5 ms·

How can $52,000 go all the way down to $1,000 in just 3 years? Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place. The hardwa

by Alupis 4y ago

How can $52,000 go all the way down to $1,000 in just 3 years? Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place. The hardware inside is nothing special... Xeon 28 core CPU, 1.5TB RAM, dual Radeon Pro GPU's, and 8TB storage. Sure it's fast, but it was only worth ~$20k-30k when it was new. The Apple Tax is very real, folks. Flashy case goes for ~$30k apparently...

shuckles 4y ago
Can you point me to a configured system with 1.5TB of ECC RAM sold at retail today for "a few thousand bucks"?
- ProAm 4y ago
  https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished (I jest) But we all know Apple products are severely overpriced per specification. It's how they sustain their profit margin, and in turn are also not currently laying folks off because of their war chest.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    > we all know Apple products are severely overpriced per specification Do we? Every time it comes up, invariably the comparisons are all something "largely similar" but not exactly equivalent, frequently in a meaningful way. It seems like the real truth is that Apple doesn't really make budget configurations in the first place, they only cater to different levels of the premium market. In particular, when it comes to the Mac Pro over the years, it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be a pretty good deal for what you actually get. Another well known example is when you could by the 27 inch 5K iMac for the same price as you could buy just the panel if you were building a PC. Whenever someone makes a really nice laptop, aluminum, great touch pad, great screen, the whole nine yards, it ends up being close to the same price as a macbook.
    - wmf 4y ago
      Apple does genuinely overprice RAM and storage. For the rest you're right.
    - Applejinx 4y ago
      Not so long ago I got significantly more than the current trade-in for the $52,000 Mac Pro, for a 27 inch 5k iMac Pro also with the mega-Xeon and a ton of RAM, etc. I think they wanted to get them off the market and get those people onto the Apple Silicon, which was going to rapidly eclipse the Xeon iMac Pro for those more 'general prosumer tasks', video editing et al. Not at all the same situation with the top-end Mac Pros with the Xeon: all the outboard stuff is the point there, and you can't as easily eclipse that outboard stuff. Put simply, the $52,000 machine might as well remain in service doing what it's doing, because Apple isn't directly replacing that. They were very much directly replacing what my old Xeon iMac Pro did, so they put more pressure on the trade-in scenario to motivate that happening. They apparently have no interest in pressuring those top-end Mac Pros to get off the market, so the trade-in is completely pathetic: hang onto the thing and keep it in service, they have no special replacement targeted or perhaps even planned.
    - ProAm 4y ago
      $999 Monitor stand. I dont want to argue or nitpick each and every product (just like good discussion and it's their company they can charge what they want and people can spend their money as they deem fit). But look at their profit margin, look at their lock-in for accessories, look at their repair prices (they are slowly being clawed away from them legally), they've only recently created good laptops after about 12 years of not good laptops (see keyboards, touchbars, lack of upgrading for years and still charging the same price for tech that was 5 yrs old). But there is a reason they have so much money on hand, for much of the 2000-2010 they were the wealthiest company (public that we know about ignoring nation state oil companies, etc...) in the world.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
        > $999 Monitor stand. I'm not an Apple fanboy, even if I'm probably starting to sound like one. I thought the stand price was only scandalous because so many of us were unfamiliar with what competing hardware in that market niche normally costs? Wasn't it competitive compared to what the competition was selling? It's been a while, but I vaguely remember that being the outcome of that. I have less opinion on their repair prices in general, though I have to say that what they charge for display replacement is not much more than the cheapest third party. It might be argued that this means the hardware is overpriced, but I don't have a basis for that claim so I won't make it. I do wish they had ditched the unreliable keyboards faster. I actually like the touchbar when I'm using the laptop as a laptop, but I'd prefer it was in addition to the function keys rather than replacing them. Although on my M1 the ESC key and power button are real, so I'm 95% good with it as is. I wish they'd have found a way to keep it, but maybe the PR damage had already been done. For certain use cases it sure is handy.
IshKebab 4y ago
Yeah this is nonsense. 1.5TB of RAM alone costs over $10k. The CPU is another several thousand. The Apple tax is clearly at work here but there's no way it's $30-40k.
- elabajaba 4y ago
  You can get 6TB of DDR5 for ~$15k, 1.5TB of RAM doesn't cost $10k unless you're getting severely ripped off.
  - plorkyeran 4y ago
    You are either looking at non-ECC prices or you have a supplier who is giving you extremely deep discounts.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place. It was worth $52k to the buyer that bought it at time t. The price a different buyer (or even original buyer) is willing to pay at time t+3 years is irrelevant to how much it was worth to the original buyer at time t.
- Alupis 4y ago
  That doesn't mean it's actually worth that amount at purchase time though - only that the purchaser was content. There is a difference. A sucker gets sold every minute - or something like that as the saying goes.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TuringNYC 4y ago
>> How can $52,000 go all the way down to $1,000 in just 3 years? I'd be curious to see a depreciation chart. It is widely known how cars depreciate 10-20% the exact minute you purchase them and drive them off the lot. I wonder if anyone has analyzed Facebook Marketplace and other locations to put together a depreciation chart of these MacPro's over time. I wouldnt be surprised if it dropped 30% immediately on sale. Now, to be fair, this is an INTEL mac, not M1 and not M2, so that is also a huge depreciation driver (60%+?) This should be easy to figure out...just look at current alternatives with the same horsepower.
randomdata 4y ago
> Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place. It clearly was, else the transaction at that price would have never taken place for there to be a machine once worth that much to sell three years later. However, the $1,000 transaction did not take place. That tells us that it is not worth $1,000 three years later – and is probably worth much, much more. The moral of the story: Don't let clickbait headlines fool you.

by Alupis 4y ago

shuckles 4y ago

Can you point me to a configured system with 1.5TB of ECC RAM sold at retail today for "a few thousand bucks"?

