You can spend $9,599 on a Mac Pro, but should you?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I can build a PC to the same specs!
Of course it won't run OS X well, it won't have the same exact specs, it will have severely worse construction with wires hanging here and there and huge fans, it won't be as silent, it will be bigger, components wont be selected, adjusted and tested to work together, and it might end up costing the same amount of money or near-ish after I add all the options (like the SSDs and thunderbold). And I'll have to support it myself, replacing parts if they fail, instead of just taking it to the Applestore for a fix. But that won't stop me saying it's overpriced.
I'd be interested to see someone do an analysis of what it would cost to buy off-the-shelf components that match in performance and see what the cost is. I would be very surprised if the cost of off-the-shelf build of similar specs were anywhere even close to $10k.
Well worth the investment.
2010 MacBook Pro (DEAD 2011 - caught fire after water spillage next to it - WTF). 2006 MacBook Pro (DEAD 2008 - logic board failure). 2007 MacBook (DEAD 2010 - logic board failure). 2006 Intel iMac (DEAD 2008 - backlight). 2007 Mac Mini (sold 2009 - worked fine at the time).
2005 IBM T43 (ALIVE - sister's daily driver). 2006 Lenovo T61 (ALIVE - backup machine - stopped using it in 2012). 2007 Lenovo T400 (ALIVE - bought 2012 second hand. My daily driver). 2008 Lenovo X200 (ALIVE - mail server because it's cheap to run).
All of the above have lived a HARD life.
The only Apple kit I have that is still alive is a 2008 iPod Nano that barely works (to be expected here). Two iPad 2's (one barely manages 2 hours on battery - replacing that will be fun!) and a brand new iPad Mini Retina.
Apple kit stinks from my experience.
I don't want to hear the favourite defence of "anecdote" to this post. Once probability. Twice coincidence. Thrice certainty.
Now my Apple experience, having laptops going back to the Duo 280c, I've had to have two faulty batteries replaced and one screen replacement, all which were fixed within a week. That's 8 laptops over 20 years, each were passed to family members when I was finished and each worked when they were given to family friends or donated to charity.
And as you say, once probability, twice coincidence, thrice certainty. That's why I stopped buying Lenovo in 2009 and finally decided Windows and its grief was not necessary in my life.
Only failure I had was a 2004 iMac G5 that died in 2007 - that SOB was heavy, and was not missed. Personally moved to all-laptops after that.
More importantly in my busy life: those same specs work well together and when I have a part failure or two I have a repair program as good as Apple's. Or if it fails completely I don't have to find similar new parts to rebuild something that my software/hardware setup is already running perfectly on.
>A coworker and I were discussing this earlier so I priced out a Dell workstation with fairly similar specs: same number of cores but across 2x CPUs, same RAM, same video card RAM, no 1TB of flash storage. The Dell ended up costing negligibly more, something like $50 or $60 above the Apple.
I've done the same thing many times with the same results.
Perhaps with non-brand name components you can do slightly better. Not much better in any case -- and you'd be wishing you had spent that extra $500 anyway.
People make an even worse mistake comparing a MBP and other laptops.
Sure, if all you want is the same CPU and GPU (or perhaps slightly better) you can get a similar PC laptop for half the price or less.
But you didn't factor in stuff like: weight (isn't it kinda big deal on a laptop?), vastly better battery life (isn't it kinda big deal on a laptop?), size (isn't it kinda big deal on a laptop?), top notch retina display with top scores for color accuracy and brightness in reviews (isn't it kind of big deal in general?). And the little things, like: multitouch trackpad, unibody construction (you might not even want it, but you have to admit it DOES cost more than plastic) illuminated keyboard, thunderbolt ports, great sleep implementation, mag safe adapter, etc etc.
So, yes, you do get something with same/better CPU/GPU for less money -- but you don't get the SAME stuff overall. Those comparisons are like basing your car purchase on horsepower or cc alone -- and forgeting everything else about the car.
And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.
And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.
