
Apple’s reinvented Mac Pro will shred your workflow - jbegley
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/goodbye-trash-can-hello-cheese-grater-apples-reinvented-mac-pro-will-shred-your-workflow/
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amarshall
The price saddens me. The $6K base is twice the base of the 2013 Mac Pro when
it was released. Some quick spec-ing for a somewhat-equivalent DIY build gives
somewhere around $3K.

I hope at least that the SSDs are standard M.2, but looking at the pictures
I’m not sure they are.

~~~
NikkiA
They're behind the T2 chip, it'll be bare flash not M.2

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tracker1
The pricing on this is more insane than Mac ever has been... Holding out for a
Zen 2 16-core or Threadripper myself, and will almost certainly be jumping to
Linux for good this time around.

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effie
Wow, Apple with its customer base is ripe for some disruption. One can get the
same performance as the cheapest version of this product for $1000, instead of
$6000 (except for the afterburner card, whose benefit is not so cleat to me
now). I have a hard time believing that Apple ecosystem and its applications
are so good to audio/video creators that they pay 6x as much as the value of
the hardware. It seems to me those buyers are actually paying for the design
and for the status symbol, like people pay for suits or expensive watches. Not
because they need this machine and its ecosystem for production.

~~~
erikpukinskis
This is like saying you can get the same calories as a high end steak by
eating $0.50 worth of table sugar.

Technically true. Yet not a useful substitution for anyone but hummingbirds.

~~~
effie
So what is so good about this steak computer that warrants 6x the cost of the
hardware? The afterburner card?

~~~
erikpukinskis
Hard to say exactly because you didn't provide your build. But I've specced
out sub-$1000 PCs recently and you have to make a lot of sacrifices to get
there. A good gaming PC with a high end GPU is going to start in the $1400
range.

~~~
effie
For example here:

Budget build for $1100:
[https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HGNWHh](https://pcpartpicker.com/list/HGNWHh)

More beefy I/O build for $1500:
[https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KWCtMZ](https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KWCtMZ)

And those are prices in retail. One can get this kind of machine second hand
at 30-50% discount.

These would have comparable performance to what Apple is proposing for $6000,
except for the Afterburner card, which I am not so sure about. Doubt it is
worth $4000 though.

High-end gaming setup would begin to touch $2000, but that is not what I am
talking about.

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amanaplanacanal
Can I just comment on the title without reading the article? I don't know if
shredding my workflow is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.

~~~
isoskeles
The "joke", which is part of the headline but not in the submission, is that
the new Mac Pro resembles a cheese grater, hence the shredding.

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hising
It will shred my wallet for sure

~~~
drivingmenuts
Goodbye, savings account ...

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Simulacra
OMG An Apple product has finally made me feel excited! It's going to be pricey
but I've dreamed up this for some time.

If it's truly repair and upgrade friendly, this would definitely be something
that will pull me back to the Apple world, after leaving in disappointment
around the touch bar.

~~~
effie
I do not understand this positive excitement. The market price for the
performance they offer is a fraction of what they ask. Why not build your Xeon
system for fraction of the price? Or buy workstation from small builders, more
expensive, but hassle-free and still fraction of the cost.

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hooloovoo_zoo
Is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get
much more compute from the cloud?

~~~
macawfish
My question would be: is there still a market for these very expensive
workstations when you can get much more by building the machine yourself?

Yes, because a lot of media people are scared away from the thought of putting
together their own machine (and a lot of them also depend on Mac OS)

~~~
collsni
I'd just build it myself and still install Mac OS... Ha, if that was a factor.

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boromi
I love the design, too bad they don't just sell the case so I could DIY a
proper PC that's half the cost with the same specs ...

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minikites
Why did this take more than two years to design and produce?

~~~
threeseed
It wasn't just the computer but the display and Afterburner card.

~~~
wmf
Which could have been delayed a year since they're super-niche.

~~~
threeseed
I think you will find that it isn't.

Video editing is a very large and pretty core use case.

~~~
wmf
But only 1% of video editors will buy a $5,000 reference monitor.

~~~
rimliu
If there was a market for $43 000 one there probably is a market for $5000 one
too.

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Kye
Is it dishwasher safe?

Kidding! I'd buy it if I could afford to pay for style over optimizing for
cost:power.

~~~
threeseed
You would find it pretty hard to spec a similar machine for similar cost.

And then you would still have to find an alternative to the Afterburner card.

~~~
gamblor956
It would be possible to spec a similar machine for similar cost as less (once
the component parts are available like the new Radeon Pro), as the $6000
_starting_ price tag is for the base model, i.e., only 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, and
a Radeon Pro 580X. (The Afterburner card appears to be standard.) The 1.5TB
ram, 32 cores, etc., are upgrade options. Based on past Apple history, a
fully-specced Mac Pro could top $20k.

[https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/](https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/)

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jseliger
A lot of my workflow is in Word and Textmate, so a lot of different Macs will
"shred" my workflow.

~~~
freehunter
Any time Apple announces a Macbook, there are hundreds of comments saying how
they've abandoned the true professionals by only supporting quad-core
processors and 16GB of RAM and expansion only through USB-C. Then they
announce a machine that has 1.4kW of power and 28 cores and 1.5TB of RAM and
we see comments from people complaining that they don't need that much power
and any machine will work for them.

~~~
Kye
There is no contradiction here. There is a range of needs expressed by
different people.

