Oh my god. If I have to tolerate months of Mac Pro speculation on the front page before they're released, I think I might go mental.
I understand why people like to speculate. It can be fun. But I don't understand so much why people like to publish their speculation, and even less why people would upvote it.
I stopped building and overclocking systems many years ago. Too old for that shit, etc etc. But the funny things is...
CPU improvements have been so stagnant on the high end. Suddenly getting a 40% clock increase out of a chip isn't just a way to save money, it gets you the equivalent of a multiple generation leap.
A friend has a mid-range ($300 I think) Intel chip, now approaching 3 years old, but running at 4.5 GHz and it is STILL notably faster than even the most expensive Haswell part sold right now. Particularly in single threaded it crushes. Those 10% efficiency improvements each chip rev are nice, but they can't come close to a massive clock speed jump like that.
SO weirdly enough now I'm considering overclocking a self-built system because you can't just wait a year and buy a regular system that is as fast anymore.
What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be achieved on a $1500-1800 PC?
If you work for a film studio, then I can understand blowing 3 grand on a machine. But most folks I know are buying these to run photoshop and illustrator, then claiming that a PC simply would not do. My POS laptop runs these programs fine, and my $750 new PC box runs them like lightning.
> What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be achieved on a $1500-1800 PC?
Running OS X with (mostly) no major issues. Given that most software is available for at least two operating systems, it's really down to choice these days. Sometimes, sentimentality and/or perceived value overrides rationality. I'm pretty sure this is OK and not a major flaw in humanity, most of the time.
Bootcamping - go ahead, try that on a Windows box. I Bootcamp into Win 8 and OS X. After a few driver updates, Windows 8 performs flawlessly (aside from, you know, being Windows 8). If I really felt like it, I'd run Linux as a third option, but it's way more convenient to run it as a VM.
People get way to wound up about the hardware/OS choices that other people make. Really, aside from having to do support for them, it should probably only be about as controversial as hair length.
A top-spec Mac Mini is pretty beastly at $1500. I have no doubt it would chew up and spit out the vast majority of workstation use cases. 2.6 GHz Quad-core i7, 16 GB RAM, SSD.
The only thing I can possibly imagine would be some seriously high-end 3D rendering or massively parallel simulation software.
To the OPs point, there is zero reason to get the Mac Pro over even a Mac Mini.
Seems like there's a hole in Apple's lineup. You can't get a discrete GPU without a monitor attached (iMac) or spending >$3000. Not that it matters much for Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. which are not GPU-parallelizable anyway. At least not yet.
Last thanksgiving I bought a Dell T5600 for lesser than the retail price of the two 8 core Xeons that were in it. Its very likely that OEM's get very different pricing from Intel as compared to retail.
Server CPU retail prices don't age very well at all, it's not uncommon to see server CPUs retain the same price even until two generations later. Newegg et al will keep the prices sky-high -- even in the face of plummeting sales -- and then discontinue the product line due to "lack of interest."
It's absolutely appalling.
So, to address your point, as another poster has mentioned you probably had previous-generation CPUs. OEMs get relatively generous discounts at the end of product lifecycles so as to encourage gargantuan purchase orders, and consumers don't see such discounts ever.
That may just have been disposal of obsolete Xeons (Nehalem?) Intel does not traiditonally give big OEM discounts; their whole business model is based on vast margins.
Hrm, that's interesting. Thanksgiving was almost certainly too easily to be dumping Sandy Bridge Xeons; they still haven't been replaced. Does the model of Dell still exist?
This is exactly the price point they should be at. The majority of people buying these desktops are professionals and they are willing to pay big prices for performance.
Every time a new Mac Pro model comes out everybody seems to do the same thing: goes to store.apple.com, spec out everything to the maximum, and gawk at the giant price tag.
It's amazing to think how as recently as the 90s it was completely normal to spend $20K+ on a Sun or SGI workstation to plop on an engineers desk. Now spending that type of money requires effort, and you'll end up with a machine with a quarter terabyte of RAM, four 30" monitors, etc.
In 1992 Apple sold a computer that started at $16,500 modern (2013) dollars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIfx. The Lisa was a probably a failure because it started at $23,500 modern dollars, which was a lot compared to the original Macintosh's $5,600 modern dollars.
You used to have to really want access to a computer. Today's computers are a mighty bargain.
I'm pretty sure Intel gives Apple a huge discount vs. the retail prices that AnandTech posted.
Is it newsworthy that Mac Pros will be expensive? They have always been >$1000 more expensive than a comparable PC.
People who care about the price difference will run a Hackintosh. If you have more money than sense (or time, patience, etc) then the Mac Pro is a pretty sweet machine.
> They have always been >$1000 more expensive than a comparable PC.
Depends what you view as comparable. The price delta between a Mac Pro and a HP or Dell workstation with Xeon CPU's and ECC Ram is usually far under $1000 for comparable base models.
These are truly professional workstations. The kinds of customers that actually "need" a Mac Pro, are spending way, way more on salaries than on equipment, for this to make a huge difference.
All this is assuming, of course, that the new Mac Pros live up to the hype and provide those amazing performance gains. (Hardware AND software)
Hardware is hardware, so the pretty Mac Pro box isn't worth much, when the same hardware is available elsewhere. Perhaps it makes the employees feel more important at work. That said, a couple of days ago, HN had an article with evidence that the more you make your employees feel like the company is on the edge of collapse - the better they'll perform.
Just like iOS, OS X is designed to build on very specific hardware and it is known which specific optimizations and generalizations can be made. Hence the term "hackintosh".
So is the Moto X, and it seems to me there's a small price delta compared to Samsung's S4 and HTC's One, but not that much. Given that its only final assembly in the USA, and not 100% made in the USA, not sure if being made in the USA would affect costs by that large a factor.
Does it matter? This Marco guy will buy anything with an Apple logo anyway - and sprout tweetable one-liners about how good and revolutionary said products are. I don't see why his articles are cross-posted here anyway, it is just fanboyism and praise. Nothing worth discussing. Here come the downvotes.
I understand why people like to speculate. It can be fun. But I don't understand so much why people like to publish their speculation, and even less why people would upvote it.