Mac Pro Build-to-Order Upgrade Pricing Revealed | Hacker News Reader

Mac Pro Build-to-Order Upgrade Pricing Revealed

macrumors.com

23 pointsunwind41 comments

RUMORED MacPro Build To Order pricing revealed.

The clue is in the name of the website that you linked, and the article couldn't make it any clearer that these are guesses.

True, sorry for not being more sceptical in the title. If I could edit I would. I don't particularly follow the Mac scene, I picked this up on Twitter from some hardcore game developers I follow.

RAM pricing is ridiculous, no one will order it like that, you can buy RAM for 1/3 the price and just replace it yourself. But i will buy a stock version. Plus a Dell 4K 28'' monitor. As soon as my Christmas bonus arrives :)

Where are you getting 1866MHz DDR3 ECC RAM for less than those prices?

The cheapest 8GB module I could find[1] is £75 ex VAT, 4x is £300 which is approx. $490USD. I think this compares fairly well with the $400 upgrade pricing on that rumour page.

[1]http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT8G3...

Newegg has 16GB and a 4GB sticks for $209.99 and $72.99 respectively. I have no idea if they would work with the Mac Pro though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...

Yes real prices announced by Apple are not that bad. With this being ECC memory, that is okay - bit overpriced, but not an outright ripoff.

Apple's RAM prices are no longer extortionate. While you can certainly find it cheaper, there's the convenience factor to consider. Also, while Apple has been good about this in the past, there's no guarantee the AppleCare warranty will cover 3rd party memory.

In their new laptops, it's soldered to the system board so you can't swap it, anyway. (So max it out up front)

Seems like everybody does this, except companies (which is probably why manufacturers still slap these high prices). It's ECC memory, though, I think it's more expensive than non-ECC (still not that expensive).

What I see is most Mac owners that buy out of their own pocket have the basic models. And the team-leaders / management types always bight the overpriced stuff because the company is paying. (It mildly hacks me off when I see this in academia, where most research is publicly funded.)

Academics (like other knowledge workers) are fairly well paid, so making them waste time by using crappy equipment does nobody any favours.

In academia — or at least in STEM and the social sciences — quite a lot of people need a somewhat high-spec machine (e.g. to run quantitative models on large data sets, compile code, process large LaTeX documents, etc).

And the basic model Macs generally come with woefully little RAM and rather small SSDs. So I'm not sure it's reasonable to be hacked off.

Computer purchasing in Academia is strictly controlled by procurement rules and other types of regulations. One magic number is $5000- universities normally doesn't charge overhead for capital investments above this, but the full purchase has to be done at the same time. This means that I'm not allowed to buy RAM separately from the computer.

These look really cool, but what is the target market for $3000+ desktop machines? I don't doubt that there are some people who could take advantage of that much power on a desktop, but it seems like kind of a niche product. I work with machines that do use their 256GB of RAM, but they're all servers. I'm a Linux user, so maybe the thin workstation model feels more natural to me. My MBP has 8GB of RAM and I rarely even come close to using that much, even running two or three VMs at a time.

> but it seems like kind of a niche product

It has always been a niche product.

Video editing and fx work can easily use 64 GB of RAM for even modest level of work. Large DTP and image editing work can also hit those levels. So basically anybody working professionally with video or print will have no problem putting these machines to use.

At the last place I worked they had people doing fluid dynamic simulation and they always complained about having too little RAM despite having 128 GB.

Wow! That's a crapload of RAM. Do you happen to know / able to say any metrics on how big the data/computations were in order to have to use that much memory?

Sorry, I never really had anything to do with that department so I don't really know any numbers.

"what is the target market for $3000+ desktop machines?"

"people who could take advantage of that much power on a desktop"

I respectfully disagree that these are visually appealing. They look like a trash can to me.

I respect Apple for continuing to innovate. Most of the time their innovations are rewarded with market acceptance. But I think this one is going to be a miss.

I dunno, I doubt the users will care much about how it looks and more about how it performs. Besides, the trash can look goes well with where you can put it, i.e. on the floor, next to the trash can, ;D.

The cool look I imagine is to maximize surface area (for cooling purposes). It does look cool/new of course. :)

I'm typing this on a windows PC with 192GB ram.

64GB RAM LIMIT? WHY OH WHY?

it is 2013. 64GB is not enough for many serious tasks.

>it is 2013. 64GB is not enough for many serious tasks.

Pretty sure the Mac Pro only has 4 DIMM slots and I don't think 32GB DDR3 modules are available.

you can buy 32GB DDR3 modules on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239...

'Cos Bill said that 64k would be enough for anyone a while back.

(Out of interest what serious tasks do you find require that much RAM? )

I'm stitching and rendering very large gigapixel images:

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-tower-panorama-photo/

http://360gigapixels.com/tokyo-gigapixel-roppongi-hills-mori...

http://360gigapixels.com/london-320-gigapixel-panorama/

http://www.360cities.net/gigapixel/strahov-library.html

Both in the rendering of the files and in the post production using Photoshop, I utilize all the RAM, and regularly use up to 1 terabyte of scratch disk.

I guess video editing, 3d work, and other image manipulation stuff also can benefit from this much RAM.

Extremely cool images! I found myself looking for the BT Tower in London... it took me a minute or so to get my bearings and realise that that's where the pictures must have been taken from!

curious about the pc - was it custom built? just interested in the other components you chose.

192GB? gosh, i feel so alone with my 3GB ram laptop, and i'm a developper...

Please complain. Complain loudly. Flip tables and announce "I CAN'T WORK WITH THIS SHIT". Or just shell out $60 (or whatever) for an 8 or 16 GB memory kit yourself.

Hmm, will Apple be blocking non-certified CPUs and RAM? Cause those princes are kinda high, would be cheaper to get the base config and upgrade it yourself...

It's possible that it is like the Macbook Air and even the RAM is soldered on. The thing about the air was that everything was so jampacked, so they were forced to do that. Hopefully not the case with Mac Pro :<

I don't think so - the RAM is definitely removable based on the pictures on the Apple website, and I believe Xeons are PGA only, no BGA version like with mainstream chips.

But if Apple limits the processor and RAM models/types in the BIOS, it would make it very hard to upgrade...

I would be shocked if Apple sockets the CPU, they haven't done that in their other Macs for years, why would this one be any different?

Looking at Wikipedia, there are BGA Xeons - a couple of new quad core, low power E3 models. However, all other Xeons are socketed, including the ones used in earlier Mac Pros. And all the 6/8/12 core Xeons are using either LGA-1356 or LGA2011 sockets (not PGA, my bad)...

Their product page for the new Mac Pro lists the RAM as "User accessible". And the Pro is traditionally the one that's designed to let you tinker with/replace/expand stuff, as opposed to the laptop line which is far less serviceable in pursuit of aesthetics.

That'll be so you can look at it. It'll be glued in though...

Ouch. Very overpriced.

Feel free to produce a competitively priced, comparatively specced workstation in a similar form factor.

[/obligatory reply]

Got one next to me which cost less than the base Mac Pro for a better spec:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/z820.html

The form factor is not important if you're not carrying it around. In fact I'd go as far as saying it's retarded for a workstation class machine. Nothing swappable, nothing replaceable, graphics are shit, max memory is pitiful, no internal disk worth mentioning.

It's a joke. A fucking expensive one designed to get slightly mental people to spend money.

Where do you see that it is cheaper? That base model is $2300 without real RAM and no graphics cards.

Where are you going to get "Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5" for under $699?

You don't pay the retail price. Take 40% off if you call them up.

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