You don't have to agree with it, I've never observed my statement to be false. I've only rarely seen a situation where the top of the line unit in electronics components gets 50% better performance than a unit of the same brand that's half the price. Add to that that the prices of graphics cards drop like a rock, next year's $200 card could easily outperform today's $400 card.
These aren't electronics components as you are wording it. Graphics cards are stratified much more so than most other products.
The $500 cards are much better than the $300 ones are. The rare $650 cards are often 15 to 20% faster still.
There is usually a three year cycle. The top card today is the middle card next year, and then the bottom one the year after that.
I checked out what might be a similar Dell computer, at least a Woodcrest quad model. I configured a Dell Precision Workstation 490 MiniTower - 64 bit with 2.66GHz porcessors and it came to $4435 I configured with a cheap ATI FireGL V7200 video card. The other options were nCidia Quadro FX 3450, 3500 or 4500 workstation class cards. 4GB of DDR2 FBD 533MHz ECC RAM and 250 GB SATA II drive and superdrive, keyboard and optical mouse. Should be close to a RAM upgraded Mac. Upgrading to quad 3GHz put it at $5255 these kinds of prices are beyond Apple's historic price points for a Quad G5 so I have to believe Apple would have to settle for something a little more modest for even their top of the line.
Closer would be a XPS 700 with a single dual-core Conroe X6800 for $3779. 3.73GHz, 4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM, 320GB HD and the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, keyboard and optical mouse. Of course these won't be shipping until 10/4/2006. I'm thinking we might be disappointed, unless price no object. Still disappointed in having to wait, if Dell is any example.
The Mac Pro will be out by WWDC. To round out the "anniversary" of about one year ago at the previous WWDC where the Intel bombshell was dropped. It would be a rousing finale for Steve J to stand on stage and say, "We did it ALL in one year, We've got this exciting high performance per watt Mac Pro, and We've got (insert number) thousands of Universal apps, all thanks to you developers." Crowd then gives standing ovation for a few minutes, exhibition hall explodes in an epic aura of RDF.
I'm thinking we might be disappointed, unless price no object. Still disappointed in having to wait, if Dell is any example.
Dell's high-end is the only place they have nice margins. Apple takes decent margins everywhere, thus they need no 40-50% margin on top, and could out-price Dell now if they wanted.
Dell's high-end is the only place they have nice margins. Apple takes decent margins everywhere, thus they need no 40-50% margin on top, and could out-price Dell now if they wanted.
Chances are they can not out price DELL. (where do you dream this shit up) DELL is one of the industry leaders, if not the leader, in PC sales. At the least they have 5X greater sales volume. If buying in volume dictates prices they can out price Apple easily. Greed dictates pricing as well, and If they raise Margins because Apple is now in the game they will probably do so, and come in at close to what Apples price is.
Dell's high-end is the only place they have nice margins. Apple takes decent margins everywhere, thus they need no 40-50% margin on top, and could out-price Dell now if they wanted.
Same thing at Apple. High margins on high end products. Apple could out-price Dell, but Dell probably still sells more XPS700 and Power Edge servers than Apple selling dual and quad G5 replacements. Apple has not tried to price match anybody, ever. Certainly not Dell or low end or midrange models. Yes, if you equip a Dell with similar stuff as Apple throws in, they are close, as opposed to a base model cheapest Dell versus Apple.
I just figured that the "Mac Pro" has a Intel processor and a Intel designed motherboard, let's see what somebody else is doing with that. Should give us an idea what Apple might ship, given their past history and bias towards less cutting edge RAM and video cards.
Dell is pushing SAS or serial attached SCSI hard drives, which are full duplex compared to SATA II and Apple has only done SATA I so far. So since no single hard drive can push 3Gb/s, at least offer double the thoughput by offering SAS drives. Not to mention that there are 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SAS drives, which are faster than the 7200 rpm SATA drives Apple now uses. They are expensive though: a Maxtor 300GB 10K SAS drive is $800 A 300GB SATA 7200 rpm drive from Maxtor is $120 You can do a stripped array of SATA drives and get better speed and capacity for less money. I think Apple's customers for desktop computers are better served with the better value of SATA. Maybe a cost no object server should have SAS.
