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Mac Pro Arrived! Pics Included
- Thread starter Laslo Panaflex
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Evangelion said:
I'm arguing it's better to have a lower priced but upgradable base system than forcing people to pay MORE for things they don't NEED and will never use.
The added price??? Most people agree Apple is beating Dell's price with a similar speced system. You could be right about it costing Apple only $50 more to offer Airport/BT and a 7600 card... but I don't think it's relly that low. I would go with your reasoning... but I think Apple would have to charge around $2699 for the system with BT/Airport and a 7600 (ignoring the fact that it isn't yet available for the Mac). If you still have the option to downgrade the specs to get back to $2499 and less, you will keep a lot of institutional buyers happy AND I would support that. There are people who don't need even the base 7300GT, airport or BT. Why force them to pay for it? If it were really only a few bucks more, I'd say go for it. How many companies have saved pennies on parts that really upset some of their user-base?
I see this as a needed departure from Apple's past pricing strategy. I don't think their margins are as high on a base configuration MacPro as you think they are. However, I have no hard figures to back this up.
I'm all for a single CPU (dual core) Conroe tower with multiple drive bays and PCIe slots. I would want this to plug in a high end nvidia card and dual boot into XP for gaming. I think this system should come in around $1299 for a ~2GHZ Conroe, 1GB, 250GB, 7300GT. I would want airport AND bluetooth and an option to upgrade the video to a high end gaming card (either myself if Apple can sort out the EFI/Driver issues - or as BTO through the Apple store). But Apple hasn't given it to us..... yet.
No, I think I've heard it's between 20 and 30%, but it doesn't matter, the margin is there because it needs to be. Let's say it costs Apple 10 bucks, if they sell 100,000 Mac Pros it's still $1,000,000 that could have been used differently. Why offer something standard on a machine and lose money when most customers of the computer we're talking about here don't want it, and I can't imagine lots of customers looking at the Mac Pro and decide that the $29 bluetooth option is a deal breaker.Evangelion said:
Oh, I do get that. I want Apple to offer a headless mid range Mac, too, but Evangelion seems to want things from the Mac Pro that really is for this non-existing consumer/prosumer oriented Mac midi. A consumer Mac should have Bluetooth included, I agree, but not a pro Mac where the majority of customers will be corporate customers where wireless capability is often banned for good reason.airmac said:
We're discussing the features of the Mac Pro here, lets not get it mixed up with our desire for consumer/gaming oriented Mac. If some gamers decides to buy the Mac Pro, then good for them, but everyone including the gamer knows or should know that they're not the focus group for the product.
Yeah the unidentified pci device may be the sound card, but I am still confused why the hard drive I/O is so slow. Anybody know the exact audio system being used on the Mac Pro so I can find a Windows driver? I installed the Intel 5000x chipset drivers and as I said above I still get yellow exclamation points on 4 of the pci-x devices in the system branch under Device Manager. I would think those would be covered by the chipset drivers. The chipset driver appeared to take and the gigabit ethernet driver worked like a charm. I still have those drivers on my laptop by the way if anybody wants to know the exact intel file names. I had to load drivers with a thumb drive until I got Internet working. Has anybody else tried to get XP running on the Mac Pro?
+ $850 = 33% More Money 2.66GHz + 340 MHz = 12.8% More Power Got Money To Burn?
So IMO no. It's a matter of if you are very wealthy and/or making money with it such that every minute of time saved will be worth it to you. I think that $850 needs to be spent on 4 GB of RAM. At $399 or more per pair of 1GB sticks, all of the $850 gets eaten up with that hidden expense.
I'm even starting to think that certain application sets may not even benefit much from the 2.66GHz speed and a downgrade to 2GHz might be the right choice. But it is a lot less power for very little less money so I'm not saying I recommend that at all. I'm saying it's a case by cse evaluation as to wiether or not an individual might only really use 2GHz x 4 worth of power most of the time.
25% less Power for 12% less Money doesn't make a lot of sense to save that little cents.
You see it appears that Apple got an amazing price for 2.66GHz Woodcrests and then set the prices for UP and DOWNgrades such that 99% of its customers will not exercise that option. I'm curious what the percentage of buyers are buying faster or slower version. But I imagine that is strictly inside information we may never know until history is written after these are no longer for sale. I would still like to know then.
It's a very clever marketing strategy that steers demand away from anything but the base speed offering. Really simplifies Apple's manufacturing process since assembling a different speed processor will be a very small part time affair.
+ $850 = 33% More Money 2.66GHz + 340 MHz = 12.8% More Power Got Money To Burn?billabong-ryan said:
So IMO no. It's a matter of if you are very wealthy and/or making money with it such that every minute of time saved will be worth it to you. I think that $850 needs to be spent on 4 GB of RAM. At $399 or more per pair of 1GB sticks, all of the $850 gets eaten up with that hidden expense.
I'm even starting to think that certain application sets may not even benefit much from the 2.66GHz speed and a downgrade to 2GHz might be the right choice. But it is a lot less power for very little less money so I'm not saying I recommend that at all. I'm saying it's a case by cse evaluation as to wiether or not an individual might only really use 2GHz x 4 worth of power most of the time.
25% less Power for 12% less Money doesn't make a lot of sense to save that little cents.
You see it appears that Apple got an amazing price for 2.66GHz Woodcrests and then set the prices for UP and DOWNgrades such that 99% of its customers will not exercise that option. I'm curious what the percentage of buyers are buying faster or slower version. But I imagine that is strictly inside information we may never know until history is written after these are no longer for sale. I would still like to know then. It's a very clever marketing strategy that steers demand away from anything but the base speed offering. Really simplifies Apple's manufacturing process since assembling a different speed processor will be a very small part time affair.
stormj said:I'm JEALOUS
not that anyone cares, but it's therapeutic to post this publicly, after wondering where the hell my computer was all day yesterday, then finding out this morning I wasn't getting it for 8 more days, almost calling, cancelling, buying one from a store and upgrading it.... i find out it just shipped.
wtf??? i wonder how many orders they lost because people thought their wait was doubled when it really wasn't.
