But trying to find reasons why the Mac Pro is overpriced is not helpful, because the customers for these machines, for the most part, don't care. These are very popular in scientific research. In engineering, publishing, graphics, movie editing, audio work, and esp. in Europe, where Archicad is more popular than Autocad, in architecture.
Well, we have a large research budget to buy whatever hardware we want, and wanted to buy 4 MPs for scientific work. But just because I can easily burn up some research grant money (paid by other people's taxes) on shiny hardware, doesn't just make these obscene jumps in markup "right". We'll probably still get the MPs, but I wish I didn't feel I was getting quite so shafted by Apple pumping *up* prices on a *cheaper* product. Why is it wrong to be upset by that, why should we just be silently stoic as a Corporation squeezes its users without justification?
Most of the Mac Pro's in my department, and almost all the switchers in my Institute only did so because, with educational discounts, they could get better prices on workstations than Dell could compete with (price was the key to the Apple resurgence, that and Matlab resupporting OS X, even though Windows is much faster still). Apple is still in a fragile position in scientific computing in the UK at least. We'll see what happens when Dell get the Nehalems, but if Apple is not competitive, I guarantee they will lose out on scientific sales.
Phil's assertion that a 2.66 quad core Nehalem is a substantial improvement over a pair of 2.8 quad core Harpertowns seems bogus. Yes the new chips are good and the new architecture has fewer bottlenecks, but there are half the physical cores, lower clock speed and, worst of all, Apple has crippled the RAM limit on the base machine.
In fact they seem to have no clue how to configure the RAM at all. Nehalem is a triple channel architecture so there should be 3, 6 or 9 DIMM slots. Instead the new Mac Pros have 4 or 8 slots.
Maybe next year they'll get their act together, but by then I'll have a Nehalem hackintosh and really won't care what Apple does.
Phil's assertion that a 2.66 quad core Nehalem is a substantial improvement over a pair of 2.8 quad core Harpertowns seems bogus. Yes the new chips are good and the new architecture has fewer bottlenecks, but there are half the physical cores, lower clock speed and, worst of all, Apple has crippled the RAM limit on the base machine.
In fact they seem to have no clue how to configure the RAM at all. Nehalem is a triple channel architecture so there should be 3, 6 or 9 DIMM slots. Instead the new Mac Pros have 4 or 8 slots.
Maybe next year they'll get their act together, but by then I'll have a Nehalem hackintosh and really won't care what Apple does.
Nehalem would have to be 200x faster than Penryn to make up for the missing 4-cores. I don't know how anyone could postulate that a quad core Nehalem is more efficient than than its predecessor to that degree. Perhaps in an encoding test or application that do not handle +4 cores well.
For those of us wanting the option of more than 8 gigs of ram, that price is up to $3299. Earlier this week, you could get that for $2499.
The single cpu Mac Pro makes no sense to me.
Enthusiasts may not need more than 8 gbs of RAM but aren't going to pay that price to play and pros often need more than 8 gbs of RAM (or don't want that limitation).
That metric is only for price sensitive markets, which the workstation market is not really part of. This is a market where performance and build quality is paramount, and that where the Mac Pros excel.
Their machines DO last 4 to 5 years. Your PC won't, thats for sure, and when you go back to the trough in 2 to 2.5 years, you'll be thinking that it was a mistake to go back to PCs.
I don't want to move to the windows platform.
I don't mind paying extra, within reason, to get good performance out of my Mac. In fact I bought a MBP almost three years ago and not a MacBook, which is probably adequate for my needs.
But right now Apple only offer the Mac Pro for those looking for more than dual core machines. I don't know why because quad core machines really aren't cutting edge at this point. They are certainly easy to find with pc vendors.
My wife and kids share a pc that's 4 years old and is ready for replacement. Right now Apple have nothing to offer me that I want and I'm trying to reasonable. But I won't 'settle' for a dual core machine at this point as I think quad core machines will have better longevity at this point. My analogy is that buying dual core now was like buying single core 3 years ago. The wave is about to roll over and quad core is going to be mainstream in one year if it isn't already.
