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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely didn't know you could pay that much for a computer. Looking at the max specs of the Mac Pro (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower), it looks like everything is marked up 2-20x the price of the individual components. $7000 for a ~$3000 processor, $25000 for ~$1500 of RAM, etc.

Edit: I misread Newegg, the RAM would be more like $10500

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Intel‘s recommended customer price is $8200 [1], and each of the 12 DDR4 sticks is probably north of $1k [2].

Are Xeons and dense ECC ram worth what they cost even at the part level? Not really, but servers have different economics than personal machines.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/193754/...

[2] https://www.newegg.com/arch-memory-128gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/...

Apple does have a significant mark up, yes, but, the costs of bringing a product like that to market is not a matter of adding up the price of the components.

The price Apple sells these configurations is entirely unrelated to any sort of costs.

They just do it because they can as they are the sole provider of high end machines running macOS.

You are right. I did not intend to imply that they were related to costs. I was simply stating that those proposed costs weren't accurate anyway.

There was a brief moment in the 90's before Jobs returned when Apple allowed MacOS to be licensed to third party system integrators. Naturally, the companies that popped up to sell generic Macs were massively under cutting Apple. Their prices have never been something that could stand up to direct competition.

Had they continued down that road, Apple would probably be as successful today as IBM's PC division.

Sure but part of their success is being a lifestyle brand. A lot of people buy Apple for that. The interesting question here is around the productivity value of a 52k computer versus something at 5k or less, since almost nobody is dropping 52k on a computer just to fit in with the cool kids.

For a video editor in an Apple shop who makes hundreds of thousands more by getting a video out a few hours faster, spending 50k do to do that makes sense. Nobody buys a fully loaded Mac Pro to fit in at the lunch table.

Lenovo seems to be doing alright. But Apple has one big difference from IBM, they control the software side. So allowing generic Macs wouldn't turn them in to IBM. It would turn them in to Microsoft.

Lenovo would have been successful with or without.

They were both massively undercutting and outperforming Apple, which Apple hadn't anticipated. They were expecting the clones to compete just for the low end.

I buy Apple because of the vertical integration. They make the software and the hardware, both work perfectly together.

Just look at Microsoft and the Windows Modern Standby debacle how not to do it.

That's true but I guess the poster was already refering to retail prices of those components which is more than what apple pays for them. And looking at the prices of other manufacturers at different scales that can offer those components integrated in products I would argue that "significant" mark up in this case is bordering profiteering.

I understand but come on, look at that RAM price. If I can find a 20x better deal with 10 seconds on Newegg, presumably Apple can get those components for like 100x less than they're selling them for.

Also $400 for some nice rolly wheels, or $700 if you decide to buy them separately: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

I don't even see any 1.5TB 12x128gb DDR4 ECC kits on Newegg.

The biggest one I see is this, which is only 50% cheaper than Apple's price per stick. Not 20x. Not even 2x.

https://www.newegg.com/nemix-ram-512gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/...

And if you go with a brand name kit, Apple's price is pretty close to Newegg.

That's not to say any of this matters. Apple sells a completed product, not a box of parts. If you want a box of parts, you're in the wrong place.

You're right I got confused, it looks like closer to a 2x markup. You don't have to buy it all as one kit though, right? Just get 6 of these for $10,500: https://www.newegg.com/nemix-ram-256gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/...

Of course, Apple doesn't use Nemix sticks either. Does Nemix get the same binned chips that SK Hynix uses in their namesake brand?

The cheapest name brand is this, $19,000+ for 1.5TB:

https://www.newegg.com/hynix-256gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/1X5-...

Huh?

Apple has a net income of 100B/year. I'm sure that has to do with big markups on their hardware.

Our statements are not mutually exclusive

Indeed.

That's why all the components are soldered on those days.

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