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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

A $2500 desktop computer with integrated graphics?

Honestly, it feels like a bit of a joke.

It starts at $800, and you can instantly save $600 even for this top-of-the-line model by installing RAM yourself (it's user-upgradable again).

The model & price reviewed here is the "let's not stop people from throwing money at us" option.

The RAM is upgrade-able on a Mac? Who put his neck on the line to get that option into the final product? That man is a hero.

Wow, didn't see that coming.

You can't upgrade the i3, or the measly 128GB hard drive they bundle with it though. For $800, nearly every other option is better.

Why you can't upgrade i3?

It's soldered to the motherboard.

It has TB3. If you need more storage you can add it externally.

How much graphics processing power does your text editor demand? How about your build server?

Apple made it pretty clear in their keynote they're focussing this product to be attractive to the 'pro' market that gives zero fucks about a whiz-bang graphics card.

My text editor needs the processing power of my $100 ThinkPad, and that's where I'll be using my text editor.

What is it that justifies the $2500 price?

6-core latest CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, plus “apple tax” (design, thermals, build/hw quality, OS, support).

You can build a similarly spec’d PC for maybe $1500, with a better GPU, but 20x as large, not silent, higher power consumption, etc. Many trade-offs, not for everyone.

Or it'll be right around $1250, the same size or smaller, and still silent:

https://www.amazon.com/NUC7i7BNH-Dual-Core-i7-7567U-Bluetoot...

With 1/2 the max RAM, 1/3 the CPU cores and from a previous generation, 1/4 the TB3 ports, no NVME, No 10GbE option. But sure. "The same".

That's a laptop CPU. The top-end Mac Mini he's using is a 65W TDP i7-8700. Pretty large difference in performance.

It would be $3500 with GPU, so I'm glad.

Don't need GPU for typical coding.

A huge chunk of that is the SSD. It's actually very reasonably priced, especially considering that you get a Mac ecosystem along with the computer.

Have you looked at SSD prices lately!?

I'm with you. A very high end 1TB M2 SSD card can be had for under $400, with good SSD cards being under $200.

The pretty-high-end 1TB Samsung 970 EVO has dropped as low as $228 recently from multiple vendors.

https://slickdeals.net/f/12192367-1tb-samsung-970-evo-nvme-m...

If you really need the very-high-end, then yeah, the 970 PRO is just shy of $400.

For cheaper stuff, ADATA's 960GB was recently down around $180.

SSD prices have really dropped the last few months.

The price for those SSD upgrade are more than double of the current Retail Pro Level SSD at same capacity and similar speed. Which Apple saves on SSD Controller, better NAND pricing, no retail and distributor margin. Even though I expected the Apple SSD upgrade were to be expensive, those upgrade price levels are simply ridiculous.

The DRAM too but at least I could upgrade that myself to 64GB.

> considering that you get a Mac ecosystem

People consider this a good thing?

EDIT: To clarify, the cost of their proprietary devices mean spending an additional bit. Every other company uses USB C now.

Yeah, turns out OS X is popular. Who knew?

I have a Windows 10 computer for gaming and oh my god am I glad I don't have to use that for anything productive.

But hey, at least it's the year of desktop linux!

As an aside- I do not like desktop linux or anyone that defends this awful status quo.

Its desktop, the user should not have to type anything ever ever ever. The community is toxic and harmful to the future of linux by telling everyone that terminal for the average user is okay.

I love my ubuntu server, its the greatest thing I've ever used. No problems ever.

With Steam Proton you could call this the year of desktop linux gaming!

Desktop linux is actually coming now, who'da thunk it would be as a trojan horse riding in via Windows.

Reasonably priced because SSD? You know a 1TB NVME PCIe M.2 drive can be had for under $250 right? How Apple justifies $800 for this single part is beyond baffling.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BN217QG/?coliid=I2D5ZX13M1AMZ7&...

Yeah, and that's one of the best consumer models available! I believe the WD Black 1TB is in the same league for performance and price as well.

I bought a 1 TB Samsung EVO 860 one month ago for a little more than 170 Euro. The SSD could be a huge chunk of the manufacturing cost but that means that Apple enjoys a huge margin on this computer.

TBH - Do you even need 1TB of storage on your desktop? If your image/music library is that large, you'd have it on a NAS. Maybe if you've got a big batch of VMs for some reason...

Get get 3.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 8GB model sell 8GB stick get 32gb for 270 and external 1TB SSD for 160 you will have very decent dev box for 1730 - whatever 8gb goes for

You could add an eGPU over TB3.

Lack of GPU wasn't OP's gripe.

How else would you interpret the comment? The only thing they mention is the lack of GPU, so I'm curious why you would say that.

In any case the price is due to the SSD and RAM upgrades. You can get the i7 with 8gb RAM and 256gb SSD for $1300, which is still pricey but what do you expect from Apple...

You would interpret it as saying that it is overpriced. A high-end GPU at the same price might make sense, but paying that much for RAM and an SSD is nonsense.

An eGPU is going to add $300 for an enclosure and $500 or whatever for the GPU itself, so even with that it gives you a pro desktop option priced cheaper than a Mac Pro.

Base price on the Mac Pro has been $3000 even before the trashcan version. With the pattern in all of Apple's recent products, the next one might be more.

I've interpreted it as being overpriced, with provision that it might not be if there was a (higher end) GPU inside.

With the availability of eGPUs, and Apple even officially supporting and selling them, it's like complaining about a barebone being a barebone.

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