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Out of all the product's in Apple's lineup, the Mac Pro is probably the one with the smallest price differential relative to competitors' products. Go ahead and

Out of all the product's in Apple's lineup, the Mac Pro is probably the one with the smallest price differential relative to competitors' products. Go ahead and spec out a similar workstation from Dell or HP: you won't see much difference in price. Base price doesn't really matter to the buyers of these machines anyway, they're not consumer products. These are being used by professionals who generate revenue way in excess of what the computer costs, and stuff like enterprise support contracts (where you can have a replacement machine at your desk ASAP if yours dies, because otherwise you're losing money by the second) matters much more to them. The articles you linked are just dumb clickbait using the logic of consumer product pricing where it isn't applicable.

overcast 7y ago
I feel like most businesses at that level of need have long moved away from the MacPro, or they are out of business. For the rest of us mortals wanting a tower mac, the price of entry is too prohibitive. Base for my 2008 MacPro was in the ball park of $2900, and it was a beast. What is the base now, $6000? It's basically hackintosh from here on out, which works amazingly well now.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  Yes, I actually had planned to buy a new Mac Pro if it had been similar in price to your 2008 Mac Pro. I am currently using a 27 inch iMac and am looking for a desktop machine with a decent GPU and decent internal storage. So at 3k for a Mac Pro plus some money for upgrades, I could have grudgingly justified. At 6k it is just way too expensive.
- theflyinghorse 7y ago
  I've been using Mint (ubuntu derivative) for a few years now on my laptop and I'm absolutely loving it, more so when you consider the price difference. (am a software dev so linux is great for me)
  - overcast 7y ago
    I use the same on my dev desktop(I use all three OSes).
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  Hackintoshes are great but I would never rely on one for any kind of production work if my business depended on it. I had a Hackintosh tower that went completely dead after something happened with device IDs. The machine was unusable. I had system updates disabled too so I'm not even sure what happened. Had to reinstall the OS and Clover (or whatever the loader was at the time).
  - overcast 7y ago
    Like I said, businesses have moved on, the rest of us found alternatives.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    I had an older (2013 or 14) Lenovo TS140 sitting around that I recently installed Mojave on. It took a little bit of experimentation to work out the kinks, but I've got it working almost flawlessly with a NVME drive in a PCIE adapter, 32GB RAM, and a Broadcom wifi card to enable Airdrop/continuity/handoff. Not bad for an older machine and less than $250 in extra parts, most of which I had already purchased over the years. I used these guides: https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-guide/ https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-... https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/wiki/faq#wiki_wifi_compatibility https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/wiki/faq#wiki_wifi_compa... The only thing I haven't been able to solve/fix is I can't use software that depends on WiBu Codemeter[1] - some sort of piracy prevention. This includes stuff like newer versions of Antares AutoTune, and other audio production software. WiBu installs a third-party kext, which doesn't play well with my audio interface for some reason (RME, also installs a third-party kext) - causes a lot of pops and clicks or dropouts until I uninstall WiBU. If anyone has any suggestions on workaround for this, please respond here! PS: after losing my system too many times in the past, now I keep a mirror image backup of all my systems in case I break something... Esp. with hackintosh it is just too easy to lose a system. [1]: https://www.wibu.com/us/products/codemeter.html https://www.wibu.com/us/products/codemeter.html
michaelt 7y ago
> Go ahead and spec out a similar workstation from Dell or HP: you won't see much difference in price. Apple: Xeon W, 8 cores, 3.5GHz, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $5,999 [1] Dell: Xeon W, 8 cores, 3.7GHz, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $3,466 [2] [1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/mac-pro-2019-specs-price,news-30241.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/mac-pro-2019-specs-price,news-3... [2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certified-dell/precision-5820-tower/spd/precision-5820-workstation/xctopt5820us_4 https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
- benologist 7y ago
  You're also paying for 12 Thunderbolt 3 ports. They really could have made some of those optional since there's PCIe slots too. In addition to expensive parts I believe TB3 requires licensing costs too but I'm not sure if Apple has to because I think it was partially created by them.
- dubcanada 7y ago
  Not to be pedantic but the Dell machine is on sale, and Apple isn't. It's list price is $4,420.29 which is still about $1500 off. But that comes with Windows that supports 4 cores so you would need to upgrade to the 4+ cores one thats another $100 so more like $1400. So basically $1400 is the difference between a top tier Dell and a top tier Apple. Still a fairly large margin, but after a certain number the amount matters less. People who are buying $4500 computers typically don't care about spending another $1000.
  - sjburt 7y ago
    Dells are always on "sale". It's part of some game involving enterprise sales and negotiated discounts off list price.
    - delfinom 7y ago
      Yep. Dell's website will always show a sales price. Even better, use a different browser or refresh a hour later and the price will change as well. Even Lenovo and HP do it. The best is when you enter the configuration for a PC build and hit refresh and you see individual items change in prices. Also if you go via a Dell sales rep you easily get 10% extra off that "sales price" for low volume buyers and if you are a large volume buyer you can easily get as much as 50% off the list price even for high ticket value items.
mugsie 7y ago
I just spec'd out a HP Z6 to the min spec of the Mac Pro - it came to about $4000 (and that is EU prices, I am sure the US prices are less) - so 20% difference. An maxed out z8 is $50k - but that is way over what most people need, or you can do with a Mac Pro If you look at other manafacturers - you can get insane performance for much cheaper. 2 x AMD Epycs (64 cores per CPU, 128 cores / 256 threads in the box) 1TB RAM 2x2TB SSD 2 x Quadro RTX 6000 Is $38,000. It is not even in the same sport, let alone league as the mac pro
utf985 7y ago
You're joking, right? I'm currently looking at the Mac Pro build page on Apple's site and literally every component upgrade costs nearly twice as much as if you got it individually - £360 to upgrade to a 1B pcie SSD (as opposed to 170 on amazon), just as much for 16Gb of DDR3 ECC memory (180 on other sites), etc.
_ph_ 7y ago
Besides that you can get equivalent machines at a lower price, as some comments here have shown, the other big problem with the Mac Pro is, that there is no other true desktop machine available from Apple, e.g. accessible components, supporting a graphics card. In the past, the Mac Pro would work as a slightly oversized deskop machine. But the new Mac Pro is priced completely out of that region, basically twice of what its predecessor cost. And I remember the times, when the entry level G5 PowerMac was slightly cheaper as the G5 iMac, the latter of course having a 20 inch lcd.