As for the video card, Apple could offer and should offer for the gamers more choices, now that there are standard PCI Express slots.
Chances are they can not out price DELL. (where do you dream this shit up) DELL is one of the industry leaders, if not the leader, in PC sales. At the least they have 5X greater sales volume. If buying in volume dictates prices they can out price Apple easily. Greed dictates pricing as well, and If they raise Margins because Apple is now in the game they will probably do so, and come in at close to what Apples price is.
Intel has recently adopted one price for all, instead of tiered pricing for the new Core 2 Duo processors, so Dell has lost that one advantage. Also Dell has been courting AMD for their high end stuff, so Apple may be in favor at Intel. That might help with priority shipping to Apple, so we might get a first to market advantage. With Vista slipping, the Mac market has a real opportunity to grow once the new desktops appear. Apple has been growing big time in laptop market share. Probably due to the Intel transition. With a MacBookPro likely to get a 20% speed bump from a Yonah to Merom upgrade soon, it's only going to get better. I just wish Adobe could ship CS3 sooner. Nobody is really complaining about MS Office 2004's performance under Rosetta.
Nobody is really complaining about MS Office 2004's performance under Rosetta.
I generally complain about it's performance running native on a PPC so I'd be surprised. Or have they magically found a way of making it skip the 'Optimizing Font Menu' every bloody time it starts?
I use Pages for Word document opening - I can be in and out of the document in the time Word starts. If only there was a cocoa Excel replacement....
I generally complain about it's performance running native on a PPC so I'd be surprised. Or have they magically found a way of making it skip the 'Optimizing Font Menu' every bloody time it starts?
I use Pages for Word document opening - I can be in and out of the document in the time Word starts. If only there was a cocoa Excel replacement....
Text Edit can open Word files. It's even faster loading than Pages. You can't avoid Word's Optimizing Font menu, but you can lessen it, by managing your fonts and having less available when Word is running. There is the free Linotype Font Explorer, or Suitcase Fusion, or just fiddling around with Font Book.
Dell is pushing SAS or serial attached SCSI hard drives, which are full duplex compared to SATA II and Apple has only done SATA I so far. So since no single hard drive can push 3Gb/s, at least offer double the thoughput by offering SAS drives. Not to mention that there are 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SAS drives, which are faster than the 7200 rpm SATA drives Apple now uses. They are expensive though: a Maxtor 300GB 10K SAS drive is $800 A 300GB SATA 7200 rpm drive from Maxtor is $120 You can do a stripped array of SATA drives and get better speed and capacity for less money. I think Apple's customers for desktop computers are better served with the better value of SATA. Maybe a cost no object server should have SAS.
Those more expensive drives have their place, though their necessity in workstations is diminishing. For consumer use, it doesn't make sense to run enterprise-type drives. But for server use, it often doesn't make sense to use consumer drives. The 10k+ RPM drives really are generally meant for servers. Some of the 15k drives can handle 2.5x the transactions per second as the faster 7.2k drives. Striping two slower drives doesn't markedly increase the number of transactions per second. The "enterprise" type drives are also designed assuming it is going to handle constant use.
Closer would be a XPS 700 with a single dual-core Conroe X6800 for $3779. 3.73GHz, 4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM, 320GB HD and the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, keyboard and optical mouse. Of course these won't be shipping until 10/4/2006. I'm thinking we might be disappointed, unless price no object. Still disappointed in having to wait, if Dell is any example.
On the happy side, if you take a low-end dual-proc Precision, mentally drop a GB of RAM and remove the monitor, and think of the savings of going from Quadro to 7600GT and losing "memory risers", you could do a $2000 Quad. Granted, that was with Xeon 50xx - I can find workstatioin 51xx's on Dell's site somehow.
