
12-core Mac pro goes on sale Dec 19th, starting at $2999 - anigbrowl
http://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/apples-12-core-mac-pro-on-sale-dec.-19-starting-at-2999.html
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angersock
This pricing reminds me somewhat of the poptarts:

[http://i.imgur.com/2PEDR.png](http://i.imgur.com/2PEDR.png)

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joeblau
That's pretty funny!

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mathattack
An open question... How long will selling computers based on increasing
processing power make sense for anything but a very-niche audience?

My thinking is that at some point, it should be transparent where the
computations take place. So rather than sell us 12 cores, it would be more
efficient for Apple to sell us "5 years of access to 12 cores", or whatever
the expected lifetime is, and we wouldn't know where the processing power
comes from.

Right now accessing remote computing power takes a little bit of thought (AWS)
but if anyone can make it easy enough for Grandma, it's Apple.

They may always be cases of having this power local (a place with bad internet
access?) but that seems like a niche.

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chc
For most tasks that you really want to throw 12 cores at (e.g. video
rendering), the latency of sending everything over the Internet will be
extremely noticeable. If you don't care about that sort of thing, you probably
don't care about having access to 12 cores.

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mathattack
I was thinking that 12 cores would be to cut a compile time from hours to
minutes, or shorten a scientific calculation, no? Or pricing a complicated
bond.

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lostlogin
That headline is distinctly average. And I can't find pricing for anything
other than the quad and 6 core model on the apple site (but am on a phone, so
it may be that I'm missing it).

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rch
Average, or just wrong? I believe the quoted price is for the low end model,
not the 12 core.

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tpurves
In other news, lian-li announces this nifty little aluminum m-itx pc case for
$149 for [http://anandtech.com/show/7595/lian-li-release-
pcv358-chassi...](http://anandtech.com/show/7595/lian-li-release-
pcv358-chassis-for-microatx-builds) And you can even chose from and upgrade to
many different CPUs, GPUs, and internal storage options. See also bitfenix
etc.

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MrScruff
The market for Apple built workstations running Mac OS probably doesn't have a
great deal of overlap with the market for home built PCs.

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csmuk
Two things to consider:

1\. home built PC market is probably larger than the entire Mac market. I
don't have any figures to back this up but based on Windows' market share and
my experience, 20% of PC's I've seen over the years are home built.

2\. Those "home built" PCs are also built and sold by PC shops as complete
computers, not necessarily home builders. My father ran a business that built
OEM white box PCs for 15 years. He sold over 200,000 units.

There is going to be some overlap. Particularly as most of the killer apps are
entirely cross platform.

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MrScruff
_home built PC market is probably larger than the entire Mac market. I don 't
have any figures to back this up but based on Windows' market share and my
experience, 20% of PC's I've seen over the years are home built._

As (presumably) a home PC builder, 20% of the PC's you seen over the being
home built doesn't imply much about the rest of the world...

The reason why there isn't much overlap is that workstations are often used in
a professional setting by designers, where spending $3000 on a computer isn't
considered a great deal. Home built PCs are rarer in this context.

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csmuk
Actually I use a ThinkPad and an HP Z820.

I work in financial services sector and we serve desktop and web apps. Bar
large businesses, we see a LOT of home built and OEM PCs.

I was involved in the family business OEM sector for the best part of 20 years
as well from a hardware perspective. There are two types of professional:
careless and obsessive. The latter build their own. The distribution I saw was
about 40% OEM/home built to 60% big manufacturer.

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MrScruff
Do you have any non-anecdotal numbers? I had a quick search and couldn't find
any.

I wouldn't class a professional who builds her own PC as obsessive, I would
just classify her as someone for whom the time/money divide is biased towards
available time. When I used to home build in the 90s I was in the same
bracket. Nowadays it would make no more sense to me than doing my own
plumbing.

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pdknsk
obligatory: [http://tubelor.neocities.org/](http://tubelor.neocities.org/)

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xarball
Wait, are you implying...

