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Comment by DFXLuna | Hacker News Reader

I work in the workstation division of one of the companies listed in the article and the market for workstations is not going anywhere for a long time.

It's not that workstations died, it's that they look different and solve a different problem. Anyone can build a computer with off the shelf parts that has the absolute maximum specs that any vendor can produce. Anytime a new workstation makes the news (see Apple's latest workstation), the "PC Master race" gang is quick to point out that they can build the same system without the Apple/HP/Dell/Lenovo tax. What they somehow always forget about is that, if I'm an ITDM and I need 100 or even 1000 systems and they need to be configured, validated and ready to deploy from day one, custom built computers aren't feasible in any sense of the word. The value add from workstation companies is a mix of scale, availability, validity and uniformity.

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On the other hand, the "PC Master Race" gang is a home/enthusiast demographic and from their perspective, they're probably correct.

They don't need that value add from workstation companies. And heck, they probably welcome excuses to tinker on their workstations.

And this is great. It keeps the open, build-able computer market going -- contrary to the alarming trend of locked down computing devices.

I build my own desktops (which are workstations in all but name) for work because I want to know exactly what goes into it and make sure it's quality parts that are widely available without vendor specific motherboards and other stuff.

It's never bitten me, worst case I'd have to next working day a part from amazon.

For development workloads you simply can't beat that approach.

Recent example, unit tests on work issued macbook pro, 2 minutes, same tests on my PC, 39s.

There simply isn't a laptop that fits my workloads better than a modern Ryzen with a crap-tonne of RAM

Which ryzen? What are the other specs?

2700X, 64GB DDR-3200, RTX2080, 2TB nvme storage - I'm due a new one, thinking 5950X next time.

I have so many questions, please ignore if this is overwhelming.

But do you know how much of a cost savings that is ballpark?

Also do you have a guide that you follow? I'd like to replace my Macbook Pro but I don't really know where to start.

Also is there a resource for a noob to run unit testing to if my performance is better when I'm done?

That PC is old now but it’s modern equiv would run around £2K give or take.

That would get you a Ryzen 3 which would be substantially faster than mine and a RTX3070 which would crush my 2080.

With two 27” 4K screens my PC came out about the same as a MacBook Pro but is much faster on the workloads I care about and as nice the MacBook Pro screen is 2x4K is better.

Bit less portable though.

Software wise Fedora is as stable as OSX and has everything I need (I’ve been Linux as a primary dev platform since the turn of the millennium) and in fact things have never been better, pretty much everything supports Linux at least that most devs need in 2020 (Xcode is an exception).

Gnome will feel most like OSX but I prefer Cinnamon.

Prices are substantially cheaper in the US.

This. It was buy a new iMac time earlier this year for me and I ended up with a Ryzen custom build.

The crate itself, a 3700X w/ 64GB of RAM, 1TiB NVMe, 1660 GTX didn't cost much more than the 64GB of RAM for the iMac was going to cost on its own...

We do the same at our small company. We recently gave all the developers a budget to use to build a custom workstation. The only requirement was being able to do the work we need to do effectively. We also provided a few template configurations with Ryzens for those who didn't want to have to think about this. But many of us really enjoyed the opportunity to create a custom configuration using whatever internals we preferred, as well as monitors, keyboards, mice, headphones, etc. that fit our preferences.

Dell can sell you a workstation with dual CPUs, dual GPUs, 3TB of ECC RAM, and a combination of up to 8 NVMe disks or 10 SATA/SAS disks. And the entire thing (including disks) can be covered by an onsite warranty that will send a technician, with parts, to your location within 4 hours, 24/7, for up to 7 years.

You cannot get those specs, or anything near that warranty, from commodity desktop hardware.

In some areas you could leverage "Amazon Prime Now" for 1-2 hour delivery on replacement computer parts

I did that back in 2016 when I needed to upgrade my GPU to play a new game after getting off work

You still have to pay more for replacement parts though, which is not how warranties work

Yes but is it matter if entire computer is 2x expensive?

Anecdote: In Japan, SanDisk sells "genuine" SD cards extremely expensive (about x3-x7 for US price). Importing SD cards from US (or buy from local importer, it's common) is makes sense even though it has no warranty.

