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but just that's it's a solid option with a great screen at what's actually a reasonable price for the components inside PC Gamer did a price comparison that tr

but just that's it's a solid option with a great screen at what's actually a reasonable price for the components inside PC Gamer did a price comparison that tried to match the components as closely as possible and found that the result is barely cheaper than the iMac Pro: http://www.pcgamer.com/apples-new-imac-pro-costs-5000-but-is-it-overpriced/ http://www.pcgamer.com/apples-new-imac-pro-costs-5000-but-is... I am not in this market segment, but if you are doing something like high-end video editing, the iMac Pro is competitively priced and (probably) has a great build quality compared to systems in the competing in this segment. I hope that they won't forget some other market segments. It would be a great to have a new Mac Mini in the 700-1000 Euro range.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
A $650 motherboard? $242 PSU? They obviously weren't trying very hard. $5000 is a lot of money to pour into one PC. Even if you are spending $1300 of that on a monitor.
- freehunter 9y ago
  Yeah might as well get cheaper RAM, a slower SSD, and a Pentium, because everyone knows quality components are a ripoff, and the people at PC Gamer are just Apple fanboys and don't know what they're talking about.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    ECC us unlikely to be worth the inflated price, too. A slightly slower CPU can be had for a significantly lower price. GPUs are a lot more important to most workloads. ... But I didn't mention any of those. The only reason for an expensive motherboard is to use multiple video cards. >$200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. My point is that you can easily build a very similar system for half the price. This isn't the rattly '90s. $5000 is a lot for one PC. If you want to shell out $3700 on PC components, you can build a much more powerful system, especially when you start putting in more GPUs.
    - FireBeyond 9y ago
      > $200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. For sure. I had this argument a few weeks before the iMac Pro came out with someone who insisted that it'd come with an 850W, more likely 1KW+ PSU... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 iFixit's tear down? 500W PSU.
  - fgonzag 9y ago
    That's a horrible system for $3700 dlls. You can easily shave $1k off if you're smart about shopping for the parts. Also, assuming you're not going for OSX (apples and oranges I know), a thread ripper would be a much better choice for a CPU.
- maccard 9y ago
  I can’t soeak specifics about the PSU but to get a server class intel motherboard (Xeon support, ECC ram), you really do have to spend quite a bit more than for the equivalent consumer board. Even if you reduce the cost of the motherboard to 200, and the psu to 150, you’re still not saving a huge amount off 5k, and you’re not getting an all in one
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    > ECC ram I'm not sure how Apple has people convinced they need ECC. It's practically worthless outside of very specific workloads. A workstation user does not fill several gigabytes of RAM with terse important data, query it millions of times/day, and do so 24/7 all year long.
    - cjsuk 9y ago
      It only takes one bit wrong to fuck your file system.
      - thomastjeffery 9y ago
        You make it sound like filesystems are so vulnerable. They aren't. The chances of memory failure ruining data are extremely slim; lower than for hardware failure. If you care about your data, back it up.
        burntwater 9y ago
        Backups don't do anything if the original material contains the flipped bits.
        cjsuk 9y ago
        I ran a lab notebook in word for a number of years and the document got fried by a filesystem error. The backup was toasted as well. This was corruption which broke the stage machine or parser in word which acted as a damage amplification. As for the source of the error, we can only speculate but the possibility of a flipped bit is higher than you think. Try running memtest86 on a PC without ECC for a week. You will be surprised at the results. I’ve seen perhaps 3 or 4 failures of this in new hardware. DRAM is not perfect.
- Synaesthesia 9y ago
  Bit silly I reckon as well as you can get similar single threaded performance for much cheaper. If you need 18 cores maybe, but $5k? But Apple have always figured out how to upsell computers perfectly.
- rayiner 9y ago
