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michaelmrose

A machine that wont outperform the new mini $6000

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.

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Exactly this, I was fine with the Mac Pro until 2012, it was a little more expensive than PCs but not much outrageously so (maybe 30% more, that's a tax I was fine paying given the OS and that it was quite a well built machine).

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

There is also the iMac and iMac Pro range. The Mac Pro is clearly demarcated as a "money is no object" product.

I'd be much more interested in the iMac if it wasn't built inside a monitor.

The M1 was released on the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini.

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.

The new Mini is certainly impressive and suitable for many tasks, but not a replacement for a full desktop machine. Memory and storage are very limited, and the GPU, while great for the MacBook Air, is far from desktop performance. Also, for desktop, the ports selection is very limited.

Given that they just bumped the imac in august we might be waiting for a bit before we start to see ARM imacs.

The iMac in many senses isn't a replacement for a proper desktop. You can't expand the disk storage, many iterations had no great graphics cards, this seems to be somewhat better now, but an upgrade means having to upgrade everything, including the screen. You can't even clean out the fans after some years.

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.

Yes, it is not a commodity machine, but it sort of goes beyond expensive to almost insulting.

If it was 1/2 the price I think it could fairly be called premium priced.

3970x 32-core is < $2000

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

probably 1/2 that for a 5950x/am4 system

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    $2599

Looks pretty nice, but for many you'd be better off with: - AMD 5600x or 5700x (saving $500 or $400) - Samsung 970 pro 2TB for $229 (twice the space for the same price) - rtx 3060 (in a few weeks)

You'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.

I don't use apple products but I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple.

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...

It's not just "enthusiast PC builds". You can buy plenty of PCs in that middle category of high-but-not-extreme performance without the certifications, Quadros and vendor markup that a full-on "workstation" model has. And they're perfectly fine choices for many professional use cases.

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.

My bad, I misunderstood the context of the comment. Thanks for the clarification.

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).

> I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple.

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.

Well, VW does sells tricked out VW Golf, straight from the factory (GTI, R) :) Though it is more competition to M135i than M3.

Exactly. You can make a VM Golf that performs like an M3, but, in the end, it'll be a lot of work for an unreliable car.

And the M3 is reliable? BMWs are famous for being leased since repair costs will kill you once your warranty is up.

Depends on the model. The E-series 3-ers were very reliable; for the F-series and newer it is exactly as you wrote.

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.

Yes and no. 15k hardware is for people who are using it professionally. By "professionally" I mean that they can throw such purchase into their cost and just pay less tax. From my perspective it does not matter if I pay ~15k to tax office or to Apple.

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).

That just isn't how taxes work. If you spend 15k of your profits and buy capital goods you don't reduce your taxes by 15k because no one was going to charge you 100% tax on it. You save only the foregone taxes rate on the purchase.

And depreciation.

Of you can put your heavy workloads on the cloud and pass it as opex.

which is the way to go

It depends. If it's a constant workload, it may be better to lease the server and operate it on-prem. If it's spiky, then cloud and on-demand/spot is the best option.

I'm not sure if a VAT (Value Added Tax) deduction is gonna save anyone's Christmas considering the base Mac Pro is 5320 EUR (6 333 USD) tax-free.

You can get the VAT off, sure, but on the rest you just get to pay out of pre-tax profit. In the UK that means 20%.

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.

Some people pay more than 20% tax. At 50% tax the savings look pretty good.

That tax rate is corporation tax, not a personal tax. Does any European country have a 50% corporation tax?

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...

If you can run your business on a Zen box with an Nvidia 3090 in it, good for you!

I mean, if you're not running macos-specific stuff, then a top-end Zen3 box with a couple of 3090s in it is going to have more grunt than a 15k mac pro with a Xeon and a Vega II Duo.

But I wasn't really here to talk about comparative value anyway - this was a tax discussion!

Not sure what needs to be discussed there, I know how much tax I pay and which tools I need to get my job done.

Back at the top you seemed to be saying that the entire spend would come off tax, that's I think why people picked you up.

I think you are talking to the wrong poster ;-)

Sure it's not the first time!

Doesn't this mean that you cannot use the computer for personal use, or that you can only reclaim the business-use proportion of that VAT?

Strictly speaking, yes, there is the expectation that the machine is used entirely for business purposes, if the business is paying for it, otherwise it might be considered a benefit in kind. It's not so much about VAT then as PAYE.

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.

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