Optical Bay Has Cables & Room For 4 Additional Hard Drives 2 PATA & 2 SATA
NOTE: Some newer SATA drives come without legacy power connectors so check that before you buy the wrong brand/model. Also might be able to hook a third PATA drive to the optical's spare PATA ribbon connector. So that would make 7 HDs inside + the Optical it came with or 8 HDs inside if move the optical outside.
Multimedia said:Nope. Up to 4.5 TB.
No longer convinced that's so. Looked at the housing and I believe two HDs will fit under the upper optical hooked to both SATA connectors with power split from the Optical's source.Evangelion said:
NOTE: Some newer SATA drives come without legacy power connectors so check that before you buy the wrong brand/model. Also might be able to hook a third PATA drive to the optical's spare PATA ribbon connector. So that would make 7 HDs inside + the Optical it came with or 8 HDs inside if move the optical outside.
Could even be more complicated than that. Point is there are TWO PATA connectors up there as well as TWO SATA connectors. I believe there is plenty of room for all FOUR to be occupied with additional Hard Drives.omfgninja said:
You may buy PATA Hard Drves for the PATA Bus ribbon as well as additional SATA drives for the TWO additional SATA cables up there. I'm sure this will all be covered by do-it-yourself sites in glorious detailed photography very soon. It's a no brainer.Evangelion said:
Patience Common For Apple To Ship Way Before They Say They Will
Down Dose The Caffeen Intake *Patience Common For Apple To Ship Way Before They Say They Will. Last time I ordered my Quad from them they said 30 days and it shipped the next day. So your when shipping notification is meaningless.stormj said:
wizz0bang said:
Am I talking to a wall here? They wouldn't be paying more! The price would be exactly the same as they are right now! Apple's margins would just be tiny bit smaller than they are today!
Or are you saying that if they sold Mac Pro for $2499 (the price might be wrong, I haven't looked it up) and equipped it with GF7300, you would be happy. But if they sold an identical MacPro with identical price, and equipped it with GF7600 instead, you would be complaining that "Why do I have to pay for GF7600 when I don't need it?"?
Yes, the added price.
So what?
Why? Apple could affort a slight hit on their margins on the machine.
*sigh*.... The price would be exactly the same as it is right now, only the specs would be better. So you would get a better computer for your money. And here you are telling me that that is NOT a good thing? Hey, want to buy my old Athlon64-box? You can have it for $3000 bucks. Surely that's a good thing, right?
Fact is that the specs they skimped on were kind of specs that do not cost that much to implement, yet they make the machine substantially better.
This is where you're mistaken. You have to think in business terms. Apple is a profit driven business, they're not a charity. They're obviously already cutting their margins lower than the competitors and you think it'll be a grand business idea to offer even more for the same money. How many more Mac Pro sales do you think a Geforce 7600 and included Bluetooth would bring Apple? Do you really think whoever makes these decisions at Apple are less capable estimating cost and demand and doing the math on this than you are?Evangelion said:
ampd said:
Don't feel bad, you're not the only one
although in other news, my better halfs iPod, has made it to Anchorage, on it's way to us 
Could be worse, you could have emailed Apple saying 'If I wanted to change the hard drive would it change the ship date' only to have them just do it, and move the date out by a week.
When you call and yell that you didn't authorize it and they change it back, and you're still out a week.
I'm not going to ask any more questions.
When you call and yell that you didn't authorize it and they change it back, and you're still out a week.
I'm not going to ask any more questions.
Evangelion said:
Are you actually privy to such information, from Apple themselves?
Realistically speaking, do you have any real clue (i.e. inside knowledge of Apple's deep financial workings) of how much it would cost to sell these machines with a better graphics card etc?
There's a lot more to be considered than just the price of the cards that you see on NewEgg.
weldon said:
I hope one of the Mac Pro owners will test installing it on a separate drive, which is how I want to do it to mine when I get it
I was disappointed at first when people were reporting you couldn't but after I thought about it none of the other intel macs could have more internal drives so it made sense devmage said:I hope one of the Mac Pro owners will test installing it on a separate drive, which is how I want to do it to mine when I get it
i think there are some in the other treads that have installed it
but apprently doesn't solve the slow SATA speed =(
Multimedia said:
If the space is standard drive-bay for optical drive (and I assume it is), then you can only fit one 3.5" HD there. There are rails and adapters for just that purpose, I have one in my tower-PC. I'm not sure that could you fit more than one laptop-HD in there though.
gekko513 said:
So I'm misguided in my desire to get more bang for my buck? I think that Mac-users are the only people on the planet who want to get less for their money.
And who is talking about charity here? We are talking about making the product better value for money. That CAN drive up sales.
That was the same argument people used againt those who wanted a cheap Mac. "Apple knows what it's doing! There is no need for cheap Mac!". And the we got the Mac Mini...
Trippy Jr said:
No, what I do have is this thing callewd common sense. Apple would still be earning healthy profit on the MP even if they had upped the specs by a tiny amount. Hell, they might be earning more money, since the machine would be VERY good value for the money!
Right now Apple offer more or less same specs as Dell does, for less money. What if they offered better specs for less money? They COULD do it.
Such as? They already offer several different cards for the system.
A bit off topic - but is there any way to confirm that this is possibly the longest thread in MacRumors history?
If not, it has to be up there!
If not, it has to be up there!
Not Even Close
Not even close. Had several thousand posts speculating before the WWDC.skibob1027 said:
