A custom-built Ryzen 5900X/RTX 3070 machine from a reputable vendor now costs 1/10th of the nearest Mac Pro configuration. There's no hyperbole, that's the price disparity when you're seeking equal performance between a Mac and a PC at a high performance level.
I've been, and still am an iMac, MBP 2015, TV 4K, Homepod, iPhone 12 Pro, iPad, watch, etc. user for more than a decade (some professional, some personal). I'm fully bought into the ecosystem and love the continuity between all devices and Apple's services. However, there's a limit to how much I love that continuity and last week I found that limit when I ordered my first PC in more than 15 years.
I was able to get the following configuration from iBuyPower for $1,558 after factoring in $50 Amazon card, credit card rewards, sale price and taxes. A Ryzen 5900X, NVidia RTX 3070, 32GB DDR4 3200 ram, 512GB NVME SSD. The equivalent Mac Pro with a Xeon W-3275M and a Pro Vega II, 32GB RAM and 512 SSD costs $15,833 after all taxes and Apple 3% cash back. See screenshots below. I know the two systems aren't identical, but close enough. The PC build has PCIE 4.0 motherboard and Wifi 6 was included, while Apple has TB3 ports and is aesthetically pleasing. Apple has a 32GB pro Vega card, but what edge it gives in video processing when maxed out, it loses in tasks like gaming, ray tracing and VR to the RTX 3070.
I went to the first benchmark site that Google had in "processor benchmark" search results to remove any bias; so I used CPUBenchmark.net. They seem to have a good blend of computational tasks and single vs multi-core performance to arrive at their single benchmark scores for CPUs. Everyone has their reasons, preconceived notions, brand loyalty, ecosystem ties, lock-ins and application dependencies, so I'm not here to judge or call anyone stupid. But for me, I couldn't possibly justify buying an Intel Mac Pro at anywhere near these astronomical prices, when AMD and NVidia are absolutely killing it on the PC side.
I've been, and still am an iMac, MBP 2015, TV 4K, Homepod, iPhone 12 Pro, iPad, watch, etc. user for more than a decade (some professional, some personal). I'm fully bought into the ecosystem and love the continuity between all devices and Apple's services. However, there's a limit to how much I love that continuity and last week I found that limit when I ordered my first PC in more than 15 years.
I was able to get the following configuration from iBuyPower for $1,558 after factoring in $50 Amazon card, credit card rewards, sale price and taxes. A Ryzen 5900X, NVidia RTX 3070, 32GB DDR4 3200 ram, 512GB NVME SSD. The equivalent Mac Pro with a Xeon W-3275M and a Pro Vega II, 32GB RAM and 512 SSD costs $15,833 after all taxes and Apple 3% cash back. See screenshots below. I know the two systems aren't identical, but close enough. The PC build has PCIE 4.0 motherboard and Wifi 6 was included, while Apple has TB3 ports and is aesthetically pleasing. Apple has a 32GB pro Vega card, but what edge it gives in video processing when maxed out, it loses in tasks like gaming, ray tracing and VR to the RTX 3070.
I went to the first benchmark site that Google had in "processor benchmark" search results to remove any bias; so I used CPUBenchmark.net. They seem to have a good blend of computational tasks and single vs multi-core performance to arrive at their single benchmark scores for CPUs. Everyone has their reasons, preconceived notions, brand loyalty, ecosystem ties, lock-ins and application dependencies, so I'm not here to judge or call anyone stupid. But for me, I couldn't possibly justify buying an Intel Mac Pro at anywhere near these astronomical prices, when AMD and NVidia are absolutely killing it on the PC side.