“Almost every time someone discusses Apple’s pricing, it is assumed that you can buy similar products from other companies for less. From the release of the very first Mac, you supposedly had to pay more money to go Apple,” Gene Steinberg reports for The Tech Night Owl. “Indeed, Apple was often attacked for daring to charge extra for Macs and other gear.”
“Now when it comes to the high-end Mac Pro, as soon as the 2013 model with its striking tubular looks shipped, you can bet that the critics were busy trying to see if a workstation that started at $2,999 for a fairly basic configuration, and came close to $9,600 fully outfitted, was indeed a good value compared to the competition,” Steinberg reports. “What is clear from the starting gate is that it’s extremely difficult to actually find anything with comparable specs in any workstation from a mainstream manufacturer, such as Dell or HP. I checked the business section at Dell’s site and tried to match the component complement, roughly speaking, of the most expensive Mac Pro with a Precision Workstation. I couldn’t come close regardless of what I did.”
“My next attempt was to build a customized HP Z820 workstation. The price hit $11,581 before I gave up without getting all the components in place,” Steinberg reports. “This appears to explain why others have tried the build-it-yourself route, using parts from different PC dealers to see if they could make one.”
Read more in the full article here.
“From the release of the very first Mac, you supposedly had to pay more money to go Apple,”
When Apple released the first Mac, there was no other way to go.
Uhhhhmmmmmm, IBM, Compaq, AT&T, Fortune Systems, etc.
True, but can you really compare a DOS system with a Mac? And comparatively, were they even cheaper then?
Just making the point that there were other ways to go, whether it was DOS or whatever shell over DOS or Unix.
2499 was a lot of money back then and the race to the lowest price hadn’t started at the time.
Common! My Radio Shack TRS80 was awesome! Along with my tape cassette drive and 110 baud modem. I didn’t touch “DOS” until 1981. Or was that 1982?
I am 100% not the target market for a Xeon processor Mac Pro. Too expensive and I don’t need the computational power.
But how about bringing out an i7 Haswell processor version of the Mac Pro for a third of the price with a single 1GB Nvidia graphics card. At $1,000 I’d jump on that. Make it 8GB standard RAM and 128GB standard SSD. As long as I can replace the RAM and SSD on my own, I don’t care about the initial capacity.
http://www.apple.com/mac-mini/
No, I don’t want a Mac mini. I want a scaled down Mac Pro with Haswell processors. The mini doesn’t interest me in the least, because it has laptop components. The Mac Pro contains desktop grade components.
You can buy the mini if you want.
So what if it has laptop components? Are you under the impression that the bigger components are somehow more robust?
Do you want an award for the most stupid comment? Of course desktop grade components trumps laptop grade components on a desktop machine. Why do you think they outfitted the Mac Pro with desktop grade components instead of laptop grade components.
Have a look at the benchmarks for laptop GPU vs desktop GPU, simply no contest. Visit bare feats.com
It was what you said you wanted a scaled down Mac Pro with an i7 rather than the Xeon.
Professionally I don’t have any problem paying for workstations and have ordered MacPro’s already, but I also have a Mini driving the TV in the living room. Great little unit (almost unbelievable how tiny it is, it puts consumer (i7) windows boxes to shame.)
So… yeah I guess I did.
Exactly my sentiments when I started reading the specs, I d even like to see a choice between Radeon and nvidia GPU. I use software that requires CUDA, why should I have to wait for the software vendor to rewrite the programmes. Unfortunately Apple is not interested in providing too much choice and that’s a shame. It’s not like they don’t have the resources…..
CUDA is a proprietary attempt to strangle the competition (ATI) without really making better products. I never liked this approach (MS used to do it all the time)
OpenCL is a far better standard and will be the successful vector computations platform because it is an open industry standard.
If this Mac Pro becomes popular, perhaps Apple will build a model that is more for consumers than professionals. They didn’t update the Mac Mini this year so maybe next year we’ll get a Mac mini Pro.
I don’t think they’ll make a consumer version since the iMac at the higher end will only become more powerful on it’s own.
So… you want a Macintosh mini tower? Here’s a weblink to build your own Hackintosh mini-tower for $600. Upgrade the components for more oomph.
http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/28/build-a-hackintosh-for-600-bucks/