ProAm 4y ago
https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished (I jest) But we all know Apple products are severely overpriced per specification. It's how they sustain their profit margin, and in turn are also not currently laying folks off because of their war chest.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > we all know Apple products are severely overpriced per specification Do we? Every time it comes up, invariably the comparisons are all something "largely similar" but not exactly equivalent, frequently in a meaningful way. It seems like the real truth is that Apple doesn't really make budget configurations in the first place, they only cater to different levels of the premium market. In particular, when it comes to the Mac Pro over the years, it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be a pretty good deal for what you actually get. Another well known example is when you could by the 27 inch 5K iMac for the same price as you could buy just the panel if you were building a PC. Whenever someone makes a really nice laptop, aluminum, great touch pad, great screen, the whole nine yards, it ends up being close to the same price as a macbook.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Apple does genuinely overprice RAM and storage. For the rest you're right.
  - Applejinx 4y ago
    Not so long ago I got significantly more than the current trade-in for the $52,000 Mac Pro, for a 27 inch 5k iMac Pro also with the mega-Xeon and a ton of RAM, etc. I think they wanted to get them off the market and get those people onto the Apple Silicon, which was going to rapidly eclipse the Xeon iMac Pro for those more 'general prosumer tasks', video editing et al. Not at all the same situation with the top-end Mac Pros with the Xeon: all the outboard stuff is the point there, and you can't as easily eclipse that outboard stuff. Put simply, the $52,000 machine might as well remain in service doing what it's doing, because Apple isn't directly replacing that. They were very much directly replacing what my old Xeon iMac Pro did, so they put more pressure on the trade-in scenario to motivate that happening. They apparently have no interest in pressuring those top-end Mac Pros to get off the market, so the trade-in is completely pathetic: hang onto the thing and keep it in service, they have no special replacement targeted or perhaps even planned.
  - ProAm 4y ago
    $999 Monitor stand. I dont want to argue or nitpick each and every product (just like good discussion and it's their company they can charge what they want and people can spend their money as they deem fit). But look at their profit margin, look at their lock-in for accessories, look at their repair prices (they are slowly being clawed away from them legally), they've only recently created good laptops after about 12 years of not good laptops (see keyboards, touchbars, lack of upgrading for years and still charging the same price for tech that was 5 yrs old). But there is a reason they have so much money on hand, for much of the 2000-2010 they were the wealthiest company (public that we know about ignoring nation state oil companies, etc...) in the world.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      > $999 Monitor stand. I'm not an Apple fanboy, even if I'm probably starting to sound like one. I thought the stand price was only scandalous because so many of us were unfamiliar with what competing hardware in that market niche normally costs? Wasn't it competitive compared to what the competition was selling? It's been a while, but I vaguely remember that being the outcome of that. I have less opinion on their repair prices in general, though I have to say that what they charge for display replacement is not much more than the cheapest third party. It might be argued that this means the hardware is overpriced, but I don't have a basis for that claim so I won't make it. I do wish they had ditched the unreliable keyboards faster. I actually like the touchbar when I'm using the laptop as a laptop, but I'd prefer it was in addition to the function keys rather than replacing them. Although on my M1 the ESC key and power button are real, so I'm 95% good with it as is. I wish they'd have found a way to keep it, but maybe the PR damage had already been done. For certain use cases it sure is handy.

IshKebab 4y ago

Yeah this is nonsense. 1.5TB of RAM alone costs over $10k. The CPU is another several thousand. The Apple tax is clearly at work here but there's no way it's $30-40k.

elabajaba 4y ago
You can get 6TB of DDR5 for ~$15k, 1.5TB of RAM doesn't cost $10k unless you're getting severely ripped off.
- plorkyeran 4y ago
  You are either looking at non-ECC prices or you have a supplier who is giving you extremely deep discounts.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

> Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place. It was worth $52k to the buyer that bought it at time t. The price a different buyer (or even original buyer) is willing to pay at time t+3 years is irrelevant to how much it was worth to the original buyer at time t.

Alupis 4y ago
That doesn't mean it's actually worth that amount at purchase time though - only that the purchaser was content. There is a difference. A sucker gets sold every minute - or something like that as the saying goes.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TuringNYC 4y ago

>> How can $52,000 go all the way down to $1,000 in just 3 years? I'd be curious to see a depreciation chart. It is widely known how cars depreciate 10-20% the exact minute you purchase them and drive them off the lot. I wonder if anyone has analyzed Facebook Marketplace and other locations to put together a depreciation chart of these MacPro's over time. I wouldnt be surprised if it dropped 30% immediately on sale. Now, to be fair, this is an INTEL mac, not M1 and not M2, so that is also a huge depreciation driver (60%+?) This should be easy to figure out...just look at current alternatives with the same horsepower.

randomdata 4y ago

> Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place. It clearly was, else the transaction at that price would have never taken place for there to be a machine once worth that much to sell three years later. However, the $1,000 transaction did not take place. That tells us that it is not worth $1,000 three years later – and is probably worth much, much more. The moral of the story: Don't let clickbait headlines fool you.