They are tools. If you have specific workloads that these excel at in your job/hobby/money-making venture, then the price shouldn't be a concern.
Depending on workload, they are comparable to $1000 PC laptops in CPU performance... or $3000 PCs. Or PCs that don't exist yet!
As someone who uses a laptop for gaming, my $1000 laptop is infinitely superior to a $6000 Macbook Pro (for the games that I play). For almost every other use, the Macbook Pro is likely far superior!
If you do Final Cut or Xcode work, these are the best tool available to you.
But the technology nerd in me still wants to buy one for completely irrational reasons.
But also, if you're a developer without any interest in Apple (and maybe someone who wants to play games), the case for using Linux for general-purpose computing is stronger than ever. It will be interesting to see how Apple addresses their own issues in MacOS over the next few months, I've really got my fingers crossed for Vulkan support or 32-bit libraries making a return.
You don’t have to consider just the CPU and GPU but the whole SoC. CPU is impressive and GPU is good, but for standard workloads some PCs may give you slightly better performances (on the GPU side), at the cost of needing the power adapter to show that. However, for some specific workloads (especially the ones involving ProRaw video) the custom modules in it make it perform better not only than a Mac Pro, but than every other machine in the market. There is also the Neural Engine that could be more important in the future.
You may not need those modules, but it seems like we are forgetting this are laptops with screens, inputs and more. These machines have one of the best screens, with high DPI, high refresh rate but most important the miniLED technology which brings true HDR. And that’s something very pricey.
Far from defending Apple, they could sell this laptops for less and we would all be happier, but at the end of the day these machines are worthy in every aspect (specific cases aside).
A problem is that such great display is bundled even if don't need.
That's $3670 -- If I build it myself. I'd expect to pay much more from a big box store for a prebuilt.
A new 14" MacBook with M1 Max, 2TB SSD, and 64GB of RAM is around $4100.
That's a great deal IMO
- I would never spend $400 for a 24" display, nor $400 for keyboard + mouse + cooling $400. I mainly use computers for HPC, so that's a totally unnecessary spending to me, you can get all those for just around $200-$300, so your estimate is unnecessarily inflated by at least $500-$600.
- You can't pair 5950x with DDR5 RAM. If future devices are on table, consider comparing against Alder Lake S CPUs, which beat M1 Max in all metrics. You can pair 5950x with DDR4 only, and 64GB DDR4 RAM prices start from just $215 (which is more than $500 less than what you quote).
- The GPU and DDR5 prices you are quoting are not their normal vendor prices (GPU shortage + virtually no RAM vendors started selling DDR5 and no CPUs or motherboards that can utilize them are sold as of today). MSRP price for RTX 3060 is $329, which is $400 less than the current unstable price. Remember that this pricing did not affect OEMs in the same manner, so you can buy computers from Dell/IBM/etc without inflated GPU prices.
- Not to mention the elephant in the room of lacking software support. Why willingly become vendor locked into using ARM Mac OS? Moreover, HPC software relies on Intel CPUs with Intel MKL and even using AMD's CPU can cripple performance. With an ARM CPU or x86/amd64 translation layer, that's far worse (which might also apply to gaming).
- Apple's offering still is a weaker computer in terms of raw hardware performance (especially on multi-core loads, by a large margin) for $500 (or $1000 if we cut luxurious spending on monitors, cooling, and an additional ~$1000 if we replace your DDR5 guesstimate with actually DDR4 prices and use MSRP price for the GPU) more by your estimation. The desktop RTX 3060 is also a better GPU.
So, why should I pay $2000 more for a weaker computer? (with broken-at-best HPC software/Linux support, no less!) That's just nonsense.
Having shopped it recently, the desktop monitor market is abysmal right now. To get a monitor remotely comparable to the new MBP internal displays you're looking at spending $3k on one of a tiny handful of FALD displays which run hot enough to need a fan and have worse DPI, or rearranging your desk setup to accommodate a 48" LG OLED TV which is subject to burnin with serious usage.
Apple can't release those lower-priced 27" displays that've been rumored soon enough.
https://www.newegg.com/crucial-64gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82...
2TB NVMe SSD, $199:
https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-2tb-blue-sn550-nvme/p...
X570 board, $154:
https://www.newegg.com/asrock-x570-phantom-gaming-4/p/N82E16...
Case, keyboard, mouse, fans:
https://www.newegg.com/petrol-blue-fractal-design-focus-g-at... https://www.newegg.com/logitech-mk120-920-002565-usb-wired/p... https://www.newegg.com/p/13C-0007-001M0?Item=9SIABW9EME4036
Together ~$100.
