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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

What if I'm in the market for a solid Mac workstation? The lowest spec option for a Mac Pro is 6000 dollars. That is a lot of money for a computer.

Barring the Mac Pro, what are my options? There's the Mac Mini. Reasonably priced perhaps, but pretty low on specs and upgradability. I also have my concerns over the cooling.

Then there's the iMac. Again, concerns with the upgradability and cooling. At least the pricing is decent for a Mac. That is unless you go for the iMac Pro, which is almost the same level as the entry-level Mac Pro. At least the iMac Pro comes with a monitor stand.

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I guess if a fully loaded iMac or MBP are not suitable to your needs, then you are in a particular niche where I would expect a person not to balk at $6000. There's not much either my MBP or iMac can't do and I heavily abuse them. The only thing I can think of would be very very intensive video editing, and in that case, $6000 is a drop in the bucket compared to most professional editing tools and software.

Except it’s not a drop in the bucket anymore. All of the costs have come way down. To be honest I don’t think they are targeting the everyday video producer. They are targeting the high end as like you say a lot of people could use the other products.

So why wouldn’t we use the other products - they are not upgradable and rely on lots of cables and external boxes hanging off them. And for me personally the thermal design is poor. My MacBook Pro gets too hot, the fans kick in and then it’s throttled.

They could take a Mac Pro and just chop it in half to create the product so many people want.

1 MPX module. 6 DIMM slots. 700 watt power supply. One 10Gb Ethernet port. Supports up to 12 cores.

Shrink the case somewhat in two dimensions and call it the Mac Pro Mini.

How hard can this possibly be you have all the parts right there...

I guess you can be upset at the price, but people have been asking Apple for a mini-tower for decades and they're obviously not interested in offering one. I'm not sure why anyone would think the Mac Pro redesign would be it.

It's because for the past two decades Apple has always provided a Power Mac or Mac Pro at the inflation-adjusted $2500-3000 price point. As of now there is no user-serviceable Mac at that price point.

The people who are upset are not necessary those Mac users who have been clamoring for the mystical "xMac" for the past 15 or so years. We know that the chances of Apple ever releasing a sub-$2,000 tower (which is what the "xMac" was) is very slim. No, the people who are upset are people who want user-serviceable, upgradeable, and expandable Macs who were able to buy them at the traditional $2,500-$3,000 price points who now feel abandoned by Apple because Apple's remaining desktop offerings are the Mac Mini, iMac, and iMac Pro, none of which satisfy the expandability requirement of the 2012 and previous Mac Pro nor the user-serviceability requirement of the 2013 Mac Pro.

I have a 2013 Mac Pro and I'm upset with Apple because I don't want to buy a Mac Mini or an iMac yet there is nothing comparable to the Mac Pro at the $3,000 price point. Of course my Mac Pro is still working and I can still get a few more years of solid use from it for my needs (although I was really looking forward to this Mac Pro announcement after years of waiting), but when it's time to upgrade, unless Apple reverses direction (which I think is slim given that Tim Cook has been wildly successful from a financial standpoint), I'll have nothing satisfactory to upgrade to; I'll either have to pick a compromised Mac that is difficult or expensive to upgrade, somehow pony up $6,000 for an upgradeable computer, or leave the Mac entirely. That's why I'm upset, as well as many other Mac users who have waited for years for a Mac Pro upgrade only to be told by Apple that we have been abandoned.

and they are just not going to listen and instead declare the Mac Pro a success for the next few years.

Most people in these threads have been complaining about wanting a mini-tower from Apple at a rock-bottom price. Personally, I'd love one, too, and the Mac Pro has never been a consideration to me because of the price.

Unfortunately, cost-creep has been happening more every year. Apple seems pretty proud that the average cost of an iPhone has jumped up since the iPhoneX. For almost a decade I would buy a Macbook Pro, then aftermarket upgrade the ram and hard drive. Now that it is no longer an option that has greatly increased the cost of a new laptop for me. (to be fair to Apple, the PC laptops I was looking at also had soldered RAM and while the SSDs weren't soldered on, they had worse performance and were close in cost after upgrading). I'm still hoping PC makers catchup.

The iMac Pro seems to have filled the price-point of the old entry level Mac Pro.

It sucks there's not a Mac that fits your needs at a reasonable price...I feel similarly about their laptops. It's like pros have gone from ignored to priced out of the market.

What type of upgradeability do you need from the Mac Mini? Storage and GPUs can be added externally and the RAM is upgradable.

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