New Mac Pro Available for Online Orders | Hacker News Reader

New Mac Pro Available for Online Orders

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35 pointsemp_67 comments

Dunno why, but I've always felt Apple (and others too) seem to chintz out on the 'upsell' portion. I just configured a new Mac Pro for $13k, and I still need to tack on another $69 for a trackpad. WTH? Couldn't they say - "hey, you're buying a machine for over $5k - would you like a complimentary mouse or trackpad with this?"

EDIT: yes, I do know why. It feels stingy. That's why.

Try looking at it from an ecological standpoint: if someone already has a working keyboard and mouse, why should they need new ones and create more waste?

Make it a free configuration option. That way people can choose it if they need it (e.g. someone coming upgrading from a MacBook won't have a keyboard/mouse).

13k? Was that top of the line, or is there room for more?

Also, yeah, I really don't see why Apple can't throw in a keyboard and mouse for free if you were to want one.

It was a mac pro will all the trimmings (well... except for the keyboard and mouse!). Oh, and 4k monitor for $3500, so...the computer itself was around $9500. And they want to ding me for $49 for a keyboard. Make it optional and free if the configuration build is > $5k ???

If you're prepared/have $13k to spend on a Mac Pro, what's $69?

An improved feeling towards the company for giving you a freebie.

Exactly, and I should have stated that more explicitly.

This reminds me of: If you are paying 20k for a car whats 500 extra for the CD-changer? What about the heated rear view mirrors? These things add up. Just saying be careful with that thinking in general. :)

Agreed, except these are even smaller. Well.. maybe not on a $3500 computer - a keyboard/mouse extra is 3% of the sales price. but... When you configure it to be $6k, or $10k... dinging someone for an extra $100 just feels cheap/stingy.

Welcome to the Porsche configurator :)

If you are contemplating buying a $4K computer, I don't think a free mouse is going to be the piece that makes your decision.

It's not about the purchasing decision, it's about goodwill after the sale. When I sold retail electronics, after I closed a decent sale, id throw in something small for free at the very end. Even if it was a $10 mousepad (cost of $3) on a $3k sale, it made people happy! And on a selfish note, made me a lot of ongoing sales and excellent customer relationships.

That's a textbook rational response. However, it doesn't address the emotional side of this kind of purchase.

Many people don't know the specs and other technical details of what they're buying. They don't really know, or have no way to tell, if they're getting good silicon value for their money.

However, they're keenly aware of the emotions surrounding this machine and its corporation: How much it will fascinate them, fascinate others, how much it will support them and their efforts, how reliable and comforting it will be, who it will put them in touch with, etc.

These people don't perceive themselves as making a capital purchase with an anticipated return; rather they perceive themselves as entering into a business _relationship_. They expect this relationship to address their emotional appetite.

Logical appetites are based on comparisons like "dollars per GHz." Emotional appetites are based on evaluations such as, "I'm taking care of you, are you taking care of me?" After paying a bunch of money, the emotional appetite expects "to be taken care of."

PP has latched onto the idea of a free gadget as a way to be emotionally taken care of. To him/her, this anticipation of his/her needs validates his/her emotional decision. To him/her, getting nickeled and dimed annihilates, or at least attenuates, the valence of the emotional response.

Buyers with diminished emotional response, who are additionally tone-deaf, ignorant or otherwise ill-equipped to evaluate the technical/capital qualities of their purchase, have little left to stand on.

At best, forcing them to consider the purchase from a perspective which concentrates on different features, facilitates their own insecurity.

So, for a technical company looking to profit off their buyer's emotional insecurity, it would make sense to simulate an emotional entity.

Of course, no one really cares that much, and PPP is simply producing outrageous examples as a diversion from a theoretically more worthwhile pursuit, but I hope my wisdom helps someone, somewhere, someday.

I had a free keyboard by just asking when I bought my iMac three years ago. Just go to an Apple Store if you want a free trackpad.

Just don't expect to get anything but the "base" model at the Apple Store (by base, I mean any one of the default option entries on the online store).

Probably because the keyboard is too big to fit in the box.

