“The first indication that Apple’s sleek, cylindrical Mac Pro is meant for professionals — other than its name — is its high cost,” AppleInsider’s Shane Cole reports. “AppleInsider assembled a comparable Windows-based system to see just how much value Apple squeezed into its new desktop.”
“For the purposes of this exercise, we used current prices at a large, nationwide internet retailer well respected by do-it-yourself PC builders. We targeted the new Mac Pro’s most tricked-out arrangement, a $9,599 configuration,” Cole reports. “Without considering shipping costs, assembly time, or additional complications that may arise from cooling the machine, it would cost just over $14,300 to replicate Apple’s new Mac Pro spec-for-spec.”
“For that substantial premium, we lose several of the Mac Pro’s tentpole features — notably Thunderbolt connectivity — and increase the computer’s size by nearly 300 percent. We would also forfeit the significant intangible addition of Apple’s AppleCare warranty service,” Cole reports. “All in all, it appears that the new Mac Pro’s startling sticker price belies the exceptional value underneath.”
See the components that make up the inferior, bulky, $4,701 more expensive, cobbled-together Windows PC — AI, you forgot the Windows anti-virus subscription(s)! — in the full article here.
Related articles:
The Verge reviews Apple’s new Mac Pro: Unlike anything the PC industry’s ever seen – December 23, 2013
Engadget reviews Apple’s new Mac Pro: In a league of its own – December 23, 2013
The first 24 hours with Apple’s new Mac Pro and Final Cut Pro X 10.1 (with video) – December 20, 2013
T3 Mac Pro review: Unboxing, hands-on, and first impressions – December 20, 2013
Apple’s powerful new Mac Pro a good value; far from the most expensive high-end Mac or high-end PCs – December 20, 2013
CNET hands on: Apple’s radically reimagined Mac Pro is a powerhouse performer – December 20, 2013
That’s because only a box-builder living in his mother’s basement would bother.
Dell can’t afford to build one and HP would have to put on spectacles just to look at a Mac Pro.
No Windows box has EVER been able to match the value of ANY Mac… Pro or otherwise. 😉
And, truth be remembered, all current Macs can run Windows just fine. (Bite my tongue for having said that) Suddenly, the top of the line Mac costs 2/3 the price of an equivalent, but lesser) Windows-only box. Hows that for TCO.
We Mac users know this, and the savings add up when you consider the maintenance cost.
But, alas, majority of PC users will just ignore like they’ve been brainwashed to. Sigh. They deserve it.
$14,300 to run Windows 8.1. Son I am disappoint.
MADE IN U•S•A• MOTHERFRACKERS!
Yeah I screamed it here too!
I am so happy for this article, given that *no* typical user (even gamers or most designers) are in any position to say the Mac Pro is a bad value. For example, 54% percent of the readers of a cnet article think it’s overpriced. That is asinine, and AI proved it.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57616116-1/friday-poll-is-the-new-mac-pro-too-expensive/
I read the comments on your linked article. Lots of strong opinions from people who don’t have a clue. I just don’t get the hostility towards Apple from people. If it sold for 999.95, I think those morons on CNET would still think it was overpriced. I sense envy and insecurity from the other side. How sad for them.
It’s because the Windows PC users seem to think it must be “compatible”. If it’s not, it must not be good, they think. They equate PC with compatible. Also, hackers don’t like Apple because they feel Apple has abandoned them (just like the pro users feel).
I want to tinker myself. I love it. But I did post here once I built a mini PC and my wife yelled at me because it cost more than a Mac mini.
I think the hostility comes from this feeling that Apple doesn’t support the hobbyist or the pro.
How to respond?
Maybe we can say: stop tinkering with the computer…tinker with accessories and add-on… Do something useful.
The concept of ‘tinkering’ is a bit misleading. People mostly swap modules these days, they don’t build new modules from simple components, they buy modules ready made and plug them in. I speak as one who built my first computer, to my own design in the 1970’s using TTL logic and stripboard and built many computers subsequently on PCBs that I designed and etched myself and then populated with the components.
It makes very little difference whether the modules are physically within the case, or external to the case. The versatility of the new Mac pro’s expansion means that it will allow a very wide range of customised configurations – which is what ‘tinkerers like to do.
