Apple: $52,000 Mac Pro Is Now Worth $1k
ymcinema.com
ymcinema.com
(… boy that would have been easier to find if journalists would just cite the source and not a random re-tweet…)
I think the main point of the article was the Apple's trade-in price is offensively low:
> This ultra-low value disrespects the customers.
I was thinking the same thing as I read, and wondering if the trade-in price was just a token to get a customer to turn the machine into e-waste, but later on the article notes Apple sells similar refurbished machines for tens of thousands of dollars, a fact that I verified:
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0ZKMLL/A/Refurbished-Mac...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230201183646/https://www.apple...
This kind of has the feel of a unscrupulous car salesman low-balling a trade-in to take advantage of a customer.
I wouldn't be surprised if the trade-in program isn't actually dealt with by Apple but is actually fulfilled by a third party for Apple so they don't have to deal with it.
Though to be fair, that's probably true of any random car dealer, because of what Tesla did to the used market a couple weeks ago.
If anything, the last 2 years of sky-high used car prices have more to do with production capacity than any intrinsic value in used cars. (The value in the last 2 years coming from immediacy, not intrinsic value.)
Almost no consumers bought this thing. The only buyers who would be using the trade-in are companies... and then it suddenly makes more sense. You get your IRS depreciation, and a quick $1K instead of sending them to the recycling center (because it's sometimes not worth employee time to figure out eBay, handle shipments, check which ones work and how well, handle returns...).
Edit: why disagree?
Has nothing to do with respect or disrespect.
Whoever was setting the prices probably just set a sane low value on the basis that nobody was going to be trading this thing in so who cares?
Offers definitely can be offensive. E.g. you interview for a corporate software engineering role and get an offer to work for minimum wage, well below market. You won't take the offer of course, but how would it make someone feel?
Perhaps what you are suggesting is that in messing up by not finding out if the arrangement was broadly compatible before wasting your time on the minor details, but being afraid to blame oneself for the glaring mistake the mind might go to inventing that it was offended by their actions as a mechanism to sooth itself? I guess... Seems like stretch. I don't really understand the need to blame others, though.
Regardless, I'm not sure that transcends to the computer case. In that case the price was asked for upfront. Apple gave their offer and that was the end of it. No unwarranted time was wasted. Just a simple: "Looks like we won't be able to reach an agreement. Have a nice day."
These machines were:
A. Ludicrously priced in this configuration new to begin with
and
B. Have been thoroughly "osbourned" by the ARM macs.
although we don't have a direct replacement machine (e.g. ARM mac with PCI-E slots), a Mac Studio off the Apple store floor will outperform it in so many tasks at a fraction of the price, power consumption and size.
I wouldn't want to buy this computer 2nd hand at any price other than fire sale low, personally. For those of us who lived through the PowerPC to Intel transition, the speed at which G5 PowerMac towers became worthless was pretty impressive and I suspect the same happens for the intel - ARM transition, if not more so.
Moot point, Apple won’t delay the release of their new chips to preserve resale value on customers devices, that’s nonsensical.
Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place.
The hardware inside is nothing special... Xeon 28 core CPU, 1.5TB RAM, dual Radeon Pro GPU's, and 8TB storage. Sure it's fast, but it was only worth ~$20k-30k when it was new.
The Apple Tax is very real, folks. Flashy case goes for ~$30k apparently...
Do we? Every time it comes up, invariably the comparisons are all something "largely similar" but not exactly equivalent, frequently in a meaningful way. It seems like the real truth is that Apple doesn't really make budget configurations in the first place, they only cater to different levels of the premium market.
In particular, when it comes to the Mac Pro over the years, it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be a pretty good deal for what you actually get. Another well known example is when you could by the 27 inch 5K iMac for the same price as you could buy just the panel if you were building a PC.
Whenever someone makes a really nice laptop, aluminum, great touch pad, great screen, the whole nine yards, it ends up being close to the same price as a macbook.
I think they wanted to get them off the market and get those people onto the Apple Silicon, which was going to rapidly eclipse the Xeon iMac Pro for those more 'general prosumer tasks', video editing et al.
