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Comment by bt3 | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see a new Mac Pro, but no one has mentioned price. The "entry level" Mac Pro from 2006 was $2199 and $2999 in 2013 (the last update). Even the top-of-the-line "trashcan" Mac Pro was ~$6500 with 12 cores.

I don't doubt the hardware is top-notch again, but an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous. Is the new case and a "revive" worth the 100% price increase for a base model? Or has Apple come to revelation that pro's will pay any price?

Sidenote - 6k monitor is beautiful but $5000? The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?). Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?

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> Sidenote - 6k monitor is beautiful but $5000? The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?). Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?

To be fair that's 6kx3k. So $1 buys 3000 pixels (more if you use the cheaper VESA stand option). The sound in the auditorium when $1000 for the stand was announced was priceless.

The live stream I'm following jokingly mentioned the stand is $1000 extra (is that true?).

Yup, it was on the screen and the presenter spoke the number without even cracking a smile. Must have practiced in the bathroom mirror for hours to pull that off.

Moved on fast to squash those grumbles that were rising

There was an audible gasp from the audience after hearing that price.

I feel like the misguided dongle philosophy has somehow been extended all the way to this. The idea that the stand is a separate price is just crazy to me, that it's a thousand dollars, absurd.

Somehow I doubt they'll be selling $1000 monitor stands in a few years.

I can't quite believe they were saying someone would turn one of the monitors 90 degrees to write code. Why anyone would spend $6k on a monitor to write code is beyond me.

I believe that girl never wrote a line of code. Why would you use a vertical monitor to write code???

More lines viewable at a time. Most places have line length limits and they're well below full screen width. There are people I've worked with who enjoy reading and writing code on a vertical orientation.

That's something new to me. I though people want more horizontal tabs/columns. Scanning a very "tall" display(like this 32" one) doesn't seem very comfortable to me.

I loved my single 21:9 LG display. I hated that it was not HiDPI by a long shot.

The ability to understand code at a macro level improves the more code you are able to see at once, because scanning with your eyes is more efficient than scrolling can ever be. So using a portrait orientation for your monitor does make sense.

Maybe you're just not used to it?

I love stacking terminals in a vertical monitor. I usually keep some code in tall columns as well if the project has longer files. It's great when it suits what you're doing, but I had my doubts like you as well.

There's at least 4 out of ~15 people in our office with one or more vertical monitors. I wouldn't buy a $6,000 monitor for it, but your standard few hundred dollar Dell office monitor pivots for a reason.

my code is almost always taller than it is wide, so a vertical monitor lets me see more at once. I try to avoid having a dozen levels of indentation because IMO it hurts legibility regardless of monitor orientation. Also handy for terminal output and documentation.

It is actually really common to have several monitors, at least one of which is vertical in order to have one dedicated "code-reading" screen. When I worked at a large investment bank, most technology people had this set-up, at least in my own experience/recollection. When the monitor is vertical, and you have one file of code that has a few thousand lines, it becomes much more practical to have 1/10th of the code in your view immediately, as opposed to 1/25th and needing to reconstruct the hierarchy of the application's codebase in your immediate mental memory

Many programmers do it, including several famous ones (you can find photos online).

You view more context (lines of code) at the same time.

https://www.google.com/search?q=vertical+monitor+programming...

The shape of screens has been traditionally determined by 1) video applications (as video pros were willing to pay premiums, hence setting standards for the market to follow) and 2) the form of keyboards (laptops must be wider than taller).

Developers have had to fight this trend by figuring out screen-splitting hacks, whjen their natural workflow is inevitably shaped by Western text, so fundamentally vertical at scale.

If you step back, you'll see that vertical layout makes more sense than the horizontal one.

(And please don't call grown-up professional women "girls". It makes you look bad.)

There are developers here who make 200-600K per annum. So they can buy these monitors. Of course they can choose not to but it wouldn't be such a big deal for them.

Such a big deal as for..?

