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A machine that wont outperform the new mini $6000 16 cores 32GB of ram least powerful gpu on the list 2GB of storage $8,799.00 28 cores 48GB of ram same gpu 4

A machine that wont outperform the new mini $6000 16 cores 32GB of ram least powerful gpu on the list 2GB of storage $8,799.00 28 cores 48GB of ram same gpu 4GB of storage $14,699 MSRP on a 2020 Toyota Corolla $19,600 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-Core 3.7 GHz Socket sTRX4 $2,629.90 Cost of the same basic GPU about $219 Cost of complete system equivalent to the almost car priced mac about 4200. 9k-15k isn't "a lot" its a crazy amount. 15k is 1/4 of the median households income. Most of planet earth can't sink 6000 into a computer let alone 15000. Under Apple the standard expandable board in a box with room to expand is a category available to 1% of the US and 0.1% of the world.

nicolas_t 6y ago
Exactly this, I was fine with the Mac Pro until 2012, it was a little more expensive than PCs but not much outrageously so (maybe 30% more, that's a tax I was fine paying given the OS and that it was quite a well built machine). The new Mac Pro is 3-4x the price of a machine built around AMD having equivalent performances. I'm building a Threadripper for exactly this reason. Most of the issue is Intel vs AMD and the fact that AMD's Threadrippers are an amazing deal when it comes to performance per dollar and that Apple has an aversion to offering decent GPUs
- foldr 6y ago
  There is also the iMac and iMac Pro range. The Mac Pro is clearly demarcated as a "money is no object" product.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    I'd be much more interested in the iMac if it wasn't built inside a monitor.
    - studius 6y ago
      The M1 was released on the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini. Buying an iMac now would seem to be a poor decision. From what I'm seeing in some of the comments, people are so lost in the history of the past years of Apple being the pooch ridden from behind on performance, that they can't get their heads out of their arses to see how awesome this is. I am sitting here right now wondering if I should invest more of my savings directly in Apple stock, at least temporarily to ride their sales wave, or if I should buy a Mac mini and a nice wide curved monitor with a mechanical keyboard from WASD and be f'ing awesome all of a sudden. The only reason I'm not hitting the buy button is that all of that isn't $135. There's no reason for that amount, but if it said $135, I'd have already paid for it and been drinking beer to celebrate the happiest purchases I ever made.
      - _ph_ 6y ago
        The new Mini is certainly impressive and suitable for many tasks, but not a replacement for a full desktop machine. Memory and storage are very limited, and the GPU, while great for the MacBook Air, is far from desktop performance. Also, for desktop, the ports selection is very limited.
        sleepybrett 6y ago
        Given that they just bumped the imac in august we might be waiting for a bit before we start to see ARM imacs.
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    The iMac in many senses isn't a replacement for a proper desktop. You can't expand the disk storage, many iterations had no great graphics cards, this seems to be somewhat better now, but an upgrade means having to upgrade everything, including the screen. You can't even clean out the fans after some years. Yes, I own an iMac, as this is the closest to a desktop machine Apple sells, but a replacement for what the Mac Pro used to be, it is not.
- m463 6y ago
  Yes, it is not a commodity machine, but it sort of goes beyond expensive to almost insulting. If it was 1/2 the price I think it could fairly be called premium priced.
piokoch 6y ago
Yes and no. 15k hardware is for people who are using it professionally. By "professionally" I mean that they can throw such purchase into their cost and just pay less tax. From my perspective it does not matter if I pay ~15k to tax office or to Apple. In Europe the incentives to buy expensive goods as a company (like cars, fancy office furniture, etc.) is even bigger because of VAT tax (much bigger than US sales tax).
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  That just isn't how taxes work. If you spend 15k of your profits and buy capital goods you don't reduce your taxes by 15k because no one was going to charge you 100% tax on it. You save only the foregone taxes rate on the purchase.
  - PixyMisa 6y ago
    And depreciation.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      Of you can put your heavy workloads on the cloud and pass it as opex.
      - mpfundstein 6y ago
        which is the way to go
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        rbanffy 6y ago
        It depends. If it's a constant workload, it may be better to lease the server and operate it on-prem. If it's spiky, then cloud and on-demand/spot is the best option.
- 6y ago
niea_11 6y ago
I don't use apple products but I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple. From a discussion I had with a friend recently, I found that Precision workstations from Dell or Z workstations from HP have similar prices for similar performances (sometime prices can reach 40k or 70k dollars). When comparing Mac Pro to an enthusiast pc build, yes the mac pro is "overpriced", but the mac pro is using a Xeon which is pricier than a ryzen (even if performance wise it's inferior) and a pro gpu which also cost more than consumer gpu (again, even if performance is inferior). The price of a nvidia quadro is always higher than a Geforce gpu with the same specs. You can see a spec/price comparison I did when having the discussion with my friend here : https://mega.nz/file/Nj4UnSJR#fBdZfn3zoZ8boxap35-GWEgDlicH3RmWm5nNGhKPvW4 https://mega.nz/file/Nj4UnSJR#fBdZfn3zoZ8boxap35-GWEgDlicH3R...
- detaro 6y ago
  It's not just "enthusiast PC builds". You can buy plenty of PCs in that middle category of high-but-not-extreme performance without the certifications, Quadros and vendor markup that a full-on "workstation" model has. And they're perfectly fine choices for many professional use cases. For that market, the Mac Pro is overpriced (the high-end Dell/HP workstations are too), and Apple doesn't make anything more suited for it. That's the criticism. That the Mac Pro is acceptably priced compared to the Dell/HP workstations doesn't matter if that's not what you need.
  - niea_11 6y ago
    My bad, I misunderstood the context of the comment. Thanks for the clarification. For me personally, outside of laptops and phones, I don't see the appeal of using Apple hardware (unless you want to use MacOS X).
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple. A professional workstation, with support, services, guaranteed replacement components, guaranteed service-life, maintenance contracts and so on is very different from an enthusiast-built machine. It's like comparing a BMW M3 to a tricked out VW Golf. You can fit a bigger, badder engine under the VW's hood, stiffen the suspension, replace the gearbox and so on but, in the end, you can get one straight from the dealer and not everyone is inclined to assemble a car from parts. Did that once. It's fun, educational and not very practical.
m463 6y ago
3970x 32-core is < $2000 I got curious... - amd 3990x 64-core 128 thread $3849 - 256gb g.skill ddr 3600 $978 - noctua nh-u14s cooler $80 - samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4 $229 - evga 1000w power supply $207 - fractal design define 7 $170 - asus trx40-pro mb $396 - nvidia rtx 3080 $699 (?) - steve jobs: a biography $15 (hardcover) = a really maxed out system $6623 probably 1/2 that for a 5950x/am4 system EDIT: ok, I had to know... - amd 5950x 16 core 32 thread $799 - 128gb g.skill ddr 3600 $489 - noctua nh-u12s cooler $60 - samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4 $229 - evga 850w power supply $139 - fractal design define 7 compact $130 - asus x570-pro mb $240 - nvidia rtx 3070 $499 (?) - steve jobs: a biography $14 (kindle) - linux with kde mac-look icons $0 = a really really great system $2599
- sliken 6y ago
  Looks pretty nice, but for many you'd be better off with: - AMD 5600x or 5700x (saving $500 or $400) - Samsung 970 pro 2TB for $229 (twice the space for the same price) - rtx 3060 (in a few weeks) You'll save a fair bit of $600, run quite a bit cooler, it will be much easier to be quieter, and have twice the disk space. Or buy 2x2TB NVMe (motherboards with 2x m.2 are common these days). Sure the 5600x/5700x isn't as fast in throughput, but how often do you max more then 6/8 cores? Per core performance is near identical and with more memory bandwidth per core you run into less bottlenecks. I bet over a few years more people would notice double the disk than the missing extra cores.