overcast 7y ago

I feel like most businesses at that level of need have long moved away from the MacPro, or they are out of business. For the rest of us mortals wanting a tower mac, the price of entry is too prohibitive. Base for my 2008 MacPro was in the ball park of $2900, and it was a beast. What is the base now, $6000? It's basically hackintosh from here on out, which works amazingly well now.

_ph_ 7y ago
Yes, I actually had planned to buy a new Mac Pro if it had been similar in price to your 2008 Mac Pro. I am currently using a 27 inch iMac and am looking for a desktop machine with a decent GPU and decent internal storage. So at 3k for a Mac Pro plus some money for upgrades, I could have grudgingly justified. At 6k it is just way too expensive.
theflyinghorse 7y ago
I've been using Mint (ubuntu derivative) for a few years now on my laptop and I'm absolutely loving it, more so when you consider the price difference. (am a software dev so linux is great for me)
- overcast 7y ago
  I use the same on my dev desktop(I use all three OSes).
dkonofalski 7y ago
Hackintoshes are great but I would never rely on one for any kind of production work if my business depended on it. I had a Hackintosh tower that went completely dead after something happened with device IDs. The machine was unusable. I had system updates disabled too so I'm not even sure what happened. Had to reinstall the OS and Clover (or whatever the loader was at the time).
- overcast 7y ago
  Like I said, businesses have moved on, the rest of us found alternatives.
- vonseel 7y ago
  I had an older (2013 or 14) Lenovo TS140 sitting around that I recently installed Mojave on. It took a little bit of experimentation to work out the kinks, but I've got it working almost flawlessly with a NVME drive in a PCIE adapter, 32GB RAM, and a Broadcom wifi card to enable Airdrop/continuity/handoff. Not bad for an older machine and less than $250 in extra parts, most of which I had already purchased over the years. I used these guides: https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-guide/ https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-... https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/wiki/faq#wiki_wifi_compatibility https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/wiki/faq#wiki_wifi_compa... The only thing I haven't been able to solve/fix is I can't use software that depends on WiBu Codemeter[1] - some sort of piracy prevention. This includes stuff like newer versions of Antares AutoTune, and other audio production software. WiBu installs a third-party kext, which doesn't play well with my audio interface for some reason (RME, also installs a third-party kext) - causes a lot of pops and clicks or dropouts until I uninstall WiBU. If anyone has any suggestions on workaround for this, please respond here! PS: after losing my system too many times in the past, now I keep a mirror image backup of all my systems in case I break something... Esp. with hackintosh it is just too easy to lose a system. [1]: https://www.wibu.com/us/products/codemeter.html https://www.wibu.com/us/products/codemeter.html

