52,600$ fully loaded mac pro

[Letgomyleghoe]

I have no idea why even apple fans are defending this price, sure this is better than any I-mac before it but for that price for the specs of a fully loaded I-mac are plain idiotic. i was looking on some other forums and people are defending the price saying that "Its PRO meaning its for professionals do these people think professional hardware is cheap!?" I don't get this either because the majority of the hardware is on the open market excluding apples afterburner accelerator card. 

sure there's 1.5 terabytes of ram but apple is charging $25000 for it... that's $7000 more just for sourcing and installing

they make the Radeon Vega II's sound good for the price because they have 32gb of dedicated memory each but that upgrade is $10000

and 4tb of ssd storage for $1400 you can get 4 tb of m.2 ssd storage for like $400-450 depending on if you want samsung or not 

the only thing that i see thats at a reasonable price is there afterburner card it can supposedly run 3 8k prores raw video streams 

BUT IF YOU WANT WHEELS...

that'll cost you another 400 

 

Please tell me if i'm missing something but i think this is the most un-justified tech pricing i have ever seen in my entire life.

 

 

[dizmo]

You're completely missing the fact that it's not really meant for individuals.

Yes, the top spec is expensive. However I bet if you looked to a comprobaly specced PC from Dell, the price would be similar, if not ridiculously more.

Why?

Systems like that are meant for corporations, or people doing a significant amount of professional work. Since it's a tax write off, you can charge significantly more for it. Same with the price of the wheels. It's a niche part in an already niche market, thus, the price is higher. Judging by the performance increases over lesser machines, it's probably worth it for the people that are going to be spending the money.

 

Find me a consumer motherboard that can take 1.5TB of RAM. Oh right. They don't exist.

[Polyvalent]

At a professional level I can think of a few reasons, one being it's a giant tax write off and another being that that kind of productivity could have a solid ROI, depending on what you're actually doing with it.

[Letgomyleghoe]

4 minutes ago, dizmo said:

 

Find me a consumer motherboard that can take 1.5TB of RAM. Oh right. They don't exist.

if you mean normal form factor boards you cant find one that will hold 1.5 terrabytes. but you can find server boards that will. i see why they would charge that much but who really needs 1.5 terrabytes of ram in the firstplace unless you were doing extreme computational multi- threaded work loads such as developing ai i could see the use 

[Jae Tee]

10 minutes ago, dizmo said:

You're completely missing the fact that it's not really meant for individuals.

 

5 minutes ago, Polyvalent said:

At a professional level I can think of a few reasons, one being....that that kind of productivity could have a solid ROI, depending on what you're actually doing with it.

Again being pro is not an excuse for being ridiculously over priced.

 

If it can be sourced on the open market AND put together by a professional for FAR cheaper, it's over priced. 

[Roswell]

I think the argument that this isn't aimed at consumers is a little silly. They're absolutely aiming at "prosumers", at the very least.

 

There are very, very few professional situations that would utilize the top spec'd machines as workstations. Anything that you need 1.5TB of RAM for is getting offloaded to a server in 99% of professional scenarios. Pixar isn't rendering movies on some random dude's office desk, Exxon isn't modeling ocean floors in Bob's office, etc.

[Eigenvektor]

7 minutes ago, scuff gang said:

if you mean normal form factor boards you cant find one that will hold 1.5 terrabytes. but you can find server boards that will. i see why they would charge that much but who really needs 1.5 terrabytes of ram in the firstplace unless you were doing extreme computational multi- threaded work loads such as developing ai i could see the use 

I'm sure you can find some media-related tools that can make use of it and are only available on macOS.

 

Put another way, if you absolutely need macOS (for whatever reason) and you need the most powerful machine you can get, you've essentially got no other choice. A hackintosh simply isn't an alternative in a professional environment, ever. (a) legal concerns, and (b) reliability concerns. If you need the machine to make you money, you can't spend a week fixing it when an update breaks compatibility with your hardware.

[Letgomyleghoe]

1 minute ago, Eigenvektor said:

I'm sure you can find some media-related tools that can make use of it and are only available on macOS.

 

Put another way, if you absolutely need macOS (for whatever reason) and you need the most powerful machine you can get, you've essentially got no other choice. A hackintosh simply isn't an alternative in a professional environment, ever. (a) legal concerns, and (b) reliability concerns. If you need the machine to make you money, you can't spend a week fixing it when an update breaks compatibility with your hardware.

yeah thats the thing that sucks is mac os is actually a really good os in how it uses its resources, it sucks that they dont sell licensing for it. i could see it being use like you said as a top of the line mac os machine 

[SenKa]

Reasons for the Mac Pro being expensive:

 

Assembled in USA

Intel price-gouging Xeon's

ECC DDR4 price being inflated

Fantastic build quality

Fully modular designs are more expensive

Gen 1 product (we pay R&D. Same as with Galaxy Fold)

macOS License baked in to price

Dual 10GBe NIC (even on base model)

 

There is more, but I honestly CBA to repeat myself.