First, high end kit always has a fat profit margin on it. Always. I don't know why people are acting as if fat margins were introduced with this update. This is partly to compensate for low sales volume, partly because the people serious about getting the latest and greatest have never begrudged the extra money.
Second, Apple is clearly making room for the iMac to move into the professional space, as I predicted (which makes it all the more remarkable that it actually happened).
Third, for its intended market it doesn't cost that much. Used professionally, i.e. to make money, it will pay for itself in a few weeks at the latest. Used institutionally, it will be bid for (not sold at MSRP) and frequently by institutions that qualify for educational discounts, and in many cases the purchase will be paid for by depreciation accounts set up 3 or 5 years ago to pay for them. In other words, most the Mac Pro's market have been buying machines at prices that would make most people here blanche, and they will react to this update by buying them if it's time for them to buy. They may go into debt that will be repaid within the month or they may draw from reserves built up for the purchase. Either way, no big deal. This isn't new: The PowerMac 9600 was made for the same market, as were the vastly more expensive workstations from SGI and Sun and HP.
As far as the video card options go, I imagine that the hold-up is with DisplayPort compatibility. As workstation GPUs accommodate DisplayPort, Apple will add them to the options list. This seems to me a lot more likely than Apple abandoning one of their core professional markets.
This, from hmurchison, made me do a double-take:
Quote:
At this rate it appears that Apple needs a shakeup. They needs a couple bad qtrs and a rechecking of the ego.
They deserve a couple of bad quarters, a shakeup and an ego check because they're the only company in their product category that isn't watching their sales go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? They deserve to fail because they're offering a gorgeous workstation with bleeding-edge chips at a price in line with prices in its category for the last decade? What?
If your answer is that they aren't passing consumer desktops off as pro machines, I seem to recall that being the final knife through the heart of once-great SGI.
You can wish that the landscape is something other than it is, but if you step over the cliff that you have convinced yourself shouldn't be there you will still fall to your death.
I hope you're right because I can't in good faith recommend this machine to our creative and studio departments with that limitation. I'm sure it's an artificail limitation imposed by Apple. I would just like to see some real world confirmation from someone who has a quad core 2009 Mac Pro, who added 3x4GB or 4x4GB of memory.
We'll likely know in a week or two, as soon as the sites that already have machines from Apple (yes, there are a few), or will get theirs rush shipped. Anandtech, Ars Technica and others, as well as Barefeats will let us know shortly.
The biggest problem I can see with the new Mac Pro is that Apple seems to forget what makes a computer a premium product. Besides the Xeon processor and the aluminum case (which hasn't been updated for 6 years), I don't see anything premium about the new Mac Pro. Where are the Quatro\\FireGL BTO options? How come there is only ONE PCIe 16X slot? How come the machine is limited to only 4 drive bays? Being a high-margin and low-volume product, it's perfectly feasible for Apple to offer many different options tailored made for each customer. The limited options offered on the new Mac Pro are frustrating customers who are willing to pay handsome amounts for a computer, but need a tailor made solution. Apple need to wake up and realize that the Mac Pro is not a cheap mid-tower and they need premium services and options to go with it!
I don't have a problem with the SMP Mac Pro going up a bit. I'm just flummoxed by the $2500 Quad system because it just seems to be excessively priced.
I love Apple's success and I have a distaste for the pleas for lower pricing because of the economy but I just have to wonder if the pricing on the Mac Pro is Apple blinking a bit out of fear.
I appears that it's not innovation that will guide Apple through the tough times here but margins that exceed what many of us feel are acceptable without rebuffing.
I certainly don't want Apple to have some down qtrs overall as I want to get my first iPhone but much like kidnapping, if we all suck it up and pay the ransom it just means more abductions LOL
Well, we have a large research budget to buy whatever hardware we want, and wanted to buy 4 MPs for scientific work. But just because I can easily burn up some research grant money (paid by other people's taxes) on shiny hardware, doesn't just make these obscene jumps in markup "right". We'll probably still get the MPs, but I wish I didn't feel I was getting quite so shafted by Apple pumping *up* prices on a *cheaper* product. Why is it wrong to be upset by that, why should we just be silently stoic as a Corporation squeezes its users without justification?
