Apple's New Mac Pro Costs $53,000 When You Max Out the Specs

Exactly, and the Mac pro as a tool is an extremely efficient tool at that. There are studios out there that want very little downtime as possible and something as simple as having to troubleshoot and update drivers is literally lost money.

In 10 years, these things will be on eBay still commanding a lot of money while PCs the same age will probably go for pennies. As a PC enthusiast I am impressed by the specifications of the Mac Pro and if I had money, I would absolutely get one due to the ease of the Macos and the sturdy hardware.

I have a gaming PC and my 2013 Mac Pro (trashcan) is still my daily driver.

No freaking studio is going to outfit these. One the chip and mb combo is unreliable. Those poor MB's have to deal with a 400w chip and they are prone to failure. At least learn about the darn cpu huh? And on performance they get crushed by Threadrippers. Again, go look at a real studio and not some vague generalization.

Who is Blur



What cpus they are using

 
Ok - so think target market - who is going to max out one of these? People who are serious content creators tied to the job they do. If they need it, they can justify it.
There are people who generate so much profit for their work that even though Apple's options don't make any monetary sense, it's more financially impacting for these people to buy the memory etc. somewhere else and install it than to just buy the Mac Pro pre-configured. Apple is quite brutally preying on the 1% with this thing, the 1% don't actually care, so everyone wins.
 
I assume you are joking right? That seems pretty high...
It's 12x 128GB. Those are anywhere between $1,000 and $2,300 depending on exact speed and design and supplier. So no, $25k for 1.5 TB of current generation, top-speed ECC RAM is not surprising at all. It is at the top-end of the range, but that's been true of Apple supplied upgrades since forever. I expect RAM from Dell would about the same cost (marked up 30-90% over street).
 
This isn't HEDT, this is professional-grade hardware. It is a tool to do a job as efficiently as possible and nothing more.

No one has mentioned the cost of the software that is most likely run on this $30-60k machine (easily in tens to hundreds of thousands per seat), but I know between the cost of the software itself (which is usually extremely thread aware and memory intensive) and the engineer/professional sitting at the chair waiting for their HW to perform a task, the cost of the machine is a drop in the bucket.

Same discussion always come up regarding the price of new Quadro's every round too. Same thing applies to those Apple tools too.

EDIT: and also to add to some of the hackintosh type talk above, no COMPANY is going to have any cobbled together machine some of you have referenced in a production environment. That is an absolute support model nightmare. I call Dell and have a part next-day delivered to me after spending a couple minutes filling out a short form, while you might have to wait weeks for that 1 part to arrive. Downtime is money lost.

There is more to the cost of these machines then just the HW components is my point.
 
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No freaking studio is going to outfit these. One the chip and mb combo is unreliable. Those poor MB's have to deal with a 400w chip and they are prone to failure. At least learn about the darn cpu huh? And on performance they get crushed by Threadrippers. Again, go look at a real studio and not some vague generalization.

I think you underestimate the hoards of Final Cut professionals in the industry. Schools are still pumping them out, including the college I work at. In fact, we even have skills competitions in it. Those people are going to buy a Mac or get jobs at employers that use FCP.

To most of them, a 400watt CPU (and even Threadripper) is meaningless jargon. They will purchase the most powerful Mac they can afford, and most have no idea what hardware is in it other than storage and possibly memory. Sure, there are gear nuts out there. But most creative people are not hardware enthusiasts, they are artists.

It sounds like you have not worked sales before. I worked retail for decades. There are different types of buyers. One very common type, dumps tons of cash to get the most powerful computer (tool) for their task, without having clue whats inside on just the word of a salesperson. If that task is editing 4K video in FCP, they will talk to someone in the Apple store, and then order a very expensive Mac Pro.

Mind you, these buyers exist no matter what you are selling, so its not exclusive to technology.

Edit: Should also mention the prestige buyers. They buy ridiculously expensive things, just to show it off. Lots of them on YouTube now, so they now more visible then ever before.
 
I think you underestimate the hoards of Final Cut professionals in the industry. Schools are still pumping them out, including the college I work at. In fact, we even have skills competitions in it. Those people are going to buy a Mac or get jobs at employers that use FCP.

To most of them, a 400watt CPU (and even Threadripper) is meaningless jargon. They will purchase the most powerful Mac they can afford, and most have no idea what hardware is in it other than storage and possibly memory. Sure, there are gear nuts out there. But most creative people are not hardware enthusiasts, they are artists.

It sounds like you have not worked sales before. I worked retail for decades. There are different types of buyers. One very common type, dumps tons of cash to get the most powerful computer (tool) for their task, without having clue whats inside on just the word of a salesperson. If that task is editing 4K video in FCP, they will talk to someone in the Apple store, and then order a very expensive Mac Pro.

Mind you, these buyers exist no matter what you are selling, so its not exclusive to technology.

Edit: Should also mention the prestige buyers. They buy ridiculously expensive things, just to show it off. Lots of them on YouTube now, so they now more visible then ever before.