[TheWiseGuy]

im not spending 400 dollars on wheels thats a rtx 2070 

[Polyvalent]

3 minutes ago, Jae Tee said:

 

Again being pro is not an excuse for being ridiculously over priced.

 

If it can be sourced on the open market AND put together by a professional for FAR cheaper, it's over priced. 

Okay, then source it on the open market and put it together for far cheaper, then market it to an incredibly niche group of people and companies who would buy that set of hardware in the first place.  The products included are already overpriced before Apple ever gets their hands on them, mainly Xeons as well as the operating system itself.  And for how difficult all of that is you're going to be adding a decent margin, unless you value your time and work as being incredibly low.

 

[Letgomyleghoe]

1 minute ago, Polyvalent said:

Okay, then source it on the open market and put it together for far cheaper, then market it to an incredibly niche group of people and companies who would buy that set of hardware in the first place.  The products included are already overpriced before Apple ever gets their hands on them, mainly Xeons as well as the operating system itself.  And for how difficult all of that is you're going to be adding a decent margin, unless you value your time and work as being incredibly low.

 

i agree with you on this one it would be extremely hard to put this together on the open market, im sure it could be done but it would be a 1 of a kind thing

[Cupar19]

I personally think the price is absurd but i think thats the point, as an individual i think its absurd. A business that needs that power and reliability probably doesn't think its that bad.

 

Also machines for similar tasks from other companies such as dell aren't any better, actually more

 

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/workstations/precision-7920-rack-build-your-own/spd/precision-7920r-workstation/xctopr7920emea?configurationid=355afaea-2977-427b-a6de-452244694dfe

[Polyvalent]

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the claim of it being overpriced.  Certainly this is an exorbitant amount for the hardware contained at face value.  You're paying for way more than the hardware that you get.  That doesn't make it a reasonable buy.  But they have their reasons for how they price their products.  Luckily as a consumer you are not obligated in any way to buy their products, ever.

[Letgomyleghoe]

1 minute ago, Polyvalent said:

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the claim of it being overpriced.  Certainly this is an exorbitant amount for the hardware contained at face value.  You're paying for way more than the hardware that you get.  That doesn't make it a reasonable buy.  But they have their reasons for how they price their products.  Luckily as a consumer you are not obligated in any way to buy their products, ever.

yeah as im looking at it to squeeze 1.5 terabytes of ram into a normal atx case would be extremely hard

[Cupar19]

2 minutes ago, Cupar19 said:

I personally think the price is absurd but i think thats the point, as an individual i think its absurd. A business that needs that power and reliability probably doesn't think its that bad.

 

Also machines for similar tasks from other companies such as dell aren't any better, actually more

 

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/workstations/precision-7920-rack-build-your-own/spd/precision-7920r-workstation/xctopr7920emea?configurationid=355afaea-2977-427b-a6de-452244694dfe

oh and did i mention the size of this dell machine

[Roswell]

47 minutes ago, dizmo said:

You're completely missing the fact that it's not really meant for individuals.

Yes, the top spec is expensive. However I bet if you looked to a comprobaly specced PC from Dell, the price would be similar, if not ridiculously more.

Why?

Systems like that are meant for corporations, or people doing a significant amount of professional work. Since it's a tax write off, you can charge significantly more for it. Same with the price of the wheels. It's a niche part in an already niche market, thus, the price is higher. Judging by the performance increases over lesser machines, it's probably worth it for the people that are going to be spending the money.

 

Find me a consumer motherboard that can take 1.5TB of RAM. Oh right. They don't exist.

You can buy similar machines for half the price: https://www.thinkmate.com/systems/workstations/hpx

 

Any number of workstation providers easily pump this stuff out.

[SenKa]

21 minutes ago, scuff gang said:

i agree with you on this one it would be extremely hard to put this together on the open market, im sure it could be done but it would be a 1 of a kind thing

Looked in to it briefly.:

This is a CPU made by Intel in partnership with Apple so far as I can tell, meaning it is special to the MP. The closest contemporary is $5000, and lacks the same 2TB theoretical RAM capacity (do note I can no longer find any publicitiy of this. Regardless, the closest CPU I can find only goes to 1TB vs 1.5TB.)

RAM is ~$1000 per stick, so 12k.

