I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used.
I don't know which way it goes with the Mac Pro. But it's certainly not obvious to me that there's any sort of substantial markup on Apple's part here. The CPU alone is going to cost something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the total purchase price. I don't even know what the GPUs cost (can't find any mention of the model Apple lists outside of Mac Pro discussion) but I bet they're not cheap either.
Apple stuff is expensive generally because it's high-end, not because there's a huge markup. When people say that e.g. the Mac Pro is too expensive, they generally mean that it has more than they need (e.g. they don't want a Xeon CPU), not that it's overpriced for what it actually has. That's why I preempted the use of non-equivalent parts, because it's really common to start out this sort of comparison with something like, "Well, I don't actually need a Xeon, so I tossed in an i7 instead, and I don't need a workstation GPU so I used a gaming GPU instead, and..." and they end up with something much cheaper but not at all the same.
You have to stop thinking that a large OEM such as apple will be as subject to the artificial market segmentation pricing Intel & AMD makes. Intel sells i7 CPUs much cheaper than the equivalent xeon cpus for example. The big advantage of the equivalent xeon is being able to dual socket it and some other cheap-for-intel features being switched on. You can't dual socket CPU this mac pro anyway and GPUs tend to max out at ~$500 each for equivalent consumer GPUs.
So in summary, you can make an equivalent performance PC for $1500-$2000 dollars.
You misunderstand. I'm not thinking that Apple is subject to anything. I'm not talking about their costs at all. I'm merely talking about our costs if we were to try to build an equivalent PC ourselves.
Apple probably gets a steep discount on all of its components, but that's completely irrelevant for this comparison.
I don't doubt that you can build a much cheaper PC if you go through the whole parts list and substitute cheaper, worse consumer parts for all the workstation parts in the Mac Pro. The question is, can you really build the same thing for the same price? I bet you can't, or at least it's close. Maybe you can, I could be wrong.
The question isn't how much a generic PC that's "good enough" costs. The question is how much it costs "with the same parts".
You get ECC RAM, but mostly you're paying for drivers. They are usually slower for gaming, but provide better accuracy and usually crush consumer cards in pro performance.
It may be a marketing con, but if you buy your $30,000 engineering package and expect it to run on your gamer GPU, you may need to do some video card firmware hacking to make that happen. And then, of course, you won't be able to get any customer support from the software vendor for any visual glitches which may appear. Sucks, but that's how it is -- workstation GPUs _are_ better, generally not in terms of FPS in Crysis, but in terms of out-of-the-box compatibility with off-the-shelf high end software packages.
If you are in the rare software segment with $30k software, then the extra $1000 or $2000 to indirectly get hardware drivers & firmware that confirm with your $30k software is not a big cost.
BUT, there are large segments that do not need those special drivers in their software set and are restricted by circumstance to use OS X only, such as iOS developers. Or just people who want high performance GPUs with their mac who don't need the FirePro feature set. There are also many software packages that do GPGPU or OpenCL just fine with consumer segment GPUs too.
I would of loved it if it was a mac pro with dual CPUs vs. dual GPUs for example, something you really can't physically get without the xeon level chipset, even though we all know it's very possible with a consumer chipset.
I just remember that at my last work, the hardware designer was using Solidworks for his CAD work, and the single-threaded rendering was an issue. There was an active community looking for the best cards to do that rendering on, and moderately high-level gaming cards did significantly better than the 'workstation' cards by Matrox and similar.
I don't know what price tier Solidworks is in, but looking at their site now, it's in the "get a quote" category, so they're not a consumer-level bit of software.
Core i7s and Xeon E3s are actually very close in price. The E3 1275v3 is $353.99 and the i7 4771 (the same sans ECC) is $319.99, and the i7 4770K (no ECC but overclockable) is $339.99. The E3 1245v3 (100MHz slower) is only $289.99, and the i7 4770 (same base speed as the 1245v3 but one extra turbo bin) is $309.99. The E3 1225v3 (300MHz slower than the top i7s and E3s) is $224.99, only slightly more expensive than the i5 4570 ($199.99) which is clocked the same but lacks HyperThreading and ECC.