You're off by about $1000.
https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-64gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82...
Here's a 2TB SSD for $143:
https://www.newegg.com/leven-2tb/p/1B0-016A-00002?Item=9SIAW...
But then you don't have PCIe 4.0 and it's 4x16GB instead of 2x32GB and it's SATA instead of NVMe.
Here's how you spend >$700 on 64GB of memory:
https://www.newegg.com/ballistix-64gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N...
$894!
But wait, here's the same thing for $310:
https://www.newegg.com/ballistix-64gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N...
It's a different color. Apparently that's what you get for the extra $584.
There's getting cheaper stuff and then there's just paying a different amount of money.
The $143 SSD you found is 540Mb/s. So < 1/10th the speed.
Both the Samsung and the Apple SSDs are just a bad fit for a machine like this. For a non-I/O bound workload it's paying money for nothing. For a read-bound workload, the machine has 64GB of RAM, so you'd need a working set larger than that to have to care, and that's pretty rare. For a write-bound workload, at those speeds, you're going to melt a consumer-grade SSD and need an enterprise one. So you don't want the faster one in this machine; either it's not worth the price or it won't survive that amount of write load.
Also, if you are getting a $15 mouse/keyboard, why are you even gaming/doing graphic work in the first place? Might as well get a raspberry-pi.
That cheap-ass cooler isn't that bad. It's pretty middle of the road. Personally I'd have the Hyper 212 Evo for $39 because it's not that much more expensive, but that plus a ~$60 case and a ~$20 keyboard and mouse still isn't $400.
The main difference between the plain keyboard and your average "gamer" keyboard is what, RGB LEDs? You can pay the money for that if you like, but there are no RGB LEDs on the Mac.
I fail to find that anywhere in the specs. It says 8 SATA3 slots and 2 PCIe 4 slots. It is not clear if you can boot/configure them from the BIOS.
> That cheap-ass cooler isn't that bad. It's pretty middle of the road. Personally I'd have the Hyper 212 Evo for $39 because it's not that much more expensive
The cooler is critical if you are doing CPU intensive work. A hot CPU will get throttled; so you'd better get a very good one if you are already paying a lot for your CPU.
> The main difference between the plain keyboard and your average "gamer" keyboard is what, RGB LEDs? You can pay the money for that if you like, but there are no RGB LEDs on the Mac.
No. The grip and precision are night and day. Even more so for mouses that I can't move back to normal ones (I had the G900 and now have the razer viper ultimate; this thing made the carpal tunnel syndrome a thing of the past and I use the mouse for 10+ hours per day).
1 x Hyper M.2 Socket (M2_1), supports M Key type 2230/2242/2260/2280/22110 M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen4 x4 (64Gb/s) (with Matisse) or Gen3 x4 (32Gb/s) (with Pinnacle Ridge and Picasso)*
1 x Hyper M.2 Socket (M2_3), supports M Key type 2230/2242/2260/2280/22110 M.2 SATA3 6.0Gb/s module and M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen4 x4 (64Gb/s) (with Matisse) or Gen3 x4 (32Gb/s) (with Pinnacle Ridge and Picasso)*
* Supports NVMe SSD as boot disks
Look under the Specs tab. You can also see them in the pictures.
> No. The grip and precision are night and day. Even more so for mouses that I can't move back to normal ones (I had the G900 and now have the razer viper ultimate; this thing made the carpal tunnel syndrome a thing of the past and I use the mouse for 10+ hours per day).
So that's completely reasonable, but now you're adding whatever that costs to the price of the Mac too.
The specs we're looking at here are pretty general. Most workloads are either going to be CPU bound or GPU bound, not both. Do you need the 5950X? Then you're CPU bound and can save $500 with another GPU. Do you need the RTX 3060? Then you're GPU bound and can save $500 with another CPU.
If you need the fast GPU in the Mac, it comes as one piece in a machine that starts at $3500.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/msi-ddr5-ram-will-cost-60-more-th...
That SSD is 2600mbs while the MacBook is 7400mbs. The Samsung Pro is the only SSD in that territory.
Buy a cheap motherboard and you'll pay the price later. I didn't spec a $800 motherboard (though those are amazing). I went quite middle-of-the-road for an x570.
A keyboard with a fingerprint reader will set you back at least $50 with a Surface keyboard costing $100. A comparable trackpad would be over $100, but even a midrange $50 mouse.
A non-garbage case will be around $100 plus or minus a little.
A decent air CPU cooler that will keep your CPU from throttling way back is going to run close to $80-120. I also didn't bother to price out all the little things.