That's beside the point I was making which is no studio is buying this for the performance when a Threadripper workstation at less than 1/5th the price will run circles around it. It seems a lot of people posting don't actually support the community in question. Apple is losing it and the community is moving to TR. The writing is on the wall.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-studios-creates-custom-production-pipelines/
 
also not to mention this isn't really shocking at all. A high end maxed out workstation from dell easily tops over 50k before corporate discounts. I had one up to 56k.
 
also not to mention this isn't really shocking at all. A high end maxed out workstation from dell easily tops over 50k before corporate discounts. I had one up to 56k.

"But where did you get those wheels for the Dell?"

Shrug

(in the background notices a Mac Pro up on blocks)
 
NVIDIA refuse to support METAL, OSX is built on METAL now and they want Apple to rewrite everything for CUDA instead, it will never happen. AMD are happy to meet customers (yes Apple are a customer) needs instead of demanding they play in their sand pit instead so they will keep getting the business.
NVIDIA has their heads lodged way too far up their asses for there to be any way hope of them ever getting them removed at this point. AMD really needs to bring the pain with some comparable GPUs.
 
NVIDIA has their heads lodged way too far up their asses for there to be any way hope of them ever getting them removed at this point. AMD really needs to bring the pain with some comparable GPUs.

It is a shame that NVIDIA can't get with it and support what customers need as it would benefit the end consumer greatly. Apple have certainly shown how good even lesser AMD GPU's can be with proper software optimisation. FCPx tends to punch well above its weight performance wise compared to other video suites
 
That's beside the point I was making which is no studio is buying this for the performance when a Threadripper workstation at less than 1/5th the price will run circles around it. It seems a lot of people posting don't actually support the community in question. Apple is losing it and the community is moving to TR. The writing is on the wall.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-studios-creates-custom-production-pipelines/

It's not beside the point. If a studio wants the best FCP performance (which is still the market leader and actually slowly gaining marketshare btw) they are going to buy the new Mac Pro. Because you can't buy a Threadripper workstation for FCP. (Legally and supported anyway).

If you don't use FCP, then sure. You are right. Intel sucks right now and a Threadripper is the obvious choice. But who is going to even consider a new Mac Pro if they don't use FCP? It's obviously made specifically for that purpose.

You are confused. The new Mac Pro doesn't compete with non Apple workstations for buyers. It competes with iMac and MacBook buyers.
 
This is SPECIFIC custom hardware for a specific use case that is validated to work and work well.

Why is it so hard to understand that it costs more than similar hardware?

validation, engineering, marketing, design, research - all of these things take time and resources which = money
 
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This is SPECIFIC custom hardware for a specific use case that is validated to work and work well.

Why is it so hard to understand that it costs more than similar hardware?

validation, engineering, marketing, design, research - all of these things take time which = money

Not to mention agruments about it not having threadripper etc are completely stupid as development of the new Mac Pro would have started years ago when Intel was dominating, its not like you can just drop a run of the mill mainboard in this thing, it is all bespoke.
 
It's not beside the point. If a studio wants the best FCP performance (which is still the market leader and actually slowly gaining marketshare btw) they are going to buy the new Mac Pro. Because you can't buy a Threadripper workstation for FCP. (Legally and supported anyway).

If you don't use FCP, then sure. You are right. Intel sucks right now and a Threadripper is the obvious choice. But who is going to even consider a new Mac Pro if they don't use FCP? It's obviously made specifically for that purpose.

You are confused. The new Mac Pro doesn't compete with non Apple workstations for buyers. It competes with iMac and MacBook buyers.

No one uses FCPX, maybe youtubers... everyone has jumped ship.
 
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I'm seeing a lot of people here who claim to be libertarians who are talking like this offends them. If Apple is making a product people are willing to pay for, good for them.

If people want to pay $8,000.00 for a genetically modified non-allergenic cat, good for them. Everyone else will go to the Humane Society.

If people want to buy a $2,000,000.00 Ferrari, good for them. Everyone else can buy a Corvette.

$7,000.00 for an ugly fish for your aquarium. $800.00 (each) for bodacious but noisy truck tires. $1,000.00 for a pound of nasty caviar. Who cares? This is what makes the economy work. You're astonished that Apple would charge $52,000.00 for a tricked out Mac, but you're paying $5.00 for coffee from Starbucks? And you're doing it because you can afford it, but you're upset because you don't want to lay out that kind of money for a computer?


P.S. Somewhere in the impoverished part of the world some poor kid thinks you're a dickhead because his dad earned $5.00 for an entire days work just to pick the coffee beans that made that cup of Starbucks coffee.


Apple have certainly shown how good even lesser AMD GPU's can be with proper software optimisation.

And so has Microsoft (XBox) and Sony (PS4).
 
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If there was no demand, there would be no supply.
Then why it take Apple 7 years to update the Mac pro? A lot of people did jump ship cause th hardware was to old and slow compared to what could be found on PC. They didn't even lower the prices for the trash can.
 