PC people think they need a big box because that’s what they’ve always used.
Just wait and see now long it takes the PC Box assemblers (like Dell) to start coming out with their own Mac Pro lookalikes. And they will probable blow it by not including Thunderbolt to cut corners.
For once you don’t get what you pay for, the cheaper apple is better value than the more expensive but inferior souped up windows pc
That’s nonsense. That headline only applies to retail Windows PCs. At least a half-dozen commenters at every site I went to said they could build a Windows PC with as much processing power as the new Mac Pro for almost half the price. And they could use four AMD GPUs in CrossFire mode to boost processing power to even greater levels. Plus the case would hold eight hard drives, two Blu-ray burners, be fully water-cooled, completely silent and double as a room heater in the winter. Jony Ive really messed up this time. He saw too many simplehuman trashcan designs and decided to put a computer inside one of them.
Now Apple is trying to sell those freaks of nature and pass it off as innovation. Everyone knows real computers were meant to be rectangular in shape for a reason. This new Mac Pro is an abomination set on shaking the computing industry to its very core. I would say it’s nothing short of heresy.
/s
I know you are being sarcastic and I agree with your take
like to add that those PC weenies don’t factor in the cost of their time of putting together and testing all those finicky high end components. PC dudes self image is that their time is worth ZERO.
typical.
Take off the “/s” and this is a typical cnet comment.
Yes most of the diehard apple haters arguments rely on substituting a Core i7 for the Xeon (because, they state confidently, of some benchmark they are equivalent)
And they also substitute Radeon for the Fire GL’s (again claiming XY benchmark proves they are equivalent.
Typical (idiot) adolescent logic; that they are far more clever than all the engineers at Intel & AMD who build them and all of the professionals who buy them and they have determined that their mythical hacked together i7/Radeon gamer rig is the equivalent of a workstation at half the price.
Can’t innovate ma ass!
The CNUTJOBS iHaters keeps posting that they can build one for 1/4 of the price… sure. Yet none post any links for a configured one to match the MPro or images of what that Frankenstein of a POS will look like.
Does anyone make a PCI Thunderbolt interface card for Window’s based PC’s? Just wondering.
No. But PC motherboards are trickling out that have Tbolt 2. For example, http://www.anandtech.com/show/7230/asus-introduces-z87deluxequad-worlds-first-thunderbolt-2-certified-motherboard
Hi cost? As soon is I saw that the maxed-out version was <$10K, I thought, "That's cheap!"
Mac Pro is a serious bargain. Apple will sell every one it can make for quite a long time.
This Mac will really be outstanding once developers jump full fledged in to Open CL. When this happens, you will see this hardware really shine. That is way I am waiting for the nest revision. You give time to developers to catch up to the hardware.
In the old days, adobe would have released a version of Photoshop that took advantage of the new mac.
Now it’s not even an afterthought.
Apple needs to buy adobe and fix it now!!!
Amen brother. Adobe software has turned into a cluster f$¢&.
you’re kidding right? WTF does apple need adobe for?
Make them an offer for Photoshop but fuck the idea of getting Adobe and its leadership in the deal.
Figure out what resources would be needed to get Pixelmator to have feature parity with Photoshop, and invest in that company. Probably a lot cheaper than buying Adobe, or maintaining Photoshop code.
I can build a PC with exactly the same specs as the top end Mac Pro +/- approx $200 (Ahem..more + than -).
Just buy the Mac Pro and install Windows with Bootcamp.
Wait a minute…Wow….even better! Two for One!
No. A real Windows PC user would never pick a circular shape for a man’s computer. They like squared corners for their computer cases. Nice, sharp edges are considered masculine. The Mac Pro looks too shiny and girlish.
I don’t think a computer that a lot of people think looks like a trash can, could be referred to, as feminine. Maybe if it was pink. I would call its aesthetic, modern industrial.
Just buy a Mac Pro and put it in a nice rectangular beige cardboard box, then!
/s
But no wait… The surface can do it can’t it? Can’t? …. Hello??? ….