GPU is special to the Mac Pro. Closest contemporary in raw compute performance is a Quadro GV100. Those are $10,000 a piece. The maxed out Mac Pro has 2, so make that $20,000

The only motherboard I could find that supports that much RAM is the Gigabyte C621 Aorus XTREME. That is $2000

PSU is 1400w, comperable is an AX1500i for $600

ProRes card is Apple specific, closest would be a Red Rocket-X, which is $7000

 

That leaves us with 6k for a custom enclosure, CPU cooler, and OS. Lets say we go to match apples build quality, protocase would run you ~$2000 to design a custom enclosure. CPU cooler would run you $100. Thats $3900 before an OS which is for arguments sake another $100.

 

So what you are paying above a comparable system is $3500 of "apple tax", as people love to call it.

 

Like I said above, this is a first gen product and Apple needs to pay off R&D for every component other than the RAM, as well as a license fee for the OS. Sounds fair to me.

[Retro_R]

1 hour ago, scuff gang said:

sure this is better than any iMac* before it but for that price for the specs of a fully loaded iMac* are plain idiotic.

What do you mean? The $52,000 model your talking about is a lot more powerful than a speced out iMac Pro, assuming that's what your saying. It has 20 more cores, about 47 times more ram, 3 more tb of storage, and an extra gpu.

[Roswell]

15 minutes ago, SenKa said:

Looked in to it briefly.:

This is a CPU made by Intel in partnership with Apple so far as I can tell, meaning it is special to the MP. The closest contemporary is $5000, and lacks the same 2TB theoretical RAM capacity (do note I can no longer find any publicitiy of this. Regardless, the closest CPU I can find only goes to 1TB vs 1.5TB.)

RAM is ~$1000 per stick, so 12k.

GPU is special to the Mac Pro. Closest contemporary in raw compute performance is a Quadro GV100. Those are $10,000 a piece. The maxed out Mac Pro has 2, so make that $20,000

The only motherboard I could find that supports that much RAM is the Gigabyte C621 Aorus XTREME. That is $2000

PSU is 1400w, comperable is an AX1500i for $600

ProRes card is Apple specific, closest would be a Red Rocket-X, which is $7000

 

That leaves us with 6k for a custom enclosure, CPU cooler, and OS. Lets say we go to match apples build quality, protocase would run you ~$2000 to design a custom enclosure. CPU cooler would run you $100. Thats $3900 before an OS which is for arguments sake another $100.

 

So what you are paying above a comparable system is $3500 of "apple tax", as people love to call it.

 

Like I said above, this is a first gen product and Apple needs to pay off R&D for every component other than the RAM, as well as a license fee for the OS. Sounds fair to me.

Scalable Xeons are available that support 2TB, it's not Apple specific.

 

Go here: https://www.thinkmate.com/system/hpx-xs8-24s1

 

That's the workstation market without the Apple tax.

 

I just built a 48 core/96 thread, 2TB RAM, 4TB SSD, 2x RTX 48GB Quadro monstrosity for $53k that would take enormous dumps all over Apple's top spec'd Mac Pro. Or you know, you could spend about half of that and come out to what Apple has on offer.

[Zando_]

Ugh. Go buy enterprise/full on business-class professional hardware and software, get back to me. It's not for individuals. I've purchased $600 6' square plastic label printers for the company I work for and that's just standard accounting office gear. 

Oh look, here's a camera body that costs within margin of error of the highest spec Mac Pro you can currently buy:


Almost like the people who need this hardware are fine with paying that price and they pay it for reasons that mean a lot to them but absolutely nothing to the average consumer because wow maybe they aren't average consumers and a computer or camera the cost of a pretty nice car isn't meant for average people anyways. 

[Blademaster91]

58 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

I think the argument that this isn't aimed at consumers is a little silly. They're absolutely aiming at "prosumers", at the very least.

 

There are very, very few professional situations that would utilize the top spec'd machines as workstations. Anything that you need 1.5TB of RAM for is getting offloaded to a server in 99% of professional scenarios. Pixar isn't rendering movies on some random dude's office desk, Exxon isn't modeling ocean floors in Bob's office, etc.

Exactly, a single workstation doesn't make any sense if a company needed 1.5TB RAM, a mac pro with that much ram has to be a very small niche.

47 minutes ago, SenKa said:

Reasons for the Mac Pro being expensive:

 

Assembled in USA

Intel price-gouging Xeon's

ECC DDR4 price being inflated

Fantastic build quality

Fully modular designs are more expensive

Gen 1 product (we pay R&D. Same as with Galaxy Fold)

macOS License baked in to price

Dual 10GBe NIC (even on base model)

 

There is more, but I honestly CBA to repeat myself.

