Master_Pain
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2007
- Messages
- 4,947
$25k for 1.5TB of Memory. Not bad.
I assume you are joking right? That seems pretty high...
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$25k for 1.5TB of Memory. Not bad.
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.
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.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.
I assume you are joking right? That seems pretty high...
This is no different than a Rolls Royce versus a BMW/Merc/Audi. If you want to pay for that next level of luxury and performance you will do so.
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).I assume you are joking right? That seems pretty high...
the engineer/professional sitting at the chair waiting for their HW to perform a task
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.
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.
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 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.
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/
just make you own for a fraction of the price
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
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.
Apple have certainly shown how good even lesser AMD GPU's can be with proper software optimisation.
No one uses FCPX, maybe youtubers... everyone has jumped ship.
you'll lose the warranty on the monitor unless you use their extremely expensive and proprietary Apple cleansing cloth:
Apple: Use only our special cloth to clean the $1,000 coating on our $7,000 Pro Display
Hmm wonder how much the cleaning cloth is..?
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.If there was no demand, there would be no supply.
I guess Ridley Scott and George Lucas are ordering..
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/the-mac-pro-is-not-overpriced/
That's ironic cuz Scott doesn't do sfx, he has it farmed out. As for Lucas and ILM, they're onthreadrippersepycs.
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.
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.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.
University students buying licenses != demand.If there was no demand, there would be no supply.