I’m sure MS insiders are wandering around, unable to help themselves humming Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, particularly the bit in the chorus that goes …”Thunderbolt and Lightning, very very frightening me!”
Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week! 😄
I have to admit I didn’t think the Mac Pro would be a successful product as far as sales were concerned but it looks like I was wrong. I got nervous from earlier concerns of that the new Mac Pro would somehow end up as the equivalent of the G4 Cube. However, now that I see the Mac Pro wouldn’t be that easy to duplicate unless somebody sat down and tried to duplicate it from scratch at the motherboard level and they certainly wouldn’t make it fit into a circular design.
I’m very, very happy that Apple might actually have a leg up on most of the Windows PCs in existence for at least awhile until the blatant copying begins. I hope Apple has some patents in place to prevent this design from quickly being duplicated in a computer environment. It would be frightening to start seeing the rest of the computer industry building circular-shaped desktop computers without the least bit of shame.
As an owner of the Mac cube, I can tell you exactly why it is not the same situation as the new Mac Pro. At the release of the Mac Cube, it was already shipping with a slower CPU and graphics card than the other Mac lines had. This is not the case with the Mac Pro.
The Mac Cube had the same problems the 20th Anniversary Mac had. The CPU was actually slow by the standards of what was shipping at the time.
I’ve been using the previous 12-core for the last three years or so for scientific computation using http://www.scm.com amazing ADF quantum chemistry package. Those guys have figured out how to squeeze 95% time usage from every processor. In my field you either book time on a really big machine [apply, justify, wait] and rarely get more than a few dozen processors or you use a really fast desktop [tinker, play, anytime]. In the end I used only the Mac. This new Pro is 3 times faster ? Three times as many stupid things I can try before I hit the correct one. Will buy one asap.
Beware, it’s only significantly faster if you are using the GPUs. Your scientific software sound like it might be floating point math, so you could be good. However, you’ll still need the software to be updated to use both GPUs.
Thanks for the info. My understanding is that they do not use the GPUs yet, but the benchmarks on floating point I’ve seen + the SSD + the fast bus mean a considerable speed advantage. Besides, it looks so cool 🙂
Interesting replay on the Mac vs. PC workstation debates since the mid-1990s, PowerPC days when the PowerMac 6100, 7100, and 8100 were released. Different people come up with different comparisons, some of which favor Apple’s machine and others which favor vendor-sourced or self-assembled PC hardware. To die hard Apple fans, there is only one right answer. To die hard PC builders, there is only one right answer. In the end, these debates will change the minds of very few. Most people are locked into their current viewpoint.
The true figure of merit is how many new Mac Pros will Apple sell? How many long-neglected pros will choose to stay with their Mac-centric workflows and software? Can the new Mac Pro sustain a vibrant pro environment that will maintain the profitability and availability of key pro software packages?
I really like the fact that many of the pros in video, science, etc. using Mac workstations, and I hope that the new Mac Pro strengthens this trend.
Hum… Two things disturb me a bit in this comparison.
1) Mac Pro will only be available in February… Prices should be compared at that time, not with the prices of today.
2) The GPU. Everyone on MDN consider as fact that it’s a “rebranded W9000”. That’s not exactly true. The specs of the D700 are slightly lower than a W9000 especially about the computing performance (probably due to cooling problems). The specs of the D700 bring it somewhere in-between a W8000 and a W9000. That makes a huge price difference.
http://wccftech.com/generation-amd-professional-gpu-arrives-firepro-d700-leads-pack-35-teraflops-compute/
That doesn’t change anything to the fact that the Mac Pro is really an interesting machine for a good price. There’s no trace of the infamous “Apple Tax”
The post also forgot the re-sale value of Mac’s vs that for a Windoze machine. The ability to get back a significant sum when you upgrade has also got to be factored into the decision making process.
Don’t forget the total cost of ownership (over time)
Macs also seem to have a substantially longer useful life than most other PCs…
Great article, I have always laughed at people who say they can build a PC for less without calculating their time. However I would like to see what the two speck models would cost next to PC OEMs equivalents. Also include the expandability of both. A PC may have internal bays and slots for optical drives, however how many external peripherals can they daisy chain together. This would be a real comparison in cost.