Apple Unveils New Mac Pro at WWDC 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Unveils New Mac Pro at WWDC 2019

venturebeat.com

19 pointspso11 comments

It’s sort of ironic that, after switching to Intel, Apple again finds themselves saddled with the second-best consumer desktop CPU architecture.

Who could’ve predicted the year they bring back the Mac Pro is the year AMD leapfrogs Intel though.

People kept saying that apple had to remember the tech crowd. This looks like a good start.

I'm struggling to see why I'd take a $5000 (realistically since it's Apple more like $6500-7000) machine over a $2000 machine running Fedora unless I need to develop for iOS.

> I'm struggling to see why I'd take a $5000 (realistically since it's Apple more like $6500-7000) machine over a $2000 machine running Fedora unless I need to develop for iOS [emphasis mine].

IIRC, the problem was that Apple left those people (and other professionals in the Apple ecosystem) with literally no good options.

I'd argue at that price they still don't have a good option merely an option.

$6k for an 8 core tower with 32GB of RAM base and a 256GB SSD (my Thinkpad has 32GB of RAM and more more nvme m2 storage than that).

So it's less powerful in the base config with half the RAM of the machine I built last year for £2000 (about $2600 currency to currency, I suspect you could do it for $2200 if you built it in the states).

Which will shortly be a 12C/24T for another $499 - whatever I get for the 2700X.

I get that I'm not the target demographic but that is hilarious.

Totally agree. Maybe I should have said "capable option" instead of "good option." Up to this point they had an expensive, dated, non-upgradable pro offering and a bunch of consumer level offerings. Something that's just expensive (but up-to-date and upgradable) seems like a significant improvement on their status quo.

A lot of their target market (photo/video/music) passes along the cost of their hardware to their clients, so I doubt an exorbitant pricetag will be too much of an obstacle. I am still using a 2010 Pro which would have sold for $3K+ when new, I spent $300 to get it used years later (and a few hundred more for SSDs and a newer GPU). Maybe I can pick up an abandoned "trashcan" once the new Pros start shipping...

Keep in mind your Thinkpad probably doesn't have ECC RAM, probably can't accept 2 TB of RAM, and doesn't have a Xeon processor.

This is a workstation for complex engineering/design/research use, not a general purpose desktop. You buy a workstation when you need as much compute power and expandability as possible, irregardless of price.

You can find similar workstations on the PC side as well (e.g. a Lenovo P920 or HP Z840). And they tend to be roughly as expensive.

Maybe you wouldn't but tons of labs, research groups, etc would shell out for one. Allows people to use Unix tools but doesn't makes the biologists unnecessarily scared.

I'm only half-joking. I've seen a lot of wasteful spending in government and medical research divisions on Mac Pros (this was before the garbage can design) for precisely these reasons. At my last research job, I got a beefy (at the time) Xeon 24 core Mac Pro with 3 Tesla Nvidia cards as my work station. Really couldn't complain. Was a super nice machine.

Sure, if someone wants to foot the bill I could bring myself to use one ;), it's just that when it's my money I'd rather have the same performance at a third the price and the same OS I'll be deploying to.

As mentioned though, I'm clearly not the target demographic.

You don't need to spend that much. But if you want a workstation grade PC, it wouldn't be that much cheaper, spec for spec.

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