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Loaded question, but as a Windows user I'd really like to know. Given that you can buy an acceptable Mac for, say, $5000, does that $52,000 Mac Pro give you an

Loaded question, but as a Windows user I'd really like to know. Given that you can buy an acceptable Mac for, say, $5000, does that $52,000 Mac Pro give you any real advantage in terms of productivity. Are you even twice as productive? As a reference, I recently upgraded my rig with an AMD 7950X and an RTX 4080 (+ other components) for around $3500. At this point there isn't really any other hardware available, that'd give me a justifiable boost in productivity.

matwood 4y ago
It was my understanding that it was basically built for people who work with 8k video. That's way outside my realm, so maybe someone else will add some details.
wheats 4y ago
Well, it would be application dependent of course. For instance at that price we are talking about a machine that was purchased because it needed to have 1.5TB of RAM and channels able to take advantage of it. I would imagine it indeed could be more than twice as fast if everything being done is cached in RAM instead of having to reference a disk. We are talking about having 4 monitors simultaneously display 8K video editing, or heavy database workloads you usually wouldn't see on consumer PCs for machines like this.
grecy 4y ago
I remember last time a machine like this popped up on HN a commenter said machines like this are purpose built one-off to color grade[1] Hollywood blockbusters that have budgets well north of $100M. Apparently, the answer is yes. When you have a hyper-hyper specific need, a machine like this really is worth it. [1] I'm no expert in video, and color grading is the only step I remember, but I'm sure there were other steps that it's used for too.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I've also read that you'd never color-grade a Hollywood blockbuster on their monitor.
- b215826 4y ago
  > to color grade Hollywood blockbusters I'm not sure if that's an argument for/against the Mac Pro, considering how terrible Hollywood color grading is. [1] [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mexican-filter https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mexican-filter
trynewideas 4y ago
$52k gets you: - A 2019-era 28-core/56-thread Xeon W that considerably outbenches a contemporary Ryzen Threadripper but isn't anywhere close to a current one. - Two linked Radeon Pro W6800X Duos, with each Duo having 2x32GB GDDR6 GPUs - A $2,000 Mac Pro-exclusive, ProRes-decoding-only FPGA accelerator card to simultaneously playback six 8k/30fps ProRes RAW video streams, or 23 RAW or 16 422 streams at 4K, in FCPX and a few other video editing and transcoding apps - 1.5TB of DDR4 ECC RAM - 8TB SSD - Wheels instead of feet Some of these things are almost redundant. The Afterburner accelerator is a better value on a lower-end Mac Pro because its benefits are narrow and often on CPU-bound work. And the wheels are still a $400 option on a new Mac Pro. Your 7950X is a fantastic value at about 2/3 the raw performance of a 5995WX that costs considerably more. You probably don't have or need 1.5TB of RAM, but tasks dealing with multiterabyte-scale data sets (genomics!) can find a use for it. Your RTX 4080 is great for nearly all applications but short by about 8-64GB of RAM from the kinds of rendering or very large language model training that the target audience of a $52k Mac Pro might want to do with it.
mdasen 4y ago
The Mac Pro is a very specialized machine. Windows desktop users aren't generally buying Xeon processors. Almost no one wants a Mac Pro. It's one of the reasons why it's often left behind by Apple. In this case, Apple still hasn't replaced the Intel CPU with an Apple Silicon one despite being more than two years into the Apple Silicon transition. > At this point there isn't really any other hardware available, that'd give me a justifiable boost in productivity I think the key word in there is "me". You're probably like 99.9% of people out there and there's nothing worthwhile in available hardware, but there are always people that have specialized needs. I mean, you didn't even upgrade your hardware to something with "the best" graphics. You could have gotten an RTX 4090! Why didn't you? Well, it's probably not worth it. Why did you get a Ryzen 9 7950X with 16 cores instead of an EPYC 9654 with 96 cores? Well, probably because you're barely scratching the surface of those 16 Zen 4 cores. I mean, there are so many upgrades you could put into your system. Why didn't you buy 1.5TB of RAM? You probably even bought a motherboard that can't support that much RAM! ;-) Yea, almost no one wants one of these $52,000 machines. Almost no one wants a Mac Pro. Most people don't want dual Radeon Pro Duo graphics cards - 4 GPUs! Most people don't even buy one discrete GPU today. Most people don't want a machine with a 1,400 watt power supply that can deliver 1,280 watts continuously. I'd love to know what Apple's sales numbers are on the Mac Pro at all. It starts at $6,000 and feels like other things are a better value at that price. However, maybe you're doing serious video editing on a professional level and time is money - and with the Mac Pro you can buy all sorts of things. Though even there, it looks like the Mac Studio's M1 Ultra is doing better than the Mac Pro - even equipped with Apple Afterburner, a $2,000 card specifically meant to speed up handling ProRes video. Again, I'd love to know Apple's sales numbers on the Mac Pro, but they were probably decent for a very tiny niche for a while when the Apple Afterburner would be a nice addition to speed up video editing (before Apple Silicon). The Afterburner card could nearly half the amount of time needed to work with ProRes video. But as I said, it's a very tiny niche - a niche we're not in.