The "assembled in USA" means nothing because all the parts are made in the same Chinese factories as the average Dell or Lenovo, it's just marketing bulls*it because it's Apple.

While Apple could've went with much cheaper Threadripper or Epyc CPU's

Praising Apple for their build quality, with how many issues they've been having with hardware?

The modular design is expensive because they went with proprietary slots instead of standardized cables.

Gen 1 means wait for the better refresh.

But yeah most of it is the Apple tax, because a $4,000 Threadripper system absolutely destroys a Mac Pro costing twice as much.

????? 10GBe NICs are relatively cheap.

[dizmo]

13 minutes ago, scuff gang said:

if you mean normal form factor boards you cant find one that will hold 1.5 terrabytes. but you can find server boards that will. i see why they would charge that much but who really needs 1.5 terrabytes of ram in the firstplace unless you were doing extreme computational multi- threaded work loads such as developing ai i could see the use 

Yes, but that's not something that's going to be sat in a room beside you. Mind you that's a very niche group.

If you price out a more reasonable system from Dell, the Apple system actually comes out to be cheaper.

If you're focusing on the extreme high end model? Yes, it's stupidly expensive, because the people that need that don't need to worry as much about budget.

2 minutes ago, Jae Tee said:

Again being pro is not an excuse for being ridiculously over priced.

If it can be sourced on the open market AND put together by a professional for FAR cheaper, it's over priced. 

You likely just don't understand how business works. If you're doing video work, a large portion of your income is going to be both your time and a non-physical item. Thus, you don't really have materials in your COGS, meaning you have a greater percentage of your earnings that need to be countered with tax write offs.

10 minutes ago, SenKa said:

Reasons for the Mac Pro being expensive:

 

Assembled in USA

Intel price-gouging Xeon's

ECC DDR4 price being inflated

Fantastic build quality

Fully modular designs are more expensive

Gen 1 product (we pay R&D. Same as with Galaxy Fold)

macOS License baked in to price

Dual 10GBe NIC (even on base model)

 

There is more, but I honestly CBA to repeat myself.

Very good points. I didn't even know about the dual 10gb NIC.

9 minutes ago, TheWiseGuy said:

im not spending 400 dollars on wheels thats a rtx 2070 

That statement alone shows that this product was never marketed towards you

7 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

You can buy similar machines for half the price: https://www.thinkmate.com/systems/workstations/hpx

 

Any number of workstation providers easily pump this stuff out.

None of those have a 28 core Xeon option.

If you price it with similar parts, there's only about a $1,000 price jump for the Apple product, which is not bad considering it has a much more advanced case, likely better support, includes MacOS (which said individual would need if they're buying the product)...

[SenKa]

Just now, Blademaster91 said:

The "assembled in USA" means nothing because all the parts are made in the same Chinese factories as the average Dell or Lenovo, it's just marketing bulls*it because it's Apple.

It means the components are assembled in the USA. While yes, they still buy their components from manufacturing companies largely in China, this adds to cost as US labor is more expensive.

1 minute ago, Blademaster91 said:

While Apple could've went with much cheaper Threadripper or Epyc CPU's

Apple has never used AMD CPU's. They likely never will, and it is entirely possible they cannot due to some contract clause when Apple went to Intel from PPC.

1 minute ago, Blademaster91 said:

Praising Apple for their build quality, with how many issues they've been having with hardware?

Mechanical build quality? You're damned right I am. You think there is a reason nobody (that I am aware of) says "Apple products feel cheaply made"?

 

2 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

The modular design is expensive because they went with proprietary slots instead of standardized cables.

The only "proprietary slot" Apple went with is their own designed MPX. You can slot a PCI-E device in to an MPX slot so long as you can supply it with external power, if such is required. There are even internal headers designed for this purpose! Also, modularity is always more expensive even while using established standards like PCI-E. Molded plastic and gold coated metal cost more than solder.

 

8 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Gen 1 means wait for the better refresh.

Okay. Then by that logic people should wait for the 2020 Mac Pro. I don't disagree.

 

8 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

But yeah most of it is the Apple tax, because a $4,000 Threadripper system absolutely destroys a Mac Pro costing twice as much.

See my post above, relating to price of a directly comparable Intel system. For this comparison threadripper is irrelevant because it is not directly comparable.

 

10 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

????? 10GBe NICs are relatively cheap.

Sure. Cheap ones. Even so, Dual 10GBe is not a luxury afforded on even high end consumer boards most of the time.

[Artherion]

Omfg that's the definition of Price overkill