Originally posted by ZachPruckowski Granted, that was with Xeon 50xx - I can find workstatioin 51xx's on Dell's site somehow. [/B]
The Precision 690 offers both 50xx and 51xx options, you have to pick "choose", then "continue" to configure the system and it will show the processor options. The 51xxs show a shipping delay though. A 1.6GHz 5110 single shows up at the same price as a single 3.0GHz 5050. The cheapest Woodcrest with only one chip is $1730, the cheapest Woodcrest dual-dual is about $2100 US. An otherwise minimal 3.0GHz 5160 quad runs to $3940.
The Mac Pro will be out by WWDC. To round out the "anniversary" of about one year ago at the previous WWDC where the Intel bombshell was dropped. It would be a rousing finale for Steve J to stand on stage and say, "We did it ALL in one year, We've got this exciting high performance per watt Mac Pro, and We've got (insert number) thousands of Universal apps, all thanks to you developers." Crowd then gives standing ovation for a few minutes, exhibition hall explodes in an epic aura of RDF.
My guess is that Apple will wait for the Xserves till later in the year, somewhere around October to November, and concentrate on getting the Pro and Consumer hardware updated.
The Precision 690 offers both 50xx and 51xx options, you have to pick "choose", then "continue" to configure the system and it will show the processor options. The 51xxs show a shipping delay though. A 1.6GHz 5110 single shows up at the same price as a single 3.0GHz 5050. The cheapest Woodcrest with only one chip is $1730, the cheapest Woodcrest dual-dual is about $2100 US.
subtract "memory risers", 1 GB of RAM ($150), monitor ($250-300), and you hit low-$2ks for a Quad 2.0 Woodcrest system. Meaning my 2 x 2.0 for $2200 isn't a total crack-pipe dream.
Comments
Originally posted by JeffDM
You don't have to agree with it, I've never observed my statement to be false. I've only rarely seen a situation where the top of the line unit in electronics components gets 50% better performance than a unit of the same brand that's half the price. Add to that that the prices of graphics cards drop like a rock, next year's $200 card could easily outperform today's $400 card.
These aren't electronics components as you are wording it. Graphics cards are stratified much more so than most other products.
The $500 cards are much better than the $300 ones are. The rare $650 cards are often 15 to 20% faster still.
There is usually a three year cycle. The top card today is the middle card next year, and then the bottom one the year after that.
I checked out what might be a similar Dell computer, at least a Woodcrest quad model. I configured a Dell Precision Workstation 490 MiniTower - 64 bit with 2.66GHz porcessors and it came to $4435 I configured with a cheap ATI FireGL V7200 video card. The other options were nCidia Quadro FX 3450, 3500 or 4500 workstation class cards. 4GB of DDR2 FBD 533MHz ECC RAM and 250 GB SATA II drive and superdrive, keyboard and optical mouse. Should be close to a RAM upgraded Mac. Upgrading to quad 3GHz put it at $5255 these kinds of prices are beyond Apple's historic price points for a Quad G5 so I have to believe Apple would have to settle for something a little more modest for even their top of the line.
Originally posted by sunilraman
"Oh, and one more thing........"
wireless mighty mouse... bummer
Originally posted by BradMacPro
I'm thinking we might be disappointed, unless price no object. Still disappointed in having to wait, if Dell is any example.
Dell's high-end is the only place they have nice margins. Apple takes decent margins everywhere, thus they need no 40-50% margin on top, and could out-price Dell now if they wanted.
Originally posted by ZachPruckowski
Dell's high-end is the only place they have nice margins. Apple takes decent margins everywhere, thus they need no 40-50% margin on top, and could out-price Dell now if they wanted.
Chances are they can not out price DELL. (where do you dream this shit up) DELL is one of the industry leaders, if not the leader, in PC sales. At the least they have 5X greater sales volume. If buying in volume dictates prices they can out price Apple easily. Greed dictates pricing as well, and If they raise Margins because Apple is now in the game they will probably do so, and come in at close to what Apples price is.
