Apple Mac Pro cheese grater gets a price tag

Quizzical

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower#

It starts at $6000 without any upgrades.  Upgrades that they offer include:

$7000 to upgrade from an 8-core CPU to a 28-core one.  (AMD will sell you a 32-core CPU for $2000.)
$25000 to upgrade to 1.5 TB of memory.  (They charge about 4 times what New Egg does for a given quantity, though once you go above 32 GB modules, you have to do exotic server stuff.)
$10800 to upgrade from what is effectively a Radeon RX 580 to 4x Radeon VII with double the memory.  (That's actually cheaper than I expected.)
$1400 for a 4 TB SSD.  (New Egg offers a PCI-E over NVMe one for less than half that price.)
$400 to put wheels on the case.

So apparently the Apple Tax is alive and well.  High end computer hardware does cost a lot of money, even if usually not as much as what Apple charges.

But what I want to talk about is those $400 wheels.  I'm sure they look nice.  But don't you think that if you're going to pay $400 for wheels for your case, they should at least be motorized or something?  What's next?  A $1000 monitor stand?  Oh, wait...

Thomas2006

I get its a work station for music editing, photo work, ect.  But WTF with them prices. I am sure you could put the same hackintosh together for a tiny fraction of them prices.

Nanfoodle

Fully tripped out with a monitor or stand is $52'000. After tax in Canadian its $83'000. LOL. PC for the win. 

tawess

Prime_Directive said:

These are geared for professional level users who do  things like motion graphics on movies from Marvel, Disney and other highly complex 3d modeling applications. This product is really mean't for the every day web surfer or gamer. 

!0k + is a drop in the buckets for people making 50k or higher per project.

Question is still... If we are talking custom pro hardware... 

Could you not find a firm to build you a as good if not better rig for less money..? 

That is the main issue i and many others take with it....

This is not for "pros"... This is for the people who have more money than patience. 

tawess

Torval said:

tawess said:

Prime_Directive said:

These are geared for professional level users who do  things like motion graphics on movies from Marvel, Disney and other highly complex 3d modeling applications. This product is really mean't for the every day web surfer or gamer. 

!0k + is a drop in the buckets for people making 50k or higher per project.

Question is still... If we are talking custom pro hardware... 

Could you not find a firm to build you a as good if not better rig for less money..? 

That is the main issue i and many others take with it....

This is not for "pros"... This is for the people who have more money than patience. 

Workstation hardware is expensive. Windows and a lot of software costs more for 4+ core licenses. Just as an example. For a Dell 7920 1.5TB RAM is $24.5k. 3TB RAM is $91K. Dual Platinum Xeon 8280L are $32K. HP and others are priced similarly.

The mac pro is overpriced imo, but working on Windows isn't cheap either at that tier. The Win10 4+ core license only include 2 simultaneous RDP connections and can't be run through a VM that allows remote connections without additional licensing fees.

Anyway, from my experience these kinds of machines are built for specific purposes not home or work desktops.

Oh i know, Hench custom pro hardware part... 

Now sadly there is one other thing in this that honestly annoys me more.... And this is what makes people so brand loyal... 

Apple has a closed eco-system... As in... Everything is peachy as long as ALL connected devices are Apple products... But as soon as you need to bring in any cross platform work... It is a outright nightmare... 

Quizzical

Torval said:

tawess said:

Prime_Directive said:

These are geared for professional level users who do  things like motion graphics on movies from Marvel, Disney and other highly complex 3d modeling applications. This product is really mean't for the every day web surfer or gamer. 

!0k + is a drop in the buckets for people making 50k or higher per project.

Question is still... If we are talking custom pro hardware... 

Could you not find a firm to build you a as good if not better rig for less money..? 

That is the main issue i and many others take with it....

This is not for "pros"... This is for the people who have more money than patience. 

Workstation hardware is expensive. Windows and a lot of software costs more for 4+ core licenses. Just as an example. For a Dell 7920 1.5TB RAM is $24.5k. 3TB RAM is $91K. Dual Platinum Xeon 8280L are $32K. HP and others are priced similarly.

The mac pro is overpriced imo, but working on Windows isn't cheap either at that tier. The Win10 4+ core license only include 2 simultaneous RDP connections and can't be run through a VM that allows remote connections without additional licensing fees.

Anyway, from my experience these kinds of machines are built for specific purposes not home or work desktops.

A lot depends on what tier you mean by "that" tier.  Yeah, 1.5 TB of memory is going to cost a lot, no matter where you get it.  Same with four, high end GPUs.  But the base model is:

8 core CPU with max turbo of 4.0 GHz
32 GB of memory
Pro version of a Radeon RX 580
256 GB SSD

Even with a professional graphics card, you can easily build that yourself for under $2000.  The closest I could come to those specs from HP was about $2000 (with a consumer graphics card).  From Dell, it was about $2300 (with a slower 8 core CPU).  Apple charges $6000, or more if you want the case to have wheels.

rojoArcueid

mmmh what to buy, a cheese grater Mac Pro or a Tesla Model 3... can't make up my mind.

/s

Quizzical

Prime_Directive said:
Flip side, this will help AMD stock int he next quarter  

If the price that Apple is charging you per GPU is less than you would pay to buy a comparable GPU from Nvidia without the Apple tax, then Apple probably isn't paying AMD a fortune per GPU.  Apple might be paying AMD something like $1k per Vega 20 GPU.  That's not nothing, and it would certainly be profitable for AMD, but neither is it going to be a major driver of AMD's revenue.

Sovrath

DMKano said:

Quizzical said:
 Apple charges $6000, or more if you want the case to have wheels.

Because Apple has done one thing over the years - build up a rich loyal userbase who are dumb enough to not realize they are getting raped just so they can have an apple logo on their overpriced junk.

Well, I can't speak to computers on that end of the spectrum but I have two Windows machines at work (one a laptop) and my gaming computer is a pc and when it comes time for my artistic pursuits my Apple Laptop is like a breath of fresh air.

Ridelynn

A business, who is able to depreciate the cost over three years, isn’t going to blink at the cost.

Cleffy

You only get a Mac for Final Cut Pro and Sound Design. 3D is not recommended on a Mac. You also don't need these specs for Final Cut Pro or Sound Design. To me it's more of a self fulfilling prophecy that they can't sell Mac Pros. 

Ridelynn

I don't know that Apple cares all that much about not selling Mac Pros.

It's a halo product and a symbol. All Macintosh products total only represent 10% of Apple net revenue... and the vast majority of that are going to be portables (MBs, Airs, and MBPs).

It does sell enough units to be counted among the worlds largest PC manufacturers... but Pro models such as this are not high volume.

This hardware is a statement -- just as the last trashcan model was, not intended for high volume sales, but intended to send a message. And hey, if any of them actually sell, all the better.