Yesterday saw the release of the new Mac Pro, finally replacing the trash can and moving back to a tower-based design. It has had a somewhat mixed response, with many people taking issue with the high prices, ranging from $6000 to over $52000. There have been those seeking to defend the prices and write off the complaints, but I don’t believe these arguments take into account the larger picture.
[…]All in all, the Mac Pro is a powerful machine. For certain workflows it is even worth the cost. But the problem is that Apple has priced out a huge swathe of the professional market by making its lower end Mac Pros prohibitively expensive for what is frankly underwhelming hardware.
The base model Mac Pro is, indeed, a terrible purchase, and some of the upgrade options are downright laughable – to get anything even remotely resembling a decent GPU, you’re asked to spend $2400, which is insane. Anybody who isn’t spending their boss’ money shouldn’t buy this machine.
That being said – the interior design and layout of the new Mac Pro is beautiful. I can’t believe that we’re still dealing with kilometers of fiddly cabling and ugly, gamery ATX motherboards that have become ever more cumbersome to deal with, while Apple can design and build such a neat, clean, and tidy system.
I think I’ve written this here before, but in the world I work in the Mac Pro used to be the ducks nuts. If you weren’t on mac Pro nobody took you seriously.
Now it’s just the workstation equivalent of the flash company car you use to collect and disperse clients. All the major players have one or two in the front office as “marketing” and the rest of the place is overloaded with cheap Windows or Linux workstations. No matter what Apple does with the Mac Pro it’s hard to see software vendors bothering to do expensive optimizations for such a small potential marketplace. So I feel this machine is consigned to Iron Man’s laboratory and the sea view desktops of celebrities who’ll probably never even switch the thing on!
cpcf,
I’ve said it before, the price point seems fine if you look at from the enterprise server market. But as a workstation the $6000 price for a system with underwhelming performance at that price point is sure to disappoint anyone who cares about more than branding. Some professional users might be ok with spending $6000, but generally they’d expect top of the line system at that price point instead of apple’s entry level macpro offering. To get a high end workstation, you’ll have to spend more. Also, not to downplay AMD, but apple isn’t even offering nvidia GPUs, which means the macpro is a non-starter for a lot of the pro workstation users who need CUDA.
Apple’s configurator lets us see exactly how much they’re charging for everything ($6k – $52k).
Can you roll your PC around the floor to impress friends? Well, for a $400 wheel upgrade your new macpro can!
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower
This may be apple’s way of saying “we don’t expect you to buy these things, but if you do we won’t hesitate to take your money!”
Thom Holwerda,
It may be a bit dated, but how are they becoming ever more cumbersome to deal with? Are you talking about trying to put more stuff into smaller and smaller case designs?
Also, the ugly motherboards and fiddly cabling are artifacts of the flexibility of the ecosystem. The glue that holds together pieces engineered by different, competing organizations, results in systems that compete with Apple very well in terms of price and performance. Appearance only has value if you have money to burn. If you have work to do, choose function over form. If form is free, fine. But in Apple’s case, it’s not at all free, it’s $50k.
They’re gamer-targeted as they are the ones that buy most of them. They’re ugly black, aggressive have stupid names and sayings, and have rgb led stuff everywhere. Just give me a boring green pcb with decent options and no rgb please. Thanks.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Ah yes, as much as I tried to avoid them, I actually ended up with a few of those components in my rig. Why the heck would I want to keep lights on in my PC? I know there are people who do, but for those of us don’t care about that crap it’s an annoying trend. I disabled/disconnected as many of the lights as I could, I could not do anything about the Nvidia RTX GPU nor the coresair cpu watercooler. Both are software controlled, but the official software only supports windows and I haven’t found a way to change/disable RGB from linux. The motherboard had RGB, but this was easily disabled in the BIOS.
Speaking of not wanting LEDs on everything…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnST5rA64Oc
It’s hilarious and sad, all at the same time.
JLF65,
Thanks for posting, that was illuminating 🙂
I am kind of sad the last server board I bought doesn’t have an LED controller. The bundled Ryzen 7 fan is stuck on red, and I can’t set it to disco mode. 🙂
I agree, but an alternative solution to outright avoiding gamer bling (I even see it on Threadripper boards supposedly aimed at creative professionals) is simply to buy a windowless metal case to hide it all inside. It makes purchasing decisions easier, allowing all the focus to be on function rather than form.
