Sure - working great for somebody like Marco who’s already loaded.
"That might work for Marco".
Marco didn't come from money or have any connections. He found a job on Craigslist working for a random guy named David Karpe as his first employee. They started Tumblr and he lucked out when it got acquired by Yahoo and made a few million.
But the acquisition happened after he started a blog that became popular, wrote Instapaper, and started a podcast that became popular. I'm sure Overcast was helped by his popularity but if it had sucked, no one would have downloaded it. Even for that he tried three different monetization strategies until he landed on one that worked -- writing his own non scummy ad platform. All of this with no outside funding.
And he lucked up and made money by being an early investor in Gimlet Media but that was way later.
But on a personal note. If I needed it, a $5,000 iMac Pro wouldn't break the bank and I'm just a regular old enterprise developer. That's less than two weeks billable work for a halfway competent cheap software contractor.
Heck my college computer was $4000 in 1992. A Mac LCII with 10MB of RAM, a //e card, a 5-1/4 disk drive, a Personal Laserwriter printer and a copy of Soft AT to run Dos compilers and a 12" monitor. Over the next two years I upgraded it with a larger monitor, an external hard drive, and an accelerator card using money I got doing a contract for a college.
You've summed up, very neatly, why he's talented and worked hard and has earned his money.
But nobody's claiming he didn't earn his bunches of money.
What they're stating is a simple fact: six thousand dollar computers might make sense for somebody with a bunch of money. But not for people with more modest means.
What expansion do you need that you couldn’t do externally on an iMac if you have “modest means” and so assume modest requirements?
Anyway, I love how Apple has convinced everybody that a ~$3000-$4000 machine cannot be pro and is not worthy of their engineering prowess because only modest, unsuccessful developers would spend such a small amount in a computer.
- I already have a monitor, 3 in fact. I do not need to pay for another, specially one that is glued to the cpu.
- The gpu is not the only hardware I listed.
- I do not want to cover my desk with external boxes and adapters, each requiring their own psu, that can only be used within 2ft, forcing them to be right next to the computer negating any “benefits” of taking them out of the machine in the first place for a desktop that never moves.
- I do not want to pay for the overhead an external box will bring, in money, noise, or in mess to my desk.
An iMac is a fine machine. It is not the machine for everyone.
I didn't say "modest means." I said "more modest means" -- compared to a guy who made major cash thanks to an IPO. The vast majority of people on Earth, engineers included, have means more modest than that.
Second, I never said "need."
However, there are clearly a lot of folks who would benefit from top-tier desktop power (namely, developers) and would pay for it, but can't pay $6K.
Like I said, my parents were the definition of
middle class - a teacher and a factory worker -
and I had a $4000 computer setup in 1992 going to
college (see specs in another post). That would be
$7300 inflation adjusted.
First of all, household median income in 1992 was about $30K unadjusted: https://www.multpl.com/us-median-income/table/by-year
Which was also roughly the average salary for teachers: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1993/10/20/07aft.h13.html
So your family like had roughly 2X median income. But that's besides the point. Besides, maybe they had 10 kids or something.
Can the average middle class US household sustain a $6K or $7 expense? Yes, with significant effort. And this made a lot of sense in 1992, because that's what a powerful desktop system cost and the alternative was not having a powerful desktop system. So your parents made the necessary sacrifices, and since you're posting on HN 30 years later I'm going to assume it was a fruitful investment. However, asking people to pay $6K for a computer in 2019 is an entirely different proposition. You can get that level of computing power for a fraction of the price.
I'm not particularly mad about the Mac Pro, mind you. There are alternatives and nobody's forcing me to buy one. I do, however, think that -- to return to the topic of this discussion -- that claiming Apple's "listening" to developers w.r.t. hardware is pretty laughable. Most developers want a fast-as-fuck CPU in a box, and many are perfectly willing to pay an "Apple tax", but not thousands of dollars worth.
But the Mac Pro wasn’t meant for your average developer. I doubt very many consumers would buy this at all. It’s aimed at businesses and professionals where a $6000 outlay is nothing. Do you really think after 2 years and building up an internal team of “pro users”, Apple didn’t design this product for its target market?
