Not to be pedantic but the Dell machine is on sale, and Apple isn't.

It's list price is $4,420.29 which is still about $1500 off. But that comes with Windows that supports 4 cores so you would need to upgrade to the 4+ cores one thats another $100 so more like $1400.

So basically $1400 is the difference between a top tier Dell and a top tier Apple. Still a fairly large margin, but after a certain number the amount matters less. People who are buying $4500 computers typically don't care about spending another $1000.

Dells are always on "sale". It's part of some game involving enterprise sales and negotiated discounts off list price.

Yep. Dell's website will always show a sales price. Even better, use a different browser or refresh a hour later and the price will change as well. Even Lenovo and HP do it. The best is when you enter the configuration for a PC build and hit refresh and you see individual items change in prices.

Also if you go via a Dell sales rep you easily get 10% extra off that "sales price" for low volume buyers and if you are a large volume buyer you can easily get as much as 50% off the list price even for high ticket value items.

Likewise for Apple (though I guess Dell's discounts are more substantial

Wait what? Apple rarely if ever has "sales" on their products, I've seen student discounts and itunes gift cards, but that's about it.

At Dell/HP/Lenovo meanwhile half their products are "on sale" the same way that furniture stores have "sales" - its "sale" price is basically it's real price.

They don't have sales, but they definitely have 'sales team pricing' .

Speak for yourself. My laptop cost almost $5,000, my desktop cost almost $3,000 to build, and you can bet that another $1,400 would have made a huge difference either way. Not to say things wouldnt have ended up the same way, but I definitely would have cared about another $1400.

When you're talking about numbers like that for individuals, 15% is a lot. Even businesses would care about a 15% increase in costs

I think it hurts when the last $1400 is basically 12 Thunderbolt 3 ports and the power allowance for them. There's no value in that many TB3 ports for most people.

Well, I think the point of the Mac Pro is that it's not for most people.

It's actually a "Pro" product.

They could have put most of those TB3 ports and controllers in optional PCIe cards and the $4999 base model would still be Pro. Because the point of the Pro devices is to be the more-powerful option.

The iPad Pro doesn't have any TB ports and the Macbook Pro and iMac Pro only have 4 each so I think 12 is simply unnecessary for the "Pro" moniker in addition to greatly exceeding most people's requirements.

Most of us here are "pros" who use our computers to make money.

Maybe if Mac Pros were designed for animation studios or something niche, the pricing would make sense.

The "Pro" suffix completely lost its value with the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

How? Have you used the Pro phone?

When Gizmodo tried, the Dell they built cost $8000:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/06/is-the-new-mac-pro-hands-...

If I were to guess the reason for the difference, I'd notice:

- Your Dell has a SATA SSD, the Mac Pro has an NVMe SSD

- Your Dell has no wifi/bluetooth, the Mac Pro has WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0

- Your Dell has 1 gigabit Ethernet, the Mac Pro has 2x10 gigabit Ethernet

- Your Dell has no Thunderbolt 3 ports, the Mac Pro has 8

- Your Dell doesn't come with a keyboard and mouse, the Mac Pro does

- Your Dell doesn't have any equivalent for Apple's T2 chip or Afterburner card

Although the Gizmodo one doesn't have a lot of these, either. Most of the price difference seems to have to do with yours being a Precision 5820 and Gizmodo's being a Precision 7920. I'm not sure exactly what the difference is here, but it might have something to do with expandability?

If you're not concerned with expandability, the iMac Pro seems to have better specs for a lower price, and may be a fairer comparison.

The 'Afterburner card' isn't present in the base configuration of Mac Pro we know the price for.

Dell can add an NVMe SSD, wifi, bluetooth, 2x10 gigabit ethernet, and a keyboard and mouse. Those increase the price by $400. Dell will do two thunderbolt ports for $70, so 8 would be $280.

So unfortunately the things you've listed only explain $680 of the price difference.

Yeah, like I said, a lot of the difference seems to be that yours is a Precision 5820 and Gizmodo's is a Precision 7920. Understanding the reason for the price difference there is probably pretty relevant to this.

The specs you've listed aren't sufficient to describe the differences. Here are some additional numbers to consider:

Mac: 1.4 KW supply, 2933MHz memory (with 12+ core), 24.5 MB cpu cache, 2.6GB/2.7GBbytes/sec SSD R/W (encrypted), Afterburner ProRes and ProRes Raw available, crazy quiet, radical thermal management, ...

Dell: 0.95 KW supply, 2666MHz memory, 8MB cpu cache, 500K/300Kbytes/sec SSD R/W, ...

Apple has designed fully custom I/O controller chips for things like SSD interfaces and the Afterburner MPX modules that have some insane specs. Simple top line specs just don't tell the whole story.

Current Imac Pros are already getting 2.4GB/3GBbytes/sec SSD RW. Even the current macbook pro gets 1.7GB/1.4GByte speeds. Nonetheless, if these high impact details don't matter to you, don't buy it. No big deal. Just don't oversimplify the comparison. Of course, we haven't even mentioned the OS differences...

The only Mac with a price announced has a Xeon W-3223 and to get a fair comparison price for the Dell, I selected the Xeon W-2145.

That means the Mac has 8 cores, 3.50 GHz, 16.5 MB cache, 2666 MHz memory [1] while the Dell has 8 cores, 3.70 GHz, 11 MB cache, 2666 MHz memory [2].

So the Mac has slightly more cache, while the Dell has a slightly higher clock speed.

I'm not sure I understand how the availability of accelerator cards that aren't fitted in either machine is relevant to a price comparison?

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/193739/... [2] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/126707/...

You're also paying for 12 Thunderbolt 3 ports. They really could have made some of those optional since there's PCIe slots too. In addition to expensive parts I believe TB3 requires licensing costs too but I'm not sure if Apple has to because I think it was partially created by them.

What GPUs?

The Mac has a radeon pro 580X - G3DMark 7540 [1] - while the Dell has a nvidia quadro P4000 - G3D Mark 10465 [2]

No evidence a difference in graphics cards accounts for the price difference.

[1] https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+Pro+58... [2] https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?id=3719