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A $43,859.00 Refurbished Mac Pro
- FreakyT 6y agoFor that price, I could buy nearly 3 of those $15,000 first-gen Apple watches! Note: for anyone wondering why it's so expensive, look at the amount of RAM it has
- kords 6y agoI wonder what's the price for a new one
- crooked-v 6y agoFor this configuration, $51,599.
- taf2 6y agoRemember that app when the App Store was still new - it was $1000 and was just named something simple like “I’m rich”. This sort of reminds of that
- anticsapp 6y agoAckshually, it was $999.
- abrowne 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
- taf2 6y agoThanks good memories
- SllX 6y agoI still think Apple should have kept it in the Store. If somebody is willing to spend the money, then dammit, let them spend the money. It said exactly what it was and who it was for, so you couldn’t even call it fraudulent.
- kevindong 6y agoFor reference, the new version of that model would be $51,599. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower# https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower#
- jvolkman 6y ago"Quality products at great prices" Express delivery to my location is an additional $8.
- billforsternz 6y agoBut at least there's a power cord already included in the box. And a mouse.
- kowsheek 6y agoMight look outlandish to everyday consumers but it's not unreasonable in my line of work (VFX, 3D, real-time graphics) to require this kind of specs.
- jimbob45 6y agoI’m pretty sure you could escape for under 10k if you built this yourself in a PC.
- seibelj 6y ago... but macOS?!?
- forgingahead 6y agoHackintosh!
- tambourine_man 6y agoThose days are over, ARM transition and all. Enjoy while you still can.
- judge2020 6y agoThey "still have unrevealed Intel Macs" as per the keynote; given that the 2013 iMac is still supported for Big Sur, we almost certainly still have 7 years of support for both architectures in MacOS.
- bilegeek 6y agoJobs said the same thing (about new Macs) about PowerPC in 2006. By 2007, Macs were all Intel, and the Intel-only Snow Leopard debuted in 2009. Complete abandonment of Leopard in 2011. I give it 5 years at the most.
- gabagool 6y agoGoing through Apple's buy site, the previous owner maxed out every single configuration except for storage (2TB not 8TB) and then skimped on purchasing a Magic Trackpad, opting solely for a Magic Mouse 2. If they were going to spend all this, they should have gone all in! Pretax cost as configured: $51,999 Cost fully maxed out: $53,948 BTW, this refurbished Mac Pro represents a savings of 15% off of $51,999.
- firloop 6y agoWe don’t know if the previous owner got the trackpad or not. For example, if there were a problem with the computer and it was swapped for a new one, Apple probably wouldn’t ask for the Magic Trackpad. Or even if it was returned, I imagine those two products have different pools of stock.
- yellowapple 6y agoSimilarly, if the issue was with the SSD, maybe Apple decided to replace it with a 2TB before reselling it?
- rileytg 6y agoOr prefers a mouse for desktop (like me)
- culturestate 6y agoI do too for most stuff, but I decided to try out a Magic Trackpad for a while and now I actually keep both on my desk. Having full gestures available right next to (or in my case directly above) the mouse makes for a surprisingly pleasant experience in macOS.
- schwartzworld 6y agoor a trackball like me
- Galanwe 6y agoWould be interesting to find out the annual price of renting a same spec machine on AWS/GC/Azure would be.
- heyitsguay 6y agoSeems pretty pricey given the specs. How much would it cost to put together a new Linux box with the same/functionally equivalent components?
- sdan 6y ago$5k max
- SllX 6y agoIs that including an FPGA?
- sdan 6y agoI'm guessing you can get (multiple) good nvidia cards to match apple's afterburner cards
- BooneJS 6y agoProbably not for the same power envelope.
- numpad0 6y agoDoubt it. FPGA is almost guaranteed worse in performance/watt and performance/dollar compared to ASIC. Only in cases where reprogramming capability or lack of initial cost of production make sense FPGA is used.
- SllX 6y agoWell here’s the relevant specs for what it does: > Compatible with Mac Pro (current generation) PCI Express x16 card > Accelerates ProRes and ProRes RAW codec in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party applications > Supports playback of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW So if there’s an NVIDIA card that does all that, great, happy to hear it. I heard Adobe Premiere was recently updated to support the Afterburner as well so hopefully it also works with NVIDIA’s equivalent.
- SllX 6y agoNew, this configuration would be $51,599.00 before tax. EDIT: Ninja’d like 5 times over. I see I wasn’t the only one that rushed to figure out what kind of discount the buyer is getting on this.
