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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

Pretty good value for money for pros who need what it is designed for. It's not a student computer for writing essays and browsing reddit.

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This "it's not for you" eliteism that creeps in when defending this product is getting ridiculous.

I feel I very much should be in Apples target for a pro-machine considering my Windows workstation is a dual GPU 1080Ti machine (cost a fraction of an iMac Pro and outperforms it) I use for 3D rendering, animation and video editing. Yet when I point out it's terrible value I again just get told it's not for me and it's for people who edit "Marvel movies" for a living.

I mean the only real complaint you could have with their pre-Mac Pro lineup was it just didn't have any way to fill niches, everything had to be good for the 80% and not right for rest. Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to target this product as modular enough to fill the rest of those needs instead of targetting it specifically at the highest-of-high-end blockbuster movie editors.

It's not elitism, not at least by the people who accurately describe it. It's for absolutely price-insensitive people who feel they need:

1) OSX 2) Top of the line specs

Anyone seriously buying a Mac Pro is either in the above group or just a crazed fanboy happy to pay the ludicrous premium to say they did.

I've got to admit, it has some "object appeal". I definitely would not dismiss the aesthetic aspect of it.

On the other hand one has to wonder, however, if at some point around the same specs as the "low-end" mac pro, that a server wouldn't make more sense? Can you stuff a pro graphics card into a Dell R740 and have it far enough away that the fan roar won't be an issue when editing 4K video?

I mean, there's no "making sense" here. The minute anyone invokes "value" regarding this unit, it's a failed argument on both sides. Of course the Mac Pro is overpriced as hell and there is no way to extract actual value from this device. It is also very specifically not the point of it, which means it's like arguing about the value of a Bugatti.

The Mac Pro is a luxury good and should be viewed as such. The fact that the tech community is up in arms about it because it's technically a computer is really their own fault for misclassifying the device.

I feel the same way about the Tesla semi truck. I have a pickup truck that I use to haul a trailer and it certainly didn't cost $150,000. People keep trying to tell me the Telsa semi was made for a market that sits above my own market, a market where the price makes sense, but I just can't imagine that market even exists.

Why would anyone buy a Telsa semi truck when the Ram 3500 HD costs half the price?

Torque?

You are mixing up the vehicle categories. The Tesla Semi is for pulling 40 ton trailers, it is not a pickup truck. Independant from the Semi, Tesla is expected to introduce a pickup truck in a couple of months, which supposedly costs around $50k.

>You are mixing up the vehicle categories.

That was the entire point of my comment. I'm saying whywhywhywhy is confusing two different product categories just because those categories happen to overlap slightly at the high end of one category and the low end of the other.

Then your posting was pure mockery and not only necessarily recognizable as such, but also not adding anything to the discussion. If you had made a clear statement about what you disagreed with, it might have improved the discussion.

And I don't think that the posting you answered was wrong. Apple calls this machine a "Mac Pro", so any professional users should be targetted by it - they don't have any other machines for professionals who require a desktop machine. Instead, they should have called it the "Mac Hollywood", as this seems to be the target audience.

Mockery? Hardly. The real intention was to use an analogy to prove the absurdity of the comment. I’m sure plenty of Ram 3500 HD drivers consider themselves professionals yet have no need for a semi truck. Any argument for/against these machines that hinges on the definition of “professional” is inherently worthless because “professional” is such a broad spectrum.

I know plenty of professionals who use an 11” MacBook Air. Your definition of professional is not the same as everyone else’s, and it’s ridiculous to try to fit everyone else to your own mold.

Basically, stop using the argument “no REAL professional would ever...”. It’s a worthless argument.

Mockery? Hardly. The real intention was to use an analogy to prove the absurdity of the comment.

There was no absurdity in the comment you answered on. Apple pitches the machine for a general "professional" audience, especially as it is the only modular Mac offerring. But in fact they only designed (and more importantly) priced it for a very special subsection of the professional audience. So they should be more specific in their pitch and also offer a modular machine for the rest of the professional users.

And your original comment would have been more constructive, if you had tried to make your point explicitly, as you are doing now.

Your definition of professional is not the same as everyone else’s, and it’s ridiculous to try to fit everyone else to your own mold.

I am not doing so. The original poster (and I agree) just also wants a modular Mac machine.

Basically, stop using the argument “no REAL professional would ever...”. It’s a worthless argument.

I have nowhere said that, please stop putting words into my mouth.

