If you don't have issues with paying a lot for hardware, why don't you buy Mac Pro?
16 cores 32GB of ram least powerful gpu on the list 2GB of storage $8,799.00
28 cores 48GB of ram same gpu 4GB of storage $14,699
MSRP on a 2020 Toyota Corolla $19,600
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-Core 3.7 GHz Socket sTRX4 $2,629.90
Cost of the same basic GPU about $219
Cost of complete system equivalent to the almost car priced mac about 4200.
9k-15k isn't "a lot" its a crazy amount. 15k is 1/4 of the median households income.
Most of planet earth can't sink 6000 into a computer let alone 15000. Under Apple the standard expandable board in a box with room to expand is a category available to 1% of the US and 0.1% of the world.
The new Mac Pro is 3-4x the price of a machine built around AMD having equivalent performances. I'm building a Threadripper for exactly this reason. Most of the issue is Intel vs AMD and the fact that AMD's Threadrippers are an amazing deal when it comes to performance per dollar and that Apple has an aversion to offering decent GPUs
Buying an iMac now would seem to be a poor decision.
From what I'm seeing in some of the comments, people are so lost in the history of the past years of Apple being the pooch ridden from behind on performance, that they can't get their heads out of their arses to see how awesome this is.
I am sitting here right now wondering if I should invest more of my savings directly in Apple stock, at least temporarily to ride their sales wave, or if I should buy a Mac mini and a nice wide curved monitor with a mechanical keyboard from WASD and be f'ing awesome all of a sudden.
The only reason I'm not hitting the buy button is that all of that isn't $135. There's no reason for that amount, but if it said $135, I'd have already paid for it and been drinking beer to celebrate the happiest purchases I ever made.
Yes, I own an iMac, as this is the closest to a desktop machine Apple sells, but a replacement for what the Mac Pro used to be, it is not.
If it was 1/2 the price I think it could fairly be called premium priced.
In Europe the incentives to buy expensive goods as a company (like cars, fancy office furniture, etc.) is even bigger because of VAT tax (much bigger than US sales tax).
So a machine that's £5k retail becomes £4167 without VAT, effectively £3333 if you take into account tax savings, which only apply if your company is in profit. A £15K machine effectively would still cost you £10k.
It's a big saving, sure, but it's still a very expensive machine.
You're right if you start looking at "Well I run my own company so the cost compared to paying myself that cash as a dividend is much smaller", but that only really applies to those of us who do run our own small companies, own them fully and run them profitably, and have already pumped their personal earnings up to that level. And then we're on to a question about what that box is for and why it's needed, is it a company asset or a personal one?
And remember that you get to apply the same percentage discount to any other machine - your 15K apple box may come down to a conceptual £5K hit on your pocket, if you're paying 50% personal tax on top of the company taxes, but a £4-5k Zen 3 box with dual nvidia 3090s in it will come in at £1333-£1600 by the same metric and quite likely perform better...
But I wasn't really here to talk about comparative value anyway - this was a tax discussion!
However I feel no particular guilt that the workstation I use for my full-time dev day-job also has a windows partition for gaming in the evening, and I hope that the tax authorities would see things the same way! It's not like the asset isn't a justified business purchase.
From a discussion I had with a friend recently, I found that Precision workstations from Dell or Z workstations from HP have similar prices for similar performances (sometime prices can reach 40k or 70k dollars).
When comparing Mac Pro to an enthusiast pc build, yes the mac pro is "overpriced", but the mac pro is using a Xeon which is pricier than a ryzen (even if performance wise it's inferior) and a pro gpu which also cost more than consumer gpu (again, even if performance is inferior). The price of a nvidia quadro is always higher than a Geforce gpu with the same specs.
You can see a spec/price comparison I did when having the discussion with my friend here : https://mega.nz/file/Nj4UnSJR#fBdZfn3zoZ8boxap35-GWEgDlicH3R...
For that market, the Mac Pro is overpriced (the high-end Dell/HP workstations are too), and Apple doesn't make anything more suited for it. That's the criticism. That the Mac Pro is acceptably priced compared to the Dell/HP workstations doesn't matter if that's not what you need.
For me personally, outside of laptops and phones, I don't see the appeal of using Apple hardware (unless you want to use MacOS X).
A professional workstation, with support, services, guaranteed replacement components, guaranteed service-life, maintenance contracts and so on is very different from an enthusiast-built machine.
It's like comparing a BMW M3 to a tricked out VW Golf. You can fit a bigger, badder engine under the VW's hood, stiffen the suspension, replace the gearbox and so on but, in the end, you can get one straight from the dealer and not everyone is inclined to assemble a car from parts.
Did that once. It's fun, educational and not very practical.
The leasing thing is for slightly different reason: it is being used by such a market segment, that always wants something new. They would not drive older car, even if it was reliable, it would be not cool enough. Unfortunately, since cca 2010 BMW also found it out, and since then their cars stopped being good -- they don't have to last -- and are just expensive.
I got curious...
- amd 3990x 64-core 128 thread $3849
- 256gb g.skill ddr 3600 $978
- noctua nh-u14s cooler $80
- samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4 $229
- evga 1000w power supply $207
- fractal design define 7 $170
- asus trx40-pro mb $396
- nvidia rtx 3080 $699 (?)
- steve jobs: a biography $15 (hardcover)
= a really maxed out system $6623
EDIT: ok, I had to know...
- amd 5950x 16 core 32 thread $799
- 128gb g.skill ddr 3600 $489
- noctua nh-u12s cooler $60
- samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4 $229
- evga 850w power supply $139
- fractal design define 7 compact $130
- asus x570-pro mb $240
- nvidia rtx 3070 $499 (?)
- steve jobs: a biography $14 (kindle)
- linux with kde mac-look icons $0
= a really really great system $2599You'll save a fair bit of $600, run quite a bit cooler, it will be much easier to be quieter, and have twice the disk space. Or buy 2x2TB NVMe (motherboards with 2x m.2 are common these days).
Sure the 5600x/5700x isn't as fast in throughput, but how often do you max more then 6/8 cores? Per core performance is near identical and with more memory bandwidth per core you run into less bottlenecks.
I bet over a few years more people would notice double the disk than the missing extra cores.
It’s an order of magnitude different with the Mac Pro, the base model is a $6000 machine that will perform like a ~$1500 PC. And the base model makes no sense to buy, it’s really a $10k-$30k machine. It’s a completely different product category.
The monitor on my MacBook Pro just died, and I bought it July of last year. The repair was about $850 USD. Luckily my credit card covered the hardware warranty, but I'm kind of wishing I'd bought AppleCare.