PickUrPoison
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Apple TV+ chiefs speak about the service's creation and future path
And that’s why Tim’s the Apple CEO and your an armchair CEO.davgreg said:The reviews are in and they should get their CVs ready. Apple TV+ is a flop of flat, lame and over budget shows.
Pull the plug now Tim or buy a studio that has content.
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Editorial: Does Apple have the mettle to fight for Mac success in the Pro market?
Wanting and lobbying Apple for a cut-down Mac Pro is great, but you missed my point again; read what I wrote. As long as you realize it would be priced at $5k, fine. Wanting it for $1,000 or $2,500 is a fantasy.tht said:PickUrPoison said:You missed my point. People can want a $1,000 or $2,500 minitower, just like people can want a $200 or $500 MacBook Air or iPhone Pro Max. Nothing wrong with wishing for something at an 85% or a 60% discount, but its about as productive as wishing for a unicorn.Yes, but that hasn’t stopped the wishing for over 20 years now.
There’s definitely a niche of people who would buy it.
Something got Apple to develop a 2019 Mac Pro, and they even told potential customers about it 2.5 years ahead of time. Probably, some big production houses said they wouldn’t buy the iMac Pro, Apple felt that meant the end for them being in the video/audio production business if so, and that was not something they wanted to lose after letting it whither for 3 years. They also made the Mac mini more of a server machine, and something of a mobile video and audio production system, instead of retiring it as well.
So, they can change their minds, and their potential customers really should provide some mindshare that there’s more to computers then just AIO desktops and laptops.
Every single piece of hardware that Apple sells, including upgrade options, comes with a built-in margin. You can subtract Apple’s various upgrade costs and that margin is still there. The rest educated guesses, and you can come from it a variety of ways.PickUrPoison said:The 8 slot minitower you describe would save Apple very little. You can’t cut $500 in cost but $3,500 in price. The machine you describe is a $5,000 box.
It’s essentially an iMac Pro without the 27” display, 6 cores instead of 8, 16 GB of RAM instead of 32 GB, 256 GB storage instead of 1 TB, a 4 GB Radeon 580 instead of a Vega 56, and 10G Ethernet either would be an option.
Reduction in cost from the iMac Pro:
5K 27” display: $700 (LG 27 Ultrafine is $1300 with a TB3 dock)
6-core Xeon W 2235 instead of 8 core Xeon W 2145: $500
16 GB RAM instead of 32 GB: $400
256 GB SSD instead if 1 TB SSD: $400
4GB Radeon Pro 580 instead of 8 GB Vega 56: $400
No 10G Ethernet: $100
That’s $2500 off from the iMac Pro. The Xeon W 2200 series are up to half the cost of the Xeon W 2100 series in the iMac Pro, so there is reduced cost from that and going down to 6-core. The upgrade cost from the iMac 8 GB 580 to 8 GB Vega 56 is $450, and the proposed GPU here has half the memory. The rest are Apple’s own upgrade costs.
Or you can look at it through the lens of the 2013 Mac Pro. For the last 1.5 years, Apple sold the 2013 Mac Pro with a 6-core Xeon, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, and 2 FirePro D500 GPUs with 3 GB memory each (6 GB total). They sold it for $3000. The proposed Mac Half Pro has 1 less GPU. So, the proposed $2500 base model cost is reasonable here.Your comparisons to 27” iMac, it’s not a valid comparison as it bears almost no resemblance to what you want Apple to make you. If you want to figure out what your “half Mac Pro” might realistically sell for, start with the Mac Pro and figure out the difference in cost to Apple for the changes you propose.Changing 8 full length slots to 8 half length slots saves Apple very little. The current case vs. a smaller case isn’t going to save Apple more than maybe $50. 16GB vs 32GB of memory saves them less than $50.The only change you’ve proposed that saves Apple much money at all is using a different CPU. So the question is, given that Apple buys upwards of 20 million CPUs a year from Intel, how much would Apple save by buying an 8-core W-3200 series vs. an 8-core W-2200 series. Apple/Intel won’t tell us but can you imagine there would even be $300 difference?
That’s why your midtower would be priced at $5k (or more). Saving $300 to 500 in BOM cost doesn’t equate to a $3000+ cut in selling price.
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Editorial: Does Apple have the mettle to fight for Mac success in the Pro market?
You missed my point. People can want a $1,000 or $2,500 minitower, just like people can want a $200 or $500 MacBook Air or iPhone Pro Max. Nothing wrong with wishing for something at an 85% or a 60% discount, but its about as productive as wishing for a unicorn.tht said:
Mac Half Pro!PickUrPoison said:
It wouldn’t be hard at all. Apple could even save a few hundred dollars in parts cost.docno42 said:I still want an xMac - the spiritual successor to the IIcx/IIci. Give me a mini tower that can hold a couple of hard drives and a couple of slots. Shouldn't be too hard!But who would be willing to pay $5k for it, when the full size model is only $6k?