Serious question. Can you manipulate 8k streams in real time on your workstation? Can you playback 3 streams of 8K or 12 streams of 4K simultaneously?

I'm not in the industry but from what I have observed of friends who are this Mac Pro is a machine that will evolve workflows compared to a DIY build workstation. As far as audio is concerned which I know more about this Mac Pro will be the industry standard for quite some time. They are already redesigning DAW software to facilitate the extra potential it provides.

I bet he can do that more effectively on his DIY build than a top of the line Mac Pro can. Hell, he can put a faster Xeon in for half of the price and already beat it on whatever the Xeon would beat an I7 in.

The Mac Pro can't do any of that either unless you get the add-in cards that specifically accelerate that. There's nothing magic about the core system. Same Xeon-Ws that everyone else has. Same ECC RAM as everyone else. Same PCI-E lanes as everyone else. Same GPUs as everyone else. Same performance as everyone else.

The video accelerator card is the only Mac Pro-specific thing, and it's competing against existing (albeit more expensive) products that enable that, too. Like the RED ROCKET-X. Or the CUDA-accelerated decoders on Quadros that you can't put in a Mac Pro.

The graphics card in the Mac Pro is older. You can add multiple. There's nothing revolutionary about it that can't also be done with (for example, as mentioned above), dual 1080 Ti systems or better.

Except... if your content is all in ProRes. Then the accelerator card makes an appearance and could make life more pleasant. But if your workflow isn't ProRes, then that pleasantry comes at the cost of 1) more than doubling storage requirements, and 2) transcoding time (which is slow, because the ProRes accelerator won't help in turning something else _into_ ProRes).

For DAWs, I'm struggling to see the "extra potential" - it's a Xeon processor.

You answered pretty conclusively. It's like saying an f1 car is useless because you can't fit your family.

Indeed, the "it's not for you" argument is tiresome precisely because the people who seem most disappointed about Mac Pro pricing are the people who actually need a powerful, expandable Mac. My mom doesn't care what it costs, because she doesn't need one, but I've used Mac Pros for years, and I actually need one.

There was a time when Mac Pros were an excellent value, and you could afford one if you were a modestly successful entrepreneur. But with the new Mac Pro, Apple seems to largely ignore the needs of entrepreneurs and small studios. It appears targeted at large studios where the cost premium is a rounding error.

But contrary to popular belief, many "professionals" do consider cost when buying equipment. Being able to depreciate this stuff on your taxes doesn't suddenly make the cost irrelevant.

It's absolutely ridiculous. The very fact that the tech community can't even come to a full consensus on who the device actually is for... it's very telling that it's really for no one.

Apple: Xeon W, 8 cores, 3.5GHz, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $5,999 [1]

Dell: Xeon W, 8 cores, 3.7GHz, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $3,506 [2]

I know there are some configurations at some points in the product refresh cycle where Apple computers are price-competitive with Windows computers, but this isn't an example of it.

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/us/mac-pro-2019-specs-price,news-3... [2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

And you need to consider that Xeon W by the time the Mac Pro ships will be an even worse value in light of what AMD is doing. The W-3223 is a $749 chip and has only 8 cores and 16 threads. At a similar price point (rumors are 700-ish) we expect the EPYC 7282 with 16 cores and 32 threads at only a slightly lower clock (rumors are 3.2 base vs 3.5 for the Xeon W). And let's not forget the ... well what else can be said? ... the epic amount of PCIe bandwidth these EPYC chips will bring. Without using very expensive data center oriented PCIe 3.0 x8 SSDs, normal PCIe 4.0 x4 SSDs are going to give these EPYC servers a very serious boost.

I sill have a 2008 Mac Pro (the last good one) and it actually was priced in line with equivalent Dell or HP workstations.

I had actually set some money aside ahead of the WWDC, wanting to replace my iMac 5k with a Mac Pro, if such a thing was announced. So for the starting price of the "can" Mac Pro (2999), or somewhat above, I would have hit the trigger. But there is no way I can afford or justify the 5999 - and until you have a working system, there is so much more money to spend.

> Pretty good value for money for pros who need what it is designed for.

Come on, this is just not true. It's an 8-core with 32GB of RAM and 256GB SSD for 6000$. Just because Apple found some PC workstation that's even more expensive than the Mac Pro doesn't mean it's good value.

Not for "pros" in general. For a certain group of video editors it is great. For other professionals, it would be nice, but is priced far outside of the budgets.

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