Not at all the same situation with the top-end Mac Pros with the Xeon: all the outboard stuff is the point there, and you can't as easily eclipse that outboard stuff. Put simply, the $52,000 machine might as well remain in service doing what it's doing, because Apple isn't directly replacing that. They were very much directly replacing what my old Xeon iMac Pro did, so they put more pressure on the trade-in scenario to motivate that happening. They apparently have no interest in pressuring those top-end Mac Pros to get off the market, so the trade-in is completely pathetic: hang onto the thing and keep it in service, they have no special replacement targeted or perhaps even planned.
I'm not an Apple fanboy, even if I'm probably starting to sound like one. I thought the stand price was only scandalous because so many of us were unfamiliar with what competing hardware in that market niche normally costs? Wasn't it competitive compared to what the competition was selling? It's been a while, but I vaguely remember that being the outcome of that.
I have less opinion on their repair prices in general, though I have to say that what they charge for display replacement is not much more than the cheapest third party. It might be argued that this means the hardware is overpriced, but I don't have a basis for that claim so I won't make it.
I do wish they had ditched the unreliable keyboards faster. I actually like the touchbar when I'm using the laptop as a laptop, but I'd prefer it was in addition to the function keys rather than replacing them. Although on my M1 the ESC key and power button are real, so I'm 95% good with it as is. I wish they'd have found a way to keep it, but maybe the PR damage had already been done. For certain use cases it sure is handy.
The Apple tax is clearly at work here but there's no way it's $30-40k.
It was worth $52k to the buyer that bought it at time t.
The price a different buyer (or even original buyer) is willing to pay at time t+3 years is irrelevant to how much it was worth to the original buyer at time t.
A sucker gets sold every minute - or something like that as the saying goes.
I'd be curious to see a depreciation chart. It is widely known how cars depreciate 10-20% the exact minute you purchase them and drive them off the lot.
I wonder if anyone has analyzed Facebook Marketplace and other locations to put together a depreciation chart of these MacPro's over time. I wouldnt be surprised if it dropped 30% immediately on sale.
Now, to be fair, this is an INTEL mac, not M1 and not M2, so that is also a huge depreciation driver (60%+?) This should be easy to figure out...just look at current alternatives with the same horsepower.
It clearly was, else the transaction at that price would have never taken place for there to be a machine once worth that much to sell three years later.
However, the $1,000 transaction did not take place. That tells us that it is not worth $1,000 three years later – and is probably worth much, much more.
The moral of the story: Don't let clickbait headlines fool you.
1) For the base system. Ok, this is unavoidable if you're buying Apple.
2) For the upgrades. The problem is that Apple machines used to be easy to upgrade yourself, like 8 years ago with the iMac. You could buy the base memory model and max it out yourself with sticks in a few minutes for a fraction of the cost. If you cared about money, you'd do this; people with money to burn could presumably pay Apple and not worry about it. Unfortunately I don't think this can be done anymore.
3) For the trade in. Yeah, you will do much better selling it yourself.
You could spend like 5 seconds verifying that they do in fact sell these used
If they were in that line of business and could benefit from economies of scale, they’d likely offer more. As it stands, they’re likely offering a price that allows for them to be a disposal option or make a profit on recycling, but isn’t meant to grow that segment of their business.
Not if you want/need to run MacOS.
Also that machine appears to have a proprietary accelerator card that a cursory google leads me to believe has no clear substitute: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-equivalent-hardware-of-a-....
Lots of companies (and sometimes people) pay up the nose for hardware, because their software has a dependency on it. See all the weird "new model" mainframes that just run an emulator on Intel chips (e.g. Unisys Dorado 8590 https://www.unisys.com/siteassets/collateral/pi-sheet/pi-200...).
Mainframes are a completely different class for which a $50k bill would be quite low. It's a different paradigm. Companies know they're using it until it's obsolete, or will get pennies on the dollar.
There are always alternatives, but sometimes buying "overpriced" hardware is the cheaper/better option, at least in the short/medium term.
If you want/need the fastest Mac and/or one with certain expansion options, this machine is probably it.
> Electronics in general depreciate spectacularly fast.
Apple itself is selling a refurb today for $37,939.00. That is a lot more than $1,000.
> Mainframes are a completely different class for which a $50k bill would be quite low. It's a different paradigm. Companies know they're using it until it's obsolete, or will get pennies on the dollar.