Apple didn’t say they were “listening to developers”. They said they were listening to pro users. Are developers a subset of that? Yes. Have a lot of high end developers gravitated toward the iMac Pro and high end iMacs? Yes.
If geeks were expecting Apple to cater to lower end needs, they haven’t been following Apple for the last two decades.
They aren’t asking ordinary users to shell out six grand. They even made the Mac Mini much more of a midrange computer than it was before.
But the Mac Pro wasn’t meant for your average developer.
[...]
Apple didn’t say they were “listening to developers”. They
said they were listening to pro users.
I feel like you're at a point where you completely understand Apple's stance ("we are listening to some pro users, but not developers in particular") and some developers' complaints ("boy, we wish Apple would listen and give us a relatively affordable desktop class machine, without a monitor") but are still, for some reason, arguing just for the thrill of it.
They even made the Mac Mini much more of a midrange computer than it was before.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Core+i7-8700B
Mac Mini 6 Core I7 16GB RAM - $1500
BlackMagic eGPU - $700
$2200
27” 5K iMac 6 Core i9 3.66Ghz 16GB RAM,256GB SSD - $2800.
A 5K display by itself is going to set you back $1300.
So now you’re at $1500 for the Mac itself.
Mac Mini 6 Core I7 16GB RAM - $1500
BlackMagic eGPU - $700
$2200
1. A two year-old GPU inside the BlackMagic that has roughly roughly half the performance of the GTX 1080 Ti that was state of the art two years ago. Also, for this privilege, we pay $700 for this $200 GPU. https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+Pro+58...
2. Whatever nightmares come with eGPU usage in 2019. At a minimum, it's another box, another fan, another power supply, and a cable. And that's if the software side of things actually works flawlessly in 2019 which, last I checked, was still a little hinky.
3. A CPU that is going to be significantly slower than a well-cooled desktop i7 due to thermal issues. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/14/testing-thermal-t...
Even if you just subtract the eGPU (I don't think most developers care too much about that) this is why a significant number of developers just sort of want a fast CPU in a desktop box. It could literally just be the Mac Mini guts in a bigger box.
Small case, excellent thermal management
From a simple, binary, "yes or no" perspective, the Mac mini clearly throttles based on the thermal condition. But, this is not a "gate," conspiracy, or anything of that nature. Everything with an Intel processor will adjust speed based on the thermal condition, with the severity of the slowdown and impact on performance depending on how much money you've invested into a cooling system if you've built the machine yourself.
All this said, we're impressed with how the performance on the Mac mini held up as the job progressed and time ticked on. The clock speed averaged out at around 3.4GHz to 3.5GHz under 100 percent CPU workload with the i7 models, but at no point did it drop below the 3.2GHz base clock speed —making it a solid performer even when under load for a long time.
Do you have comparative benchmarks between the Mini and a desktop under load for a long time?
Why would you think that an eGPU codesigned with Apple, where Apple wrote the drivers, to run on Apple hardware would have issues? I chose Black Magic’s eGPU since it appeared on Apple’s website, and I don’t know that market. But there are raw enclosures for $200 that let you put in any card with a supported driver.
I work in the UK. I make about 80k a year pre-taxes. That's an average, if not relatively high salary for a developer. "Regular old enterprise developers" don't make 5000 bucks in two weeks, at least not in 99% of the developed world, not to speak of the rest.
And it's true that technology in 1992 was very expensive, but technology is actually supposed to get cheaper, that's the entire point, you get more for less. If you pay more for the same, that's anti-technology
I live in Atlanta - almost as far from the west coast of the US that you can get and salaries are much lower than the west coast. They pay developers with 3-5 years of experience $65/hour on a 1099 (Corp to Corp) basis. Since this would be a tax deductible company expense, that would be less than two weeks working.
But now? I can buy a 1.5k desktop machine, throw linux and windows on it and I am a perfectly happy camper (and very happer developer). I can buy a 400$ phone and I hardly notice any difference in quality. I don't see, in the context of alternatives, why apple is seemingly raising prices at will and that makes me feel duped, regardless of what I earn.
If you can’t “justify” the need for a Mac Pro - (and neither can I) you aren’t the target market.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20143484
And the memory...