Most of the Mac Pro's in my department, and almost all the switchers in my Institute only did so because, with educational discounts, they could get better prices on workstations than Dell could compete with (price was the key to the Apple resurgence, that and Matlab resupporting OS X, even though Windows is much faster still). Apple is still in a fragile position in scientific computing in the UK at least. We'll see what happens when Dell get the Nehalems, but if Apple is not competitive, I guarantee they will lose out on scientific sales.
What I keep telling people here is that you have to wait for comparable machines from other manufacturers before complaining about these prices.
Only after Dell, Hp, Boxx, and others come out with theirs can we determine if these prices are too high. If they are all about the same, then clearly, they are not too high.
If the others are substantially lower, then we can see that they are.
If price is such an issue, why don't you just buy the same consumer boxes some others here are touting to be just as good at half the price?
Nehalem would have to be 200x faster than Penryn to make up for the missing 4-cores. I don't know how anyone could postulate that a quad core Nehalem is more efficient than than its predecessor to that degree. Perhaps in an encoding test or application that do not handle +4 cores well.
Enthusiasts may not need more than 8 gbs of RAM but aren't going to pay that price to play and pros often need more than 8 gbs of RAM (or don't want that limitation).
Who's this machine marketed for?
Enthusiasts would pay that price. They were paying over $3,000 for the game machines from Alien and Voodoo.
And we don't yet know if 8 GB is a real limitation or not.
Besides, very few pro's DO need more than 8 Gb RAM. It's a power race. "I have more RAM than you do".
I don't mind paying extra, within reason, to get good performance out of my Mac. In fact I bought a MBP almost three years ago and not a MacBook, which is probably adequate for my needs.
But right now Apple only offer the Mac Pro for those looking for more than dual core machines. I don't know why because quad core machines really aren't cutting edge at this point. They are certainly easy to find with pc vendors.
Stop making the same mistake as others here. This is NOT a home machine. This is an industrial workstation.
Sadly, Apple refuses to make a home tower. But this is not one. It's not clear if it's too expensive either. We have to wait for Xeon machines from others to know.
Quote:
My wife and kids share a pc that's 4 years old and is ready for replacement. Right now Apple have nothing to offer me that I want and I'm trying to reasonable. But I won't 'settle' for a dual core machine at this point as I think quad core machines will have better longevity at this point. My analogy is that buying dual core now was like buying single core 3 years ago. The wave is about to roll over and quad core is going to be mainstream in one year if it isn't already.
Right now the cheapest quad core Mac is $2500.
I agree. I'm finally giving up my dual 2 GHz G5 Powermac.
With Apple's new OS tech coming out, the more cores the better. In a few years, people will be very happy they plunked down the extra cash. While those who bought single cpu machines are replacing theirs, the dual crowd will just be coming into the full power crest their machines are designed to deliver. In the long run it will have been cheaper, even though the upfront cost is higher.
First, high end kit always has a fat profit margin on it. Always. I don't know why people are acting as if fat margins were introduced with this update. This is partly to compensate for low sales volume, partly because the people serious about getting the latest and greatest have never begrudged the extra money.
Second, Apple is clearly making room for the iMac to move into the professional space, as I predicted (which makes it all the more remarkable that it actually happened).
Third, for its intended market it doesn't cost that much. Used professionally, i.e. to make money, it will pay for itself in a few weeks at the latest. Used institutionally, it will be bid for (not sold at MSRP) and frequently by institutions that qualify for educational discounts, and in many cases the purchase will be paid for by depreciation accounts set up 3 or 5 years ago to pay for them. In other words, most the Mac Pro's market have been buying machines at prices that would make most people here blanche, and they will react to this update by buying them if it's time for them to buy. They may go into debt that will be repaid within the month or they may draw from reserves built up for the purchase. Either way, no big deal. This isn't new: The PowerMac 9600 was made for the same market, as were the vastly more expensive workstations from SGI and Sun and HP.
As far as the video card options go, I imagine that the hold-up is with DisplayPort compatibility. As workstation GPUs accommodate DisplayPort, Apple will add them to the options list. This seems to me a lot more likely than Apple abandoning one of their core professional markets.