Chances are they can not out price DELL...(where do you dream this shit up)
ROFLMAO
Originally posted by ZachPruckowski
Dell's high-end is the only place they have nice margins. Apple takes decent margins everywhere, thus they need no 40-50% margin on top, and could out-price Dell now if they wanted.
Same thing at Apple. High margins on high end products. Apple could out-price Dell, but Dell probably still sells more XPS700 and Power Edge servers than Apple selling dual and quad G5 replacements. Apple has not tried to price match anybody, ever. Certainly not Dell or low end or midrange models. Yes, if you equip a Dell with similar stuff as Apple throws in, they are close, as opposed to a base model cheapest Dell versus Apple.
I just figured that the "Mac Pro" has a Intel processor and a Intel designed motherboard, let's see what somebody else is doing with that. Should give us an idea what Apple might ship, given their past history and bias towards less cutting edge RAM and video cards.
Dell is pushing SAS or serial attached SCSI hard drives, which are full duplex compared to SATA II and Apple has only done SATA I so far. So since no single hard drive can push 3Gb/s, at least offer double the thoughput by offering SAS drives. Not to mention that there are 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SAS drives, which are faster than the 7200 rpm SATA drives Apple now uses. They are expensive though: a Maxtor 300GB 10K SAS drive is $800 A 300GB SATA 7200 rpm drive from Maxtor is $120 You can do a stripped array of SATA drives and get better speed and capacity for less money. I think Apple's customers for desktop computers are better served with the better value of SATA. Maybe a cost no object server should have SAS.
As for the video card, Apple could offer and should offer for the gamers more choices, now that there are standard PCI Express slots.
Originally posted by onlooker
Chances are they can not out price DELL. (where do you dream this shit up) DELL is one of the industry leaders, if not the leader, in PC sales. At the least they have 5X greater sales volume. If buying in volume dictates prices they can out price Apple easily. Greed dictates pricing as well, and If they raise Margins because Apple is now in the game they will probably do so, and come in at close to what Apples price is.
Intel has recently adopted one price for all, instead of tiered pricing for the new Core 2 Duo processors, so Dell has lost that one advantage. Also Dell has been courting AMD for their high end stuff, so Apple may be in favor at Intel. That might help with priority shipping to Apple, so we might get a first to market advantage. With Vista slipping, the Mac market has a real opportunity to grow once the new desktops appear. Apple has been growing big time in laptop market share. Probably due to the Intel transition. With a MacBookPro likely to get a 20% speed bump from a Yonah to Merom upgrade soon, it's only going to get better. I just wish Adobe could ship CS3 sooner. Nobody is really complaining about MS Office 2004's performance under Rosetta.
Originally posted by BradMacPro
Nobody is really complaining about MS Office 2004's performance under Rosetta.
I generally complain about it's performance running native on a PPC so I'd be surprised. Or have they magically found a way of making it skip the 'Optimizing Font Menu' every bloody time it starts?
I use Pages for Word document opening - I can be in and out of the document in the time Word starts. If only there was a cocoa Excel replacement....
Originally posted by aegisdesign
I generally complain about it's performance running native on a PPC so I'd be surprised. Or have they magically found a way of making it skip the 'Optimizing Font Menu' every bloody time it starts?
I use Pages for Word document opening - I can be in and out of the document in the time Word starts. If only there was a cocoa Excel replacement....
Text Edit can open Word files. It's even faster loading than Pages. You can't avoid Word's Optimizing Font menu, but you can lessen it, by managing your fonts and having less available when Word is running. There is the free Linotype Font Explorer, or Suitcase Fusion, or just fiddling around with Font Book.
Originally posted by onlooker
Chances are they can not out price DELL. (where do you dream this shit up)
At 6:51 AM, having gone to bed at 5:30, I was sleep-posting (sort of like sleepwalking but awkwarder).
But if you don't think Apple will beat Dell, you're not expecting a sub-3k Quad, and you're not expecting a 3.0 GHz model for under $4k.
Originally posted by ZachPruckowski
At 6:51 AM, having gone to bed at 5:30, I was sleep-posting (sort of like sleepwalking but awkwarder).