- milkytron 6y agoPersonally I do not need this, and I imagine most people don't. But I wonder what Apple's return policy on this machine was, and what happened? Did someone buy this and then not find it good enough? Did someone want to test it and then get their money back? Was something broken? This is an expensive machine, comparable in price to a nice, new car. I'd want a history report if I were buying this.
- c22 6y agoMaybe they just ran their compute then sent it back. Like leaving the tag tucked into the fancy shirt you only need to wear once.
- mxcrossb 6y agoI’m imagining someone on the white board comparing time to solution with various setups while taking into account shipping time
- snowwrestler 6y ago"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." — Andy Tanenbaum
- daveevad 6y ago> You have 14 calendar days to return an item from the date you received it. https://www.apple.com/shop/help/returns_refund https://www.apple.com/shop/help/returns_refund That might be just enough time to render your student film.
- auggierose 6y agoIt's customised, so you cannot just give it back. Something must have broken.
- ericzawo 6y agoVery likely from a studio with a business account that's made more than a few orders.
- kasey_junk 6y agoWhat is the cheapest desktop you can build with 1.5 TB of ddr4 ram?
- SethTro 6y agoIt's pretty standard to have 8 slots [1] on motherboards and rarely 16 slots [2] 64 gig DDR4 modules cost ~$300 [3] 128 gig DDR4 server modules can cost as little as ~$800 [4] 8x64 = 0.5 TB of DDR4 ram = 8300 = $2,400 16x128 = 1.5 TB of DDR4 ram = 16800 = $12,800 [1] https://www.amazon.com/TRX40-AORUS-PRO-Fins-Array-Motherboard/dp/B081JCCGQR/?tag=li-org-main-20 https://www.amazon.com/TRX40-AORUS-PRO-Fins-Array-Motherboar... [2] https://hothardware.com/news/gigabyte-mz31-amd-epyc-7000-motherboard-16-dimm-slots https://hothardware.com/news/gigabyte-mz31-amd-epyc-7000-mot... [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007611%20601275379 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007611%20601275379 [4] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007952%20601324426 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007952%20601324426
- msbarnett 6y agoThat’s just the RAM cost, though. The threadripper TRX40 platform supports 256GB max RAM, and the epyc you linked tops out at 1TB. Just finding a cpu and mobo that will host 1.5 TB is a multi-thousand dollar expense all on its own.
- belltaco 6y agoI was able to configure a prebuilt for about $21K https://i.imgur.com/rbZB2uv.png https://i.imgur.com/rbZB2uv.png
- syspec 6y agoECC ram is more expensive than regular DDR 4 ram
- disillusioned 6y agoDoesn't even include the wheels!
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoWhat does this do that a much cheaper computer doesn't?
- TimTheTinker 6y agoMassive realtime video renders (think multiple simultaneous 8k in real time), compositing, scene rendering/animating, transcoding. Or computations on extremely large scientific datasets.
- ponker 6y agoYou are color grading a $200 million movie and want to apply various tweaks to the video and see the effect in real time. With a regular PC you have to render and then view... with something like this you could render in real time at 8k.
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoIn which case 50k seems like a pretty reasonable price. It's surprising that there are enough of those kinds of use cases to justify an entire production of a product like this. Something about the depth of certain markets being way bigger than they appear.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoThere are a lot of production studios around the world, of which only a fraction produce movies that end up in theaters or sold on Amazon or iTunes.
- ponker 6y agoEvery YouTube ad you’ve seen has a client who at least wants their ads to look as good as a James Cameron movie.
- philistine 6y agoFast
- mrtnmcc 6y ago>> Afterburner is a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC. With over a million logic cells, it can process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second. Interesting -- didn't realize FPGAs were commonly used in graphics development flows. Does anyone know what software is used to customize the FPGA to accelerate tasks in macOS?
- monocasa 6y agoIt's not used often. It's a one off thing for Apple. And I don't think you as the end user or third party programmer are given any options to customize it.
- SllX 6y agoIt’s programmed to function as a ProRes and ProRes RAW video accelerator, so is more useful for video production. Apple has it locked down though, so while they can update it, 3rd party devs would have to find a way to hack it to do anything useful with it, and I’m not sure how appealing a target the Afterburner is with other FPGAs around.
- kevingadd 6y agoDoesn't really count as 'an FPGA', how it's implemented is really a minor detail. Lots of consumer and prosumer hardware out there is based on FPGAs, but programming it isn't something you're allowed to do. At least two pieces of hardware hooked up to my PC are powered by FPGAs. Part of the logic here is that if you're only gonna sell 20000 units, it's probably better to just slap an FPGA in there than build out a fully custom board with a bunch of dedicated chips. The FPGA is easier to update after release, too.
- julienfr112 6y agoI'm interested. What are the two pieces of hardware you are talking about ?
- kevingadd 6y agoVideo capture hardware and audio interface
- KiDD 6y agoApple has a very generous return policy. There are so many refurb Mac pros due to return for incompatible peripherals or whatever reason it was returned.
- mgkimsal 6y agoI'm going to go out on a limb here and predict you'd still get those beach ball spinners even with this setup.
- wtallis 6y agoIt's definitely a machine optimized more for throughput than latency. Though 1.5TB of RAM can go a long way toward hiding storage latency for some workloads.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoI wonder if the number of people who would are willing and able buy a refurbished Mac Pro is higher or lower than the number of people who are willing and able to buy a used Bugatti. It seems that once you have the kind of money to be getting those items, you would want to get it new and customized exactly how you want it.
- philistine 6y agoI struggle to find any job that requires a Bugatti. Few jobs exist that require a 50,000$ computer, but they do exist.
- ascorbic 6y agoA Bugatti is bought as a status symbol. This Mac Pro was bought for high end video editing. They were willing to pay $50k because it's for editing multimillion dollar projects. They'll probably be paying thousands of dollars per day for this editing work. The refurbished one does the job just as well as the new one.
- imagetic 6y agoMy last Mac Pro cost $3499. I did professional video work on it for 8 years. And now I can't justify / afford one. What a world.
- jijji 6y agoi would go for a 48-core dell poweredge r820 with 1.5TB of ram for 7k on ebay, albeit missing the GPU cards
- yellowapple 6y agoIt's only 500GB away from being able to load the entirety of the SSD's contents into RAM. Of course, I say "only" when that difference alone is nearly 16× the amount of RAM I have in this here Threadripper rig on which I'm typing this comment.
- rovr138 6y agoThis reminded me of running Linux on RAM and being amazed at the speed. Knoppix, damn small Linux, puppy Linux, slax, and a few, even older, firewalls and router distros that existed (exist?)
- junar 6y agoEven if you needed these specs and macOS, you could easily save thousands by buying the RAM yourself. You could save even more with by using the W5700X GPU (or even off-the-shelf 5700 XT).
- 1000100_1000101 6y agoI'm reminded of the time someone actually put the "you could build an identical PC cheaper yourself" to the test back in 2013. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/173695-apples-new-overpriced-10000-mac-pro-is-2000-cheaper-than-the-equivalent-windows-pc https://www.extremetech.com/computing/173695-apples-new-over... While I'm sure AMD's latest high-core count chips may be giving us new cheaper options, high priced Macs have typically been reasonably priced for their specs. More recently when the 27" 5K iMacs came out, I looked at the price of a 27" 5K IPS DCI-P3 monitor on Dell... it was only $100 less than the iMac, despite the Mac having a full computer in it, in addition to the display. People still complained that they were expensive.
- monksy 6y agoThe PC version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_IHSRPVqwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_IHSRPVqwQ
- quickthrower2 6y ago> on Dell That's why :-)
- 1000100_1000101 6y agoThe Dell was the only 5K IPS DCI-P3 monitor I could find. That's why. DCI-P3 was new to consumer space. 5K was new to consumer space. IPS further limited the the ability to find a comparable screen.
- binaryblitz 6y agoA lot of people, even in the HN/tech communities don't seem to understand that all monitors aren't created equally.
- quickthrower2 6y agoYeah the point is Dell ain't the cheapest. Clearly it is the only one from what you have added. I was making the point that saying something is cheaper than Dell ain't saying much.
- _bxg1 6y agoIt was terrifying to click this link and have it open up in the Apple Store app, with my payment info already available, and a big blue "Add to Bag" button under my thumb.
- jdavis703 6y agoThe bank would immediately decline a $43,000 purchase on my card. Not only is this way over my debit card’s daily anti-fraud limit, it also exceeds my bank balance. I would recommend keeping a small balance in any account used for online purchasing.
- lewisj489 6y agoMy trick is to only have a £200 net worth
- readme 6y agoI never purchase items with a debit card. A credit card always beats a debit card if you are able to pay it off every month. If there's a wrong transaction with a credit card, the company will 99.99% of the time immediately take your side, and all you have to do is click dispute, and the money is instantly credited to your account. With a debit card, in the past I have had to go through a week or so long process to get fradulent charges removed. Plus other benefits, there are perks like automatically extended warranty on purchases like this one (amex), and all sorts of discounts.
- m463 6y agoI purchased something with a credit card, and returned it, but it was "lost" in shipping even though they signed for it. It took a while to notice, then it took a while to investigate and then a specified time period had elapsed and my cc company wouldn't reverse the charge. I cancelled the card.
- readme 6y agoI'll stop blanket recommending credit cards now. Amex it is.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jppope 6y agoApple's prices are starting to get out of control.
- jppope 6y agoOk. I learned my lesson... don't make fun of Apple on HN.
- feathj 6y ago-1 doesn't have $700 wheels
- jp0d 6y agoWhen I create an EMR cluster with 10 nodes with 16 cores each. I get 10 cpu nodes with 1.3 terabytes of RAM. Costs $10 per hour! I use it to run Spark to process and analyse data. Amazon has the option to have GPU based nodes too! If I run it for a whole month then it'd cost me around $7.5K. Running it for 6 months will cost the same as this machine. Although not an Apple to apple comparison. This seems like a reasonably priced machine, especially for Machine Learning/Data science folks (Only if it had nVidia GPU) :D. For someone who needs that kind of power, it's not overpriced. Especially for the quality of hardware you get.
- seshagiric 6y agoI like it that it has stainless steel with feet.
- person_of_color 6y agoIf a single SKU costs 50k, what are the development costs? Insane.
- dschuetz 6y agoWhy buy an expensive new/refurbished Mac now if there are completely new models with ARM available in a couple of years? I'd wait 1 year or so for Intel Macs' prices to drop to half or lower, because Apple will not be able to sell them anymore, and then buy and install Linux on them.
- grzm 6y agoOne reason is that you might need a machine now, as opposed to in a couple of years.
- dschuetz 6y agoThat's the beauty of Macs: they are (or were) reliable for at least a decade, unless Apple decides to drop software support for them. Waiting was never a problem for Macs. It's the architecture transitions that kills them. The new Mac Pro is not even shipped, it's basically obsolete now. Or in two years, if Apple keeps their promise.
- grzm 6y agoThe new Mac Pro has indeed shipped. It was released in December 2019, and people started receiving them months ago. And “it’s basically obsolete now” stands in apparent contradiction to “they are reliable for at least a decade, unless Apple decides to drop software support for them”, which Apple has made clear they’re not looking to do with the transition to Apple Silicon. Reliability doesn’t necessarily play a role here at all. For some users, the trash can Mac Pro did not meet their needs. The 2019 Mac Pro is a completely different beast. The last machine I’d argue that was comparable was the 1st generation, which no longer supported the most recent versions of macOS.
- dschuetz 6y agoWould you still buy software for "the beast" knowing that software support will be dropped anyway? I did that once, being naïve enough to believe that Rosetta (powerpc on intel) will be there forever as an option in MacOSX. Man was I dumb. Apple literally burnt $15k worth of hardware and software in front of my eyes when they announced to drop PowerPC and then Rosetta later. No. Screw that. Don't buy news Mac now. Don't make the same mistakes.
- triangleman 6y agoWhen did Apple stop making the "trash can" style Mac Pros? This link is surprising to me.
- gdubs 6y agoIf I’m not mistaken, this was roughly the price point of an SGI Indigo II workstation — in 1995 dollars. Seems to be targeting a similar niche. Machines like the Onyx were even more, if I remember correctly — could be north of $100k. A license to something like Alias PowerAnimator was another ten to fifteen grand.
- syspec 6y agoIt seems to me the ECC ram, maxed out is really the driving factor of the cost.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoNo wheels ??? :).
- nix23 6y agoThat is a ripoff, not even the wheels are interluded.
- FatDrunknStupid 6y agoArgue what you like about the cost but AppleCare+ is absolute steal.
- romes 6y agoA 5$ option https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Grater-Stainless-Parmesan-Vegetables/dp/B01FNR4REY?ref_=s9_apbd_otopr_hd_bw_b16yl3&pf_rd_r=8NJMKDMJ86ZV1P5ADYSC&pf_rd_p=ad3c712d-5c2c-577a-914b-076ea6d01c50&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-11&pf_rd_t=BROWSE&pf_rd_i=16439861 https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Grater-Stainless-Parmesa...