This, from hmurchison, made me do a double-take:
They deserve a couple of bad quarters, a shakeup and an ego check because they're the only company in their product category that isn't watching their sales go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? They deserve to fail because they're offering a gorgeous workstation with bleeding-edge chips at a price in line with prices in its category for the last decade? What?
If your answer is that they aren't passing consumer desktops off as pro machines, I seem to recall that being the final knife through the heart of once-great SGI.
You can wish that the landscape is something other than it is, but if you step over the cliff that you have convinced yourself shouldn't be there you will still fall to your death.
The biggest problem I can see with the new Mac Pro is that Apple seems to forget what makes a computer a premium product. Besides the Xeon processor and the aluminum case (which hasn't been updated for 6 years), I don't see anything premium about the new Mac Pro. Where are the Quatro\\FireGL BTO options? How come there is only ONE PCIe 16X slot? How come the machine is limited to only 4 drive bays? Being a high-margin and low-volume product, it's perfectly feasible for Apple to offer many different options tailored made for each customer. The limited options offered on the new Mac Pro are frustrating customers who are willing to pay handsome amounts for a computer, but need a tailor made solution. Apple need to wake up and realize that the Mac Pro is not a cheap mid-tower and they need premium services and options to go with it!
First of all, read Amorph's post. It explains some of what you're talking about.
Secondly, you are wrong about the slots. If you went to Apple's site and looked at the specs, you would have seen that there are TWO 16 channel slots. The double width slot for the normal placing of the graphics card, and the one next to it as well.
Four drive bays are plenty. Just how big do you want this machine to be? How much more expensive do you want it to be?
Those that need significantly more than the 8 Terabytes you can now put inside (yes, we see Apple's typical conservatism here, stating 4 Terabytes) get external drive bays, often using the fiber card Apple offers.
The biggest problem I can see with the new Mac Pro is that Apple seems to forget what makes a computer a premium product. Besides the Xeon processor and the aluminum case (which hasn't been updated for 6 years), I don't see anything premium about the new Mac Pro. Where are the Quatro\\FireGL BTO options? How come there is only ONE PCIe 16X slot? How come the machine is limited to only 4 drive bays? Being a high-margin and low-volume product, it's perfectly feasible for Apple to offer many different options tailored made for each customer. The limited options offered on the new Mac Pro are frustrating customers who are willing to pay handsome amounts for a computer, but need a tailor made solution. Apple need to wake up and realize that the Mac Pro is not a cheap mid-tower and they need premium services and options to go with it!
The new Mac pro has 2 16x PCI Express and 2 4x slots. One 16x is populated with a graphics card. The 3 remaining are 16/4/4.
That's like calling a four cylinder engine essentially the same as an eight cylinder engine.
Don't give into the marketing, look at facts. Xeon and Core i7 are brand names. Bloomfield is the base chip. It is available in Core i7 and Xeon 3500 branding. The only difference is ECC memory support. The xeon branding doesn't magically turn from an I4 into a V8. It remains the same chip, pricing and all. It will perform the same no matter what branding is used. Then there is Gainestown (Xeon 5500). Gainestown is nothing more than bloomfield with a second quick path link for multiprocessing.
And what we keep responding is that the PCs with i7 ARE comparable machines. In the case of the 8 core, yes we'll have to wait and compare.
No, they are not. Apple doesn't make an i7 machine for consumers, or for anyone. When the single cpu Xeon workstations come out from others, you can then compare the costs.
Apple doesn't make the machine you, and many others would like to see, including me. That's too bad, and I'm not saying that in a sarcastic way.
But you have to stop comparing machines built for commercial use to machines built for home use. Even if the performance is comparable, it's still not the same machine. The organizations that buy expensive workstations and servers do NOT buy the machines you and a few others here are pushing. The failure rates are too high, among other things.
Quote:
I just might. On tuesday morning I had $2799 burning a hole in my pocket, and it's really looking like Apple may lose that sale.
Well then, pull the trigger and buy it. It's not like that's a threat to us here. We'll miss you, but you can have fun in the PC forums.
