If I’m going to be honest, I don’t think this product is for you, and I feel sad, because the market has been carved by an ageing iMac Pro and Mac Mini with little expandability. I wonder what the store staff at WWDC would recommend to me or you... I should ask them.
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MP 7,1 Is the new Mac Pro too expensive? [MERGED]
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If I’m going to be honest, I don’t think this product is for you, and I feel sad, because the market has been carved by an ageing iMac Pro and Mac Mini with little expandability. I wonder what the store staff at WWDC would recommend to me or you... I should ask them.
Aren't there a large number of people like me or you? I just don't get why Apple ignores this segment of the market.
Man, I feel for my fellow Brazilians and the taxes they pay. Every time I come home and see the prices of hardware, I cringe.
That said it's an expensive proposition for most professionals. I wish Apple had a lower entry cost. I guess this is it. If the old cheese graters MP are any indication of the future ones, it will be a machine that will be productive for many years to come. So anyone will rip the benefits in the long run.
Apple ignores that segment of the market because they don't want the instability of a million custom configured machines...
They've been aggressively moving the iMac up the line from it's mobile CPU roots to the iMac Pro, and they'd really rather sell you an iMac. That's never changed - from the time of G3s and G4s, there has never been an expandable tower positioned below the top iMac.
When the well-loved 2010 towers came out, only the very top 27" iMac had a quad-core chip. That iMac cost $2199, while the most stripped-down quad-core Mac Pro cost $2499 (and was slower than the iMac).
Now, Apple would still rather sell you an iMac, but they offer a much wider range of iMacs. There is now a perfectly reasonable non-Pro iMac for as much as $4249 (it's a CTO, but it doesn't have any absurd options like 4 TB SSDs). Take the 8-core iMac (9900K) with a Vega 48, add 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD and you're there. Of course you could get it for $4000 or so by adding the RAM yourself, but many people are going to buy it from Apple.
There's also, of course, the iMac Pro.
Because of these powerful iMacs, the Mac Pro moved up the line...
They've been aggressively moving the iMac up the line from it's mobile CPU roots to the iMac Pro, and they'd really rather sell you an iMac. That's never changed - from the time of G3s and G4s, there has never been an expandable tower positioned below the top iMac.
When the well-loved 2010 towers came out, only the very top 27" iMac had a quad-core chip. That iMac cost $2199, while the most stripped-down quad-core Mac Pro cost $2499 (and was slower than the iMac).
Now, Apple would still rather sell you an iMac, but they offer a much wider range of iMacs. There is now a perfectly reasonable non-Pro iMac for as much as $4249 (it's a CTO, but it doesn't have any absurd options like 4 TB SSDs). Take the 8-core iMac (9900K) with a Vega 48, add 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD and you're there. Of course you could get it for $4000 or so by adding the RAM yourself, but many people are going to buy it from Apple.
There's also, of course, the iMac Pro.
Because of these powerful iMacs, the Mac Pro moved up the line...
After all the high end post houses make their purchases, I foresee sales plateauing. There's just not enough high end customers to make up for all the lost sales from the individual creatives/small businesses. I freelance photo and video work and don't want an iMac pro because it's $5000 and I can't change the video card and have to use TB3 for everything. A decent drive bay is over $400.
Just give me a $3500-$4000 Mac Pro that has a few PCIE ports, upgradable ram, and an upgradeable video card.
I've been let down by Apple since 2013. Long live the 5,1.
Just give me a $3500-$4000 Mac Pro that has a few PCIE ports, upgradable ram, and an upgradeable video card.
I've been let down by Apple since 2013. Long live the 5,1.
You see, this time around, a base iMac Pro is significantly better equipped out-of-the box than the tower, while being cheaper. It doesn't matter for companies willing to drop 40k inside of it, but those who bought cMP years ago and were waiting to upgrade are scratching their heads.
Did you mean "plummeting" instead of "plateauing"?
There's a huge difference in I/O capabilties here. An i9 with a z390 or z370 has 16 PCIe lanes off the CPU and another 4 PCIe lanes (DMI 3.0) to the chipset. The chipset will have a bunch more PCIe lanes but they are all bottlenecked by the 4 PCIe lanes connecting to the CPU via DMI 3. This is why if you ever build an intel system if you add more than 1 NVMe drive it shuts off a ton of SATA ports because it needs to borrow lanes from somewhere.
The new Xeon-W's have 64 PCIe lanes vs your i9 with 16 PCIe lanes off the CPU. That Z390 motherboard may have 3 x16 PCIe physical slots, but there will be PCIe switches that will split those 16 lanes into various combinations of 8x 8x or 8x 4x 4x or add lanes off the chipset.