I am a developer, I make roughly in the middle of that range and I own the business so expensing it is straightforward. It's the value proposition that doesn't stack up from my perspective.

The value proposition is for video and 3D pros, where equivalent accurate monitors can cost tens of thousands.

"However, there is a class of users that is currently buying an Eizo monitor for $5,000 to get professional-class image quality, and Apple’s display is so much better that it’s not even close. There are also people who buy Sony reference monitors that cost more than $40,000—and Apple’s display is basically a match for them in terms of quality. By these standards, the Pro Display XDR is either a breakthrough in terms of quality or a staggering breakthrough in terms of price." [1]

But if you're a coder and like nice things and money's no issue, then, why not...

[1] https://sixcolors.com/

200K-600K doesn't quite yet put one in the category of "I'm know I'm getting bent over a barrel, but I have so much money I don't give a shit that I'm going to have anal tearing in the morning." It's enough to do that for a few things that one finds important, but not everything. If, OTOH, you impulse-buy Ferraris, this might go well on your desk at home.

I’s argue the primary device you interact with 8+ hours per day should qualify for “things you might care about”. Together with chair and desk, monitors should be THE priority for any smart developer.

(Note this doesn’t mean that this screen is not overpriced. Not all developers need 6k, a 4k screen already renders butter-smooth text at the correct resolution. This screen is for photographers, print professionals and moviemakers, imho.)

My point is that a developer is spending (give or take) $4K extra for utility they don't need (my argument being that $2K should get a dev all the monitor they'll ever need). A well-paid developer can afford to do that once in a while, but they have to be choosy, maybe spend that $4k of extra utility you don't need toward upgrading the BMW to the "M" version you'll never put to full use on public streets. Buy that Colnago bicycle you'll never be in good enough shape to put to full potential.

But blow $6K on a monitor when $2K will do? Nah, you need a multi-million dollar exit for that kind of diamond-crusted iPhone silliness. The rest of us wage-slave devs making only $250K/year make do with 5K monitors that are more than good enough.

>But blow $6K on a monitor when $2K will do? Nah, you need a multi-million dollar exit for that kind of diamond-crusted iPhone silliness.

Err, I know a few people making $200K and up, routinely spending similar money for BS like Leica cameras + lenses (and they're not pro photographers), or hi-fi amplifiers. Not to mention furniture and fine art.

There are mid-of-the-market headphones people buy that are $500k -- and those are not even considered expensive.

6K for a great monitor, which could even be the last one you'll ever need to buy is a bargain compared.

I fall in this camp but I would never drop $6k on a monitor that provides such a marginal benefit over dual 4k monitors with an ultra high end VESA arm for a fraction of the price. It's outrageous.

>It's enough to do that for a few things that one finds important, but not everything

Well, something a $200-600K programmer looks at for 8-10 hours per day, I'd call important.

They could also afford to take 10 $100 bills and set them on fire, with only slightly less utility than spending the same amount on a monitor stand.

The stand attachment seems really nice though. Would've been a steal at around a $499 price point but obviously that isn't Apple's game.

Did you not see that it attaches magnetically, and that you can basically rotate it in any direction and also "pull" and "push" it without a lot of physical exertion? It seems pretty interesting. Sure, it's definitely a little pricey, but it isn't just a "stand" in the same way that a plastic DELL monitor is mounted on a "stand."

I have a fairly narrow monitor as my second orientated vertically to write code in. I can see more and horizontally it just didn’t work. It’s fairly easy to configure in the Mac and Linux control panels so i doubt I’m unique.

Regardless I’m not in the market for a 6k monitor (1$ per k)

Totally get that, a $1k 4k monitor vertically gets you a lot of lines of code at a resolution that looks good.

I'd have to really care about my syntax highlighting colour accuracy!

Because they make $100K-$300K per year, they stare at their monitor every day for 8-10 hours or so, and they want to have the best quality?