Comments
But trying to find reasons why the Mac Pro is overpriced is not helpful, because the customers for these machines, for the most part, don't care. These are very popular in scientific research. In engineering, publishing, graphics, movie editing, audio work, and esp. in Europe, where Archicad is more popular than Autocad, in architecture.
Well, we have a large research budget to buy whatever hardware we want, and wanted to buy 4 MPs for scientific work. But just because I can easily burn up some research grant money (paid by other people's taxes) on shiny hardware, doesn't just make these obscene jumps in markup "right". We'll probably still get the MPs, but I wish I didn't feel I was getting quite so shafted by Apple pumping *up* prices on a *cheaper* product. Why is it wrong to be upset by that, why should we just be silently stoic as a Corporation squeezes its users without justification?
Most of the Mac Pro's in my department, and almost all the switchers in my Institute only did so because, with educational discounts, they could get better prices on workstations than Dell could compete with (price was the key to the Apple resurgence, that and Matlab resupporting OS X, even though Windows is much faster still). Apple is still in a fragile position in scientific computing in the UK at least. We'll see what happens when Dell get the Nehalems, but if Apple is not competitive, I guarantee they will lose out on scientific sales.
In fact they seem to have no clue how to configure the RAM at all. Nehalem is a triple channel architecture so there should be 3, 6 or 9 DIMM slots. Instead the new Mac Pros have 4 or 8 slots.
Maybe next year they'll get their act together, but by then I'll have a Nehalem hackintosh and really won't care what Apple does.
Phil's assertion that a 2.66 quad core Nehalem is a substantial improvement over a pair of 2.8 quad core Harpertowns seems bogus. Yes the new chips are good and the new architecture has fewer bottlenecks, but there are half the physical cores, lower clock speed and, worst of all, Apple has crippled the RAM limit on the base machine.
In fact they seem to have no clue how to configure the RAM at all. Nehalem is a triple channel architecture so there should be 3, 6 or 9 DIMM slots. Instead the new Mac Pros have 4 or 8 slots.
Maybe next year they'll get their act together, but by then I'll have a Nehalem hackintosh and really won't care what Apple does.
Nehalem would have to be 200x faster than Penryn to make up for the missing 4-cores. I don't know how anyone could postulate that a quad core Nehalem is more efficient than than its predecessor to that degree. Perhaps in an encoding test or application that do not handle +4 cores well.
For those of us wanting the option of more than 8 gigs of ram, that price is up to $3299. Earlier this week, you could get that for $2499.
The single cpu Mac Pro makes no sense to me.
Enthusiasts may not need more than 8 gbs of RAM but aren't going to pay that price to play and pros often need more than 8 gbs of RAM (or don't want that limitation).
Who's this machine marketed for?
That metric is only for price sensitive markets, which the workstation market is not really part of. This is a market where performance and build quality is paramount, and that where the Mac Pros excel.
Their machines DO last 4 to 5 years. Your PC won't, thats for sure, and when you go back to the trough in 2 to 2.5 years, you'll be thinking that it was a mistake to go back to PCs.
I don't want to move to the windows platform.
I don't mind paying extra, within reason, to get good performance out of my Mac. In fact I bought a MBP almost three years ago and not a MacBook, which is probably adequate for my needs.
But right now Apple only offer the Mac Pro for those looking for more than dual core machines. I don't know why because quad core machines really aren't cutting edge at this point. They are certainly easy to find with pc vendors.
My wife and kids share a pc that's 4 years old and is ready for replacement. Right now Apple have nothing to offer me that I want and I'm trying to reasonable. But I won't 'settle' for a dual core machine at this point as I think quad core machines will have better longevity at this point. My analogy is that buying dual core now was like buying single core 3 years ago. The wave is about to roll over and quad core is going to be mainstream in one year if it isn't already.
Right now the cheapest quad core Mac is $2500.
First, high end kit always has a fat profit margin on it. Always. I don't know why people are acting as if fat margins were introduced with this update. This is partly to compensate for low sales volume, partly because the people serious about getting the latest and greatest have never begrudged the extra money.
Second, Apple is clearly making room for the iMac to move into the professional space, as I predicted (which makes it all the more remarkable that it actually happened).