That is, of course, if the new Mac Pro ever makes it into the enterprise given Apple's track record in that area. I always what happened to the IT manager who convinced their boss to invest heavily in a few XServes... :-)
Track record? You mean the inroads they've been making for like 5 years with the iPhone and the iPad?
That said, Mac Pro is not for the enterprise. It's for big calculations: video, 3D, pro audio, scientific computing, etc.
It's not for running Lotus Domino and accessing some VB internal app.
Then both OSX and Windows are awful.
I've only ever administered scientific clusters in linux, but from what I've heared from people that work as admins in "we use Apple" groups (and scarce they are), it must be absolute hell.
For "outward facing" code, the Mac Pro really isn't a server, and using any workstation as a server is pretty fail. As far as uptime in weeks, my (old style) Mac Pro would be surprised to learn that it can't run for weeks at a time, given it has in the past, hammering simulations the whole time.
The point is that they're excellent client machines. You can rig up code on your Mac in R, Python, etc. and then hand it over to the cluster fairly effortlessly, at least in my experience compared to Windows.
I can only speak for myself, but at my most recent position, when we replaced my Dell with a Mac, my productivity shot up.
What was also notable is that most of the problems seemed to appear on the admin side of things (running the "mac servers"), while for the users, meaning the scientists programming and crunching on the machines, everything worked just fine. That of course added to the admin's frustration, as nobody could understand why they were complaining about the perfectly fine Apple-centric setup.
So Mac for the scientist and Linux for the server might quite likely produce happyness for everyone.
Virtualization is fine for non desktop apps. That's exactly what I do.
Depends on the software you use. For scientific computing, maybe.
For other tasks a Mac Pro would be used, no. Logic Pro, for example, is not cross platform. Neither is Final Cut Pro. And even if I depend on something like Adobe CC, most multimedia pros prefer to use it on the Mac, because of other benefits of using OS X.
>And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.
Or just a cable and a NAS.
But that's the outside, which is a given that you'd need multiple disks. Ever seen a video pro using just the internal HDs on his Desktop machine? Each project usally takes a whole disk by itself. Nobody uses the internal disks for 4K work.
>And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.
Sure it was, as were several other units from the 1-2 million sold of the same MBP production run.
Now lets see how many unreliables you'd get from 1-2 million different self-built PCs.
That's the comparison that matters.
Adobe After Effects + Adobe Premiere Pro. The guys I know who use it do it on Windows because OSX is a moving target from hell. You get reliable iSCSI support on Windows and better SAN performance. Plus it's easier to get 10Gbit ethernet cards to your SAN when you have some real PCI express slots available.
They don't use internal disks but some of us do for storing virtual machines in my case.
See my other comments about how my Mac experience has gone. Also look at Apple forums. Nothing but bitching from people about endless stupid problems.
Microsoft get a bad rep for beta testing their products on the customers but if you've used iWork on an iPad recently you'll see what I mean.
Not pleased. People need to look at these problems pragmatically and stop defending something which has descended into the same hell as everything else.
Very few high end pros use Adobe Premiere Pro as it's all the worst parts of Avid and FCP without the good sh!t, although the tiny one man shops seem to love it.
Any shop that is busy uses tons of firewire drives and big ass SANs, internal drives are mostly for the OS and occasionally often used assets.
Apple isn't perfect, their QC has definitely faltered as they've grown, but in Post it's a shit ton better than Windows, even facilities that aren't using FCP prefer Avid and After Effects/Photoshop for Mac. Windows is bigger in the 3D world, Linux is popular for color grading and compositing software.
Hell is a Post Facility relying on Windows. I used to know a few, never liked working for them, always seemed to cut corners if it saved a few bucks. That's fine if you're cutting web videos or local spots, but not when you're cutting Fortune 500 national brand campaigns.
As far as looking at these problems pragmatically, you can't rely on an OS that's going to crap the bed because the editors spent their down time trolling shady websites.
a) http://shopping1.hp.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/WW-USS...
b) http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-T7600/pd
c) http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/superworkstation.cfm
I'm absolutely terrible at offices.
Boy aren't meaningless analogies fun!
