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How much do you think the Mac Pro 2019 will be?
- Thread starter pers0n
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I remember pricing out a 2012 MacPro on the Apple site, maxing out every option. It was over $24,000.
Now I have one sitting in my studio with considerable better specs, for 10%
I can imagine the new one will be $$ if maxed out.
Now I have one sitting in my studio with considerable better specs, for 10%
I can imagine the new one will be $$ if maxed out.
I find it hard to believe that a $2400 cMP is better than a $24,000 system.
Please explain.
In 2010, the Mac Pro was what it was. Very expensive, if maxed out. In 2018, my Mac Pro has 12 core x5690 and pcie based M2 drives, pcie SSD, SSDs in the optical bays and a couple 12TB HDDs for backup/storage, a modest metal capable GTX680 with booot screen, all running Mojave and Win10. $2400 to build. It far exceeds whatever that original maxed out MP was capable of. You don’t always have to buy the latest, greatest. Satisfied?
An extremely dubious premise. The iMac Pro is largely priced at $4,999 as not to "cannibalize" the high end BTO iMacs. It is not priced to avoid the Mac Pro ( 'not cannibalize on price') . The current Mac Pro starts at $2,999 and the other standard configuration is $3,999. The iMac Pro tops both of those. Yes the current Mac Pro is stale but there is zero rigid dogma about the priciest of price 'king of the pile' for the Mac Pro. If there was such a dogma policy Apple could have canceled the 6 core current Mac Pro and cranked up the bottom configs in the 8 core model to put the Mac Pro on top. They didn't .... so it is extremely unlikely such a rigid dogma policy exists.
It is far more fratricide that Apple is typically concerned about not particular cannibalization. For the most part the Mac Pro and iMac Pro are differentiated. if folks spent 2013-2019 avoiding buying a Mac Pro 2013 and the iMac Pro then pricing the next Mac Pro into the stratosphere isn't going to make a large chunk of those users buy an iMac Pro if their budget only goes up to $3,400-3,999 range. ( even in $4-6K it isn't going to make many of those folks substantially shift ). They have already 'skipped' the product as something they don't want. Extremely priced out of the market means they'll more likely just pick a competitor.
The Mac Pro doesn't necessarily need substantially even more expensive components than the iMac Pro. It just needs to be a different value proposition.
Is Apple going to take the same CPU/GPU/RAM/SDD and ports on the base iMac Pro and sell it in a Mac Pro for $2500 less than a iMac Pro? No. They aren't going to massively under cut the iMac Pro. But the Mac Pro doesn't have to start at this base iMac Pro specs. 6 cores , smaller SSD , mid-range GPU could easily be a starting point substantially less than the iMac Pro starts at.
Not everyone wants a modular Mac. The vast majority of Mac sales 90+ % are to folks where that isn't a top priority. So it was already a small percentage the Mac Pro targets anyway. So starting relatively small it would make little sense for Apple to push the target market to 1% of an already small ( probably around 1-2% ) market. More than likely the Mac Pro has had resource priority issues because the user base is relatively small.... going even smaller would likely cause the product to be straight up cancelled.
The Mac Pro 2013 had two GPUs. If Apple drops a GPU in the standard configuration they would have a decent BOM budget to add RAM , GPU VRAM , and/or SSD capacity and still be at the 'old' $2,999 starting point. Jumping way out to the $6,999 range ( a 133% increase ) and not expecting that demand would substantially collapse is kind of crazy. Apple has made some bonehead moves but that would be pretty big.
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Here's the issue, Apple has been trying to kill or delay the headless expandable desktop as much as they could because expandable Macs aren't as profitable as soldered/glued Macs. Apple right now is bathing in gold from all the SSD/RAM upgrades people are forced to do due to the soldered nature of these components.
So Apple has been trying to lure pros into buying all sorts of different glued/soldered Macs like MBP, iMac Pro, and now 2018 Mac Mini, and they have been trying to keep pros away from what they really want which is an expandable/modular/powerful headless machine.
A modular expandable Mac Pro is a direct threat to all the profitability of the glued/soldered scheme Apple has built. I believe a huge majority of pro users want to choose their own display and going with something like an iMac Pro would not be their first choice if there was an alternate reasonable option like you are suggesting.
This is partly why I think Apple will price Mac Pro above iMac Pro. Anything below that with moderate specs like you are mentioning and it would overlap with Mac Mini and iMac 5k.
Trust me I wish you were right, I just think Apple will protect their soldered/glued profit scheme and put Mac Pro as distant and far away as they can.
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It seems more likely that Apple will simply solder the Mac Pro components initoo. For better or worse Mac Pro 7,1 is likely going to have a T3 + soldered ssd. The Mac Mini showed the blueprint: RAM will be socketed, CPU and SSD will be soldered in. The GPU remains an open question.
Well , here is another issue - reality .
As in, Apple will have to face it at some point .
The MP is living in a very clearly defined market space, that of workstation computers .
It needs to be priced - and designed - competitively , or it will not sell .
That simple .
The iMP is not its competitor in that segment, apart from a very small niche .
Besides, personally I doubt Apple is selling a lot of top spec iMacs or Minis, if any ...
I hope the Mac Pro will be available at a wide range of price points so that it sells in the volumes that make it worthwhile to keep it updated on a regular basis.
they are not going to soldered in a workstation / server CPU and the storage can be on imac pro like boards.
Less main boards for apple to deal with unless they want to cram it in an small space.
That's an unsupported opinion that flies counter to everything that Apple's released in the last year or two.
You realize that although the Imac Pro storage NAND cards are on daughtercards - the SSD controller is the T2 CPU that's soldered to the motherboard?
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Think of a price that you’ll consider too expensive.....then add 25%. That might be the price for the base model which will not even have the specs you want.
I'll do up a complete post. This is going to be a personal box, and I've got a couple more upgrades en route for it.
If anybody is expecting a classic Mac Pro in a standard big case, then get ready for a big surprise... Apple doesn't want you to buy cheap components from third parties, it wants you to buy components from them. So Apple's dilemma is to find a way to monetise the upgrade path. Perhaps the 'modular' components must be Apple made and contained and Apple sold.
the new macpro dont have to be 6 or 9 k on the base model because it wont sell and they can make a very decent tower for 2990$ and still make a lot of profit because people will absolutely throw away their trash can for a modern tower desing macpro.
they cant solder the ram or the cpu because xeon and ecc ram can not be soldered.
they Absolutely have to have at least ONE x16 pcie slot otherwise you defeat the concept of a tower...
they can make plenty margin selling us a 1500€ tower pc at 2990€ and keep selling 10k upgraded version to company... because most companies wont buy used cpu from ebay and will just buy whatever is needded to be productive...
xeon scalable processor that equal a x5690 (25k geekbench) can be have for little less than 1000€... good luck finding them on ebay... so they are sure that a very few people will mess with it...
so a tower mac pro with a two socket but only one processor server motherboard 32 gb of ram and a rx580 or a rtx 2060 would cost them 1300/1500€ to build and the can sell **** loads of them...
it just has to be more powerful than a cMp 5.1 with x5690 / 128 gb of ram/ rx580... that’s it...
when you pay a motion designer 7k a month, making him gain 1 hour of productivity per day pays a 10k computer very fast...
dont forget that the x5690 that we delid with a vise and put in the 5.1 used to be 4000€ a pièce back in the days...
by the time we will be able to find xeon scalable cheap of ebay, they will still sale a lot of « upgraded by apple » maxed out mac pro 7.1.
I work with a large company who just bought a W9100 egpu for a macbook, when i was offering them to built a 7 slot pcie expender for a cMP they already have...
they cant solder the ram or the cpu because xeon and ecc ram can not be soldered.
they Absolutely have to have at least ONE x16 pcie slot otherwise you defeat the concept of a tower...
they can make plenty margin selling us a 1500€ tower pc at 2990€ and keep selling 10k upgraded version to company... because most companies wont buy used cpu from ebay and will just buy whatever is needded to be productive...
xeon scalable processor that equal a x5690 (25k geekbench) can be have for little less than 1000€... good luck finding them on ebay... so they are sure that a very few people will mess with it...
so a tower mac pro with a two socket but only one processor server motherboard 32 gb of ram and a rx580 or a rtx 2060 would cost them 1300/1500€ to build and the can sell **** loads of them...
it just has to be more powerful than a cMp 5.1 with x5690 / 128 gb of ram/ rx580... that’s it...
when you pay a motion designer 7k a month, making him gain 1 hour of productivity per day pays a 10k computer very fast...
dont forget that the x5690 that we delid with a vise and put in the 5.1 used to be 4000€ a pièce back in the days...
by the time we will be able to find xeon scalable cheap of ebay, they will still sale a lot of « upgraded by apple » maxed out mac pro 7.1.
I work with a large company who just bought a W9100 egpu for a macbook, when i was offering them to built a 7 slot pcie expender for a cMP they already have...
You are assuming that you will be able to buy one in 2019
.I'm predicting 1st quarter 2020 when you can actually get one.
Which has basically been the entire “North Star” of Apple’s hardware design since 2012.
apple usually set the trend design wise
they had with the cheese grater macpro.
but high end desktop must follow design rule that no one even apple have to respect :
airflow from front to back
acces from the side
maximum 19 inch in one direction to be rackable.
the thing i keep seeing here is people speculating on what a « mac gamer » would be? we are talking about a pro machine, not a i9 with a gtx 1070 watercooling and rvb led flashing...
not that it would not be a powerful machine , but there is already a machine doing this : the mac mini.
any macpro will have xeon processor and ecc
they HAD to do the xserve because people loved the macprochessgrater, but wanted a rackable unit, the trash can never took of also because it is un usable in a datacenter.
I definively think they will do a revemp of the cheese grater but only 19 inch high and 3 or 4 u thick. this is dictated by two industry standards :
rack mount and pcie gpu.
they can just do fine with single PSU but
with scalable xeon they basically need to design only one dual socket Motherboard to cover anything from 2990€ to 50k€