  They under-balled it if anything. They used a $400 Broadwell Xeon, while the base iMac Pro has a Skylake Xeon W. The chip is a custom Apple SKU, but the closest is a $1,100 Xeon W 2145. $650 is steep for a motherboard, but it has dual 10 gig-e ports and supports registered ECC. A SuperMicro motherboard with the Xeon W support will run about $350 (they’re not out yet) and an X550AT2 NIC is about $200 on eBay.
  - brigade 9y ago
    Slightly less: the iMac Pro uses the ~$100 AQC107 whereas the X99 motherboard chosen uses the more expensive X550AT2 because Aquantia only launched their chips this year. But yeah, the Xeon they chose is quite a bit slower than the 8-core Xeon-W; the Broadwell equivalent was really the $1100 E5-1660 v4. So -$200 for motherboard, +$700 for CPU, and -$100 for PSU if you're feeling generous. That's still $5k.
  - michaelmrose 9y ago
    * Video Card: Zotac - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founders Edition ($678.99) whereas the actual gpu used in the mac is $399 * Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 1000W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($242.89)whereas they could have gotten a fine psu for $99 * Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 7 Professional ($134.99) How about not and say we did. * Monitor: LG - UltraFine 5K Display 60Hz Monitor ($1299.95) whereas one can probably get a really nice 4K monitor for 400-500. Some can spend the extra funds on another 4K monitor, others you know already have monitors. * CPU Cooler: NZXT - Kraken X62 Liquid CPU Cooler ($158.99) Did I miss the part where the mac is liquid cooled why is this here? * CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2620 V4 2.1GHz 8-Core Processor ($408.99) This is an amazingly poor choice while relatively expensive its performance is decidedly mediocre being an older generation. Motherboard: Asus - X99-E-10G WS SSI CEB LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($649.00) Expensive not primarily because its awesome but because its xeon. The $1059 could have been better spent on this motherboard http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specification http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specifi... note supports dual gb lan and ecc, $340 this cpu https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113457&cm_re=threadripper-_-19-113-457-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911... $535 and about $100 for a single port 10G lan Total $975 between motherboard and cpu All in all a machine could be built that is nearly equivalent for about 3544. Given the extra $1500 one could buy a second 27" 4k monitor upgrade to 16 cores and buy a second gpu. Pretending mac is comparable in price to pc remains silly.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
proginthebox 9y ago
If you buy a workstation from HP/Supermicro, then you get something much more powerful for the same price. So, to say, they are very close is not very correct. The problem here is that the assembled PC is a customer PC assembled for workstation performance. Even then, they were not trying very hard.
- dagw 9y ago
  If you buy a workstation from HP/Supermicro, then you get something much more powerful for the same price. Not really. Go to HPs site and put together something like a z640 with as similar spec as possible and you're close to $4k before even adding a screen.
  - proginthebox 9y ago
    Point. Somehow, I have seen quotes from HP which were always much cheaper. May be it is because my employer had some sort of deal? Also, proliant servers were somehow cheaper than towers. Again I am not sure how, but yes, point taken.
    - dagw 9y ago
      What HP (and others) does give you is the opportunity do buy something almost as good (and quite possible more than good enough) for less money. They also let you buy something for the same price that is a lot better along the one axis you care most about (but worse along the axis you don't care so much about). But if you want to blindly match spec sheets you're going to pay about the same.
jaxondu 9y ago
Kind of suspect Apple will drop the dustbin Mac Pro form factor, instead release Mac mini Pro.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I'd be happy to see something in the middle.
- sudhirj 9y ago
  I'd buy that. A sleeper Mac Mini would be a perfect machine in my books.
- ebbv 9y ago
  They already announced that the new Mac Pro is a ground up redesign and with serviceability in mind. So you don’t have to suspect anything.
addicted 9y ago
Yes but what happens 2 years down the line? That’s an important question for professional devices. The iMac Pro looks like a great machine. But it’s definitely not comparable to a Mac Pro (although the last Mac Pro also wasn’t really a Mac Pro).

