty sure said corporate account isn't free.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

7 minutes ago, HarryNyquist said:

Exactly. This is geared at the same industry of people who bought the SGI workstations back in the day.

Buy you could do things with an SGI workstation that you couldn't to with anything else.

 

In that case, every price is fair. That's the kind of pro equipment where you can legitimately spend every kind of money on

 

What can you do on a mac that you can't do on a similarly specced pc today?

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

What can you do on a mac that you can't do on a similarly specced pc today?

What can any professional-targeted workstation do that a similarly specced PC built on consumer grade parts can't?

 

Outside of software restrictions, likely nothing.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

4 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

What can any professional-targeted workstation do that a similarly specced PC built on consumer grade parts can't?

 

Outside of software restrictions, likely nothing.

Yeah but there no such an enormous difference cost between, say, a lenovo workstation and a similarly capable common pc.

 

There's some. But it reflects warranty durability, general quality etc.

 

But what does offer a macpro that a lenovo workstation does not to justify more money

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

What can any professional-targeted workstation do that a similarly specced PC built on consumer grade parts can't?

 

Outside of software restrictions, likely nothing.

Dual/triple/quadruple/hexuple/octuple socket systems.

[D13H4RD]

18 minutes ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

Oh God, this sentence. Listen, you don't have any idea on what my job is. More relevant, I never claimed that I'm the target audience for this. I'm a Linux guy mostly, so meh.

I never claimed that you were. But any time I see a thread talking about the price of the Mac Pro being too damn high, it's usually from someone who would honestly be more than adequately served by a high-specced consumer PC.

 

The only thing I see wrong with the Mac Pro is the stand for the new display. That is just pure memery. Everything else about it isn't too bad and about in-line with very high-end specialized workstations.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

6 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

I never claimed that you were. But any time I see a thread talking about the price of the Mac Pro being too damn high, it's usually from someone who would honestly be more than adequately served by a high-specced consumer PC.

 

The only thing I see wrong with the Mac Pro is the stand for the new display. That is just pure memery. Everything else about it isn't too bad and about in-line with very high-end specialized workstations.

What? Actually that's very cheap for a reference monitor.

Edit: oh, the stand. Well... that's just apple being dicks. But then again, it's a reference monitor...

[Mira Yurizaki]

28 minutes ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

Yeah but there no such an enormous difference cost between, say, a lenovo workstation and a similarly capable common pc.

If I want to be peachy, I could take a config with 6 cores, 32GB, a GP104 GPU or similar, and a 250GB NVMe SSD... I could get those core components for ~$710 (plus maybe another $100 for a decent case and PSU), whereas this same configuration on Lenovo would be $2200+

 

Oh except that this wouldn't really be a "similarly capable" PC on my terms because I used consumer grade parts.

 

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But what does offer a macpro that a lenovo workstation does not to justify more money

The highest-end config on Lenovo's website that I can make is still missing two cores, runs 500MHz slower on max turbo, and is missing a second video card. Also the CPU is two or three generations out of date an the GPU I picked is a generation out of date, which might explain why it's relatively cheaper.

 

But trying to do the same thing as a Mac Pro on Dell or HP, which you can do more or less? Apple starts looking competitive.

Edited June 12, 2019 by Mira Yurizaki

[Bouzoo]

1 hour ago, harryk said:

Fortune 500 companies

Global 2000. Paints even a better picture.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

 

 

 

 

3

29 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

If I want to be peachy, I could take a config with 6 cores, 32GB, a GP104 GPU or similar, and a 250GB NVMe SSD... I could get those core components for ~$710 (plus maybe another $100 for a decent case and PSU), whereas this same configuration on Lenovo would be $2200+

 

Oh except that this wouldn't really be a "similarly capable" PC on my terms because I used consumer grade parts.

 

The highest-end config on Lenovo's website that I can make is still missing two cores, runs 500MHz slower on max turbo, and is missing a second video card. Also the CPU is two or three generations out of date an the GPU I picked is a generation out of date, which might explain why it's relatively cheaper.