matwood 4y ago

It was my understanding that it was basically built for people who work with 8k video. That's way outside my realm, so maybe someone else will add some details.

wheats 4y ago

Well, it would be application dependent of course. For instance at that price we are talking about a machine that was purchased because it needed to have 1.5TB of RAM and channels able to take advantage of it. I would imagine it indeed could be more than twice as fast if everything being done is cached in RAM instead of having to reference a disk. We are talking about having 4 monitors simultaneously display 8K video editing, or heavy database workloads you usually wouldn't see on consumer PCs for machines like this.

grecy 4y ago

I remember last time a machine like this popped up on HN a commenter said machines like this are purpose built one-off to color grade[1] Hollywood blockbusters that have budgets well north of $100M. Apparently, the answer is yes. When you have a hyper-hyper specific need, a machine like this really is worth it. [1] I'm no expert in video, and color grading is the only step I remember, but I'm sure there were other steps that it's used for too.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I've also read that you'd never color-grade a Hollywood blockbuster on their monitor.
b215826 4y ago
> to color grade Hollywood blockbusters I'm not sure if that's an argument for/against the Mac Pro, considering how terrible Hollywood color grading is. [1] [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mexican-filter https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mexican-filter

trynewideas 4y ago

$52k gets you: - A 2019-era 28-core/56-thread Xeon W that considerably outbenches a contemporary Ryzen Threadripper but isn't anywhere close to a current one. - Two linked Radeon Pro W6800X Duos, with each Duo having 2x32GB GDDR6 GPUs - A $2,000 Mac Pro-exclusive, ProRes-decoding-only FPGA accelerator card to simultaneously playback six 8k/30fps ProRes RAW video streams, or 23 RAW or 16 422 streams at 4K, in FCPX and a few other video editing and transcoding apps - 1.5TB of DDR4 ECC RAM - 8TB SSD - Wheels instead of feet Some of these things are almost redundant. The Afterburner accelerator is a better value on a lower-end Mac Pro because its benefits are narrow and often on CPU-bound work. And the wheels are still a $400 option on a new Mac Pro. Your 7950X is a fantastic value at about 2/3 the raw performance of a 5995WX that costs considerably more. You probably don't have or need 1.5TB of RAM, but tasks dealing with multiterabyte-scale data sets (genomics!) can find a use for it. Your RTX 4080 is great for nearly all applications but short by about 8-64GB of RAM from the kinds of rendering or very large language model training that the target audience of a $52k Mac Pro might want to do with it.

mdasen 4y ago

The Mac Pro is a very specialized machine. Windows desktop users aren't generally buying Xeon processors. Almost no one wants a Mac Pro. It's one of the reasons why it's often left behind by Apple. In this case, Apple still hasn't replaced the Intel CPU with an Apple Silicon one despite being more than two years into the Apple Silicon transition. > At this point there isn't really any other hardware available, that'd give me a justifiable boost in productivity I think the key word in there is "me". You're probably like 99.9% of people out there and there's nothing worthwhile in available hardware, but there are always people that have specialized needs. I mean, you didn't even upgrade your hardware to something with "the best" graphics. You could have gotten an RTX 4090! Why didn't you? Well, it's probably not worth it. Why did you get a Ryzen 9 7950X with 16 cores instead of an EPYC 9654 with 96 cores? Well, probably because you're barely scratching the surface of those 16 Zen 4 cores. I mean, there are so many upgrades you could put into your system. Why didn't you buy 1.5TB of RAM? You probably even bought a motherboard that can't support that much RAM! ;-) Yea, almost no one wants one of these $52,000 machines. Almost no one wants a Mac Pro. Most people don't want dual Radeon Pro Duo graphics cards - 4 GPUs! Most people don't even buy one discrete GPU today. Most people don't want a machine with a 1,400 watt power supply that can deliver 1,280 watts continuously. I'd love to know what Apple's sales numbers are on the Mac Pro at all. It starts at $6,000 and feels like other things are a better value at that price. However, maybe you're doing serious video editing on a professional level and time is money - and with the Mac Pro you can buy all sorts of things. Though even there, it looks like the Mac Studio's M1 Ultra is doing better than the Mac Pro - even equipped with Apple Afterburner, a $2,000 card specifically meant to speed up handling ProRes video. Again, I'd love to know Apple's sales numbers on the Mac Pro, but they were probably decent for a very tiny niche for a while when the Apple Afterburner would be a nice addition to speed up video editing (before Apple Silicon). The Afterburner card could nearly half the amount of time needed to work with ProRes video. But as I said, it's a very tiny niche - a niche we're not in.