Thom is comparing random parts, which have to support lots of use cases, to integrated systems, which can be more focused.
They aren’t getting more cumbersome. Things are getting more streamlined. NVMe drives have eliminated needing to string SATA cables everywhere, and iGPUs are good enough for everything except games. PSUs are the only thing that hasn’t really changed. Plus, NUCs are surprisingly powerful for what they are, and cover like 85% of the desktop market use cases.
This week in “Nothing is Ever Good Enough for Nerds”.
I think that most companies do not care about this kind of pricing. And if they do care about it, they will just buy the Windows equivalent of this piece of hardware.
Nothing to see, move along.
loic,
I need to know where you work! All the companies I’ve worked for seek to buy *cheaper* machines than those I choose to buy for myself personally. Seriously, I’ve never witnessed a company behave like money wasn’t an issue, I guess maybe if you live and work in wealthier cities it could be different.
The Oil and Gas industry is one that comes to mind. If they need a $54K machine, they need a $54K machine, and that’s sofa change in a multi-million dollar project.
It’s a bit frustrating reading some of the discussions regarding this – lots of people talking past each other with long heated discussions that basically boil down to:
“I wish Apple made a computer for me”
vs.
“It’s not for you, so stop whining and go away”
It’s interesting seeing tech commentator types dismiss the desire for an upgradeable/repairable consumer computer as nothing but nostalgia for an outdated hobbyist product that has no place in the current market. There’s probably some truth to that, but I still see some difference between a desktop computer and an appliance like a TV or microwave.
It doesn’t have a spot in the current market for the most part. Capitalism demands people spend money. Saving money is for communists. 😉
Seriously though, people repairing stuff doesn’t benefit companies as much as throwing things away and purchasing new products does. Companies don’t see any of the money from people buying third-party parts, and the don’t get a cut from third-party repair centers. Does it benefit the economy more, yes, but not the companies, which are the only one who matter. 😛
Techies are such a small part of the market that it doesn’t even matter. There are companies which will cater to that market, but at substantially higher prices to cover the lack of quantity.
Next, we keep asking for more and more performance, and that means integrating things heavily to reduce the performance losses. Sockets and connections reduce the efficiency of electrical transmissions, and while it’s not a lot, it does add up. Thus, soldering everything on to a board is more efficient, even if it is more annoying for those of us who Frankenstein our computers.
I don’t even bother reading what the pundits have to say about products. They’re English majors making a deadline. If a product works for me, it works for me. I need the specs and exact chipsets, nothing more and nothing less.
Will the new MacPro work for me? No. An SSH session doesn’t need that much power, and at this level, there are better options for running Linux.
Will it work for other people? Yes. Much better then the iMac Pro or previous Mac Pro.
Flatland_Spider,
Is there any evidence for that? I ask because I don’t actually know the answer, but as a general rule upgradable discrete components can always be had that outperform the integrated ones. Obviously it’s far easier&cheaper to upgrade above and beyond the original specs if they remain discrete. By soldering the ram & flash, it makes the computer obsolete quicker.
It’s not just people who “frankenstien their computers” who benefit from discrete components, anyone who needs to replace a defective component will appreciate it as well. Integrated components obviously have a smaller profile, which can be important, but by most other metrics I consider them a negative.
Apple (almost) never made a computer for “me”…
They either have an entry level device (at an inflated price), or an expensive beauty for people with too much money, or high end business needs. They do not seem to support “mainstream”, since most people would just buy one of these devices anyways.
I can see the value in the Mac Pro as a Xeon workstation. The motherboard itself could easily cost more than a thousand dollars for a comparable alternative. However not everyone needs that much, and a Threadripper would be more than enough for most development or design projects.
Specifically, if you really need the top end Xeon, your budget build would be a SuperMicro workstation (and a bare-bones – no CPU, no RAM, just case+mobo+PSU would cost $2,500). But “I” do not need that. I want a good development machine, which would cost less than $2,000 with a Threadripper or Ryzen 2 build.