Things are a bit different if you are running IT for a large organization instead of buying your own computer though.

Generally speaking Amazon is not going to have 1000 of a specific computer part in a 2-hour delivery window. You could order different parts but then you now have increasing numbers of variations of setups and you don‘t want to be fixing lots of small unrelated problems than a widespread issue which has the same fix all the time.

And for corporations it is better to have the cost paid for upfront; it is expensive, and hard to get approvals for unexpected budget items.

Fully agree. So even SanDisk can sell products in such price.

The "PC Master Race" Community is booming, more people than ever are building their own rigs, customizing. The market is very very hot for hardware and the latest graphics cards. I can only see this continuing. Workstations/Desktops are continuing onward.

This is a different market though, Dell/HP/Lenovo are mostly targeted toward businesses or the common consumer just looking to get a laptop for school.

> Anytime a new workstation makes the news (see Apple's latest workstation).

If you where talking about Workstations from the usual suspects (HPE, Dell) I'd agree but Apple really do put a fantastic markup on their kit.

There are also a lot of people buying those Apple Workstations where they only need one or two of them and someone like Puget could build something faster for much less.

You are so right. At the moment its 14k for 28 * 2.5Ghz Xeon W with 32GB of ram and 2 TB of ssd storage. This is 10000 over an equivalent machine. This is 250% markup.

Insane. For that price you could build a monster Threadripper box.

I won't say it's insane but now lack of Threadripper or EPYC is serious lineup defect. I'm exciting how Apple make competitive chip.

Surprisingly, the margin isn't as insane as you would think. Linus Tech Tips actually did a video comparing a homebrew Mac Pro killer vs the Mac Pro and they came out surprisingly close. Ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_IHSRPVqwQ

Once you factor in the cost of stuff like support and hardware validation it becomes pretty much a moot point. That's without even considering that you would need to hire a supply chain expert(s) to acquire large quantities of parts if you needed anything more than a few machines. At my work, we have whole departments full of people dedicated to making sure we have the right mix of hardware at the right time to fulfill customer needs.

There are definitely some configurations that really don't make sense (the lowest end config comes to mind) but, at the same time, if you run a business with a team of people training on Macs, the amount of money it would cost in training and lost productivity to switch over to Windows for possibly lower prices makes even less sense.

I'm a custom PC and linux guy myself but this seemed like a good time to remind everyone that there's more to computers than just the cost of making a single machine.

> the "PC Master race" gang is quick to point out that they can build the same system without the Apple/HP/Dell/Lenovo tax

They also pay their workstations with post-tax money, vs a business that can write-off workstations as business expenses.

This suddenly makes the Mac Pro pricing a little more obvious.

That said, not all companies are that big. I did support at an engineering firm that built all it's own machines for about 400 users.

It was kinda nice, we could replace any part ourselves same day. As parts got older the machines were reconfigured for people who needed less power (like HR).

That said it wasn't all rosy there. The ticket system was passing sticky notes between people, and active directory/a few other windows management things were replaced with... some sort of lotus product? It replaced the login in screen.

I did engineering at a firm that built all its own machines for PC-based industrial testing equipment, about 50 per year.

It was totally not worth it for us, it was penny-wise and pound-foolish. We switched to buying some Advantech machines, and while the BOM cost was one $1200 line item compared to a long DIY BOM off pcpartpicker.com that ran closer to $600, all the engineering time we wasted on component selection and ordering and progress bars and BIOS configs and Windows update and cable ties and debugging reliability issues was much harder to quantify and probably significantly more than $600.

I think there's a few inflection points on the quantity/process value curve - Building 4 machines? That's a little one-day project for somebody. Building 400? Hire a technician, set up an assembly station, and develop some work instructions. Building 40? That's going to have one or two that need warranty work, and you're not going to recoup the investment required to develop a good process - just buy them from someone who has. Building 4000? Your process is now multiple technicians, an engineer, a purchasing agent, and some management, and support needs after-hours on-call people, and you need an inventory of spare parts...developing that capability is again more expensive than just buying it. Building 40,000? At that level, you're building a PC-construction business and you can sell your spare capacity to the 40-unit guys.

> uniformity

In my experience, there is no uniformity. If you buy 10 machines in the same order with the same SKU, you may end up with 10 different combinations of components between them...

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