
Those Mac Pros are going to be expensive - mh_
http://www.marco.org/2013/08/10/ivy-bridge-ep-prices
======
mikeash
Oh my god. If I have to tolerate months of Mac Pro speculation on the front
page before they're released, I think I might go mental.

I understand why people like to speculate. It can be fun. But I don't
understand so much why people like to publish their speculation, and even less
why people would upvote it.

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KVFinn
I stopped building and overclocking systems many years ago. Too old for that
shit, etc etc. But the funny things is...

CPU improvements have been so stagnant on the high end. Suddenly getting a 40%
clock increase out of a chip isn't just a way to save money, it gets you the
equivalent of a multiple generation leap.

A friend has a mid-range ($300 I think) Intel chip, now approaching 3 years
old, but running at 4.5 GHz and it is STILL notably faster than even the most
expensive Haswell part sold right now. Particularly in single threaded it
crushes. Those 10% efficiency improvements each chip rev are nice, but they
can't come close to a massive clock speed jump like that.

SO weirdly enough now I'm considering overclocking a self-built system because
you can't just wait a year and buy a regular system that is as fast anymore.

------
bparsons
What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be achieved
on a $1500-1800 PC?

If you work for a film studio, then I can understand blowing 3 grand on a
machine. But most folks I know are buying these to run photoshop and
illustrator, then claiming that a PC simply would not do. My POS laptop runs
these programs fine, and my $750 new PC box runs them like lightning.

~~~
drivingmenuts
> What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be
> achieved on a $1500-1800 PC?

Running OS X with (mostly) no major issues. Given that most software is
available for at least two operating systems, it's really down to choice these
days. Sometimes, sentimentality and/or perceived value overrides rationality.
I'm pretty sure this is OK and not a major flaw in humanity, most of the time.

Bootcamping - go ahead, try that on a Windows box. I Bootcamp into Win 8 and
OS X. After a few driver updates, Windows 8 performs flawlessly (aside from,
you know, being Windows 8). If I really felt like it, I'd run Linux as a third
option, but it's way more convenient to run it as a VM.

People get way to wound up about the hardware/OS choices that other people
make. Really, aside from having to do support for them, it should probably
only be about as controversial as hair length.

~~~
YellowRex
A top-spec Mac Mini is pretty beastly at $1500. I have no doubt it would chew
up and spit out the vast majority of workstation use cases. 2.6 GHz Quad-core
i7, 16 GB RAM, SSD.

The only thing I can possibly imagine would be some seriously high-end 3D
rendering or massively parallel simulation software.

To the OPs point, there is zero reason to get the Mac Pro over even a Mac
Mini.

Seems like there's a hole in Apple's lineup. You can't get a discrete GPU
without a monitor attached (iMac) or spending >$3000. Not that it matters much
for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. which are not GPU-parallelizable anyway. At
least not yet.

------
dman
Last thanksgiving I bought a Dell T5600 for lesser than the retail price of
the two 8 core Xeons that were in it. Its very likely that OEM's get very
different pricing from Intel as compared to retail.

~~~
ihsw
Server CPU retail prices don't age very well _at all_ , it's not uncommon to
see server CPUs retain the same price even until two generations later. Newegg
et al will keep the prices sky-high -- even in the face of plummeting sales --
and then discontinue the product line due to "lack of interest."

It's absolutely appalling.

So, to address your point, as another poster has mentioned you probably had
previous-generation CPUs. OEMs get relatively generous discounts at the end of
product lifecycles so as to encourage gargantuan purchase orders, and
consumers don't see such discounts _ever_.

~~~
dman
See my response to the other poster.

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lquist
This is exactly the price point they should be at. The majority of people
buying these desktops are professionals and they are willing to pay big prices
for performance.

------
zdw
I wouldn't be surprised if the new Mac Pro only allowed 115W TDP CPUs - they
could provide 4/6/8/10/12 core models all under that speed.

I'm willing to bet that Apple won't even bother with the 4-core models, unless
they want to hit a very low price point.