thomastjeffery 9y ago

A $650 motherboard? $242 PSU? They obviously weren't trying very hard. $5000 is a lot of money to pour into one PC. Even if you are spending $1300 of that on a monitor.

freehunter 9y ago
Yeah might as well get cheaper RAM, a slower SSD, and a Pentium, because everyone knows quality components are a ripoff, and the people at PC Gamer are just Apple fanboys and don't know what they're talking about.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  ECC us unlikely to be worth the inflated price, too. A slightly slower CPU can be had for a significantly lower price. GPUs are a lot more important to most workloads. ... But I didn't mention any of those. The only reason for an expensive motherboard is to use multiple video cards. >$200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. My point is that you can easily build a very similar system for half the price. This isn't the rattly '90s. $5000 is a lot for one PC. If you want to shell out $3700 on PC components, you can build a much more powerful system, especially when you start putting in more GPUs.
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    > $200 is not a good price for a PSU. 1000watt is absolutely unnecessary unless you need to power 3-4 GPUs. For sure. I had this argument a few weeks before the iMac Pro came out with someone who insisted that it'd come with an 850W, more likely 1KW+ PSU... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922978 iFixit's tear down? 500W PSU.
- fgonzag 9y ago
  That's a horrible system for $3700 dlls. You can easily shave $1k off if you're smart about shopping for the parts. Also, assuming you're not going for OSX (apples and oranges I know), a thread ripper would be a much better choice for a CPU.
maccard 9y ago
I can’t soeak specifics about the PSU but to get a server class intel motherboard (Xeon support, ECC ram), you really do have to spend quite a bit more than for the equivalent consumer board. Even if you reduce the cost of the motherboard to 200, and the psu to 150, you’re still not saving a huge amount off 5k, and you’re not getting an all in one
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > ECC ram I'm not sure how Apple has people convinced they need ECC. It's practically worthless outside of very specific workloads. A workstation user does not fill several gigabytes of RAM with terse important data, query it millions of times/day, and do so 24/7 all year long.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    It only takes one bit wrong to fuck your file system.
    - thomastjeffery 9y ago
      You make it sound like filesystems are so vulnerable. They aren't. The chances of memory failure ruining data are extremely slim; lower than for hardware failure. If you care about your data, back it up.
      - burntwater 9y ago
        Backups don't do anything if the original material contains the flipped bits.
      - cjsuk 9y ago
        I ran a lab notebook in word for a number of years and the document got fried by a filesystem error. The backup was toasted as well. This was corruption which broke the stage machine or parser in word which acted as a damage amplification. As for the source of the error, we can only speculate but the possibility of a flipped bit is higher than you think. Try running memtest86 on a PC without ECC for a week. You will be surprised at the results. I’ve seen perhaps 3 or 4 failures of this in new hardware. DRAM is not perfect.
Synaesthesia 9y ago
Bit silly I reckon as well as you can get similar single threaded performance for much cheaper. If you need 18 cores maybe, but $5k? But Apple have always figured out how to upsell computers perfectly.
rayiner 9y ago
They under-balled it if anything. They used a $400 Broadwell Xeon, while the base iMac Pro has a Skylake Xeon W. The chip is a custom Apple SKU, but the closest is a $1,100 Xeon W 2145. $650 is steep for a motherboard, but it has dual 10 gig-e ports and supports registered ECC. A SuperMicro motherboard with the Xeon W support will run about $350 (they’re not out yet) and an X550AT2 NIC is about $200 on eBay.
- brigade 9y ago
  Slightly less: the iMac Pro uses the ~$100 AQC107 whereas the X99 motherboard chosen uses the more expensive X550AT2 because Aquantia only launched their chips this year. But yeah, the Xeon they chose is quite a bit slower than the 8-core Xeon-W; the Broadwell equivalent was really the $1100 E5-1660 v4. So -$200 for motherboard, +$700 for CPU, and -$100 for PSU if you're feeling generous. That's still $5k.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  * Video Card: Zotac - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Founders Edition ($678.99) whereas the actual gpu used in the mac is $399 * Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 1000W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($242.89)whereas they could have gotten a fine psu for $99 * Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 7 Professional ($134.99) How about not and say we did. * Monitor: LG - UltraFine 5K Display 60Hz Monitor ($1299.95) whereas one can probably get a really nice 4K monitor for 400-500. Some can spend the extra funds on another 4K monitor, others you know already have monitors. * CPU Cooler: NZXT - Kraken X62 Liquid CPU Cooler ($158.99) Did I miss the part where the mac is liquid cooled why is this here? * CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2620 V4 2.1GHz 8-Core Processor ($408.99) This is an amazingly poor choice while relatively expensive its performance is decidedly mediocre being an older generation. Motherboard: Asus - X99-E-10G WS SSI CEB LGA2011-3 Motherboard ($649.00) Expensive not primarily because its awesome but because its xeon. The $1059 could have been better spent on this motherboard http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specification http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X399%20Taichi/index.asp#Specifi... note supports dual gb lan and ecc, $340 this cpu https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113457&cm_re=threadripper-_-19-113-457-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911... $535 and about $100 for a single port 10G lan Total $975 between motherboard and cpu All in all a machine could be built that is nearly equivalent for about 3544. Given the extra $1500 one could buy a second 27" 4k monitor upgrade to 16 cores and buy a second gpu. Pretending mac is comparable in price to pc remains silly.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

proginthebox 9y ago

If you buy a workstation from HP/Supermicro, then you get something much more powerful for the same price. So, to say, they are very close is not very correct. The problem here is that the assembled PC is a customer PC assembled for workstation performance. Even then, they were not trying very hard.

dagw 9y ago
If you buy a workstation from HP/Supermicro, then you get something much more powerful for the same price. Not really. Go to HPs site and put together something like a z640 with as similar spec as possible and you're close to $4k before even adding a screen.
- proginthebox 9y ago
  Point. Somehow, I have seen quotes from HP which were always much cheaper. May be it is because my employer had some sort of deal? Also, proliant servers were somehow cheaper than towers. Again I am not sure how, but yes, point taken.
  - dagw 9y ago
    What HP (and others) does give you is the opportunity do buy something almost as good (and quite possible more than good enough) for less money. They also let you buy something for the same price that is a lot better along the one axis you care most about (but worse along the axis you don't care so much about). But if you want to blindly match spec sheets you're going to pay about the same.

jaxondu 9y ago

Kind of suspect Apple will drop the dustbin Mac Pro form factor, instead release Mac mini Pro.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago
I'd be happy to see something in the middle.
sudhirj 9y ago
I'd buy that. A sleeper Mac Mini would be a perfect machine in my books.
ebbv 9y ago
They already announced that the new Mac Pro is a ground up redesign and with serviceability in mind. So you don’t have to suspect anything.

addicted 9y ago

Yes but what happens 2 years down the line? That’s an important question for professional devices. The iMac Pro looks like a great machine. But it’s definitely not comparable to a Mac Pro (although the last Mac Pro also wasn’t really a Mac Pro).