Have to say I was really taken in by the Afterburner's 8K/4K performance figures in terms of the number of simultaneous streams it can handle... until I realised that they were measured at 30fps! Got to say though that since yesterday, the design has started to grow on me a bit. Initially it looked mirror-finish but I think having looked closer at it, the fact that it isn't makes the difference. In terms of compute power, for me it's nothing more than a wet dream!
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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
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One tradeoff you get with ANY high-end workstation (and the Mac Pro was never going to be anything else) is that the base model has an absurd combination of specs... I suspect that the case, power supply and cooling system alone add up to well over $2000 of the cost - before they put the motherboard in (a workstation-grade 1.4 KW power supply probably costs Apple $500, then they mark it up to $1000). That 8-slot, 12-DIMM motherboard is a $1000+ item - here's a gamer version of a similar board for $1800.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119192...
That leaves Apple with not a huge amount of budget for the other components - they spent most of the entry price on infrastructure to support nearly unlimited upgrades of the other components.
HP does exactly the same thing - a $3000 entry-level Z8 performs like a $500 computer - the rest of the budget goes to supporting its massive potential. At least the base model of this thing is a viable computer (with the possible exception of the 256 GB SSD) - it performs like a $2500 iMac with a $200 RAM upgrade, while entry-level Zs perform more like MacBook Airs.
HP will sell you a machine where every component has to be upgraded before you get any use out of it. Apple's minimums are high enough that you might leave something at base if that particular component doesn't matter to your workflow.
Yes, Apple chose a relatively entry-level CPU for the base model - to the relief of people whose work is exclusively GPU-bound. The CPU is plenty to run macOS and get the work to the GPUs...
Yes, that's a $200 GPU in the base model - to the relief of people whose work is CPU-bound. It'll drive any display, and there are plenty of workloads where that's all that's needed.
32 GB of RAM is definitely low for this type of machine - but (unlike HP's default 8 GB), it's plenty to run the operating system and support an application that is doing the heavy lifting in the processor cache (small, very fast data set).
No, I don't know what the purpose of that 256 GB SSD is - maybe there's a case where the application is relatively small, and all the data lives on a NAS, SAN or in the cloud?
If you were going to leave all the options at base, Apple has other machines for you for much less money (including a 4 lb one that runs on batteries - a top-end 15" MBP will outperform a purely stock Mac Pro). They'll also sell you an iMac or an upgraded Mini.
On the other hand, each individual option could make sense at base for certain uses - a musician might be happy with the base GPU (although she chose a 24-core CPU and 192 GB of RAM), while an AI researcher whose code runs exclusively on the GPU might choose a Vega Pro Duo (or even two of them), but the 8-core CPU and 32 GB of RAM are fine for getting the code to the serious processing in the GPUs.
No, Apple didn't cater to people who wanted an expandable midrange Mac - something like a Dell XPS tower. It would be possible to use the base model that way, but you'd pay literally thousands of dollars for cooling, power supply, chassis and slots that you don't need.
They have maintained for over 20 years that this market is better served by largely sealed computers - cue gnashing of gamer teeth.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119192...
That leaves Apple with not a huge amount of budget for the other components - they spent most of the entry price on infrastructure to support nearly unlimited upgrades of the other components.
HP does exactly the same thing - a $3000 entry-level Z8 performs like a $500 computer - the rest of the budget goes to supporting its massive potential. At least the base model of this thing is a viable computer (with the possible exception of the 256 GB SSD) - it performs like a $2500 iMac with a $200 RAM upgrade, while entry-level Zs perform more like MacBook Airs.
HP will sell you a machine where every component has to be upgraded before you get any use out of it. Apple's minimums are high enough that you might leave something at base if that particular component doesn't matter to your workflow.
Yes, Apple chose a relatively entry-level CPU for the base model - to the relief of people whose work is exclusively GPU-bound. The CPU is plenty to run macOS and get the work to the GPUs...
Yes, that's a $200 GPU in the base model - to the relief of people whose work is CPU-bound. It'll drive any display, and there are plenty of workloads where that's all that's needed.
32 GB of RAM is definitely low for this type of machine - but (unlike HP's default 8 GB), it's plenty to run the operating system and support an application that is doing the heavy lifting in the processor cache (small, very fast data set).
No, I don't know what the purpose of that 256 GB SSD is - maybe there's a case where the application is relatively small, and all the data lives on a NAS, SAN or in the cloud?