Keep in mind each NVMe drive wants 4 PCIe lanes, each thunderbolt controller needs 4 PCIe lanes, pretty soon you're out of PCIe lanes. Want dual 10gb etherenet, well that's typically another 2-4 lanes.
This is a workstation beast with high bandwith I/O.
My only disappoint here is that we're approaching the next iteration of tech, PCIe 4.0 and Navi and if I want to keep this machine for another 5-6 years, being on PCIe 4.0 would have been ideal. This isn't apple's fault because PCIe 3 or 4 is determined by the CPU and chipset, which is Intel.
That's true. Inflation over 35 years is crazy.
However... the Mac Pro from just 6 years ago had a starting price of $3,000
Today it has doubled to $6,000 !!!
That's quite a jump in a relatively short time. I think that's the part people are freaking out about.
Yes... Macs have always been "expensive" but this takes it to a whole other level.
The title of this thread can be taken in two ways, which is why there are two parallel arguments here. It could mean "Is the new Mac Pro overpriced as a high-end workstation?", or "Is the new Mac Pro too expensive for current / previous MP owners?".
It's hard to answer the former, since we only know the base price so far, and as many have pointed out, this is not a spec anyone should buy. If one is happy with 8 cores, 32GB RAM and an RX580, it makes more sense to buy an iMac / iMac Pro. The logic board, PSU etc. are expensive overkill for the base spec, and only make sense with 24/28 core chips and multiple Vega IIs. Once we know the price of loaded configs, they can be compared to HP / Dell machines to answer the value question. I expect they'll be at a premium, but if you prefer macOS (as we all do) - and especially if someone else is paying - then it's likely worth it.
The second question is a little more nuanced, because it partly depends on whether you bought your Mac Pro tower new, or picked up a bargain on eBay years later (as I did). If you bought your MP new (i.e. £3000) and have been waiting for a worthy replacement, then I would say you've got a legitimate gripe. The new one is double the cost. The iMac Pro is a nice machine, but not really equivalent. For one thing, adding / replacing a GPU is easy in a tower, yet TB3 boxes cost £500 - an unnecessary expense. Plus, an iMP + external GPU is more desk clutter than having a tower under your desk.
For people who bought an MP cheap second hand, it's essentially been the tower PC that Apple never made. I wouldn't have bought one new, as at the time I felt it was too big and too expensive, especially for a highly clocked one with a decent GPU. I didn't especially want a Xeon or ECC RAM. But if you want to use macOS and don't want the hassle of a Hackintosh (I want stuff like Sleep to work), you can only pick from what's available. If Apple refuse to make a tower with an i7 and PCIe slots, then a 3 year old, second-hand workstation is the next best thing. The problem is that if Apple sell tiny numbers of £10,000 workstations, eBay is not likely to be flooded with cheap Mac Pros any time soon.
I think macOS users tend to rationalise Apple's offerings, as if expecting them to make a typical PC tower with consumer parts is an unreasonable request. But if AIO desktops are so popular, why isn't the PC market flooded with iMac rip-offs? Because if people actually have a choice, they generally buy a tower. Unfortunately, for a bunch of business reasons, Apple refuses to make such a machine. Which their position as sole hardware provider for the platform lets them get away with.
It's hard to answer the former, since we only know the base price so far, and as many have pointed out, this is not a spec anyone should buy. If one is happy with 8 cores, 32GB RAM and an RX580, it makes more sense to buy an iMac / iMac Pro. The logic board, PSU etc. are expensive overkill for the base spec, and only make sense with 24/28 core chips and multiple Vega IIs. Once we know the price of loaded configs, they can be compared to HP / Dell machines to answer the value question. I expect they'll be at a premium, but if you prefer macOS (as we all do) - and especially if someone else is paying - then it's likely worth it.
The second question is a little more nuanced, because it partly depends on whether you bought your Mac Pro tower new, or picked up a bargain on eBay years later (as I did). If you bought your MP new (i.e. £3000) and have been waiting for a worthy replacement, then I would say you've got a legitimate gripe. The new one is double the cost. The iMac Pro is a nice machine, but not really equivalent. For one thing, adding / replacing a GPU is easy in a tower, yet TB3 boxes cost £500 - an unnecessary expense. Plus, an iMP + external GPU is more desk clutter than having a tower under your desk.
For people who bought an MP cheap second hand, it's essentially been the tower PC that Apple never made. I wouldn't have bought one new, as at the time I felt it was too big and too expensive, especially for a highly clocked one with a decent GPU. I didn't especially want a Xeon or ECC RAM. But if you want to use macOS and don't want the hassle of a Hackintosh (I want stuff like Sleep to work), you can only pick from what's available. If Apple refuse to make a tower with an i7 and PCIe slots, then a 3 year old, second-hand workstation is the next best thing. The problem is that if Apple sell tiny numbers of £10,000 workstations, eBay is not likely to be flooded with cheap Mac Pros any time soon.