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Hmm. Lots of opinions.

My own: I'm not in a business sector that makes use of this type of gear. If there is a use case that provides a value proposition, then that's great. It doesn't provide benefit to me, but then, I'm not everyone.


As a tool, as a status symbol accessory...whatever. It seems harmless to me to offer it for sale.

I'd be very interested to see head-to-head performance comparisons in real world uses with other hardware, however. It would be interesting.

In so far as the cost - meh. There's different perspectives. My buddy just bought probably 60-70k in enterprise SSD's to speed up some batch processing. Time gained: something like 4-12 minutes per batch. Resource-intensive enterprise time can be very valuable.
 
You can price out a Dell or HP workstation with similar specs to the new Mac Pro and it will probably cost $40,000 if not more.

Corporations with big budgets and profits will buy the prebuilt reliable machine with a warranty and next day service. High end Mac Pro or Dell/HP workstation is not something most people reading this forum would buy.

Final Cut Pro actually is easier to use and learn then Adobe Premiere and does have its following. It performs well enough even with only a RX580 and some old xeons.

Hackintosh for home use actually is gaining in popularity even with students at design schools like SVA. Students can't afford $6000 for a mac pro. $800 for a hackintosh sure. Many of my creator friends are running hackintosh because its just faster and better then that trashcan. People have hackintosh dual epyc that has to run rings around the new Mac Pro.
 
Almost all my workstations are Macs. Almost all my personal machines are PCs running Windows or Linux/BSD. If we weren't going all-in on SaaS I could make a business case for getting one, albeit with much less than 1.5 TB of RAM (probably 256 GB or 512 GB). Since Apple may or may not decide to upgrade these in the future you're better off getting what you think you can use for several years instead of hoping you can upgrade relatively quickly.
 
Watching pro’s actually use the system instead of bitching about specs. This basically sums up Apple airdrop was dope!

 
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That's ironic cuz Scott doesn't do sfx, he has it farmed out. As for Lucas and ILM, they're on threadrippers epycs.

That’s actually cool to know.

the article was just blabbing on as an apparent example

“Apple’s attempt to meet the needs of people like Ridley Scott”.

So I was paraphrasing the “like”
 
And they will drop support for it so you have to buy a new one. A $1000 windows computer will last more than twice as long.
 
I think you underestimate the hoards of Final Cut professionals in the industry. Schools are still pumping them out, including the college I work at. In fact, we even have skills competitions in it. Those people are going to buy a Mac or get jobs at employers that use FCP.

To most of them, a 400watt CPU (and even Threadripper) is meaningless jargon. They will purchase the most powerful Mac they can afford, and most have no idea what hardware is in it other than storage and possibly memory. Sure, there are gear nuts out there. But most creative people are not hardware enthusiasts, they are artists.

It sounds like you have not worked sales before. I worked retail for decades. There are different types of buyers. One very common type, dumps tons of cash to get the most powerful computer (tool) for their task, without having clue whats inside on just the word of a salesperson. If that task is editing 4K video in FCP, they will talk to someone in the Apple store, and then order a very expensive Mac Pro.

Mind you, these buyers exist no matter what you are selling, so its not exclusive to technology.

Edit: Should also mention the prestige buyers. They buy ridiculously expensive things, just to show it off. Lots of them on YouTube now, so they now more visible then ever before.

Yep. The answer to "why is this so expensive" is that it doesn't matter why. Price is only one part of the calculus.

I'm not an Apple guy, but the predictable "lol expensive cheese grater, I can just go down to Microcenter and build my own pee cee for way less" posts always give my scrollwheel a workout. Apple has focus-grouped the shit out of this - up, down, and sideways - and know exactly who the target market is. And more power to them.
 
This isn't HEDT, this is professional-grade hardware. It is a tool to do a job as efficiently as possible and nothing more.

No one has mentioned the cost of the software that is most likely run on this $30-60k machine (easily in tens to hundreds of thousands per seat), but I know between the cost of the software itself (which is usually extremely thread aware and memory intensive) and the engineer/professional sitting at the chair waiting for their HW to perform a task, the cost of the machine is a drop in the bucket.

Same discussion always come up regarding the price of new Quadro's every round too. Same thing applies to those Apple tools too.

EDIT: and also to add to some of the hackintosh type talk above, no COMPANY is going to have any cobbled together machine some of you have referenced in a production environment. That is an absolute support model nightmare. I call Dell and have a part next-day delivered to me after spending a couple minutes filling out a short form, while you might have to wait weeks for that 1 part to arrive. Downtime is money lost.

There is more to the cost of these machines then just the HW components is my point.
In professional industry if downtime is that expensive then you have spare machines... At 10k a minute, waiting a day for Dell to send an often useless tech out is a huge waste of money and time. And yes people do build their own shit at high levels, in many different disciplines, just because you ain't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
 
If there was no demand, there would be no supply.
University students buying licenses != demand.
Just like in my country there is a glut of camera operators, but universities are still full of them because selling the sizzle always works.
 
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