The Mac “Pro”
pilky.me
pilky.me
I highly anticipated the new Mac Pro and was generally excited with the result. It is, in my opinion, a realignment and a positive move from Apple. But, as the article points out, it is a piss poor value until you considerably upgrade from the base specs. Worse still the Xeon options are a disaster compared to newly minted threadripper parts dollar for dollar.
The Pro and the 16” have me feeling more positive about Apple than I have in years. It’s also too little too late. I’m part way into a hackintosh build that I hope to ride for a couple of generations to watch Apples decisions from a safe distance. I want them to win me back, but I remain nervous that developers represent a market segment Apple either doesn’t understand or isn’t interested in pleasing.
Currently I have a 2009 MacBook Pro 5.1 running High Sierra.
Tim Cook has become a slave to the stock price, they keep increasing the profit margin to boost their stock price, despite already being ludicrously profitable and having billions in the bank. If that trend continues, they will eventually price themselves out of business.
I have no need for the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. The $329 iPad fulfills all of my needs - but I did upgrade to the cellular model.
If you think about it, Apple really exclusively makes products for the normal consumer market, and then their pro products are exclusively aimed towards the two largest economic sectors in the state: Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
The Mac Pro isn't the Mac Pro, it's the Mac Los Angeles. And the iMac Pro isn't the iMac Pro, it's the iMac San Jose.
In Tim Cook, Phil Schiller's, and the rest of the exec team's heads the rest of the country needing pro might as well get fucked. All the scientists, all the artists, all the people who would love a Surface-type product you can ink with, all the music producers (including me) using iPads who bristled at them removing the headphone jack from that product, all the people doing business work, all the people needing machines for power users, all the starving professionals who need a machine they can upgrade: Apple thinks you can get fucked.
What customers are left with is just price-signaling, which, while it has value of its own in customer circles, competes with the always-hovering sucker-signaling. Once the latter pops to the top, momentarily, all the price-signaling for new products instantly transmutes into sucker-signaling, and only people with older machines will have any left.
High prices and sucker-signaling do not make a strong brand. Flirting with sucker-signaling is a dangerous game.
Absurdity is new terrain for them, iMacs notwithstanding.
- their first mainstream computer - the Apple //e
- one of the first “consumer Mac” - the LCII (with a //e card)
- one of the first PPC Macs - a 6100/60 (with a 486Dx/2 card)
- one of the first Intel Macs - the Core Duo Mac Mini.
And they’ve all been “overpriced” compared to their competitors.
As far as absurdity. The $329 10.2 inch iPad is a great value by any measurement and the cellular Apple Watch is smaller, faster, with more features than any of its competitors. The Series 3 Cellular at $330 is a great deal.
The “74” in my name should give you a clue that I am not exactly a spring chicken.
And the software was better. Trying to get Unix-based software working on Windows used to be hell, and Linux on the desktop was a lacklustre experience, struggling with the lack of drivers for petty much everything, as well the dearth of quality software.
Today, those advantages are much less strong. The competition has closed the distance on hardware quality and both Windows and Linux as desktop OSes have improved a lot.
Even now, I’d still much rather use macOS than anything else. But I’m a lot less happy being an Apple customer than I used to be. If they lean too much of the goodwill of their fans, they will eventually wear it out.
The talk a big game about software developers being their biggest “Pro” audience, but on the other hand they released one laptop after another with crappy keyboards for years, and they don’t put much effort into making the common work flow of a software developer easier. Every developer I know spend most of their working time at a desk, with a laptop, but they’ve done a lot in the latest years to make that work flow more annoying by removing ports, ending the production of good, affordable monitors and forcing us to rely on expensive third-party pseudo-docking stations because they, unlike every other laptop producer out there, refuse to engineer their own docking stations.
Sorry, what? I haven't seen a shred of marketing material aiming the new Mac Pro at programmers. Everything about it - including every piece of software shown onscreen in a render - screams Hollywood, which by the author's own admission, "wouldn't bat an eyelid at paying high 5 figure sums for hardware".
> even the 1.5TBs a maxed out Mac Pro can handle
The max is currently 4.0TB, with an 8.0TB option on the way. Not sure where 1.5 came from.
The value proposition on the baseline model is definitely weird, especially how it compares to Apple's own iMac, but I think it's an extreme case for a machine that's really intended to be specced-up. And most of the article was spent laying out, in detail, just how bad of a deal that anomalous configuration is, instead of discussing the more realistic ones.
One of my coworkers was given a Mac laptop by IT, not sure why. He uses it to RDP into his Windows desktop. I've told him he should probably... fix that, but he says he's happy with his workflow, and who am I to judge. It's also helped us catch at least one RDP related bug in our software, which is nice.
