Two years ago I purchased a dual Xeon E5 workstation for 32 total HT cores, along with 128 GB, an Intel NVMe SSD, a GeForce 9-series GPU, and two 40-inch 4K 60 Hz displays for ~$5,000. Today's typical $5K workstation would presumably include an nVidia 10-series Titan and possibly an Optane SSD. And today you'd probably go with those sweet 43-inch LG 4K monitors that have matte screens (oh how I miss when matte displays were common).
I mean, I get it. This review is about the fastest official MacOS platform around. It's not concerned with Hackintoshes and certainly not concerned with Windows or Linux. That's fair. But this review is also unintentionally about how outdated the previous-generation Mac hardware is. Catching up to the present is a big deal, and congratulations to Apple on that, but how about not falling so far behind the present in the first place?
As for the computer, the CPU alone is about US$ 1400. Add PCIe flash storage, RAM, a US$ 800-1000 GPU and you are quickly matching that US$ 5000 range for a regular PC running Linux, even before you add a 5K HDR monitor.
While I don't begrudge someone who enjoys a small monitor, for me, usable screen real estate is priority #1. Pixel density is nice, but not at the expense of usable real estate. So I'll take two (or even one!) 40-inch 4K monitors running at 100% UI zoom over a small 5K monitor running at 250% UI zoom.
I'm not sure why you mentioned televisions. The displays I bought in 2015 are Philips BDM4065UC monitors [1], which clocked in at $700 a piece in 2015.
> As for the computer, the CPU alone is about US$ 1400. Add PCIe flash storage, RAM, a US$ 800-1000 GPU and you are quickly matching that US$ 5000 range for a regular PC running Linux, even before you add a 5K HDR monitor.
In 2015, I was able to build out a 32 HT core dual Xeon E5v3 with 128 GB of ECC DDR4, an Intel NVMe SSD, a Samsung SATA SSD, and a 9-series nVidia GPU for ~$3,500. The two 4K monitors brought the grand total very close to $5K.
Today, $5K should get you the same along with some mix of more cores, faster clock rates, a 10-series nVidia GPU, or possibly even an Optane SSD.
I suspect that small 5K monitor Apple is using is a major cost driver. It's a shame it's permanently affixed to the computer and not optional.
[1] https://www.philips.com.au/c-p/BDM4065UC_75/brilliance-led-b...
Cabel Sasser noted 41% improvement Mac Pro 6 core -> iMac Pro 10 core :
https://twitter.com/cabel/status/940669012765065216
Speed. We tried compiling one of our meatier Xcode projects on the iMac Pro (10-core Xeon W, 3 GHz) vs. our standard Mac Pro (3.5 GHz Xeon E5, 6-core). Sure, the Mac Pro is old, but the iMac Pro compiled the project 41% faster. A pretty sincere boost.
As in, if this is a workload you care about, maybe what you really want is a 64 core EPYC not the "lowend" 10-core Xeon they managed to fit into the display.
Isn’t this simply a consequence of Apple not having any competitive pro desktop hardware since 2013?
I’m not sure they deserve praise for just catching up.