This is the only traditional desktop computer that Apple sells, so it’s disappointing that everybody outside of movie studio employees has to fall back to an iMac or a Windows/Linux machine.
> Prices ranged from $1,599 to $3,499,
According to one online inflation calculator, $1599 in 2000 dollars is $2,372.95 in 2019 dollars. and $3499 is $5,192.58.
So, I guess, yeah.I do recall them seeming awfully expensive.
I agree this new release seems awfully awfully expensive.
By 2012, the entry level Mac tower was up to $2499. Since 2013, the cheapest Mac Pro (no PCI/E slots) has been $2999.
The 2019 model is literally more than twice as expensive as the 2013, which in turn was already the previous most-expensive entry-level Mac workstation ever.
PowerMac/MacPro prices have always seemed steep, but this is a new ballgame even for Apple.
It's about $23k in 2019 dollars.
Mac IIcx, 16 MHz 68030, 4 MiB RAM, 80MiB HD: $7069
Radius two-page display (19”): $1495
Monochrome video card: $699
Extended Keyboard II: $229
Also in googling for it I found it had been featured in Jurassic Park: https://productplacementblog.com/movies/supermatch-20-t-moni...
Accounting for inflation, the old 2012 cheese grater models started at $3150 in 2019 dollars. The older models were $1000 cheaper
No, but an entry-level SGI Octane was like TWENTY GRAND back then. The Mac Pro is what occupies that space today.
- Apple finally made the RAM on the new Mac Mini upgradeable, but it is not user-serviceable; you have to get the RAM installed by an Apple-authorized repair center in order for the warranty to stay valid on the Mac Mini. The same holds true for the iMac Pro.
- The Mac Mini lacks expansion slots. All expansion must be done externally using Thunderbolt or USB-3.
Until the 2013 Mac Pro was released, Apple has sold an entry-level Power Mac or Mac Pro model for around $2,500 in inflation-adjusted currency that was user-serviceable and has expansion slots. The 2013 Mac Pro was still user-serviceable, but it lacked expansion slots. Now Apple is finally selling a user-serviceable, expandable Mac, but at prices that are beyond what many users can afford. There are no user-serviceable, expandable Macs that cost under $5,999.
I'm pretty confident this isn't legal in the US. Under a law from the 70's the FTC released a letter reiterating this fact last year. Apple and other companies have made this purposefully vague as well as fighting right to repair laws.
> There are no user-serviceable, expandable Macs that cost under...
This has been a gripe against Apple for at least 20 years.
1. Apple first failed to update the cheese grater line for years consecutively
2. Then Apple's redesign of the Mac Pro transformed it into a larger Mac Mini trashcan which wasn't really expandable compared to the original cheese grater line. No one asked for that.
There is evidence for demand for a reasonably priced Mac Pro Tower if you look at the Hackintosh community and eBay sales of older cheese grater Mac Pros, but Apple keeps refusing to meet demand.
There is "niche" demand for consumer towers, sure, but I don't think it would be worth Apple's effort. The iMac 5K is really good, and its even the cheapest option to get one of the best displays out there.
> It's for people who don't know what a CPU core is but know how to produce a platinum album, get an Oscar nomination, or bring a revolutionary industrial design to market.
Wait, what? When I say "for pros" I mean able to support latest specs. Something that had the latest NVIDIA cards, or could at least USE the latest NVIDIA cards to do ML or rendering would qualify under most people's definition of Pro I think? Right? When did the definition of Pro become "Music Producer"?
My lab has grant support. I've bought workstations just as expensive as this recently, but then new Apple ones are non-starters, even if I've been using Macs since I was in 2nd grade.
And to think music studios need so much horsepower when "Sgt. Pepper's" was recorded on 4 tracks…
What audio effects there were in Sgt. Pepper’s were generated in analogue effects pedals and synths. Today, those same effects are expected to be simulated, in parallel, in realtime, on the DAW you’re producing the track on. (And modern music genres use way more effect layers. Modern pop music is a fifty-deep effects tree with one-second-long samples at the bottom, with full-fidelity rendering of such monitored in real-time as performers feed vocals and other live input in.)
Estimates are > 700 hours for the album; 700/13 = more than 50 hours per track. A lot of that time was bouncing down 4 tracks to smaller numbers for future takes.
Currently, his only outstanding need is for better render times on Final Cut Pro (rendering videos of conference proceedings for YouTube), but I know he'll balk at $6000 for the new Mac Pro. I don't know what I'll recommend.
> It's for people who don't know what a CPU core is
We were talking about different kind of "Pro", lol.
And issue is not in butterfly keyboard - humans can adapt to different things. Issue that keyboard breaks too often.
