A maxed-out Mac Pro will cost you $53,000 – without display | Hacker News Reader

A maxed-out Mac Pro will cost you $53,000 – without display

appleinsider.com

31 pointsjquery36 comments

Apple's completely crazy with the pricing for the new Mac Pro. $6000 for an 8 core Xeon with a Radeon 580x is a mid range machine nowadays thanks to AMD and the Ryzen/Threadripper CPU's. The old towers were far more reasonably priced. Unless you are really tied some Apple specific app, I can't imagine justifying purchasing one of these machines.

Ultimately, if you really need something that supports 1.5TB of RAM or a 28 core Xeon, you're going to get in the same realm as Apple's pricing even if you build it yourself.

The $6k cost includes a ton of built-in cost for the fancy case, the server grade motherboard, and fancy power supply/cooling system.

As far as I'm aware, you're not even capable of building a Threadripper platform with that much RAM... because you're limited to 8 DIMM slots? There's a few things on the horizon that might address that (namely, 256GB DIMMs), but I'm not sure those are released yet... and I bet they cost a lot more than 128GB DIMMs.

Not saying it's not overpriced... but Dell et al. probably will gouge you just as much if you try to build a Xeon workstation.

Hopefully Threadripper drives down the Intel pricing even on the server side, cause as of right now it's just crazy.

No one who needs a machine that supports 1.5TB of ram is going to buy one that comes with only 32GB. Same for CPU. Charging someone for support for the high end, even if they only use the low end doesn't seem to make sense.

If it is actually an issue of unit cost, sell a lower-end base. If it is to recoup development costs, find a way to price discriminate.

Otherwise, you are charging low end users for functionaility that they will literally never use.

Depending on the user base, it wouldn't be farfetched to just buy the lowest end RAM version and upgrade the RAM yourself. When you're spending $30k on RAM... it's probably worth some time to shop around. Whether Apple supports it... well that's another question.

Also, if you only NEED 32GB of RAM, then don't buy a Mac Pro. This is just like buying a Xeon motherboard anywhere else and only putting 16GB of RAM into it. Sure, you can do that, but it's a waste of money.

That's a great point. I get that there are users who do need this kind of power. Heck, that's why companies like Silicon Graphics existed back in the day. It seems to me that a major part of the people who purchased Mac Pro's were audio producers and graphic artists, who would not need a machine of this caliber. They still want a computer like the old Mac Pro tower, relatively cheap and expandable.

Just buy AMD, the higher performance, less expensive option. Dell will configure TR4 workstations if you ask.

Intel is HP in the 2000s. They're not going to right themselves gracefully or intact.

If you compare spec for spec with actual server/workstation grade hardware, the price premium is small or non-existant.

Once you leave the consumer grade category, the prices go way up. Xeons, server motherboards and ECC are not cheap.

This is an actual pro level workstation for video and audio. It's not a consumer or even developer desktop. And relative to those markets, it's priced competitively. For example, a basic RED camera setup will run you at least $20-30k, easily.

If you do the same on dell.com, hp.com, etc. you will get a similar price or higher.

Yep, it is absolutely non news. And you could even call Apple's prices competitive.

Try a high end Dell with 3TB of RAM: way above $110,000

And if the screen is comparible to reference screens from Sony you can call the screen extremely cheap.

Edit: but I would go for HP or Dell. Better support and much easier to upgrade hardware to keep your system up to date.

I thought that might be hyperbole, but I just configured an HP Z8[1] that cost $63K without trying too hard.

1: https://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/z8.html

Bloomberg had essentially the same article (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-10/apple-s-n...), clearly intended to provoke shock at the price. While at the base level it feels a bit pricy, for example in comparison to the base iMac Pro, on the other end of the spectrum if you need 28 cores and >1TB of ram... if you need that kind of capacity, then chances are you can afford it.

Apparently as of 2 years ago, 1 stick of 128GB RAM from Crucial could cost $4,000[1] if purchased on its own, so at 12 sticks of 128GB RAM maybe this is a relative bargain compared to building it yourself? Of course at the lower end, it's not really competitive at all.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/this-single-128gb-of-ddr4-ram-from-c...

It's extremely unlikely that you'll find ram cheaper from an OEM than buying direct or retail.

Nowadays you can find 128GB for < $1k. And that's the retail price, not the wholesale price.

I did this with every high end pro Mac since I was about eight years old. I still have the B&W G3/Cinema Display posters in storage, though I never actually had one.

A couple years ago, I finally got to a place where I could do that and then click Buy. My main workstation is a big black 18 core iMac Pro with an asston of ram, and I love it dearly. It was $15k or so, and I used it to earn well over 20x that during the year I bought it—it was a relatively small expense.

Shake it if you got it.

What on earth do you do that made you $300,000 and required that kind of hardware? nobody I know outside Hollywood makes that kind of money in media/graphics work.

Nothing I do requires that level of hardware; 100% of what I do could be done on a Raspberry Pi, it would just take a lot longer and be a lot more frustrating. A $300 beater (or even a $3000 reliable used car) and an $80k BMW will both get you from A to B.

I provide security, software/architecture design, and product consulting to small businesses; I have been making and breaking web and web-adjacent applications for 20 years.

It’s super nice not waiting (as much) on one’s computer. The additional RAM is the most important part.

That would count as a requirement in my book - reclaiming as much time as possible from my local development process so that I can spend it doing other things.

I bought an entry-level trash can Mac Pro on launch and it's my daily driver to this day. It's still great but is outclassed by the new MacBook Pros in every way except noise levels. I'm sad that there is no $3000 base model like there was previously, because I really enjoy having development workstations.

I agree wholeheartedly; my time is my only truly nonrenewable resource. I trade money for more time whenever and wherever possible.

That's full time work with 2 weeks vacation at $150/hour, which is a typical mid-high freelancer rate in my experience.

are freelancers typically fully employed? you have lots of downtime and chasing the next client, writing RFPs.

IOW, yes $150/hr full-time == $300k, but $150/hr as a freelancer != $300k.

I only have an 8 core iMac Pro worth 6k and to be frank, it crashes sometimes, it sometimes shows the beach ball and overall it's ok but I would have thought I'd get more for the price (compared to the MacBooks etc. I had over the last 15 years).

50x ROI would seem more impressive.

Shake it, if you got it

Well, I got another year and a half (and counting) out of it after the year in which I bought it, and eBay says it’s still worth at least 50% of what I paid for it, so I think the final ROI is TBD.

Didn't shake it obviously, too bad

A base model isn't the best investment, and the only thing that really makes it special is the vega II and afterburner cards which pushes the build to the $11-13k range. That's a lot of money for a rig without a monitor or storage.

The base models are an absolute scam. You get far better specs with far less money (the gap is way bigger than usual for apple). The higher spec models are pretty good tho.

We just spec'd it out to $73k CDN

For $53K I'd imagine you can get yourself a better machine and a software developer to hackintosh it for you and provide support. :P

64 gb ddr5 ram, decent Ryzen+video card, 512 gb SSD and 2TB will lose you 1600$-1800$.

I wouldn't know why I would ever consider a Mac

what about 1.5tb ram?

What would you do with a terabyte of ram on a mac?

For the price, buy a Tesla instead

The top 10 things to do with $53,000 besides buying a mac...

Imagine spending all of that money, and at the end of the day you end up with a monitorless computer running macOS, the mind reels

People do that all the time with servers because they don't expect to have a monitor with it. When you're in the $53k price bracket, another few grand for a monitor (or, few hundred, depending on what you want) isn't remarkable.

As others have noted, you can price a HP or Dell workstation PC for the same price. And guess what? No bundled monitor.

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