Your problem is in assuming that the Xeon E5s that are going into high-end workstations and servers are in any way comparable to the E3s and the consumer parts. They're not. The E5s have twice the memory bandwidth, more than twice as many PCIe lanes, and a minimum of 20% more cache (and cache sizes scale up with core count). The E5s admittedly don't have the integrated GPU, but nobody in that market misses it.
Do you know how much those GPU's cost? This isn't a $1500 home gaming machine, it's a standalone server. And spending $3-$5k on a Dell server with dual video cards is completely reasonable. Some of the Tesla cards run for $3k+, by themselves!
I know it's not linear, but you really expect Apple to be paying $1000 to $1500 for a 3.7GHz quad core?
I'm sure I'm one of those people you're thinking of. I built a PC last year for $1k and it appeared either identical or better than the maxed out iMac which was ~$3k.
While that is not the correct CPU, the overall sentiment is correct; there's no way that the CPU would constitute such a significant portion of the purchase price.
And indeed one may be able to obtain a ready to ship and in stock OEM packaged version of the CPU in the upcoming Mac Pro for $303.99 (+2.99 UPS ground + CA tax as applicable):
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?p=E5-1620V2
Thanks. I wasn't sure how to find that, even though I did do some searches on superbiiz.
I'm not sure I understand the discrepancy. Why would the CPU be so cheap ($303.99) compared to the one I posted, which several commenters are claiming is severely under powered in comparison?
These new lower end E5 16xxs are essentially Core i7s and priced about equivalently[1]. The 26xx's are much beefier (I think people were expecting 26xx's across the line but matching specs[2], this is obviously not the case).
I'd be pleasantly surprised if the 12C Mac Pro sold for less than $6K but as you can see the big ($1500!) bump is between the 6C/8C and they didn't talk pricing beyond the 6C so if they don't eat the cost you're looking at a $6K 8C and a $7K/$8K 12C.
[2] https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/ and the description text: "Intel Xeon E5 with 10MB L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz. Configurable to 3.5GHz 6-core processor with 12MB L3 cache, 3.0GHz 8-core processor with 25MB L3 cache, or 2.7GHz 12-core processor with 30MB L3 cache"
I don't expect Apple to, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were putting in a CPU that we would pay that much for.
The CPU you cite is an E3 versus an E5 (not that I have any clue what that means), runs slower, and has less L3 cache. I don't know how much those add but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a lot. Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....
Xeon E3s have half the memory bandwidth, only 40% of the peripheral bandwidth, and at best 80% of the cache of the low-end E5s. A Xeon E3 is just a consumer CPU with ECC support. A Xeon E5 is a pro part.
>Just once, it would be nice if someone making a Mac versus PC price comparison could compare against a part that was better than the one in the Mac....
I'm very sorry. I couldn't find a faster xeon for sale and I thought it would suffice to demonstrate how a 200MHz increase most likely isn't worth $1000.
I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu, since I can't currently buy the cpu myself (and thus the cost for me is infinite)...
When I'm the most valuable company in the world and not just some guy searching newegg, I'll get back to you.
You may not be aware of this, but there has been a years-long practice of people making claims about outrageous markup of Apple hardware versus BYO systems, and not actually using the same hardware. It's irritating. (There certainly are cases of outrageous markup, but in this case, we don't really know yet, and the prices for Xeons are high.)