People buy $30K and $50K cars when they could do their job with $15K one just fine. And they put them in the garage most of the time. This is something they'll actually use the hell off...

Are you saying developers don't code in portrait mode? I personally prefer it. I have two monitors side by side, both in portrait mode. The one on the left has the IDE. It is nice being able to see so much code at once without needing to scroll. The monitor on the right has my browser on the bottom half of the screen and what other tools I need on the top half. It is much much better than having two monitors in horizontal mode (which is what I used for years).

I read it as “(most) developers will have little need to spend $6000 on a 6k monitor just to code”. It’s not that developers aren’t the target market for a vertical monitor - it’s that they’re not the target market for a $6000 super-duper-dynamic-range 6k monitor.

> Or has Apple come to revelation that pro's will pay any price?

Hasn't that always been the case? The price is surprising because Apple had basically abandoned the pro audience and has even started losing some of the prosumer audience with all the keyboard/touchbar shenanigans on the MacBook Pro. But the "pro" in the Pro lineup did have meaning at one point and this appears to be a return to that. It is clearly an attempt to recapture that pro market and the Mac Pro isn't the least bit targeted at the average home user. Although I am sure plenty of home users will buy the things just because.

The $1,000 stand was not a joke.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-unveils-powerfu...

> The all-new Mac Pro starts at $5,999 and will be available to order in the fall. Pro Display XDR starts at $4,999, the Pro Stand is $999 and the VESA Mount Adapter is $199.

> an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous

Machine on itself may be, but the software? Let me offer from music production perspective.

For instance, Logic Pro X costs $200 - and has more value than even the fullest edition of Ableton Live (at least, for me), which costs $800. And Windows Pro is $200 against a free OS X, so the cost difference just for audio production is $800 already. And if you compare the quality of ASIO4ALL with it's OS X counterpart, I'm not sure how to put monetary value on it, but it just shows that it's not about the hardware...

I have recently outgrown my 2014 macbook and didn't want to buy neither a modern one, nor a trashcan mac, so I moved to Windows machine. Now, with modular Mac Pro design back, I know that I can finally build the workhorse I want.

The screen is very competitive, comparable screens in the audiovisual industry regularly go for 10,000$ or more. The screen actually looks like a bargain tbh knowing about HDR 4K screens im not even sure there’s anything in the same ballpark. And knowing Apple I expect them to have done this well - iPads were known around pro audiovisual production circles as one of the few consumer level screens where you could approve final Color correction on - because they were so Color accurate they were up there with pro screens.

In the Mac Pro I have no idea but in audiovisual again there’s a reason Macs are king - ProRes. Doesn’t matter how much thy price their pro machines, production companies around the world will gobble them up because they still own the most efficient video codec known to the industry - very fast encoding times and excellent compression.

Most movies and TV shows you watch today are still recorded in ProRes in high-level low-compression modes such as 4444 or XR.

> I don't doubt the hardware is top-notch again, but an 8-core machine (I get it's Xeon), with a 256GB SSD and 32GB of RAM with a nice graphics card for $6000 is ludicrous.

I tried pricing out a Dell workstation with comparable features (though still not as fast in any spec), and it came to just under $8000.

> Have we truly moved into $1/ pixel territory?

6K means 6000 pixels wide, not total. It's roughly $1 per column of 3384 pixels.

For high end displays, that price is nothing new. In 2004, the Apple Cinema Display was 2560x1600 at $3299 (accounting for inflation: $4463 in 2019 dollars), or $1.29 (2019: $1.74) per column of 1600 pixels.

Over the 6 years that Apple sold it, the price dropped from $3299 to $1799.

My understanding is the monitor is a genuine technological marvel that competes with pro-grade stuff that costs in the tens of thousands of dollars. The $1000 stand is pretty funny, though.

I think you're right on the comparison for the monitor. Dell has a monitor that's nowhere near as bright with nowhere near as good of a contrast ratio for about the same price as Apple's: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-ultrasharp-32-8k-m...