The new Mac Pro is for movie studios and maybe very large machine learning models.
You have to wonder how many you could reasonably expect to sell that way, though. Everyone in this thread is talking about some upper-elite of pro computer users (above your ordinary multi-six-figure developer salary on HN), but at only $6k per, that's not any way to make money. If that's really the target market, I would worry about making my design money back, let alone making a profit.
So I have to assume that that's not quite true: it's a computer targeted at studios, other million dollar a year creative professionals, and (the largest market) relatively rich folks who want to play at being creative professionals. Nothing else makes sense: it's not a computer for enthusiasts, because it's at least 50% overpriced for the market, it's not for developers, as this thread amply illustrates. Consumers are far more likely to buy an iMac than a Mac Pro if they have a desktop at all. The only major market left are people with enough disposable income to buy products because of their branding and because they know it's what the fancy creatives are buying. Buying a Mac Pro will make you feel like a multimillionaire creative - that's the selling point.
It's really the same principle as in digital cameras. Pricey full frame SLRs like the Canon 5D mk.IV are great cameras that are essential to photography professionals, but the vast majority of the market for these cameras is wealthy people who want to buy the expensive model from a recognizable name brand because "it's what the pros use".
Edit: perhaps those who disagree with this could provide their own breakdown of who they think is the target market for these, and how many Apple can expect to sell to each.
So no Nvidia cards is a feature for me.
[1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/blob/master/Docs/Mo...
I don't know much more about Metal beyond that though.
In terms of just GPGPU performance Vega is pretty competitive against Nvidia. It's not nearly as one-sided as the gaming space is. That is, in fact, the one saving grace of the Radeon VII in the first place vs. the RTX 2080 - its stronger professional workload capabilities.
What do 3D modelers use CUDA for? I know it gets used for machine learning, but I'm not familiar with what else.
So, my bold prediction: Apple is going to shred Nvidia to pieces within the next 10 years.
CUDA/OpenCL is all about writing super parallelism code to be run on the GPU instead of CPU, so many trivially parallel problems are usually outsourced to it.
Source: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/mac-pro-cylinder-...
That $8000 base model Boxx workstation has 20 cores instead of 8, 50% more RAM, and twice the storage.
You would get something like this instead of consumer hardware because man hours cost real money. At a previous job they wanted a VR PC, so someone speced out a bunch of high end parts and a case with flashy lights. A couple days of my salary went to putting it all together. That was the first time I had to RMA a motherboard. When I asked they didn't think to confirm the GPU would fit in the case and luckily it did. It also took a couple weeks longer than it should to get up and running because of things like this.
Some specialty software is only certified for specific hardware. You can probably deviate, but it's like building a hackintosh. You might not be able to upgrade it and the man hours will likely kill any benefit.
I also see a lot of managers forget that artists aren't always tech savvy. Honestly, you don't pay them to be tech support, anyway. You want to pay a known quantity and get improved return. It can be a huge time suck to nickel-and-dime when you're tying to manage large projects.
However, using consumer grade hardware has its place.
Honestly, Apple wasn't what I had in mind when I was replying. Personally, I've had to deal with HP z-series workstations compared to various cobbled together machines. Having machines where the series will be in production for a decade, data sheets are readily available, fewer tools needed to open it and install stuff saves so much time and allows less downtime and faster turnaround.
The only reason I'm even waiting is because Zen 2 is right around the corner.
The 256GB SSD is so confusing. The price difference between a 970 EVO 256GB and a 970 EVO 512GB for example is only $50 (I couldn't even find a 256GB 970 PRO or 980). Are they really that desperate for margin on a machine this expensive?
The lack of NVidia is also strange, do the AMD cards in this config even support Tensorflow?
Whether it's an exclusivity deal or not we may never know. But it does seem strange given Nvidia cards generally have lower TDP/performance (something all macs struggle with)
But this one has PCIE ports so theoretically nothing is stopping the average joe from just adding a GTX 1070? That'd certainly add a lot more justification for updating the drivers I hope.
Cheers to everyone who wants nvidia drivers for hackintoshs :D
With the T2 chip this may not be an option forever, and the initial setup means it may not be an option for everyone. But right now it feels like a very stable and viable option for those who were never going to buy a $6000 cheese grater in the first place.
Awesome. It's great that you choose to do that. You're also not the target market for this product.
This is a product for people and companies for whom increased performance equals increased revenue.
Had I been able to justify it, I could have also chosen n-core Xeon processors (some people do go this route) and I still wouldn't have been anywhere near $6000, and that's the base model here. That's obscene, and in that light I think that my original comment is relevant.
