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Comment by rys | Hacker News Reader

Did you check to see what the $13K gets you? 18-core Xeon with 4.3GHz Turbo, 4TB SSD, 128GB of fast DDR4 w/ECC. The option price for the Xeon alone is almost as much as your entire laptop. Same with the SSD.

The base hardware is just generally expensive.

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Oh it's a beast of a machine that you'll get for that wedge but I feel like they've rounded all the component parts up to the nearest $1,000 just because they can.

That display panel, that motherboard, that case, that PSU, that graphics card, that memory, the CPU – would you expect to pay the bones of $14K?

From Amazon:

   - 18-core Xeon $2,826.20
   - 128GB of ECC memory from Kingston in 32 GB chunks $1,569.63
   - can't find the GPU but the Vega Frontier Edition with 16GB is $999
   - Samsung 850 EVO 4TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD $1,469
   - Apple's own 5K monitor is $1,350

That's $8K – which means that the motherboard (which Apple make design and source themselves), the case, the peripherals and cables, the assembly and testing, and software make up the other $6K …

$6K ???

[0] https://smile.amazon.com/INTEL-PROCESSOR-E5-2697V4-2-3GHZ-SM... [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Kingston-ValueRAM-2133MHz-KVR21R15D... [2] https://smile.amazon.com/Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Air-Retail/dp/... [3] https://smile.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E4T0... [4] https://smile.amazon.com/Apple-MK462LL-27-Inch-Discontinued-...

I’d argue that’s a totally reasonable margin on high end hardware.

By the way, who’s gonna pay all those engineers who fit all those components in such a nice box?

Not I. Even if I had that kind of money burning a hole in my pocket I think it would be better spent elsewhere.

- Replacing that 18-core Xeon with ThreadRipper 1950x: -2000 USD

- Buying that ECC RAM yourself: -600 USD

- Buying those NVMe SSDs yourself -600 USD

Enjoing your new, affordable workstation: priceless :)

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