Last time a imac broke at work a few years ago (before we phased them out), we were told Apple refused to accept it if we mailed it in and have to physically lug it to the store. HP and Dell send a guy over or send a box for 2 day replacement. That imac repair took almost two weeks.
So, sure, you can build your own rig and try and get it leased, that's theoretically possible, but a lot more hassle than filling out a form. Plus, you'll only save what ends up being dollars per month.
"Over-priced" is sometimes a matter of how you're paying for it.
It costs, not a lot, but the time I save from actually walking and doing all this shit pays for itself.
I am disappointed in the mac pro because I don't care about graphics cards, I just wanted a dual socket CPU computer with the pci-e ssd. 12-cores for $3500 more is way more expensive than the dual socket near-equivalent of 2x 6 core CPUs. It becomes about a $4000 difference in the end.
External drives are connected to the Mac Pro using strands of sexy intangible unicorn hair.
CPU: Xeon E5-2697 12-core 2.7 Ghz - $2749.99
Video: AMD FirePro S9000 6GB - $2199.99 ea. (close as I could get) - x2 $4,399.98
RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 64GB (8 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL - $599.99
SSD: SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE1T0BW 2.5" 1TB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) $569.99
Motherboards that handle 64GB of RAM look to be generally under $400
Let's add $300 for case, PSU etc. and we're looking at ~$9000.
So even if the individual upgrades are badly priced (64GB of RAM for $800!), the entire system is actually pretty fairly priced at the top configuration. The tight integration of the parts, and I'm guessing sourcing directly from the manufacturers rather than through 3rd party parts builders, probably cuts lots of the BOM out. And there's no way Apple won't make a profit on these ugly things.
Whenever I've looked at non-cheap machines, independent of OS (I'm often flexible between macos and linux), the difference between an apple machine and something from another major vendor, for as closely-comparable machines I can find, is often a fairly small percentage. And considering the unique features of the devices -- usually better (exterior) case design, MacOS, etc., it's pretty reasonable.
1. No option to use non-premium components. The two most obvious examples are the fact that you can't replace the Xeon with an i7 or the FirePro with a Radeon.
2. The prices will change slowly or not at all over time. $400 for a RAM upgrade might be reasonable now, but it won't be in a years time.
I still don't understand the target market for the new model, though. Who wants multiple graphics cards but limited RAM and no disks?
to some people, and most businesses, $10k is not a lot of money. especially for a capital good that can be purchased or leased without spending $10k of cash.
for example, i can imagine upgrading an editing bay or scientific workstation for $10k is kind of a no-brainer.
to put this into terms that people on HN can understand:
$10k buys you about 6 months of cc2.8xlarge on ec2 on-demand.
Right now this is geared towards video editors and audio engineers where more GPU translates directly into faster rendering and where you can never have enough 4K screens.
You know which we can replace bits of.
I have nothing but contempt for the Mac Pro design - it's style over substance to the extreme.
Hence, depends on your definition of better. Computers are trade offs. Always have been. Your choice of trade offs is not inherently better than someone else's.
(this is academic, btw, I'm not getting any of the computers in question)
It's the Ugg boot of computers. Looks pretty and keeps your feet warm but you can't get it wet and it isn't waterproof, they fuck up your feet and fall to bits.
I'd rather have a pair of Berghaus explorers, warm and dry feet and for them to still be on one piece after a 20 mile hike (HP Z820).
Don't really care about the OS - you can get where you need to with virtualization.
While it certainly is an interesting case, stylish for some, its pure form over function. They have essentially made a Mac Pro Mini / Mac Pro iPad ... as in what you bought it what your stuck with. Want to upgrade to a new processor or newer video card, well buy a newer machine.
I'll pass, I'm a professional in another field, not a PC mechanic.
My HP: redundant PSU, disks, next day service for all parts or replacement unit.
No competition. I can't afford the downtime.
Heck, a professional of the kind that needs a Mac Pro can also afford an assistant to take to the Apple store...
Nor it's like checking the damage on my home-built PC, tinkering, ordering parts and replacing them will take me less time...
The most elitist of elite gaming machines
So if we adopt the law wholesale, we can editorialize by reversing the premise we wish to imply.