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Comment by jarjoura | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a product meant to serve a very niche market.

During lockdown I had the Intel Mac pro in my home office and my electric bill doubled with that thing on. It also pushed out so much heat, but at least the chassis design was whisper quiet. I don't know, by the end of it all, I was so happy to get that heavy thing out of my house.

Sure, it was definitely the fastest thing to enable the tools I needed back in 2020 and I was extremely happy to have it. It also became obsolete once the M1 had native tooling ready a couple of years later. Soooo yea.

I guess with all that excessive space in that chassis they can overclock the system and squeeze out every bit of performance. The PCI expansion could be good for production studios that need it. At that cost level though, the system will have to outperform anything you can find on the windows side.

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> This looks like a product meant to serve a very niche market.

The Mac Pro always was a niche-market device for professionals with big compute needs in a workstation and money to burn.

> At that cost level though, the system will have to outperform anything you can find on the windows side.

You can count on that. It's Apple. Not only is the M2 designed to outperform any other desktop-class chip out there, but they've also bought out almost all of TSMC's entire 3nm process capacity, shutting Intel, AMD, and other ARM vendors out of the highest tier of CPU performance entirely.

I don't know what kind of work you do, but in some ways it is a niche market. It's a professional workstation that is usually meant for compute intensive tasks like scientific computing, 3d rendering and animation, etc. It's certainly overkill for most software engineers, for example.

Is it overkill? I use all 32 of my CPU cores when building C++ or Go, and while fuzz testing. I'd take 64 if I could get them. There is no reason why I'd ever want fewer cores, even if it doesn't make Chrome or Emacs any faster. Latency is crucial during the edit/compile/debug cycle; making compile as close to 0 as possible is always a productivity win.

Finally if you think Intel power saving is bad, wait until you see AMD's. My Threadripper system idles at 270W. This is exceedingly wasteful. Before upgrading to a Threadripper I had an i7-6950X which idled under 100W. The difference is quite noticeable.

I too subscribe to the Tim "The Toolman" Taylor ideology of more power. My only point was that most developers don't "need" a Mac Pro, even if they neeeeed it.

I’m going to be using that one. Thank you.

> During lockdown I had the Intel Mac pro in my home office and my electric bill doubled with that thing on.

Total lifetime electricity use of a professional laptop is something like $30, FWIW.

Mac Pro is a desktop, not a laptop.

Indeed, I read "macbook". Still, going from 30W average over 40 hours a week to 60W continuous[1] doesn't change the calculus that much, and if anything a 3Y amortization is probably too short for a workstation. Really my point was that this was a bit too far down the hyperbole hole. There are reasons to like new efficient hardware, but "electricity bills" aren't one of them.

[1] Measured average consumption of my 64-core Zen 2 box, which is surely going to be more than that Mac.

I googled “intel mac pro electricity usage” and this was the top hit: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201796

The first (and highest) entry at 302W at idle would consume ~50% our household’s monthly usage. It’s at least the right order of magnitude.

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