Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoctorPenguin | Hacker News Reader

Please forgive my ignorance but the specs on this are just average in my opinion. Why would I choose this over a custom build pc with almost the same, if not better, components?

My experience with all apple products at work has been quite bad so I might be a little biased.

View on HN

Try to build a custom PC with equivalent specs, paying attention to the expansion options and I/O characteristics, and you'll end up with similar pricing. People who need professional workstations are in a different market than gamers or almost all software developers — the question is kind of like asking why anyone buys a semi-truck when your pickup can beat it off the light.

If you don't get why you'd want to buy this, then it's not aimed at you.

"Why would I pay AWS to host a Virtual Machine for me when I can get a physical host on Hetzner for the same price, if not less, that's 5x better?" -- the point has truly been missed.

And what is the point then? I'm serious since i read this "if you do not understand why then it isn't for you" but without any explanations about what isn't understood.

Think about other products that exist in the wild. Have you ever looked at something on a shelf, or in someone's hand, come to an understanding of what it is and what it does and then thought, "That's stupid. I don't need that. There are better options!" The thing is the person using it loves it , and it's solving a very specific problem for them, a problem you don't have.

It's the same thing here: you don't respect the product so you don't understand who would use it, so you don't buy it. That's fair enough.

But the MacPro is designed for a niche audience who are happy with the hardware, implementation, support, and so on. The things they're doing with this product are not things you're doing, so you don't understand their pain points.

This doesn't answer the question though. The question was "why would you buy this over a pc with the same specs?" and you answered essentially with "if you do not already know this then you cannot know this".

How would one gain that knowledge in the first place? We aren't born with the knowledge of why one would buy this machine over another.

We gain that knowledge based on specifics of the two machines. So the question is simple: what specifically makes the new Mac Pro a more desirable purchase option for someone than a PC with similar specifications?

You'll never beat a custom built PC on price/performance.

I have zero interest in building my own PC, or dealing with fragmented and terrible support when issues crop up, or using anything other than macOS. And definitely not to save a few bucks. You clearly are different in your values and priorities. That’s what “if you don’t understand, you’re not the target market” means.

The parent didn't mention anything about saving money, or building a machine from parts. You can order a custom build from any number of OEMs and have a same-day on-site service warranty. The point about building a technically superior machine stands. I use Apple for their laptops because the OS is superior on a touch pad. But really all their desktop machines are joke hardware. The Mac Pro is just a bigger more expensive joke than the others.

Intel is old news on HEDT ever since Threadripper became a thing. The final nail in that coffin will be the November release of the third-gen Ryzen Threadripper making that 28 core Xeon obsolete. I'm curious if the new Mac Pro will even be available by then.

AMD builds admirable video cards, but the Radeon VII is inferior for professional work compared to Nvidia cards and CUDA.

MacOS is superior to Windows but inferior to Linux. A lot of people with HEDT builds are in Linux (myself included). I appreciate being able to do some of my favorite Unixy stuff in MacOS at a fraction of the speed, but for high end use it's still a joke.

Thank you. That is pretty much what I had in mind when asking why to buy the Mac.

I get that Apple has some products that are really good, but for a professional environment I am still unsure if I would really recommend to buy them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com