You forgot to say that Dell is an 8k monitor(Apple is only 6k), 1-2 years old, cheaper by far than Apple's pro display. Don't mention the stand.

But I did say far less bright with far lower contrast ratio, which matters more for the audience they targeted in the keynote.

What about Sony's infinite contrast? I wonder why they didn't mention it...at best this is an overpriced monitor with different trade-offs(i.e lower resolution than dell, hdr, higher price etc) but has little to do with Sony pro displays. They compare a consumer led display with a pro oled to justify the ridiculous price.

Sony's "infinite contrast" is on their OLED screens and is a marketing gimmick for consumers that graphic professionals can see straight through. Plus OLED has problems with accurate color representation over time along with screen burn-in. The infinite contrast talks about OLED's ability to turn off pixels if they're black, but if they're very very dark grey the argument falls to pieces.

OLED is great for consumers. This isn't a consumer device. Dell's screen is great for the existing graphic design world. Apple's new screen is better.

I'm honestly baffled by your statement that this is a consumer display. I have absolutely no idea what gave you that opinion, especially considering the price. It absolutely is not. You can make the argument that the stand and VESA mount are overpriced (they are) but the monitor itself exists in a world that desperately needs it.

Just listen to yourself! In a few words you said that the $40.000 pro monitor that Apple used as reference in their comparison is a marketing gimmick for consumers while this Apple LED is what pro users actually need. You know that Sony offered LEDs before the upgrade to OLED, right?

How is this 6K display better for 8K content than Dell's 8K monitor? You know you can get HDR on plenty of 4K displays, right?

It's a LED, has HDR but lower resolution than Dell's flagship. To sum it up it's just a an overpriced LED with different trade-offs. Sony is really in a different league. Apple used it just to justify its non-8K overpriced LED.

In a few words you said that the $40.000 pro monitor that Apple used as reference in their comparison is a marketing gimmick for consumers

I think the comment you're replying to called Sony's "infinite contrast" OLEDs a "marketing gimmick for consumers". This Sony BRAVIA OLED is listed for <$2,000: https://www.newegg.com/p/16C-0006-00183?Description=sony%20o...

That seems like a consumer price point to me.

Maybe you should look at the Pro displays instead of some consumer TVs?

Btw Apple said other lies there too(i.e that Sony sells only small<17"> pro displays).

You may also wonder why Apple put an OLED display on its flagship phone instead of a LED one.

Prediction: next Apple display will be OLED and they will make it sound like they invented it or are first to use this tech...just like they did with Apple TV 4K(even if 4K was already old/common tech at that time)

https://www.marcotec-shop.com/en/sony-bvm-x300-oled-monitor-...

https://pro.sony/en_FI/products/broadcast-monitors/pro-monit...

I'm not sure why I would look at the Pro displays. I don't know anything about displays, I only know that you misread or mischaracterized the comment you were replying to.

You said the comment you were replying to said that a pro monitor was a marketing gimmick for consumers. But that's not what the comment said.

Well they want to make it look that way but they simply lie. Before anything else they compare a LED display with an OLED display and I doubt Sony pro display users even consider this Apple "X-price" display. Their comparison checklist is pathetic or better said: misleading.

If you need more pixels you may consider Dell's 8K display(which makes more sense for 8k streams that were demoed anyway) which is also cheaper, though it lacks HDR. But there are plenty 4K HDR displays so Apple's display is nothing new to say at least.

Apple is a trillion dollar company. You don't get their peddling budget computers.

Apple makes most of their money off of iPhone.

Apple hardware has always been ludicrously overpriced compared to competition, nothing new there. They charge what the market will bear. You don’t complain about the price of a Lamborghini, you either pay it or you don’t.

The 1k stand is funny though. It’s the hardware equivalent of $200 t-shirts (yes, they exist - go check the various Prada, YSL etc): you know it’s not worth it, they know it’s not worth it, but you buy it anyway just so that people will know you have so much money that you can overpay for trash.

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