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Comment by rch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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