If you were going to leave all the options at base, Apple has other machines for you for much less money (including a 4 lb one that runs on batteries - a top-end 15" MBP will outperform a purely stock Mac Pro). They'll also sell you an iMac or an upgraded Mini.
On the other hand, each individual option could make sense at base for certain uses - a musician might be happy with the base GPU (although she chose a 24-core CPU and 192 GB of RAM), while an AI researcher whose code runs exclusively on the GPU might choose a Vega Pro Duo (or even two of them), but the 8-core CPU and 32 GB of RAM are fine for getting the code to the serious processing in the GPUs.
No, Apple didn't cater to people who wanted an expandable midrange Mac - something like a Dell XPS tower. It would be possible to use the base model that way, but you'd pay literally thousands of dollars for cooling, power supply, chassis and slots that you don't need.
They have maintained for over 20 years that this market is better served by largely sealed computers - cue gnashing of gamer teeth.
i was so looking forward for this 2019 mac pro. Sadly, Apple overshoot and went for highest end of niche market. Good luck.
They didn't overshoot at all. The Mac Pro needs to be the halo product.
If it's too much for you, they have plenty of lower priced options for you to meet your needs.
Anyone that wanted a $10,000+ machine for sale for $3,000 was delusional.
The iMac Pro is plenty of computer for the vast majority of users. The MacPro is for those who need more and that was never going to be cheap. It's easy to find flaws in some of their choices, but that's inevitable.
Color me impressed with their willingness to make a heavy duty workstation for the niche that needs it.
Color me impressed with their willingness to make a heavy duty workstation for the niche that needs it.
Nobody wanted a $10,000+ machine for $3,000. I wanted $3,000 machine for $3,000. And the baseline $6,000 is a rip-off at that specification. 256 gig SSD? that more than 2 year old graphic ? Basically, there's a huge Apple tax for their proprietary platform, and Apple's credibility in platform is something to be proven after trashcan fiasco.
HP 4 x 8GB 32GB RAM BTO price +1030
Crucial Memory store for same system (HP Z4 G4): 4 x 8GB DIMMs price ( 4 * $68 ) $272.
( around a ~$700 difference in price. ~$768 difference if only by three 8GB DIMMS since have one. )
Apple is price comparisons jump in the the BTO certain configurations at Dell/Lenovo/HP which have just as rampant "print money" mark-ups as Apple's BTO do. When want to look thin, stand next to the "Fat Lady" at the carnival show.
There probably are enough customers that are pragmatically spending "other people's money" , so they'll get away with it for a certain number of buyers (most of the big players do. Although for most of the others selling service contracts, larger corporate sales will haggle away some of this huge mark up to make the buyer feel like they got a deal even when still paying around 100% mark-up. ).
This is a move to sell the Mac Pro to substantially fewer people at higher margins. Whether that is slow death spiral pricing model or a fast one we'll see. If Intel and Apple are both playing that game then we'll see if that is a problem in 2020 or not.
The bigger worry for them should be that the market will change quicker than they can react. If they reassign most of these people who put this together off to other products that will be an issue.
One odd thing in the context of future PCI-e v4 and v5 systems is that the x16 sockets are the furthest away from the CPU. I suspect these boards were not deigned with v5 in mind for the future. But that will be a future board anyway if they stick with Intel (as there will be a socket change probably).
Apple has a chance to build a track record with MPX modules. If the bump the 580X "half height" module in Jan-April next year then would be a good sign. ( the basics of the 580X module should have been done relatively long time ago. If they can't trail 6-10 months behind mainstream card releases that went into other Macs, then they aren't on a good iteration path. )
If the rack thing slides into 2020... that would be a bad sign.
The only way Apple is going to get out of the "trusted execution" hole is regular execution ; not dog and pony shows.
You can spec the new Mac Mini or a MacBook Pro for $3000 and they are great devices..... so what's the problem?
Why are you mad there is something beyond your price point?
That's like saying Ferrari's should be illegal because you can only afford a Toyota.
As you can see in my sig, I already own Mac Mini. I wanted to give a shot with eGPU as iGPU in mini was my biggest issue with the model. Guess what? Apple's implementation of egpu is far from perfect. I cannot put the thing in sleep and awake through egpu. So back to my frustration. No headless mac with proper gpu from Apple.
You don't get it do you? Apple is the only company selling a product with Mac OS. I want to use Mac OS, and they don't give me choice. They are pretty much telling me to either buy Hyundai or Ferrari and nothing between.