From The Verge:
> Still, all hope isn’t lost: we also don’t know how robust the box that the Pro Display XDR comes in is. It’s entirely plausible that you’ll just be able to prop up the $5,999 display with a hunk of cardboard or by leaning it up against a wall. Just be careful not to drop it.
I don't know why but I've thought something like that would almost be an ideal vehicle for xeon-d type parts.
(I aggree - I feel like maybe I will never be able to afford or justify a Mac-based system in my 3rd world country...)
People just want an affordable desktop that you can easily expand over time. At $6000 just for the starting model, in my head I'm already planning to move back to Windows. The only major thing I might miss is iCloud. The cheese grater lineup is still the best incarnation of the Mac Pro overall.
People don't want to be forced to buy an integrated screen, nor do they want a headless laptop, and not everyone can live with a laptop alone. In other words, I don't want a semi-powerful machine trapped in amber or a larger version of an iPhone / iPad.
I just have to figure out a good replacement for iCloud and its related apps.
Who wants that? You can tell what people want based on what’s selling in the market. Most people want a laptop. Most of the rest want a Word/Excel machine. A small minority want an expandable desktop.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/hackintoshes-keep-gi...
The solution I settled on was a Mac Mini to serve as my interface and run desktop applications, and a big hefty expandable Threadripper box running Linux that I SSH into to do all heavy lifting (and that I can put away in a closet). A NAS holds most files.
I've been really happy with the Mac Mini for this role, and the Threadripper box provides more power than I could reasonably get from any Mac.
Anyways I found my solution: iCloud for Windows https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204301
This is going to make my transition back to Windows much easier. Maybe the people at Apple have failed to realized that Windows has gotten a lot better under Nadella?
There's the Windows Subsystem for Linux as well: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about Not to mention stuff like docker also made working on Windows less of an issue and I think Ubuntu will be shipping on Windows by default in the future.
This release was the last straw.
Also, the Mac Mini isn’t glued shut, first thing I did when I got it after verifying that it booted was to swap in 32 gigs of aftermarket RAM.
But good luck!
You are right about the higher quality software on the Mac. I will miss that but I’m not sure how long it’ll last given Apple’s hardware direction. You can already see it with the rise of electron based apps
It’s a pain upgrading the mini compared to a bigger box. You run into all kinds of annoyances. Also I want to upgrade storage as well and not just the ram.
Maybe when remote VSCode improves I'll try that.
One thing you can do is run a Linux VM locally with VMWare’s shared folder stuff (annoying to get working but solid once working). Develop using your local IDE, test locally on your VM, and then check in/check out on the heavy weight machine once you have something ready to run something big. Depends on what you’re doing, though. For machine learning, Jupyter is niceish.
Its not like people haven't been able to run it illegally in a vm for at least a decade. That was one of the preferred ways of running it if your machine didn't have the exact correct hardware requirements back when I paid attention to such things.
I hoped for the same price point since it comes without a monitor.
Worse than just not supporting gaming, they're antagonistically blocking companies like Nvidia who tried to fill in the gap with external GPUs.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/18/apples-management...
If you want to game, you buy Windows, end of story.
They just announced PS4 and Xbox One gamepad support and had Mojang on stage to demo a new version of Minecraft in this very keynote.
Question is why people keep wanting MacOS to be a hardcore gaming platform.
I don't think any of those games are GPU intensive. Blizzard seems to want their games to run on as many machines as possible, and Rimworld and Factorio are both 2D.
I wouldn't recommend it for gaming as it doesn't shed heat fast enough. You can build a separate really good gaming PC for ~$1000 and still be far off from even the iMac Pro.
It's like the previous generation of Apple computers were primarily designed for people in crowded metros like Tokyo. I still don't understand Apple designers' obsession with compactness for their desktops at the cost of everything else.
> I worked at two movie studios (Pixar, Weta Digital) and they were both almost 100% Linux with a smattering of Windows machines here and there. Apple stuff was mainly iPads for story boarding and that kind of stuff.
https://schuttejoe.github.io/post/disneypostmortem/
> This image was rendered at 2048x858 with 256spp and took 3.5 hours to render. I allowed it access to 28Gb of RAM but had to estimate how much embree would use for BVH data so it occasionally would exceed that number enough that the OS would start paging.
When you are paying tens of thousands of dollars you don't want to be stuck in Apple's weird AMD-only walled garden.
Mac Pro will start at USD 5999, Pro Display at 4999 (without stand), matte version will cost 5999, stand for display 999 or 200 for the vesa mount adapter.
I feel stupid for not knowing this. Haven't seen it in the Apple Store app.
Otherwise seems like a good machine. But not at this price. Probably configuration that I would like to have will be something around $10k and I'll build this configuration for $3k myself.