On the opposite, insanity side of things, I could easily see a >$10k Mac Pro
with 12 cores, 128GB of RAM, 4TB of SSD, and 12GB of VRAM.

~~~
bodyfour
Every time a new Mac Pro model comes out everybody seems to do the same thing:
goes to store.apple.com, spec out everything to the maximum, and gawk at the
giant price tag.

It's amazing to think how as recently as the 90s it was completely normal to
spend $20K+ on a Sun or SGI workstation to plop on an engineers desk. Now
spending that type of money requires effort, and you'll end up with a machine
with a quarter terabyte of RAM, four 30" monitors, etc.

Computers are so damn cheap.

~~~
ynniv
In 1992 Apple sold a computer that _started_ at $16,500 modern (2013) dollars:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIfx](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIfx).
The Lisa was a probably a failure because it started at $23,500 modern
dollars, which was a lot compared to the original Macintosh's $5,600 modern
dollars.

You used to have to really want access to a computer. Today's computers are a
mighty bargain.

------
fsckin
I'm pretty sure Intel gives Apple a huge discount vs. the retail prices that
AnandTech posted.

Is it newsworthy that Mac Pros will be expensive? They have _always_ been
>$1000 more expensive than a comparable PC.

People who care about the price difference will run a Hackintosh. If you have
more money than sense (or time, patience, etc) then the Mac Pro is a pretty
sweet machine.

~~~
atonse
These are truly professional workstations. The kinds of customers that
actually "need" a Mac Pro, are spending way, way more on salaries than on
equipment, for this to make a huge difference.

All this is assuming, of course, that the new Mac Pros live up to the hype and
provide those amazing performance gains. (Hardware AND software)

~~~
minor_nitwit
Any evidence of software gains from OSX?

Hardware is hardware, so the pretty Mac Pro box isn't worth much, when the
same hardware is available elsewhere. Perhaps it makes the employees feel more
important at work. That said, a couple of days ago, HN had an article with
evidence that the more you make your employees feel like the company is on the
edge of collapse - the better they'll perform.

~~~
pearjuice
Just like iOS, OS X is designed to build on very specific hardware and it is
known which specific optimizations and generalizations can be made. Hence the
term "hackintosh".

~~~
mikeash
Can you be more specific about what sorts of optimizations it could be making?

------
simonh
No mention of the GPUs that are likely to be the real drivers of performance
in these machines viA opencl and cuda.

------
patman81
Marco estimates an entry price of $3,500. Any guess what a Retina Display will
add to that?

~~~
rsynnott
Asus currently makes a 30" 4k display for about 3500. Doubt it'll be much
below that for a year or so.

~~~
patman81
A 25" 4k display should work nice with HiDPI mode in OS X and $1.999 would
look nice on the price tag. That's my guess. But when will it ship?

~~~
rsynnott
Unless they're actually willing to take a loss on it, they probably won't be
doing it at that price this year.

------
sag47
He's using crappy metrics. It depends on the instruction set architecture
being used because a better ISA trumps more GHz.

~~~
ggreer
That's not a problem in this case. All of the CPUs listed have the same Ivy
Bridge cores, just different numbers of them running at different speeds.

If there's one thing Marco missed, it's that the larger L3 cache will help
some single-threaded workloads run faster on the higher-end Xeons.

------
cremnob
They're being assembled in the US and it's a product for a niche market, of
course it's going to be expensive.

~~~
samspenc
So is the Moto X, and it seems to me there's a small price delta compared to
Samsung's S4 and HTC's One, but not that much. Given that its only final
assembly in the USA, and not 100% made in the USA, not sure if being made in
the USA would affect costs by that large a factor.

~~~
rsynnott
Yeah; for this, certainty, the US issue wouldn't be very relevant. Intel
charging OEMs up to 3k for the processors will be more of an issue.

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pearjuice
Does it matter? This Marco guy will buy anything with an Apple logo anyway -
and sprout tweetable one-liners about how good and revolutionary said products
are. I don't see why his articles are cross-posted here anyway, it is just
fanboyism and praise. Nothing worth discussing. Here come the downvotes.

~~~
icarus_drowning
Well at least you expect the downvotes. Which leads me to wonder why you
thought this comment would be informative and helpful in the first place.

~~~
pearjuice
It is a friendly reminder which few are willing to accept or able to publicly
acknowledge.

~~~
larrywright
It's not the least bit friendly, and quite rude.