michaelt 7y ago

> Go ahead and spec out a similar workstation from Dell or HP: you won't see much difference in price. Apple: Xeon W, 8 cores, 3.5GHz, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $5,999 [1] Dell: Xeon W, 8 cores, 3.7GHz, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $3,466 [2] [1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/mac-pro-2019-specs-price,news-30241.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/mac-pro-2019-specs-price,news-3... [2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certified-dell/precision-5820-tower/spd/precision-5820-workstation/xctopt5820us_4 https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

benologist 7y ago
You're also paying for 12 Thunderbolt 3 ports. They really could have made some of those optional since there's PCIe slots too. In addition to expensive parts I believe TB3 requires licensing costs too but I'm not sure if Apple has to because I think it was partially created by them.
dubcanada 7y ago
Not to be pedantic but the Dell machine is on sale, and Apple isn't. It's list price is $4,420.29 which is still about $1500 off. But that comes with Windows that supports 4 cores so you would need to upgrade to the 4+ cores one thats another $100 so more like $1400. So basically $1400 is the difference between a top tier Dell and a top tier Apple. Still a fairly large margin, but after a certain number the amount matters less. People who are buying $4500 computers typically don't care about spending another $1000.
- sjburt 7y ago
  Dells are always on "sale". It's part of some game involving enterprise sales and negotiated discounts off list price.
  - delfinom 7y ago
    Yep. Dell's website will always show a sales price. Even better, use a different browser or refresh a hour later and the price will change as well. Even Lenovo and HP do it. The best is when you enter the configuration for a PC build and hit refresh and you see individual items change in prices. Also if you go via a Dell sales rep you easily get 10% extra off that "sales price" for low volume buyers and if you are a large volume buyer you can easily get as much as 50% off the list price even for high ticket value items.

mugsie 7y ago

I just spec'd out a HP Z6 to the min spec of the Mac Pro - it came to about $4000 (and that is EU prices, I am sure the US prices are less) - so 20% difference. An maxed out z8 is $50k - but that is way over what most people need, or you can do with a Mac Pro If you look at other manafacturers - you can get insane performance for much cheaper. 2 x AMD Epycs (64 cores per CPU, 128 cores / 256 threads in the box) 1TB RAM 2x2TB SSD 2 x Quadro RTX 6000 Is $38,000. It is not even in the same sport, let alone league as the mac pro

utf985 7y ago

You're joking, right? I'm currently looking at the Mac Pro build page on Apple's site and literally every component upgrade costs nearly twice as much as if you got it individually - £360 to upgrade to a 1B pcie SSD (as opposed to 170 on amazon), just as much for 16Gb of DDR3 ECC memory (180 on other sites), etc.

_ph_ 7y ago

Besides that you can get equivalent machines at a lower price, as some comments here have shown, the other big problem with the Mac Pro is, that there is no other true desktop machine available from Apple, e.g. accessible components, supporting a graphics card. In the past, the Mac Pro would work as a slightly oversized deskop machine. But the new Mac Pro is priced completely out of that region, basically twice of what its predecessor cost. And I remember the times, when the entry level G5 PowerMac was slightly cheaper as the G5 iMac, the latter of course having a 20 inch lcd.