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Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

The 1987 Mac II released at $5,498, $12,125 adjusted for inflation.

Granted, that included a monitor.

IMO these things are designed for companies like Pixar, Disney, and aerospace, the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" world.

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“If you think the computer is expensive, you’re going to completely lose it when you find out the salary of the boffin who will put it to good use. Or, more mind-numbing yet, the cost of having neither.”

> aerospace

I was under the impression that most engineering software for mechanical and aerospace engineers are only supported on Windows.

I am not sure about aerospace, but for mechanical engineering, SolidWorks is a must, and it is only available on Windows. Many other important pieces of software, for example ANSYS, ABAQUS, and Fluent are not available for Mac. In fact, the only mechanical engineering software I know is available for Mac is AutoCAD.

I think Apple are trying to make the point that they have invested again in this space, so they hope that software developers will also invest. The expectation might not be for an immediate switch from software developers, but laying the groundwork for something longer term. We'll see how it pans out, but Apple are experiencing pressures they didn't experience a few years ago.

Aerospace has been going heavily towards gpu accelerated simulation via CUDA, so the lack of NVIDIA support kind of kills the market potential there.

This is in the context of Apple increasing its prices to ludicrous levels across its product lines though (look at the iPhones!). I'm sure it's great for short-term profitability, but I think they'll come to regret this.

They have been a premium company for decades.

So not sure why you think they will suddenly change.

They used to do premium performance and design at a premium price. For the macs they just seem to do a bit of design lately, and that's considering that PC's look better now than a decade or two ago and that apple still pushes proprietary stuff like this MPX Module.

Hardware was many orders of magnitude more expensive to manufacture in 1987[1]. The base model that you get for $6000 is not impressive at all by today's standards. The max specs would make it a powerhouse but it probably will also cost ~$12000.

[1]: http://www.singularity.com/charts/page59.html

12k for max specs feels low. I'm thinking the over/under is 20k.

I'm thinking $10/GB for ram - that's $15k just to max out that one segment

If aerospace get computers like this, I'd love to hear where I need to be applying to. We're running on Windows 7 machines with i5-2400 CPUs, about 4GB of RAM, and integrated graphics. All our CAD software is run on a grid system, where we access e3, Altium and Catia via a remote server. The engineers are all on hardware about 7 years old.

They were priced like a low end Sun computer, so that must have been what they were after [1]. But it still didn't make sense. The near-identical Amiga 2000 in 1987 was 1495 dollars.

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/Sun_Price_List_Dec88.pdf

Back in 1999, the original Cinema Display was $1299 and the G4 Tower was $2499

That's $2000 and $3800 in today's dollars

> "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" world.

I don’t know, I can afford it, but Apple is losing it (see MacBook Pro fiasco).

The 2006 Mac Pro Cheese Grater model was $2,499. $3,124 adjusted for inflation. Earlier G models were even cheaper.

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