 

But trying to do the same thing as a Mac Pro on Dell or HP, which you can do more or less? Apple starts looking competitive.

I'll say to you the same thing for the tenth time. You can't compare these prices directly. These are not the real prices. Because resons.

I opened the webpage of my supplier now.
I have 25%+ discount on every lenovo workstation for the SINGLE unit.

[Evanair]

People complaining about prices don't understand time, money, and investment of companies.

 

It's not uncommon for a server to get a first class plane ticket for 10 grand+, and the delivery person, to literally hand deliver in hours what would take FedEx a few hundred to overnight.  

 

Companies know time = money, and to Apples credit, this launch is one of the few times I think they did a wonderful job on just about everything... Except the stand. 

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

7 minutes ago, Evanair said:

People complaining about prices don't understand time, money, and investment of companies.

 

It's not uncommon for a server to get a first class plane ticket for 10 grand+, and the delivery person, to literally hand deliver in hours what would take FedEx a few hundred to overnight.  

 

Companies know time = money, and to Apples credit, this launch is one of the few times I think they did a wonderful job on just about everything... Except the stand. 

Hi. I've been shipped to Dubai, 6000km from home, to flick a switch.
I'm in Stockholm now. 2000 clicks from home. I've been here a week. To connect nine (9) pc to nine (9) touchscreens.
I think that I understand this more than you do, actually.

Companies spend more money when they think that someone will give them more money for that.

I don't see how someone will give me more money if my video editor uses a mac pro instead of a lenovo workstation.

By the way, I browsed my suppliers' website a bit and I think that as soon as Lenovo release a new workstation with the new xeon w, one similarly specced as the new mac pro, will be 2500-3000$ but with better video card. 

[Evanair]

1 hour ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

I don't see how someone will give me more money if my video editor uses a mac pro instead of a lenovo workstation.

It's not about the output of a video, work, or whatever end product.  It's about Time (or even real time) abilities that this kind of hardware unlocks.

 

Also, 2500-3000 will not buy the 128GB single module of ram that these would ship with on the high end.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

4 minutes ago, Evanair said:

It's not about the output of a video, work, or whatever end product.  It's about Time (or even real time) abilities that this kind of hardware unlocks.

 

Also, 2500-3000 will not buy the 128GB single module of ram that these would ship with on the high end.

And what time (or even real time) abilities will the mac pro have compared to a windows workstation with identical hardware that costs half the price?

Also, I'm comparing the lower end one.

[Drak3]

16 minutes ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

a windows workstation with identical hardware that costs half the price?

Unless you're building it yourself, they don't cost half the price. They're in the same ballpark.

 

And the "Bulk discount" cop out doesn't work either. Apple also offers bulk discounts to enterprise users, AND they offer discounts for individual employee purchases.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

Just now, Drak3 said:

Unless you're building it yourself, they don't cost half the price. They're in the same ballpark.

 

And the "Bulk discount" cop out doesn't work either. Apple also offers bulk discounts to enterprise users, AND they offer discounts for individual employee purchases.

Why do I have to repeat the same answer again and again and again?

I have three huge wholesale distributor price lists in front of me right now. Trust me.

[imcaspar]

Just now, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

Why do I have to repeat the same answer again and again and again?

I have three huge wholesale distributor price lists in front of me right now. Trust me.

Because you are wrong. What @Drak3 said is true.

[Bouzoo]

1 minute ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

I have three huge wholesale distributor price lists in front of me right now. Trust me.

Just for comparison for the sake of everyone, print screens wouldn't hurt.

[Drak3]

1 minute ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

Why do I have to repeat the same answer again and again and again?

Because that is the only argument you can make.

 

1 minute ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

have three huge wholesale distributor price lists in front of me right now.

Congrats. That means nothing to us.

 

1 minute ago, Riccardo Cagnasso said:

Trust me

No.

[Riccardo Cagnasso]

Just now, caspar! said:

Because you are wrong. What @Drak3 said is true.

No it's not.

It's kinda part of my job, you know?