Implied in that is that it would have a base model at half the price. By half, I do not mean half the slots. Keep the 8 slots, just make them half length, well 7” instead of 12.5”. Then reduce the PCIe lanes in half to x8 instead of x16. The slots would be x16, but be electrically x8. Keep 4 at double width, keep the MPX power headers for 225+75 W power support. Use the Xeon W 2200 or a Core X platform. A base model with 6 cores, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB of storage, 4 GB Radeon Pro 580 could be had for $2500. MPX modules for Pro Vega II, dual 3.5” HDD,
I’d have a slightly ID than the 2019 Mac Pro, but taking out 5” of depth for a 18” x 8.5” x 11” sized tower would make for a nice and smallish desktop footprint. It would be a pretty good look on a desktop imo.
Of course, there would be people hoping for a $1000 tower, but it really doesn’t hurt today’s Apple to offer more models per product line. It’s the reticence that’s is hard to understand. Doing the high end tower (the Mac Pro is a workstation) would free them to take the iMac 27 down market, make it crazy thin, as they won’t need to outfit it with 95 W CPUs and 150 W GPUs anymore, while they would make more money on the high end tower, especially if they had a $1500 TB3 monitor.The 8 slot minitower you describe would save Apple very little. You can’t cut $500 in cost but $3,500 in price. The machine you describe is a $5,000 box. -
Editorial: Does Apple have the mettle to fight for Mac success in the Pro market?
Where to start... middle finger? You must be joking.rain22 said:Apple basically gave the middle finger to pro’s with the new Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro IS NOT for pros at all - it’s for a niche market of video content creators.
A ‘pro’ computer would service all professionals, not just one small segment
The cheese grater was the last truly ‘pro’ computer.
Like many others, I bought the iMac after they announced this thing and it will probably be my last as I’m buying a Windows box to test out that playground for possible transition out of the Apple environment.
This is after 28 years and an entire career with Apple.
Another point to consider - is after Apple's track record of support, you have to be a gambler to invest 10k into a single desktop that could very well be unsupported a few short years later.You’re 100% wrong. Apple gave pros exactly what many were asking for: a highly expandable box. And I t’s a nice box. With lots of industry-standard slots and PCIe lanes. 12 DIMM slots with 1.5TB max RAM, and a CPU that maxes out at 28 cores/56 threads. It’s also quiet—even under load—with great cooling and a huge power supply. Of course, it has plenty of I/O too, with four Thunderbolt 3 slots, two 10Gb Ethernet ports and even a couple USB3 ports thrown in for good measure.
In what world does any professional user who needs an expandable Mac consider the 2019 model anything but a gift from the Mac Pro gods? It’s a truly outstanding platform, as good—or even better—for one-person shops or small businesses as it is for larger corp and enterprise requirements.
Please enlighten me as to which pros are not well served by the soon-to-be-released model. -
Editorial: Will Apple's $6k+ Mac Pro require brainwash marketing to sell?
Buyer’s remorse does suck. Can you imagine buying an iMac Pro for $5k, but having zero PCIe slots and only four DIMM slots, with a 256GB max RAM? When you could have spent $6k and gotten 8 PCIe slots, with 12 DIMM slots that support 1.5TB?madan said:I'm not trying to make it hard on anyone. But I am trying to clear things up so people know what they're getting into. Buyers remorse sucks. It would be a shame to spend 8k on a computer and find out that it competes unfavorably with a 5k iMac Pro.Yikes. What a disaster.It’s almost like the two machines have different target markets or something.
You’re not clearing anything up. Declaring that buyers of the base Mac Pro are “paying between 4-10x as much for the privilege of the Apple emblem” is nothing short of BS. Price an equivalent Xeon workstation from Dell, Lenovo or HP and let’s compare. Let’s see how much the Apple logo really adds. (But I won’t hold my breath.)There’s a reason there’s a base Mac Pro. Some users need a ton of memory but not a lot of cores. Some need cores but not a lot of memory. Some need both but couldn’t care less about the GPU. Some want as much GPU as they can get. Many won’t bother upgrading the base SSD, others will max it out. Surely this can’t be news to you.Most Mac Pro buyers will order the config they want from Apple, whether that’s ten, fifteen or thirty thousand bucks. If someone wants to buy a $6k base model and throw their own RAM and half a dozen NVMe SSD drives in, more power to them.
Running through a PC Parts Picker list and saying the Mac Pro—or any Mac for that matter—is overpriced is beyond ridiculous. It also displays a profound lack of understanding of the reality of the pricing. Apple has a certain cost structure. They’ve got 130,000+ employees and spend a billion and a half per month on R&D.
Apple’s gross margin on hardware is about 30%, and their net is about 20%. If they sold a base Mac Pro for $3k they’d lose upwards of $2k on every unit sold. Your complaint about the $6k price of the base Mac Pro is no more valid than saying a MacBook Air “should” be $550 or an iPhone 11 $350. It’s naive, and flat out wrong.