Personally, I would be annoyed. I know that TANSTAAFL, and so I'm ultimately paying for that trackpad, which I don't want.

They're offering a Sharp 4K monitor as an add-on in the configuration. Costs £3,499.

Well, there goes my decision to wait. Apparently the updated Cinema Display is not coming any time soon - certainly not before February. Seems like today would have been the perfect day to announce it.

So Apple's high end display option is still a Thunderbolt Display that requires a Magsafe - Magsafe 2 adapter, only supports TB1, and only has a USB2 hub...

I don't get it. Who is the market for these, and why?

You ever tried to edit 4K video? Real time editing is very important to post-production studios and when you are adding effects, rendering etc in a time sensitive environment - and you are a Final Cut person - then this is a great tool.

This is not for your average dev or photo person, this is legitimately a 'Pro' machine aimed at very small a subset of Apple customers who actually mean quite a bit to the company. It is a quality perception game, when Hollywood is using your stuff you gain a certain mystique.

If you're doing 4K check out Dell, they actually have a monitor for it.

I actually dont, but I leased office space in a post-prod studio for a long time and am still friends with the owner. There is a demand for raw horsepower on a level many people dont understand.

I do understand :-)

My preferred architecture for serious users at the moment is to have the horsepower in a datacentre, monster boxes with 96 cores and 2T RAM, connected to SAN via Infiniband/Fibre Channel, and on the user's desktop, a thin client, connected to it via gigE. Schlepping the data back from the DC to the office, crunching it on a normal desktop box and sending it back again is a wild goose chase.

Without being too verbose, have you configured your admittedly over-provisioned desktop as a thin client and actually tried the post-prod workflow this way?

I'm just saying that it's being looked at, and current hardware is definitely _not_ up to the task.

This is not for video editing but for number crunching. I am saying that I am familiar with apps and users that have an insatiable demand for memory...

Do you have any links handy for researching how to set up or rent/buy from a vendor such a solution?

There's little magical about it - it's just very expensive. Multi-gigabit MAN links for example! And Infiniband is not cheap either. You can use something like FreeNX for your thin client solution. Storage would be something like 3Par or HDS. The servers and desktops themselves are actually not the major cost in a setup like this.

Honestly, if 4k video editing is the goal, why the hell is it capped at 64GB of memory. Being able to store more than like a minute of the 4k film in memory would seem useful.

According to http://web.forret.com/tools/video_fps.asp?width=4520&height=... ... which is the "Camera: Red One 2540/60p" preset.

We haven't seen benchmarks yet but I bet the PCIe SSD can stream more than 64GB of video off the disk in 60 seconds.

A Surface tablet with integrated GPU manipulating raw 6K video from a RED Dragon in real-time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A7Y5KCI1wc

I like my Surface but what they are showing and doing in that video is not truly editing. Showing raw or changing colors is not exactly the bar you need to get over.

But then, wouldn't you want a beefier machine? 64Gb of RAM seems a bit on the low side for such tasks.

I would also think having multiple disks would be a pretty important feature (so you can stripe them for speed...) A single SSD? Really?

For video editing, proc and gpu are actually the important parts once you hit a certain point with ram and disk. Think about it, 4K videos in raw form are about 15gb per minute so you need a threshold of swapping and loading with ram and disk that allows you to move data in and out fast enough so the editing can be done in ram but you experience no lag as the user.

With disk in PCIe and a good controller you are getting around 1gb per second disk action so you have more than enough headroom.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for your explanation :)

I'd imagine the intent with storage is to use the Thunderbolt ports to connect to a storage device (probably one with hardware RAID) that takes up far more physical space than is available inside the Mac Pro chassis itself and has far larger capacity / redundancy that they couldn't fit into the form factor reasonably.

Can't you use a render farm instead?

Film editors will gobble these up.

Not really. You can do 4k in real time on relatively inexpensive machines already and it's better to invest price difference into storage. I did just that last year while I was waiting for new Mac Pros. AVID and Premiere work great on Windows as well. It would be great if Adobe supported Linux, but oh well.

