
No, Apple's New Mac Pro Isn't Overpriced - alwillis
https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/19/12/13/no-apples-new-mac-pro-isnt-overpriced
======
posix_me_less
Yeah, "what about HP expensive offerings". Of course they're overpriced too.
HP, Dell and likes demand ridiculous premiums on the front so they can build
respect and offer "discounts" later in the back. You can see the real value
after 4-5 years when you can find their boxes on ebay for peanuts.

Apple on the other hand is a master of price hiking behind smoke and mirrors.
The target group of this product seem to be gullible easy spenders. Which is
not a small group, and maybe containing some big rich companies that do not
care for price, so profit-wise, it makes sense for Apple to price the weakest
config for $6000. People or small businesses that care about value/money will
go with buying/building their own Xeon machine, or go with the
EPYC/Threadripper platform with its tradeoffs, in both cases with much higher
performance. For half the price at most.

~~~
bitwize
Here's what gets me.

The other day on youtube I saw a review of a very thin, very crappy laptop
that was going on sale at Wal-Mart for less than $100. It was held together
with six screws. The guy dismantled it on camera to give the audience a view
of its innards. Meanwhile, Apple is selling laptops in the two-kilobuck range
and higher that are glued together.

This tells me that using glue instead of screws is not about keeping cost,
thickness, or weight down. It is _strictly_ about keeping the end user from
being able to easily disassemble and then reassemble the equipment they
bought. If your MacBook wears out or breaks, Apple expects you to buy new. (Or
take it to the Genius Bar, which in principle is the same as buying new.)
Apple's great reputation is built, in part, on the top-quality machines of the
90s and early 2000s, which were designed to be able to be kept running for
years if not decades. Now, it's like, MacBook is four years old? Why haven't
you bought new yet? They are catering to the more-money-than-brains crowd.
Maybe the Mac Pro is different, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to
be engineered to have a very short service lifetime also.

~~~
hellofunk
I think this is a bit of a distortion. I know many Apple users, myself
included, who still have laptops or desktops from 8 - 10 years ago that are
still running and useful. They last just as long as Windows machines, if not
usually longer.

~~~
thawaway1837
Apple wasn’t gluing things together 8-10 years ago.

My 2008ish MacBook lasted almost a decade because I was able to open it and
replace the HDD with an SSD and max out its RAM.

Without that even if it was working fine, it would have basically been
unusable.

This is not true of their current offerings.

Also, this doesn’t factor in that when things do go wrong, and they often do,
repairing them has become significantly more expensive, because you cannot
simply replace an HDD for example.

------
Zanni
When (some) people claim the Mac Pro is overpriced, what they're really
reacting to is that there isn't an upgradable tower Mac available at a price
point they can afford. There are people who don't need Xeon processors and
multi-terabyte SSDs who still want the option to swap and upgrade components
but can't afford to start at higher than $2k-$3k.

The Mac Pro isn't overpriced for what it _is_ , but its overpriced for what
many people _want_.

------
jacobjuul
Does this mean I can finally run slack and chrome without running out of
memory?

------
thebruce87m
I wish people would stop using the term “overpriced”. Apple sets the price.
Their sales targets and subsequent results dictate whether they have priced it
appropriately. We will probably never know if it was overpriced.

But we already have a word to describe something that costs a lot: expensive.
Really we should be asking if it is good value for money.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
According to Merriam-Webster, "overprice" is a word that has been in use since
at least 1576 and has always meant "to price too high (relative to its
perceived value)".

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/overprice](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/overprice)

~~~
thebruce87m
Good info. I wonder if the feeling of “nails on a blackboard” will go away
whenever I read it now that I know.