I forgot to add a PSU by the way. A name-brand, modular PSU with midrange internals that is just big enough (around 5-600w) is another $100-120.
Naturally it's DDR4. The 5950X only supports DDR4. If it had DDR5 it would be twice as fast on all the things the M1 Max is doing well on as a result of having more memory bandwidth.
> That SSD is 2600mbs while the MacBook is 7400mbs. The Samsung Pro is the only SSD in that territory.
This is kind of fair, but then that's the other problem. For most workloads a 2600MBps read speed is already going to move the bottleneck somewhere else, especially on a machine with 64GB memory to use as cache. If you're the rare exception who actually benefits from it, the Samsung one is available, but for everybody else they get to save $170 by not coupling the fast CPU they actually want with an expensive SSD that wasn't their bottleneck and has a poor cost benefit ratio.
> Buy a cheap motherboard and you'll pay the price later.
How do you mean? At best it won't have some ports you eventually want and then you buy the add-in card later and spend half as much on it because by then the price is lower.
$155 is a fairly high price for a motherboard. $300 is a severe price. The most common ones are like $70.
> A keyboard with a fingerprint reader will set you back at least $50 with a Surface keyboard costing $100. A comparable trackpad would be over $100, but even a midrange $50 mouse.
The logitech keyboard and mouse are perfectly serviceable and on par with anything you get when you buy a complete PC from the store. I would take them over the chiclet thing that Apple makes.
You can have a $100 keyboard and a trackpad to use with your desktop, but now you have an advantage over the Macbook, because you get to buy it once and use it forever instead of it being permanently attached to a machine that will be obsolete before the keyboard is. So you get to amortize the cost over several hardware generations.
The same goes for the monitor for that matter.
> A non-garbage case will be around $100 plus or minus a little.
How is the thing provided a garbage case? What am I not getting from it that I actually care about?
> A decent air CPU cooler that will keep your CPU from throttling way back is going to run close to $80-120.
That was a decent air CPU cooler. It has copper heat pipes and a 92mm fan. The crappy ones are like $13:
https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-air-cooler-series-rh-a3...
A really great one is $39:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005O65JXI
I went to see what you would get for $120 and for that price some of the coolers included a CPU.
The coolers bundled with some CPUs have similar issues, and are noisy to boot. Unless budget is hyper-restrictive, one is doing themselves a disservice by not bumping cooler budget to at least $50-$60 for something with a 120mm fan, decent number of heatpipes, and decent fin surface area like a Scythe Mugen 5 Rev B, Scythe FUMA 2, Be Quiet! Shadow Rock 3, or Noctua NH-U12S Redux which will all be significantly more quiet and better performing.
I had a Xeon workstation from one of the big name OEMs. Dual socket, each CPU had a TDP of 135W. The fans they shipped it with were rated for 140W. They were essentially their version of that Zalman thing, but with 80mm fans instead of 92mm. The rating was the real limit for what they could handle.
Which worked fine for one 135W CPU, but the sockets were positioned so the hot air from the first socket would blow over the second one. The second CPU would get just over temperature and thermally throttle. So I replaced them both with the Hyper 212 and the temperatures dropped 25 degrees.
What I gather from this is that the smaller one was good for a 135W CPU as long as its inlet temperature wasn't already high and the bigger one was good for it even if it was.
The 5950X has a TDP of 105W and all AM4 boards have one socket.
Do the even more expensive fans cool even better? Probably. And if you're the sort who likes to pay more to have a little slack, do as you like. But it's not what you'll get from an OEM.
Put simply, it has a particular temperature target that it tries to stay at as much as possible and it'll adjust its clockspeed boosting dynamically to achieve that. The more easily it can maintain that temperature, the higher the CPU will boost. With a lesser cooler, this means the chip may barely be boosting at all depending on the cooler's capabilities, especially for hotter chips like the 5800X, 5900X, and 5950X (which interestingly all share the same 105W TDP despite considerably different power consumption characteristics). Depending on how bad the mismatch is between CPU and cooler you may be better off saving money and buying a cheaper CPU with performance closer to what your cooler is capping more expensive CPUs to.
And yes you're right, you're probably not going to get cooling that competent from a major OEM. That's why it's not a great idea for home users to buy from a major Windows PC OEM unless their needs are fairly pedestrian.
Don't think that I'm being overly negative here. These look like outstanding computers that are worth a premium price. My question here is about how much of a premium and I'm not trying to give an opinion with a question - I really don't know the answer :)
The M1 computers seemed like an absolute bargain for the performance.