I think macOS users tend to rationalise Apple's offerings, as if expecting them to make a typical PC tower with consumer parts is an unreasonable request. But if AIO desktops are so popular, why isn't the PC market flooded with iMac rip-offs? Because if people actually have a choice, they generally buy a tower. Unfortunately, for a bunch of business reasons, Apple refuses to make such a machine. Which their position as sole hardware provider for the platform lets them get away with.
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Oh no, not this nonsense again.
In 1984, a PC/AT was $4000 - about the same as a Mac + external HD. Just about any "business" computer would cost $1500+ for a complete system. A "home computer" like a C64 would cost the same number of dollars as an iPad does today (ignoring inflation). All computers - Apple or not - in 2019 are a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful than their 1984 "counterparts" while costing the same - if not less - number of dollars. Its an interesting factoid, but completely, utterly irrelevant to a discussion about the "value for money" of a 2019 computer.
Maybe it is wishful thinking on my part, I am hoping after the initial surge in sales, maybe Apple might use the same enclosure and bring a 4 and 6 core versions of the new MP with less expansion capabilities starting at $3/4k systems. Also a 5K display with stand at $2.5k. I can only hope...
I wonder down the road after sales start to slow down, they finally will open these machines to the rest of the pro market. Keep in mind if they do not move that many units, I wonder how much effort they will put on future updates.
If you buy a car for $20K and want to sell it in 3 years you might get $10K for it, yielding a per year ownership cost of around $3,300. If you buy a $50K car and want to sell it in 3 years you might get $35K, for a $5,000 cost per year of use. That makes the delta around $1,700/yr. For a workstation, one would assume the bomber one will save time - which is money.
In terms of the "hole" in their lineup, I don't think Apple is that interested in making commodity computers that can be easily upgraded - they want you to buy a new one. The mMP is an exception to their typical strategy due to the specific needs of workstation buyers - which might be one reason they priced them where they did.
IMHO, Apple could take the design language of the mMP and build a MacMiniPro, roughly double the size of the current Mini, with at least one PCIe slot and proper cooling. Starting price around $999, $3,299 fully loaded.
In terms of the "hole" in their lineup, I don't think Apple is that interested in making commodity computers that can be easily upgraded - they want you to buy a new one. The mMP is an exception to their typical strategy due to the specific needs of workstation buyers - which might be one reason they priced them where they did.
IMHO, Apple could take the design language of the mMP and build a MacMiniPro, roughly double the size of the current Mini, with at least one PCIe slot and proper cooling. Starting price around $999, $3,299 fully loaded.
Of course they could, but they won’t.
It’s also typical of the bargaining we do with ourselves to settle for 1 PCIe slot. It would hardly be unreasonable to expect an mATX-type machine for that money (like the old G4 towers, only with airflow this time). It would need to be bigger than a couple of minis to house / power a decent PCIe GPU. Either way, they’re not interested, unfortunately.
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Yep, there are.
They want to try to distinguish between the “Pro” and non-Pro folk, and offer the iMac Pro as the intermediate step.
There’s nothing pro about the Mac Mini. Or simply, they don’t care about semi professional or prosumers anymore. Their main cash cow doesn’t come from us, it’s from people who don’t need such power buying them because it makes them feel better, or the non pro items being sold.
Let’s me tell you, there’s nothing pro about the MBP or iPad Pro, just a slightly more powerful core which might or might not be the cause for extra functionality support. The segregation of this markets feels like an Apple thing to do.
When they said on stage that this isn’t a device for most, or literally anyone, it made me think, who is this for? I can only really select a handful who can benefit from this, and most aren’t sticking with macOS.
I could grudgingly afford the new Mac Pro, but my thoughts are:
- Only one expensive storage drive (T2 provided proprietary stacked SSD's, not upgradable), at least viable 1 TB result in additional $600
- There are two SATA connectors,but were to get power? Will there be cables to get the power from PCI-E slots? Or is it the connector below ? Will there be an aftermarket cable for this connector?
- The Radeon Pro 580x is average at best, but the Radeon Pro Vega II with 32 GB VRAM is way overkill. Nothing in between. So I don't want to be stuck with only the graphic cards Apple releases.
- All 'MPX module' graphic cards are routing DisplayPort connections to the internal Thunderbolt 3 ports, how will a standard GPU behave? Will the Thunderbolt ports also work when only a standard PC graphic card is installed? Or is at least one MPX module mandatory?
- Will the heat dissipation of an installed standard PC graphic card work?