The price point isn't the issue for me.
It is the sad collection of EOL technologies that I would get for that $6,000.
A Mini or MacBook (or an iMac) can't do a LOT of things that earlier MPs do. They throttle.
That is in the "motion picture" zone ( 24 fps ) and sometimes real time TV broadcast ( 30 fps ) [ no time for proxies because 'massaging'/'cutting' it as in comes in. ]
Digging into the number '8' footnote, the clip 8K clips are also only 50 seconds log. How it holds up with an 1 hour might be a little different. And what the PCI-e lane switch configuration is. That x8 is being shared by something else (an empty slot ... that's fine. But if put another extreme rate consumer on it will clip at max streams. Same if drop it downstream onto a Thunderbolt v3 link, but useful in more modest contexts. ) .
Evil advocate:
High entry price hurts those not actually needing a Mac Pro, for such money you get an iMac pro with much better specifications.
But I think is an Apple strategy to tax on diy day 0 upgrades, the logic is high entry price then upgrades cheaper (but not a lot cheaper) upgrades than diy.
I.e. I want 16 core 96gb 1tb and dual vega ii (dual instinct mi60), it would cost purchasing the base model:
6000$+
2000$ 16core Xeon
600$ 8x dimm ECC DDR4
1000$ 2tb (4x 512mb + PCIe x16 raid nvme aicl
7000$ 2x mi60/Radeon VII
This is: 16600$-600$ (8core Xeon resale)~ 16000
Apple then should sell that Mac pro just below 16000$ to avoid driving me to the diy drive, and how they profit? Lifting margins to the base model.
High entry price hurts those not actually needing a Mac Pro, for such money you get an iMac pro with much better specifications.
But I think is an Apple strategy to tax on diy day 0 upgrades, the logic is high entry price then upgrades cheaper (but not a lot cheaper) upgrades than diy.
I.e. I want 16 core 96gb 1tb and dual vega ii (dual instinct mi60), it would cost purchasing the base model:
6000$+
2000$ 16core Xeon
600$ 8x dimm ECC DDR4
1000$ 2tb (4x 512mb + PCIe x16 raid nvme aicl
7000$ 2x mi60/Radeon VII
This is: 16600$-600$ (8core Xeon resale)~ 16000
Apple then should sell that Mac pro just below 16000$ to avoid driving me to the diy drive, and how they profit? Lifting margins to the base model.
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Unless change the settings, no. But it is simply a matter of changing the setting when go to a system configuration that is different from fresh "out of the box". Is Apple ever going to change it so the initial owner can't possibly ever change that setting? Extremely likely not.
The T2 validates the firmware of the system. If the firmware and its configuration settings ( also protected ) is set to ignore the external ports it doesn't make one lick of difference how many of them there are.
It hurts anybody that needs a Mac that doesn't throttle.
That iMac Pro throttles - so the specifications are irrelevant.
It is a different chassis, but the dimensions look like the internals will fit in a rack mount chassis with zero mods, the motherboard is just flipped 90 degrees onto its back...
I didn’t see that picture, thanks for posting it.
IMHO, 16grand are better invested in a Linux box:
A 32core Epyc (< 3000$) + 4x rtx2080 nvlink (<4000$> + 128gb ram (800$) + same SSD nvme + 8 slot supermicro motherboard+ 3U chassis (<1000$)
Still below 10k and are much more faster for ml the dual dual vega ii, not to say Navi, which will support PCIe 4 with Epyc Rome, no urgency for GPU interconnect fabric
This actually goes waaaaaaay beyond the xMac thing. Apple had a pretty stable entry price in the $2,299-499 range. The Mac Pro 2013 extended that to $2,999 ( and there were complaints then tool). The vast majority of the xMac crowd is looking for iMac fratricide in the classic iMac price zone.
Going from $2,499 to $2,999 is a 20% increase.
A another 20% increase over that would have been ~$3,600. Apple jumped way past that.
$2,999 to $5,999 is a 100% increase. ( and a 140% increase over the $2,499 price point. )
The notion that not leaving a significant chunk of folks behind with a triple digit percentage increase in price is loopy. This move expands the group being left out. Apple is going to sell less Mac Pros. They'll have fatter margins so perhaps Apple will retain some interest in the product and not fall into another long Rip Van Winkle nap.
