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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

I was somewhat surprised with their entire Mac Pro strategy. With a base tower configuration starting at $6k (about twice what I was expecting), they seemed to signal a shift in what they consider a “pro” user to be.

They’re pretty clearly chasing after the commercial, high-end computing market, but they’ve kinda left the high-end consumer market behind in some ways.

Still no definitive fix to the fly switch keyboards, lots of complaints about other design issues in MacBooks, basic spec bumps in mainstay products like the iMac. All while they continue to (somewhat unjustifiably) raise prices.

The new Mac Pro is the coolest piece of tech they’ve built in a while, and it’s completely unsuited for 99.9% of users. What’s the point in mass-marketing it? It felt like watching a marketing video to buy an airplane or something.

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They said all along that the Mac Pro would be for users that the iMac Pro isn't powerful enough. Since the iMac Pro maxes out pretty high, a 3K base Mac Pro would make absolutely not sense as thats not even iMac Pro entry pricing but rather typical pricing for a consumer iMac.

Not everyone is a fan of having to buy a new screen every time they get a new computer.

Then buy a Mac mini. I have about a dozen of them they're great.

A Mac Mini is a consumer level, medium powered at best device.

It doesn't come close to an iMac or an iMac Pro.

The newest Mac Mini shares the same processors as the current iMac (21 in) and some of the same processors as the 27in version...and has user upgradeable RAM. It's not in the same league as the iMac Pro, but it's def comes close if not surpasses an iMac these days, and a non-upgraded iMac still ships with a spinning disc, where as the non-upgraded Mini's ship with SSDs...

> What’s the point in mass-marketing it? It felt like watching a marketing video to buy an airplane or something.

It's because sites like this have been complaining for years that Apple has left the Pro market behind. This was their response to that. And now this site is switching to complaining that Apple's definition of "Pro" is too "Pro" for us.

> switching to complaining that Apple's definition of "Pro" is too "Pro" for us.

If by too Pro you mean someone using an 8 core CPU with 32 GB of RAM ...

The higher end models might be great, with some genuine innovation in the GPU interface that to some will justify high prices. But I don't know who the target demographic for a $6k PC with those specs is supposed to be.

It’s the rich people who can afford not thinking more than twice to make the purchase. If that excludes almost everyone, thats fine. Apple is making a statement that they are still the premium of the premium

That may be, but their recent decision to no longer disclose per-unit sales for any of their products on earnings calls moving forward doesn't necessarily signal good times ahead. Their revenue for the last 2 quarters is down from the same period a year ago, and there doesn't appear to be anything on the horizon that's going to catapult their earnings back up. iPhone sales have been in decline for a few years now.

They're banking that the margins of these new, higher-end products offsets the sales lost by shrinking their market. The problem with this strategy is that it isn't very sustainable and leaves them vulnerable to losing market share.

Microsoft keeps getting more serious about Linux compatibility, and if they ship a surface pro or something similar that can seriously compete with the MBP, things will get interesting.

I don’t agree with this.

Most tech professionals I know had lots of misgivings about Apple’s design decisions around the MBP. Mainly, shipping only with usb-c and the Touch Bar, which has been a total dud. Neither of those things were demanded by the market, but apple pushed them anyway. In the process of redesigning the MBP chassis, they introduced numerous design issues which plague them today. Apple baker in a bunch of incorrect assumptions that haven’t planned out for them. The incredibly high sales of refurbished pre-usb-c MBPs really drive this home.

The new Mac Pro, on the other hand, is very clearly designed for users that require massive parallelism and power in their work, which just aren’t most people. How many people need 20 cores? Most users weren’t complaining about the core count in 2016, they were complaining that Apple took a rock-solid product and introduced a bunch of regressions to it.

"Pro" is NOT a price.

Is features.

Apple was already "expensive" but somehow reachable. Now, the Mac line is more and more out of reach for anyone without deep pockets.

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I could have understand (somehow, still out my reach for a machine >3000) if the Mac Pro was > 10 cores, >= 32 GB, >= 1TB SSD, Vega or Nvidia > 1080

ie: just buy and is already a top of the line (or, what you will do with a base (old) Mac Pro to get to middle config)

It's not pro at all.

This is a homer car made of money.

I have not yet seen any speculation about what a full spec mac pro might cost but I would not be surprised if it approaches 100k$. It can also connect to up to 6 screens for 5k$ which means this thing might go up to 130k$ in price, fully specced

The mac pro itself might have never been meant for everyone. Most of the people in the "pro" group didn't know or didn't care that they might only be on the lower end in terms of "proness" and asked for a new mac pro anyways. But I guess Apple considers them already well served with the iMac pro.

Previously I thought the iMac pro would be phased out as soon as a real mac pro is introduced but perhaps Apple will keep it around now.

A hundred thousand dollars? Where are you getting that from? It has got to be expensive, but $6k base ($12k with monitor and stand) to $130k fully specced seems exceedingly unlikely. Are the GPUs and 28-core Xeon that expensive? What component causes the sudden jump in price?

1.5 TB ECC RAM for a start. Then the 4 Vega II GPU cards. Add to that the Afterburner card, a terabyte or more of native SSD storage, and possibly more PCIe SSD storage through MPX slot. Yeah, I think you will hit that very easily!

Edit: I couldn't find a single 128 GB DDR4 ECC 2993 MHz DIMM, but the closest I found is the 128 GB DDR4 ECC 2400 MHz DIMM at 2249.99 a piece. Now imagine 12 of those, at higher frequency, with the usual Apple markup. That's already 30 to 40K alone.

Okay, you’re not that far off. A similar HP Z8/G4 machine would come in at $53,325, so I could see the Mac with monitors nearing $100,000.

I used the hp workstation configurator for their highest priced tier and added 28c Xeon and ram and single v100 and it came out at 56k. I assume the Vega II duo x2 at 28 tflop will be similar to 4x v100 each at 9k so going from there it’s already at 84k.

Add a little extra because it’s apple and I could see it pushing 100k

> What’s the point in mass-marketing it? It felt like watching a marketing video to buy an airplane or something.

That's exactly what this is. It may sell some units to professionals and high end consumers but it's main value is establishing Apple at the top of the consumer pyramid which works to move all their other products. I remember getting my import Alfa Romeo serviced at the dealer where they also sell Ferraris. It was fun except for paying the same hourly rates.

> With a base tower configuration starting at $6k (about twice what I was expecting)

Should part of the blame for the high price should go towards Intel? The 8-core CPU in the base Mac Pro looks like it might be an Xeon Gold 6244 [1][2] which costs $2925. Obviously Apple will be paying less, but half the cost is the CPU alone.

[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/192442/...

[2] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/xeon_gold#5200.2F6200-Ser...

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