- Future Nvidia GPU support?
- No 32bit application support in macOS Catalina
+ PCI-E-slots for M.2 PCIE adapters for additional drives
++ Plenty of PCI-E-slots
- Price; For $5999 you get a Mac Pro with 32GB memory, Radeon Pro 580X and 256GB SSD.
I have already a Mac with 32GB memory, eGPU Sapphire RX 580 8GB and 1TB SSD -> For the moment I'm quite happy with my 2018 i7-Mac Mini. And of course with my Mac Pro 4,1.
- Only one expensive storage drive (T2 provided proprietary stacked SSD's, not upgradable), at least viable 1 TB result in additional $600
- There are two SATA connectors,
- The Radeon Pro 580x is average at best, but the Radeon Pro Vega II with 32 GB VRAM is way overkill. Nothing in between. So I don't want to be stuck with only the graphic cards Apple releases.
- All 'MPX module' graphic cards are routing DisplayPort connections to the internal Thunderbolt 3 ports, how will a standard GPU behave? Will the Thunderbolt ports also work when only a standard PC graphic card is installed? Or is at least one MPX module mandatory?
- Will the heat dissipation of an installed standard PC graphic card work?
- Future Nvidia GPU support?
- No 32bit application support in macOS Catalina
+ PCI-E-slots for M.2 PCIE adapters for additional drives
++ Plenty of PCI-E-slots
- Price; For $5999 you get a Mac Pro with 32GB memory, Radeon Pro 580X and 256GB SSD.
I have already a Mac with 32GB memory, eGPU Sapphire RX 580 8GB and 1TB SSD -> For the moment I'm quite happy with my 2018 i7-Mac Mini. And of course with my Mac Pro 4,1.
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The basic price is extremely unacceptable. You get 8 cores, 32gb RAM, 256gb SSD, Radeon Pro 580X, and a new Mac Pro case for $6000. Since Mac Pro 2019 is aimed for high-end production, Why do they even bother to add 8~16 cores? 256gb SSD is a joke and not upgradable. 580X has poor performance.
I assuming that the case itself is expansive.
I assuming that the case itself is expansive.
Nothing says 'good argument' quite like going to a time where everything computer wise was expensive as all hell. Try googling what IBM machines in 1984 cost next champ.
Here, I'll even be nice and help you out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT
Release date August 14, 1984; 34 years ago[1]
Introductory price Approx. $6000
That's a computer that cost almost $15,000 today
WOW MAYBE IBM SHOULD MAKE SOME $15,000 MACHINES FOR THE HOME MARKET!!!11!!!111
Your 'argument' gets worse by the day.
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Just point them to the prices of IBM machines in their time period. maybe they'll get a clue....
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_II
1987 starting at $5,498
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE/30
1989 starting at $4,369
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIfx
1990 starting at $9,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_950
1992 starting at $7,200
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh
1997 starting at $7,499
1987 starting at $5,498
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_SE/30
1989 starting at $4,369
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIfx
1990 starting at $9,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_950
1992 starting at $7,200
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twentieth_Anniversary_Macintosh
1997 starting at $7,499
Sure, you can do that. Or you could just buy one of those 5K monitors from LG. Those come with a stand and so all the beautiful people complain about the stand instead.
1983 - Lisa (Jobs kicked out of the project) - $10,000
1984 - Macintosh - $2500 (Jobs leads the project)
1985 - Jobs leaves Apple
1997 - Jobs comes back to save Apple from bankruptcy, took 12 years to run company into the ground with overpriced machines while he was gone
PowerMac G3
1997 starting at $1599
PowerMac G4
1999 starting at $1599
PowerMac G5
2003 starting at $1999
MacPro
2006 starting at $2299
2010 starting at $2499
2011 - Jobs dies
Mac Pro 6.1
2013 starting price $2999
Mac Pro 7.1
2019 - starting price $5999
Sounds familiar.
1984 - Macintosh - $2500 (Jobs leads the project)
1985 - Jobs leaves Apple
1997 - Jobs comes back to save Apple from bankruptcy, took 12 years to run company into the ground with overpriced machines while he was gone
PowerMac G3
1997 starting at $1599
PowerMac G4
1999 starting at $1599
PowerMac G5
2003 starting at $1999
MacPro
2006 starting at $2299
2010 starting at $2499
2011 - Jobs dies
Mac Pro 6.1
2013 starting price $2999
Mac Pro 7.1
2019 - starting price $5999
Sounds familiar.
Indeed.
Also: Customers can buy what Apple generously offers rather than what customers want. At increasingly unwarranted prices.
Yes Tim Cook is running the company into the ground... Thanks for the funny joke LMAO
Company - no
Its computer business - yes