Third, for its intended market it doesn't cost that much. Used professionally, i.e. to make money, it will pay for itself in a few weeks at the latest. Used institutionally, it will be bid for (not sold at MSRP) and frequently by institutions that qualify for educational discounts, and in many cases the purchase will be paid for by depreciation accounts set up 3 or 5 years ago to pay for them. In other words, most the Mac Pro's market have been buying machines at prices that would make most people here blanche, and they will react to this update by buying them if it's time for them to buy. They may go into debt that will be repaid within the month or they may draw from reserves built up for the purchase. Either way, no big deal. This isn't new: The PowerMac 9600 was made for the same market, as were the vastly more expensive workstations from SGI and Sun and HP.
As far as the video card options go, I imagine that the hold-up is with DisplayPort compatibility. As workstation GPUs accommodate DisplayPort, Apple will add them to the options list. This seems to me a lot more likely than Apple abandoning one of their core professional markets.
This, from hmurchison, made me do a double-take:
At this rate it appears that Apple needs a shakeup. They needs a couple bad qtrs and a rechecking of the ego.
They deserve a couple of bad quarters, a shakeup and an ego check because they're the only company in their product category that isn't watching their sales go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? They deserve to fail because they're offering a gorgeous workstation with bleeding-edge chips at a price in line with prices in its category for the last decade? What?
If your answer is that they aren't passing consumer desktops off as pro machines, I seem to recall that being the final knife through the heart of once-great SGI.
You can wish that the landscape is something other than it is, but if you step over the cliff that you have convinced yourself shouldn't be there you will still fall to your death.
I hope you're right because I can't in good faith recommend this machine to our creative and studio departments with that limitation. I'm sure it's an artificail limitation imposed by Apple. I would just like to see some real world confirmation from someone who has a quad core 2009 Mac Pro, who added 3x4GB or 4x4GB of memory.
We'll likely know in a week or two, as soon as the sites that already have machines from Apple (yes, there are a few), or will get theirs rush shipped. Anandtech, Ars Technica and others, as well as Barefeats will let us know shortly.
I don't have a problem with the SMP Mac Pro going up a bit. I'm just flummoxed by the $2500 Quad system because it just seems to be excessively priced.
I love Apple's success and I have a distaste for the pleas for lower pricing because of the economy but I just have to wonder if the pricing on the Mac Pro is Apple blinking a bit out of fear.
I appears that it's not innovation that will guide Apple through the tough times here but margins that exceed what many of us feel are acceptable without rebuffing.
I certainly don't want Apple to have some down qtrs overall as I want to get my first iPhone but much like kidnapping, if we all suck it up and pay the ransom it just means more abductions LOL
Well, we have a large research budget to buy whatever hardware we want, and wanted to buy 4 MPs for scientific work. But just because I can easily burn up some research grant money (paid by other people's taxes) on shiny hardware, doesn't just make these obscene jumps in markup "right". We'll probably still get the MPs, but I wish I didn't feel I was getting quite so shafted by Apple pumping *up* prices on a *cheaper* product. Why is it wrong to be upset by that, why should we just be silently stoic as a Corporation squeezes its users without justification?
Most of the Mac Pro's in my department, and almost all the switchers in my Institute only did so because, with educational discounts, they could get better prices on workstations than Dell could compete with (price was the key to the Apple resurgence, that and Matlab resupporting OS X, even though Windows is much faster still). Apple is still in a fragile position in scientific computing in the UK at least. We'll see what happens when Dell get the Nehalems, but if Apple is not competitive, I guarantee they will lose out on scientific sales.
What I keep telling people here is that you have to wait for comparable machines from other manufacturers before complaining about these prices.
Only after Dell, Hp, Boxx, and others come out with theirs can we determine if these prices are too high. If they are all about the same, then clearly, they are not too high.
If the others are substantially lower, then we can see that they are.
If price is such an issue, why don't you just buy the same consumer boxes some others here are touting to be just as good at half the price?
Nehalem would have to be 200x faster than Penryn to make up for the missing 4-cores. I don't know how anyone could postulate that a quad core Nehalem is more efficient than than its predecessor to that degree. Perhaps in an encoding test or application that do not handle +4 cores well.