Look at the spec sheet I linked. It looks like that "mainframe" machine is a 4 CPU Xeon server. I don't know how much one costs, but I'm guessing it's orders of magnitude more than similar "commodity" PC hardware.
That's fine, but the people buying it should realize they aren't getting that money back. If they're complaining, then they should probably have made a different choice.
"Apple itself is selling a refurb today for $37,939.00. That is a lot more than $1,000."
And Ebay has them around $5K-10K.
"Look at the spec sheet I linked. It looks like that "mainframe" machine is a 4 CPU Xeon server."
You don't know how much it costs, because as I said, it's a different paradigm. You can pay fixed cost or by performance/use. You also would be going through a sales pitch. There is some research out there suggesting that hardware costs are higher, but software costs are lower for mainframes when compared to similar server farms. So when comparing similar solutions the costs would not be orders of magnitude higher.
I think they do. No one's expecting to get dollar for dollar.
The issue is Apple seems to be low-balling to an almost offensive degree. Pointing to other hardware, that you think would have been a better deal to buy in the first place, is a distraction and doesn't address that issue.
There is simply no way this strategy makes sense at Apple's size, I'd argue, especially for a "vanity project focused on a tiny market" as you correctly put it.
Just as with 68k and PPC before it, MacOS will eventually drop x86 CPU support and it will be fine - the process of migrating the entire computer line is already almost complete.
They sorta already do this via Rosetta..
But more to your point, yes they need to treat this like a leak in a damn and plug it even if it takes seemingly disproportionate resources.
Across Apple, to continue making x86 machines alongside ARM, is going to need a lot more than just the Rosetta software layer.
Rosetta doesn't help hardware design, R&D expenditures for this tiny handful of x86 machines OP is proposing Apple keep in the lineup. Those R&D expenses for just x86 development work are much harder to justify when its just the Mac Pro that benefits, not the entire computer line, too.
I'm not totally sure what the complaint, here, is apart from the usual "Apple's stuff is expensive."
...
Hey, I'll buy your 2019 Ferrari for $1000.
that the company you bought your product from will offensively low ball you on a trade-in?
Of course a used product dealer is going to pay you less than the next consumer will. They have to sell to the same consumer and need a margin to justify their time acting as the middleman. Same reason the used car dealer will give you less for your used car than the next driver buying direct will give you.
If you walk into an Apple Store, you can buy specific configurations off-the-shelf. If you pick the boosted RAM or faster processor or whatnot, they have to ship it to you.
Yes this is a bit extreme, but I doubt refurbished high end Intel Macs are flying off the shelves at this point.
Also you always take a bath on trade ins to the manufacturer for the convenience factor. This is not unique to Apple
I mean I've literally never, ever, in my life, sold a product I bought, to the company or person that sold it to me. The fact that one of these companies happens to offer a ridiculously low-ball price is not news, it's completely irrelevant.
It's a funny thing, sure. Feel free to mock Apple for it. But the whole outrage with words like 'disrespecting customers' is just silly.
If you think it's so easy and straightforward to pay significantly more than Apple and resell the things for even more, enjoy the free profits with your new business. I happen to have met a guy who's been reselling Macs for the past 10-15 years or so, to the tune of a low seven figure profit annually at a NYE party a few weeks back. Be less outraged and enjoy the business opportunities, I'd say.
I end up just getting the top(ish) tier because once I start clicking on things I can't resist but obviously given the rate technology develops any 50k machine was bound to lose its value fast.
Not sure if that’s what’s happening here. But sometimes when you see a bad offer what you’re really seeing is “we’d rather not.”
if you ask me, that's a good investment, if you plan to sell one in few decades
I don't know why you'd trade it in to be honest. The Mac Pro is all about high bandwidth shovelling of data across PCIe for edit suites. I don't think there's any real replacement.
Is it a bit lower than I could get via a private sale? Yes, but it's a lot more convenient, and they're not gonna scam me on Facebook Marketplace.
if b), then fuck off!!! ;-)
if a), then hopefully you made enough money from it that this is just the typical depreciation of production equipment.
is this devaluation shocking to anyone other than someone looking to get some clicks?