nicolas_t 6y ago

Exactly this, I was fine with the Mac Pro until 2012, it was a little more expensive than PCs but not much outrageously so (maybe 30% more, that's a tax I was fine paying given the OS and that it was quite a well built machine). The new Mac Pro is 3-4x the price of a machine built around AMD having equivalent performances. I'm building a Threadripper for exactly this reason. Most of the issue is Intel vs AMD and the fact that AMD's Threadrippers are an amazing deal when it comes to performance per dollar and that Apple has an aversion to offering decent GPUs

foldr 6y ago
There is also the iMac and iMac Pro range. The Mac Pro is clearly demarcated as a "money is no object" product.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  I'd be much more interested in the iMac if it wasn't built inside a monitor.
  - studius 6y ago
    The M1 was released on the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini. Buying an iMac now would seem to be a poor decision. From what I'm seeing in some of the comments, people are so lost in the history of the past years of Apple being the pooch ridden from behind on performance, that they can't get their heads out of their arses to see how awesome this is. I am sitting here right now wondering if I should invest more of my savings directly in Apple stock, at least temporarily to ride their sales wave, or if I should buy a Mac mini and a nice wide curved monitor with a mechanical keyboard from WASD and be f'ing awesome all of a sudden. The only reason I'm not hitting the buy button is that all of that isn't $135. There's no reason for that amount, but if it said $135, I'd have already paid for it and been drinking beer to celebrate the happiest purchases I ever made.
    - _ph_ 6y ago
      The new Mini is certainly impressive and suitable for many tasks, but not a replacement for a full desktop machine. Memory and storage are very limited, and the GPU, while great for the MacBook Air, is far from desktop performance. Also, for desktop, the ports selection is very limited.
      - sleepybrett 6y ago
        Given that they just bumped the imac in august we might be waiting for a bit before we start to see ARM imacs.
- _ph_ 6y ago
  The iMac in many senses isn't a replacement for a proper desktop. You can't expand the disk storage, many iterations had no great graphics cards, this seems to be somewhat better now, but an upgrade means having to upgrade everything, including the screen. You can't even clean out the fans after some years. Yes, I own an iMac, as this is the closest to a desktop machine Apple sells, but a replacement for what the Mac Pro used to be, it is not.
m463 6y ago
Yes, it is not a commodity machine, but it sort of goes beyond expensive to almost insulting. If it was 1/2 the price I think it could fairly be called premium priced.