But if you don't think Apple will beat Dell, you're not expecting a sub-3k Quad, and you're not expecting a 3.0 GHz model for under $4k.
That's what I expect. I'm more than happy to be proved wrong. Apple just announced bluetooth mighty mouse.
Originally posted by BradMacPro
Dell is pushing SAS or serial attached SCSI hard drives, which are full duplex compared to SATA II and Apple has only done SATA I so far. So since no single hard drive can push 3Gb/s, at least offer double the thoughput by offering SAS drives. Not to mention that there are 10,000 and 15,000 rpm SAS drives, which are faster than the 7200 rpm SATA drives Apple now uses. They are expensive though: a Maxtor 300GB 10K SAS drive is $800 A 300GB SATA 7200 rpm drive from Maxtor is $120 You can do a stripped array of SATA drives and get better speed and capacity for less money. I think Apple's customers for desktop computers are better served with the better value of SATA. Maybe a cost no object server should have SAS.
Those more expensive drives have their place, though their necessity in workstations is diminishing. For consumer use, it doesn't make sense to run enterprise-type drives. But for server use, it often doesn't make sense to use consumer drives. The 10k+ RPM drives really are generally meant for servers. Some of the 15k drives can handle 2.5x the transactions per second as the faster 7.2k drives. Striping two slower drives doesn't markedly increase the number of transactions per second. The "enterprise" type drives are also designed assuming it is going to handle constant use.
Originally posted by BradMacPro
Closer would be a XPS 700 with a single dual-core Conroe X6800 for $3779. 3.73GHz, 4GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM, 320GB HD and the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, keyboard and optical mouse. Of course these won't be shipping until 10/4/2006. I'm thinking we might be disappointed, unless price no object. Still disappointed in having to wait, if Dell is any example.
On the happy side, if you take a low-end dual-proc Precision, mentally drop a GB of RAM and remove the monitor, and think of the savings of going from Quadro to 7600GT and losing "memory risers", you could do a $2000 Quad. Granted, that was with Xeon 50xx - I can find workstatioin 51xx's on Dell's site somehow.
Originally posted by ZachPruckowski Granted, that was with Xeon 50xx - I can find workstatioin 51xx's on Dell's site somehow. [/B]
The Precision 690 offers both 50xx and 51xx options, you have to pick "choose", then "continue" to configure the system and it will show the processor options. The 51xxs show a shipping delay though. A 1.6GHz 5110 single shows up at the same price as a single 3.0GHz 5050. The cheapest Woodcrest with only one chip is $1730, the cheapest Woodcrest dual-dual is about $2100 US. An otherwise minimal 3.0GHz 5160 quad runs to $3940.
Originally posted by sunilraman
The Mac Pro will be out by WWDC. To round out the "anniversary" of about one year ago at the previous WWDC where the Intel bombshell was dropped. It would be a rousing finale for Steve J to stand on stage and say, "We did it ALL in one year, We've got this exciting high performance per watt Mac Pro, and We've got (insert number) thousands of Universal apps, all thanks to you developers." Crowd then gives standing ovation for a few minutes, exhibition hall explodes in an epic aura of RDF.
My guess is that Apple will wait for the Xserves till later in the year, somewhere around October to November, and concentrate on getting the Pro and Consumer hardware updated.
Originally posted by JeffDM
The Precision 690 offers both 50xx and 51xx options, you have to pick "choose", then "continue" to configure the system and it will show the processor options. The 51xxs show a shipping delay though. A 1.6GHz 5110 single shows up at the same price as a single 3.0GHz 5050. The cheapest Woodcrest with only one chip is $1730, the cheapest Woodcrest dual-dual is about $2100 US.
Thanks. I get so lost in Dell's site...
Anyhow - 2x 5130, DVD+/-RW, 250 GB HDD, rest basic = $2847
subtract "memory risers", 1 GB of RAM ($150), monitor ($250-300), and you hit low-$2ks for a Quad 2.0 Woodcrest system. Meaning my 2 x 2.0 for $2200 isn't a total crack-pipe dream.