You mean 200% don't you?
The single cpu Mac Pro makes no sense to me.
Enthusiasts may not need more than 8 gbs of RAM but aren't going to pay that price to play and pros often need more than 8 gbs of RAM (or don't want that limitation).
Who's this machine marketed for?
Enthusiasts would pay that price. They were paying over $3,000 for the game machines from Alien and Voodoo.
And we don't yet know if 8 GB is a real limitation or not.
Besides, very few pro's DO need more than 8 Gb RAM. It's a power race. "I have more RAM than you do".
I don't want to move to the windows platform.
I hope not, but you brought it up.
I don't mind paying extra, within reason, to get good performance out of my Mac. In fact I bought a MBP almost three years ago and not a MacBook, which is probably adequate for my needs.
But right now Apple only offer the Mac Pro for those looking for more than dual core machines. I don't know why because quad core machines really aren't cutting edge at this point. They are certainly easy to find with pc vendors.
Stop making the same mistake as others here. This is NOT a home machine. This is an industrial workstation.
Sadly, Apple refuses to make a home tower. But this is not one. It's not clear if it's too expensive either. We have to wait for Xeon machines from others to know.
My wife and kids share a pc that's 4 years old and is ready for replacement. Right now Apple have nothing to offer me that I want and I'm trying to reasonable. But I won't 'settle' for a dual core machine at this point as I think quad core machines will have better longevity at this point. My analogy is that buying dual core now was like buying single core 3 years ago. The wave is about to roll over and quad core is going to be mainstream in one year if it isn't already.
Right now the cheapest quad core Mac is $2500.
I agree. I'm finally giving up my dual 2 GHz G5 Powermac.
With Apple's new OS tech coming out, the more cores the better. In a few years, people will be very happy they plunked down the extra cash. While those who bought single cpu machines are replacing theirs, the dual crowd will just be coming into the full power crest their machines are designed to deliver. In the long run it will have been cheaper, even though the upfront cost is higher.
A few things:
First, high end kit always has a fat profit margin on it. Always. I don't know why people are acting as if fat margins were introduced with this update. This is partly to compensate for low sales volume, partly because the people serious about getting the latest and greatest have never begrudged the extra money.
Second, Apple is clearly making room for the iMac to move into the professional space, as I predicted (which makes it all the more remarkable that it actually happened).
Third, for its intended market it doesn't cost that much. Used professionally, i.e. to make money, it will pay for itself in a few weeks at the latest. Used institutionally, it will be bid for (not sold at MSRP) and frequently by institutions that qualify for educational discounts, and in many cases the purchase will be paid for by depreciation accounts set up 3 or 5 years ago to pay for them. In other words, most the Mac Pro's market have been buying machines at prices that would make most people here blanche, and they will react to this update by buying them if it's time for them to buy. They may go into debt that will be repaid within the month or they may draw from reserves built up for the purchase. Either way, no big deal. This isn't new: The PowerMac 9600 was made for the same market, as were the vastly more expensive workstations from SGI and Sun and HP.
As far as the video card options go, I imagine that the hold-up is with DisplayPort compatibility. As workstation GPUs accommodate DisplayPort, Apple will add them to the options list. This seems to me a lot more likely than Apple abandoning one of their core professional markets.
This, from hmurchison, made me do a double-take:
They deserve a couple of bad quarters, a shakeup and an ego check because they're the only company in their product category that isn't watching their sales go over Niagara Falls in a barrel? They deserve to fail because they're offering a gorgeous workstation with bleeding-edge chips at a price in line with prices in its category for the last decade? What?
If your answer is that they aren't passing consumer desktops off as pro machines, I seem to recall that being the final knife through the heart of once-great SGI.
You can wish that the landscape is something other than it is, but if you step over the cliff that you have convinced yourself shouldn't be there you will still fall to your death.
I agree completely!
What I keep telling people here is that you have to wait for comparable machines from other manufacturers before complaining about these prices.
And what we keep responding is that the PCs with i7 ARE comparable machines. In the case of the 8 core, yes we'll have to wait and compare.