This reminds me of complaints about Apple laptops. I'm sold now, but when I first purchased one I was still a Linux/Windows dual-booter. So I specced out the Macbook Pro that I wanted, specced out (roughly) equivalent systems with every major brand at the time (circa 2006, this was the Core 2 Duo CPU version). I got a lot of systems that were close enough (+/- 50GB depending on their HDD sizes, = RAM or slightly more because I had some minimum I wanted at the time, close enough clock speeds with the same CPU (+/- .2GHz)). Every one of them ran to +/-$300 of the cost of the Macbook Pro, and not all of them had educational discounts (still in school at the time so I could take advantage of that). I haven't done this comparison in years, but ~2009 I did it again because I was tired of the noise from my coworkers and it came out similarly, similar specs meant priced within 200-300 of the Mac. Spec it out, don't just guestimate, and equivalent systems aren't significantly cheaper, if cheaper at all (either BYO or from someone like Dell or HP).
Yeah, Apple hardware is often decent value for money at launch, if your needs are exactly met by one of Apple's handful of models, with nothing that's overkill or unused and nothing missing. How many people is that true for though?
For example, if - for instance - you want a decent dedicated GPU you have to get a Mac Pro with an expensive Xeon E5 CPU and a workstation-glass GPU, even if you only need a much cheaper i7 or i5. Similarly, if you need lots of CPU power you have to pay for an expensive GPU even if you don't need it. These are hardly unusual requirements! (Also, Apple famously skimps on RAM compared to the rest of the system and then overcharges for extra RAM.)
Maybe sometime you should try the reverse exercise. Pick out a handful of popular PCs and see how much it would cost to buy an equally-powerful Mac.
I completely agree. Apple doesn't offer the ability to pick and choose, so you can end up with hardware much in excess of your needs, both in capabilities and in price.
My point is simply that this is a rather different situation. People phrase it as "Apple charges a premium" when it's more like "Apple sells high-end products". It doesn't make much difference to you if you want a medium-range product instead, but it does mean that Apple isn't just ripping everybody off.
As I mentioned, clock speed is only one difference. The cache is not the same, and from a bit of research, it looks like the E5 has double the memory bandwidth over the E3, so it's not at all a trivial difference.
> I imagine you think it logically impossible that Apple could be marking up the cpu
What would make you think that? I just want to see an actual comparison, not comparisons with parts people think are "close enough". Maybe that's impossible right now, in which case I want people to stop trying instead of coming up with "close enough".
The question is, how much does it cost to build a PC "with the same parts"?
There's a reason people pay much, much more for E5s than E3s, and it's not for clock speed. You can't get more than 32 GB of RAM in an E3 server, for example, while E5 servers can handle 256 per processor. E5s can coordinate between processors for multi processor machines, too.
>I've seen plenty of cases where someone said they could build an equivalent PC for less, and then ended up not being able to, because they were thinking of cheaper and worse components than Apple used.
If your needs align exactly with the models Apple offers, and Apple just released a product (what would the comparison look like if you needed to buy a system six months ago?) then sure.
The real-world question is to decide what your needs are in terms of specs and then compare the different ways of satisfying those needs. To choose an egregious example: I need an average CPU with a powerful GPU for real time performance. Going with Apple I am pushed into a hardware bracket where I have to spend in excess of $4000 to meet those needs. I could also satisfy those needs with a 700 PC and a 400 GPU.
I don't know which way it goes with the Mac Pro. But it's certainly not obvious to me that there's any sort of substantial markup on Apple's part here. The CPU alone is going to cost something like 1/3 to 1/2 of the total purchase price. I don't even know what the GPUs cost (can't find any mention of the model Apple lists outside of Mac Pro discussion) but I bet they're not cheap either.
Apple stuff is expensive generally because it's high-end, not because there's a huge markup. When people say that e.g. the Mac Pro is too expensive, they generally mean that it has more than they need (e.g. they don't want a Xeon CPU), not that it's overpriced for what it actually has. That's why I preempted the use of non-equivalent parts, because it's really common to start out this sort of comparison with something like, "Well, I don't actually need a Xeon, so I tossed in an i7 instead, and I don't need a workstation GPU so I used a gaming GPU instead, and..." and they end up with something much cheaper but not at all the same.