So yes, Apple does not make a computer for “me”.
I work for a startup, we’re probably 90% Mac hardware. This is not the “Pro” we’re looking for.
256GB SSD in the base model is laughable, we order 500GB minimum for laptops these days, even ultraportables. $6k for the base model is absurd.
Given the huge number of hardware recalls on Mac laptops over the last five years, and the abysmal state of the operating system lately, I’m seriously considering our options. The devs are happy with Linux machines (and wow that Threadripper box we built for about $2k is fast), and several people have even requested Windows machines. One switched her MacBook Pro for a ThinkPad because she’s a heavy Photoshop user, and at the time the MBP didn’t support 32GB of RAM. She’s got 64GB now.
Our customers don’t care at all about macOS, and barely care about iOS. We mostly keep things going there for our own purposes (most devs are on MacBook Pros… for now), and for giving demos. Demos that always seem to involve a VM running Linux or something else.
Maybe we’re not “pro” enough for Apple to want our business.
Chrish. This has many aspects in common with my past experience, and it’s why we are no longer majority Mac.
We also found that the clients that seemed to force us down the Mac route turned out to be not profitable, they were often rusted on in their ways, There seemed to be a clear link between spurious requests and the demand for us to use Mac for demonstrations and development. I suspect the clients were basically judging a book by the cover, and as a result they made costly and sometimes unreasonable requests which lacked any real substance. A couple of our old Mac Pros now sit in a corner of the office as a safe guard and mostly get cranked up for legacy/compatibility reasons, we also keep a couple of big screen iMacs because users love the displays. That is 4 out of 56 workstations, the rest are either Windows 10 Pro (We took advantage of the recent upgrade amnesty/extension to replace the remainder of our legacy Win 7 workstations), or Linux with a split of Win and Linux servers. I suppose because we are developing full stacks it’s natural that we are diverse, but Mac OS is no longer a priority.
Jesus. People really don’t get that for the market this workstation is targeted for: professional content creation, this machine is not that bad price wise.
Go and spec out a similar Dell or HP system and weep.
Old geeks out of the loop with little disposable income are not the target for this machine.
Old geeks, you mean the guys that built the companies that directly or indirectly create your income and pay your wages! Or who built the companies that make the technology that gets assembled into that creative milk crate!
I would never buy one of those machines, if I liked it, if it fit the purpose, I’d be buying 50!
There is no way in hell professional content creation is going to happen on this Mac Pro or some expensive after-market souped up Z8, regardless of if it’s design or media. The workhorse machines and the bulk of the grunt in content creation comes off high standard Linux workstations worth a fraction of the price, but lined up by the hundreds in the sweat shop conditions of Shanghai, Bangkok or Manilla! The HP Super Z8’s and Mac Pros are in the marketing department at Disney or Boeing, or in Brad Pitts Study looking nice and operating super energy efficiently(aka, Switched Off!)
No matter what you offer me in a workstation, I can build a high performance distributed solution that makes it redundant for a fraction of the price!
There’s a clear market for this system: people making a living using FinalCut Pro, Logic, and stuff like that.
Apple carters to a mid-high end revenue shops. In that market 50K workstations are not that uncommon. The monitor is actually a very good value for serious color work.
You and I are not the market.
javiercero1,
I kind of feel bad for anyone who buys the $6k mac pro only to end up with a low end workstation. They should have started the prices at $10,000-$15,000 rather than insulting their pro users with subpar specs at $6,000. If money is no object, you should at least have an above average workstation, haha.
I still say it makes more sense as a server than a workstation. Sometimes paying more is worth it. With servers you will pay more for parallelism and redundancy, etc. However many people are surprised that desktop components can be faster than server components that cost much more because they’re optimized for different types of workloads. Server components trade off latency in order to get more parallelism, longer queues, ECC memory, etc. For a workstation, you could actually be better off with cheaper desktop components than the expensive server ones, it really depends… more expensive doesn’t always mean a better and faster desktop.
My advice is to never make assumptions and always look at the benchmarks. For example, it would be interesting to see how these macs compare against AMD’s high core count ryzen CPUs.