If price is such an issue, why don't you just buy the same consumer boxes some others here are touting to be just as good at half the price?
I just might. On tuesday morning I had $2799 burning a hole in my pocket, and it's really looking like Apple may lose that sale.
Stop making the same mistake as others here. This is NOT a home machine. This is an industrial workstation.
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I'm aware that the Mac Pro is not a home machine. I'm not even considering getting one. I don't have any idea if it is or isn't fairly priced.
But right now it's the ONLY quad core machine that Apple offer.
What quad core Mac would you recommend to a friend?
The biggest problem I can see with the new Mac Pro is that Apple seems to forget what makes a computer a premium product. Besides the Xeon processor and the aluminum case (which hasn't been updated for 6 years), I don't see anything premium about the new Mac Pro. Where are the Quatro\\FireGL BTO options? How come there is only ONE PCIe 16X slot? How come the machine is limited to only 4 drive bays? Being a high-margin and low-volume product, it's perfectly feasible for Apple to offer many different options tailored made for each customer. The limited options offered on the new Mac Pro are frustrating customers who are willing to pay handsome amounts for a computer, but need a tailor made solution. Apple need to wake up and realize that the Mac Pro is not a cheap mid-tower and they need premium services and options to go with it!
First of all, read Amorph's post. It explains some of what you're talking about.
Secondly, you are wrong about the slots. If you went to Apple's site and looked at the specs, you would have seen that there are TWO 16 channel slots. The double width slot for the normal placing of the graphics card, and the one next to it as well.
Four drive bays are plenty. Just how big do you want this machine to be? How much more expensive do you want it to be?
Those that need significantly more than the 8 Terabytes you can now put inside (yes, we see Apple's typical conservatism here, stating 4 Terabytes) get external drive bays, often using the fiber card Apple offers.
The biggest problem I can see with the new Mac Pro is that Apple seems to forget what makes a computer a premium product. Besides the Xeon processor and the aluminum case (which hasn't been updated for 6 years), I don't see anything premium about the new Mac Pro. Where are the Quatro\\FireGL BTO options? How come there is only ONE PCIe 16X slot? How come the machine is limited to only 4 drive bays? Being a high-margin and low-volume product, it's perfectly feasible for Apple to offer many different options tailored made for each customer. The limited options offered on the new Mac Pro are frustrating customers who are willing to pay handsome amounts for a computer, but need a tailor made solution. Apple need to wake up and realize that the Mac Pro is not a cheap mid-tower and they need premium services and options to go with it!
The new Mac pro has 2 16x PCI Express and 2 4x slots. One 16x is populated with a graphics card. The 3 remaining are 16/4/4.
Get over the fact that a Xeon is not an i7.
That's like calling a four cylinder engine essentially the same as an eight cylinder engine.
Don't give into the marketing, look at facts. Xeon and Core i7 are brand names. Bloomfield is the base chip. It is available in Core i7 and Xeon 3500 branding. The only difference is ECC memory support. The xeon branding doesn't magically turn from an I4 into a V8. It remains the same chip, pricing and all. It will perform the same no matter what branding is used. Then there is Gainestown (Xeon 5500). Gainestown is nothing more than bloomfield with a second quick path link for multiprocessing.
And what we keep responding is that the PCs with i7 ARE comparable machines. In the case of the 8 core, yes we'll have to wait and compare.
No, they are not. Apple doesn't make an i7 machine for consumers, or for anyone. When the single cpu Xeon workstations come out from others, you can then compare the costs.
Apple doesn't make the machine you, and many others would like to see, including me. That's too bad, and I'm not saying that in a sarcastic way.
But you have to stop comparing machines built for commercial use to machines built for home use. Even if the performance is comparable, it's still not the same machine. The organizations that buy expensive workstations and servers do NOT buy the machines you and a few others here are pushing. The failure rates are too high, among other things.
I just might. On tuesday morning I had $2799 burning a hole in my pocket, and it's really looking like Apple may lose that sale.
Well then, pull the trigger and buy it. It's not like that's a threat to us here. We'll miss you, but you can have fun in the PC forums.