Video editors, recording engineers, anyone who needs a super powerful desktop that runs os x and has a big budget for such things.

I am baffled as to why apple went with such bespoke / underpowered hardware. It would have been relatively simple to update the internals of the existing mac pros and add thunderbolt 2 support.

Yup, and they could have pushed out a Mac Pro update much faster if they stuck with the old tower design.

And nobody (outside of the real market for Mac Pros) would have cared. Being audacious with their design gets attention from mere mortals which helps their brand image overall.

The budget isn't even that insane. I'm actually in the market for a new machine in the month or two. By the time I spec a 27" iMac up to where I'd want to be (Fusion Drive, i7 processor, graphics upgrade) it's close to 3 grand anyway, so making the jump to the base Mac Pro and just using my existing monitor isn't an insane jump.

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that I'd be better off decoupling my display anyway, and a base model Mac Pro is perfect in terms of power for me. And it looks pretty. I like having a workstation, and this is a hell of one!

Yea exactly. That said, I'd love if they "offered" a lite version for, say, $2500 with consumer Radeon(s) instead of the Firepros.

People who want a really powerful Mac.

The lab I work with likes Macs, so I get to optimize for it. We have an interesting (and expanding) database of peptides, and just about everything we do will benefit from the extra horsepower.

Well, this is the problem. Back in the day, it was pro graphics and video, and developers. Today, well, it's still nice for the pro video and 3D people, but you don't need it for photoshop, and certainly not for development. It's doomed to become ever-more niche as computer capabilities grow.

I wish this would be half the price tag... I'd buy it right away.

Quoting from the page: "What's in the box - Mac Pro, Power Cord, Keyboard and Mouse sold separately".

Funny that one of the three items really doesn't belong on that list.

No oxford comma: 'keyboard and mouse' are one entry in the list.

Re: pricing, these are expensive but the specs are pretty aggressive:

CPU - $300 RAM - $200 SSD - $200 GPUs - No exact model match, but the D300 seems to be a version of the FirePro W7000 with half the memory and half the memory bus width; those are $700 each on NewEgg.

Motherboard is obviously custom, but one supporting Xeons and ECC memory can easily run $300-500.

My guess is that it'd cost you well over $2,000 to build this yourself even before you get to the size, form factor, Thunderbolt, etc.

Add $3000 for the 12 core. Really?

Edit: actually , all together it still comes to what was projected. I just didn't expect so much of it to be in the CPU.

That chip retails for $2,795, so not really that out there.

Apple doesn't pay retail. Also, that $3,000 is above the cost of the base CPU.

For this kind of niche chip they probably more or less do. It's mostly workstation-focused, and the Xeon workstation market is _tiny_. It's not like this is a Haswell i5 and Apple is buying 10 million of it; I'd be surprised if they're buying over a thousand of the 12 core per month.

I see that now. And I just tried to price an alternative system at Colfax and came up with $15K (included dual cpu, dual 400GB SSDs, and a Xeon Phi 7120P, no GPU). The Mac Pro is a niche product, but not really 'out there' as workstations go.

This is more Intel not Apple.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75283/

Retail price for that CPU is 2.7k... you are paying maybe a $500 markup?

Yeah. That was my next stop too. I was going to mention the cache, but it was too much of a pun.

Plus whatever the CPU you replaced cost.

Closer to $1000, but that's not surprising really.

I believe the "3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache" chip is this one http://ark.intel.com/products/75780 which has an RRP of $583.

The difference in retail prices for those two chips is $2031 (2614-583) but you're paying Apple $3000 for that upgrade.

That seems reasonable.

Order a Dell and upgrade the ram. I bet you pay > 33% markup.

Or go order a car and get the premium Boise sound system. I bet you also pay > 33% markup

"Available to ship: February"

Only for BTO - stock config shows Dec 20th

There was "December 30" when I looked 3-5 hours ago.

Ten thousand fuckin' bucks.

They'll sell dozens!

Another release of pro hardware from Apple. Another slew of comments everywhere from laptop peasants who don't understand the pro market, and can barely comprehend the competition.

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