Apple’s reinvented Mac Pro will shred your workflow | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s reinvented Mac Pro will shred your workflow

techcrunch.com

46 pointsjbegley49 comments

The price saddens me. The $6K base is twice the base of the 2013 Mac Pro when it was released. Some quick spec-ing for a somewhat-equivalent DIY build gives somewhere around $3K.

I hope at least that the SSDs are standard M.2, but looking at the pictures I’m not sure they are.

They're behind the T2 chip, it'll be bare flash not M.2

The pricing on this is more insane than Mac ever has been... Holding out for a Zen 2 16-core or Threadripper myself, and will almost certainly be jumping to Linux for good this time around.

Wow, Apple with its customer base is ripe for some disruption. One can get the same performance as the cheapest version of this product for $1000, instead of $6000 (except for the afterburner card, whose benefit is not so cleat to me now). I have a hard time believing that Apple ecosystem and its applications are so good to audio/video creators that they pay 6x as much as the value of the hardware. It seems to me those buyers are actually paying for the design and for the status symbol, like people pay for suits or expensive watches. Not because they need this machine and its ecosystem for production.

This is like saying you can get the same calories as a high end steak by eating $0.50 worth of table sugar.

Technically true. Yet not a useful substitution for anyone but hummingbirds.

So what is so good about this steak computer that warrants 6x the cost of the hardware? The afterburner card?

Hard to say exactly because you didn't provide your build. But I've specced out sub-$1000 PCs recently and you have to make a lot of sacrifices to get there. A good gaming PC with a high end GPU is going to start in the $1400 range.

For example here:

Budget build for $1100: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HGNWHh

More beefy I/O build for $1500: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KWCtMZ

And those are prices in retail. One can get this kind of machine second hand at 30-50% discount.

These would have comparable performance to what Apple is proposing for $6000, except for the Afterburner card, which I am not so sure about. Doubt it is worth $4000 though.

High-end gaming setup would begin to touch $2000, but that is not what I am talking about.

Apple's customer base seems to be suffering some kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome, they definitely "think different" and bend over and cough when requested.

Can I just comment on the title without reading the article? I don't know if shredding my workflow is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.

The "joke", which is part of the headline but not in the submission, is that the new Mac Pro resembles a cheese grater, hence the shredding.

It will shred my wallet for sure

Goodbye, savings account ...

OMG An Apple product has finally made me feel excited! It's going to be pricey but I've dreamed up this for some time.

If it's truly repair and upgrade friendly, this would definitely be something that will pull me back to the Apple world, after leaving in disappointment around the touch bar.

I do not understand this positive excitement. The market price for the performance they offer is a fraction of what they ask. Why not build your Xeon system for fraction of the price? Or buy workstation from small builders, more expensive, but hassle-free and still fraction of the cost.

Is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more compute from the cloud?

Yes, many media workflows. No one rents cloud servers to edit 8k video.

They may not rent in the cloud, but I guess I'm surprised they aren't using machines or servers running in a data center with a high performance display protocol to view the output

In 8K? How do you recommend transfering raw footage to the data center?

When we need to transfer raw video footage between offices, we still ship drives by mail most of the time.

A couple thoughts:

(1) A lot of independent video people spend their time getting better at video stuff rather than learning the sysops stuff they'd need to set up or maintain something like that.

(2) Latency!

For comfortable work with gui applications, 60 fps and low response time (sub 16ms) are the minimum agreeable specs. For 4K uncompressed stream, that is 3.8GiB per second and the datacenter must not be behind too many routers. The bitrate would be substantially less with lossy compression (video streaming works), however text and gui elements look bad with that, so only lossless compression is reasonable. Still, I think very few places have a strong enough network connection to a datacenter to use remote server in this way. The idea isn't bad, especially with GPU prices skyrocketing last few years, but the network quality will have to go up order of magnitude to make it realistic.

In industries where latency matters, there absolutely is a market.

You mean placing critical data in someone's else computer?

No, many businesses are a bit more clever than that.

How am I going to run 1000 Serum instances live in the cloud? Latency is killer.

My question would be: is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more by building the machine yourself?

Yes, because a lot of media people are scared away from the thought of putting together their own machine (and a lot of them also depend on Mac OS)

I'd just build it myself and still install Mac OS... Ha, if that was a factor.

I love the design, too bad they don't just sell the case so I could DIY a proper PC that's half the cost with the same specs ...

Why did this take more than two years to design and produce?

Finding the perfect placement for the 3.5mm audio jack took most of the time. The rest was easy.

It wasn't just the computer but the display and Afterburner card.

Which could have been delayed a year since they're super-niche.

I think you will find that it isn't.

Video editing is a very large and pretty core use case.

But only 1% of video editors will buy a $5,000 reference monitor.

If there was a market for $43 000 one there probably is a market for $5000 one too.

The Mac Pro is super niche. Inside of that incredibly small niche, I think the Afterburner card won't actually be that rare.

Couldn't they have released it 2 years ago without the Afterburner card?

6 years actually.

> Why did this take more than two years to design and produce?

Measure twice, cut once.

"After throwing the first one out because you ... didn't."

Exactly. I imagine they've measured and cut very many times.

They pulled off their best hardware engineers to work on laptop keyboards.

They didn't spend much time on the grill--its basically the 2007 MacBook packaging styrofoam.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/chromedecay/568037457/

Is it dishwasher safe?

Kidding! I'd buy it if I could afford to pay for style over optimizing for cost:power.

You would find it pretty hard to spec a similar machine for similar cost.

And then you would still have to find an alternative to the Afterburner card.

I wasn't clear. Strictly speaking, I don't need that much power. 1/5 of that is fine. I am honest about my needs as a musician, writer, and occasional video person. My needs would be well-served by a ~$1k system.

If I had the money, I would get it just because I can, and for all those weird resource-demanding ideas I can't do on a more practical computer.

It would be possible to spec a similar machine for similar cost as less (once the component parts are available like the new Radeon Pro), as the $6000 starting price tag is for the base model, i.e., only 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, and a Radeon Pro 580X. (The Afterburner card appears to be standard.) The 1.5TB ram, 32 cores, etc., are upgrade options. Based on past Apple history, a fully-specced Mac Pro could top $20k.

https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

A lot of my workflow is in Word and Textmate, so a lot of different Macs will "shred" my workflow.

Any time Apple announces a Macbook, there are hundreds of comments saying how they've abandoned the true professionals by only supporting quad-core processors and 16GB of RAM and expansion only through USB-C. Then they announce a machine that has 1.4kW of power and 28 cores and 1.5TB of RAM and we see comments from people complaining that they don't need that much power and any machine will work for them.

There is no contradiction here. There is a range of needs expressed by different people.

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