Apple probably knew that the Mac Pro 2013 design was leaving a significant chunk of folks behind and made it anyway. This move is doing the same thing. Will that work out different for them this time, they have better numbers to work off of then most of us. [ Does it match where the overall workstation market is going? No. Apple is trying to swim "upstream" of the smartphone market also. It is mostly working for the moment, but long term they should be nervous. Same thing here. With the initial demand bubble they probably look real good with short, peephole sales charts; like the MP 2013 started out with. )
The price creep here is distributing because is spreading across the whole line up.
Mac Mini used to start in the $499-599 range. Now it "pro" oriented the floor has crept up to $799. ( There was a $699 spike when HDDs shot up Mini has largely hovered in the $599 range). 599 -> 799 ( ~33% increase ).
MBP touch bar ... price bump that doesn't seem to be going away.
AppleTV more now. ( actually creeping back up to 1st gen $299 but even from $99 low point a double digit % increase to current entry point. )
iPad Pro ... higher. ( double digit % increase though)
iPhones ... higher (double digit % increase though)
The current stand ( not monitor just the freaking stand) costs as much as the whole previous Apple label display. [ How many folks did Apple "leave behind" on that move who want an Apple label monitor? ). Matte... oh yeah only another $1K more.
The Mini , some Mac laptops , iMac , iMac Pro all top or match the 6 core count mark so Apple will point more folks at those. But that has been the driver of the multiple 1000 post threads since 2013. Stoking a bigger group into a mismatch is going to cause more abrasion. Apple cares if you're wealthy, but otherwise they increasingly don't. ( As much as Apple chaff's at Google's dig on them ... worldwide it is increasingly accurate. )
If Apple is going out of their way to create a whole rack chassis ( and perhaps a slightly modified board ) for fatter margins , they are going to get complaints about how they couldn't have just done something starting back in the $2.5-4.5K zone. When it becomes "fatter margins seem to often win" they are going to get more folks complaining about the "Apple Tax".
And if this is primarily driven by chasing fatter margins it smells alot like the lead up to another Rip van Winkle cycle.
Personally I am not after this kind of machine anymore, but I am seeing a lot of people using this dumb argument over and over...
How come people are delusional to have hoped for such a machine at that price when 5 years ago Apple launched a machine named also named Mac Pro in that price ranged, and that machine called Mac Pro is still being sold today and will be replaced by this...
I could understand the argument if they had named it Ultra Mac Pro or something, but for you to not understand that people who had a machine available until now, with the same name, at half the price, were expecting something similar to replace it... heh, I think you are the one who seem to not want to understand things here, or at least bash them as invalid without even taking the time to consider them.
So, if someone had a need for 10 MacPros up to the year 2013 would pay min. ~30.000, in 2019 needs min. 60.000 (with the same ssd size of 2013). Of course the specs are better but this was also valid and for the older ones at their time.
So again, imho, there is something missing in the line, there is a huge gap from mini to Pro, a very huge one.
So again, imho, there is something missing in the line, there is a huge gap from mini to Pro, a very huge one.
Well at least with this model they don't have any excuses for not updating it regularly.
As for the price, this is what a top-end workstation from a Tier One OEM costs nowadays. You want a 1400-watt power supply in a PC workstation? From HP that means you have to buy a Z8 because their lower-tier models max out at 1000 watts or less. And a Z8 with an 8 core Xeon (at 1.7GHz, mind you, not 4.0GHz), 32MB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and a W4100 video card will run you just over $5000.
And while a fully-tricked out Mac Pro will probably approach $50,000, you can more than double that with a Z8 checking all the top options.
Delusional is unfair and unkind, but with the price creep we have seen with every other Apple product and the starting point of the iMac Pro, believing that $3000 was going to be the starting point was not being realistic.
I personally figured it would be $5000 (with 8/10 cores, 32/64GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and a Vega 56 card) so I clearly significantly underestimated it, as well. And while I still find the base price far too high for what you get, when I consider what the machine was designed to support (a 28 core 205W CPUs, 1.5TB of RAM, two dual-GPU cards with a total TDP around 600 watts or more) I can see why it was never going to cost $3000.
For the people this machine Apple is aiming this machine at, $60,000 is going to be one of the cheaper line items on the final bill to bring their production to market.
There is a (headless) gap, but it’s one I don’t think Apple is interested in filling. There’s basically a maxed Mac mini hole of difference between the highest end mini and the lowest Pro, which doesn’t make much sense until you include the iMac and iMax Pro to fill it.