piokoch 6y ago

Yes and no. 15k hardware is for people who are using it professionally. By "professionally" I mean that they can throw such purchase into their cost and just pay less tax. From my perspective it does not matter if I pay ~15k to tax office or to Apple. In Europe the incentives to buy expensive goods as a company (like cars, fancy office furniture, etc.) is even bigger because of VAT tax (much bigger than US sales tax).

michaelmrose 6y ago
That just isn't how taxes work. If you spend 15k of your profits and buy capital goods you don't reduce your taxes by 15k because no one was going to charge you 100% tax on it. You save only the foregone taxes rate on the purchase.
- PixyMisa 6y ago
  And depreciation.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Of you can put your heavy workloads on the cloud and pass it as opex.
    - mpfundstein 6y ago
      which is the way to go
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        It depends. If it's a constant workload, it may be better to lease the server and operate it on-prem. If it's spiky, then cloud and on-demand/spot is the best option.
6y ago

niea_11 6y ago

I don't use apple products but I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple. From a discussion I had with a friend recently, I found that Precision workstations from Dell or Z workstations from HP have similar prices for similar performances (sometime prices can reach 40k or 70k dollars). When comparing Mac Pro to an enthusiast pc build, yes the mac pro is "overpriced", but the mac pro is using a Xeon which is pricier than a ryzen (even if performance wise it's inferior) and a pro gpu which also cost more than consumer gpu (again, even if performance is inferior). The price of a nvidia quadro is always higher than a Geforce gpu with the same specs. You can see a spec/price comparison I did when having the discussion with my friend here : https://mega.nz/file/Nj4UnSJR#fBdZfn3zoZ8boxap35-GWEgDlicH3RmWm5nNGhKPvW4 https://mega.nz/file/Nj4UnSJR#fBdZfn3zoZ8boxap35-GWEgDlicH3R...

detaro 6y ago
It's not just "enthusiast PC builds". You can buy plenty of PCs in that middle category of high-but-not-extreme performance without the certifications, Quadros and vendor markup that a full-on "workstation" model has. And they're perfectly fine choices for many professional use cases. For that market, the Mac Pro is overpriced (the high-end Dell/HP workstations are too), and Apple doesn't make anything more suited for it. That's the criticism. That the Mac Pro is acceptably priced compared to the Dell/HP workstations doesn't matter if that's not what you need.
- niea_11 6y ago
  My bad, I misunderstood the context of the comment. Thanks for the clarification. For me personally, outside of laptops and phones, I don't see the appeal of using Apple hardware (unless you want to use MacOS X).
rbanffy 6y ago
> I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple. A professional workstation, with support, services, guaranteed replacement components, guaranteed service-life, maintenance contracts and so on is very different from an enthusiast-built machine. It's like comparing a BMW M3 to a tricked out VW Golf. You can fit a bigger, badder engine under the VW's hood, stiffen the suspension, replace the gearbox and so on but, in the end, you can get one straight from the dealer and not everyone is inclined to assemble a car from parts. Did that once. It's fun, educational and not very practical.

m463 6y ago

3970x 32-core is < $2000 I got curious... - amd 3990x 64-core 128 thread $3849 - 256gb g.skill ddr 3600 $978 - noctua nh-u14s cooler $80 - samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4 $229 - evga 1000w power supply $207 - fractal design define 7 $170 - asus trx40-pro mb $396 - nvidia rtx 3080 $699 (?) - steve jobs: a biography $15 (hardcover) = a really maxed out system $6623 probably 1/2 that for a 5950x/am4 system EDIT: ok, I had to know... - amd 5950x 16 core 32 thread $799 - 128gb g.skill ddr 3600 $489 - noctua nh-u12s cooler $60 - samsung 980 pro 1tb nvme pcie4 $229 - evga 850w power supply $139 - fractal design define 7 compact $130 - asus x570-pro mb $240 - nvidia rtx 3070 $499 (?) - steve jobs: a biography $14 (kindle) - linux with kde mac-look icons $0 = a really really great system $2599

sliken 6y ago
Looks pretty nice, but for many you'd be better off with: - AMD 5600x or 5700x (saving $500 or $400) - Samsung 970 pro 2TB for $229 (twice the space for the same price) - rtx 3060 (in a few weeks) You'll save a fair bit of $600, run quite a bit cooler, it will be much easier to be quieter, and have twice the disk space. Or buy 2x2TB NVMe (motherboards with 2x m.2 are common these days). Sure the 5600x/5700x isn't as fast in throughput, but how often do you max more then 6/8 cores? Per core performance is near identical and with more memory bandwidth per core you run into less bottlenecks. I bet over a few years more people would notice double the disk than the missing extra cores.