Apple is rightfully very targeted towards the content creation crowd. It's a very spendy bread and butter to carry around in your pocket.
Windows: 47.5% macOS: 26.8% Linux: 25.6%
Not in the West. Go to any conference, Java, Rails, JS, Rust, etc, and the share of Mac is widely more than its average market share (like 40% vs 5-10% of the overall market).
And when it comes to presenters and "star devs" it's way too much Mac share...
This is certainly cultural. I’ve worked in four different states for four different developer driven companies and they were all mac dominated. Macs are certainly “there” in the developer community.
In 1987, PC's Limited (later renamed Dell) 386-16 included a 16MHz Intel 80386 CPU, 1MB RAM, a 1.2MB floppy drive, a 40MB hard drive, and a monochrome video card for $4,799.
We just tend forget how powerful and cheap Moore's law made things. In terms of relative inflation-adjusted dollars, many of us old-timers back in the day have already spent as much or more than Apple is asking multiple times on 'prosumer' machines when you factor in inflation.
(That said I don’t need that much machine right now and am running on a Dell laptop at the moment...)
The only reason I don't own one is because the 16/512 variant makes a silly jump in price. I think that's where the complaint should be. Not with the Mac "Pro".
Apple is not dumb. They sell the 8/128 variant to college kids and know that companies will pony up the ridiculous price jump so their developers can run VMs and local compiles on a i7 16/512.
I wouldn’t buy these until they update the keyboard.
I'm not an Apple person so all the funny distinctions get lost on me sometimes.
Apple can win at this game, all they need to do is price it 25% over the best-quality competitor, as the market is willing to pay a premium for Apple's brand and perceived quality. Apple's distinct advantage is not in engaging in self cannibalizing price wars with the cheapest competitor, but being at the intersection of "High Quality " and "Affordability"
But whoever's advising this pricing needs to be held accountable for their input. Unless they really intend for this to be a vanity purchase, like a Hermes bag. Just remember, none of the designer brands have market caps comparable to mass market brands, so what is sold Apple upto?
I am willing to pay even 30%. The problem is Apple has already pass this range and edging closer to 50%.
One reason being competitors are increasing racing to laser thin margin.
Okay: - Xeon W compatible motherboard: ~$700-750 - E-ATX case with a good airflow: ~$200-300 - Quiet cpu fan (not server one): ~$70 - Keyboard/Mouse: ~$50-100 - OS: $199
After some simple calculation we may see a little bit increased estimated price about $3000 which is not so impressive as $1739 right?
This is a “budget” setup compared to Apple’s “luxury” components like highly extensible custom motherboard with T2, Thunderbolt 3 etc., large, beautiful aluminum case with an excelent airflow and so on.
Had Apple a leeway space to lower the price? Of course yes, but it’s definitely not $4200, i’d say like $500-1000. Should Apple do this? No. I see no reason for price drop, while competitors like Dell and Asus offers more expensive and less featured workstations.
Unlike with the iPad this device can be upgraded, repaired at home, it'll run software purchased outside the app store, the battery won't degrade and users may even get a whole decade of use out of it. One could argue that's all lost potential revenue to Apple and thus priced into the machines.
Perhaps I'm wrong. The main thing that makes me doubt this theory is that the Mac mini exists at its current price point. Come to think about it, one could build quite the renderfarm out of these for $60k.
I have never seen them say it was meant to be the replacement, and it fits a gap in the price/performance space that no other machine fills.
What makes it redundant?
Well they rarely pre-announce anything.
>What makes it redundant?
It will be squeezed by the iMac from below and the Mac Pro from above.
It looks to me like they planned for the iMac Pro to be the replacement for the Mac Pro but after the outcry from power users they changed tack. I'd put money on it disappearing from the range in a year or two.
In the end, I'm relatively happy with Linux... waiting on a R9-3950X to become available to bump out my placeholder (R5-3600). If I really needed more, would absolutely go ThreadRipper at this point. If I needed more ram, would probably get a workstation class machine elsewhere, and likely Epyc in that space.
It's just hard to consider any situation where the Mac Pro is really worth it.
Compare it to High End Desktop Windows or Linux machines because the hardware is ~almost~ the same. (e.g. the mac has the special platform chip, but you can get a NVIDIA GPU for a non-Mac which is much more useful if you are doing GPGPU work)
Really there is nothing new here. Some business run MacOS only software so they will have to pay the premium. Nearly everyone else using a Mac would be better off, on paper, using something else but a lot of people just like Apple computers so they too pay the price.