I'm just saying that every time I buy an Apple computer that what they offer as the base model is lower than is generally considered base, IMO. When I got my pro it came with a 650G HD, now it's 1TB I think? I think the base MP should have a 2TB or 3TB hard drive in it now.
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2013 Mac Pro Price (Range?)
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I'm just saying that every time I buy an Apple computer that what they offer as the base model is lower than is generally considered base, IMO. When I got my pro it came with a 650G HD, now it's 1TB I think? I think the base MP should have a 2TB or 3TB hard drive in it now.
Cubemmal said:
When there are many users that don't need nor want to pay for storage they don't need there is no reason to put that much in. 1TB is still a hell of a lot of ones and zeros for a lot of people. Apple has addressed your issue with the new Mac Pro however since all storage other than the system drive will be external and up to the user to decide how much they want/need/pay for.
I agree with you 100%.
Would have cost them almost ZERO to have included these things.
Once you have eliminated the motivation of saving $$$ only reason left is "encouraging" TB by leaving no other options.
Completely and 100% wrong. Ever worked with a BOM (Bill Of Materials) on a hardware project? Everything adds up. Let's see, no CD ROM, no daughter board, smaller main board(s), hard drive caddies, no PCI slots, etc. etc. Yes new Mac Pro has a vastly cheaper BOM and is highly likely to be cheaper to make overall, even with the gratuitous case polishing. The freaking only more expensive thing is a second GPU, but it's on a cheaper sub assembly with no fan, heatsink, nacelle, etc. Since Apple is just buying chips from AMD you can bet your firstborn they are getting them at a steep discount.
Those costs all count against each and every unit sold, and with Apples profit margins really drive up cost. Initially setting up a new product line costs millions, especially here since they're doing it brand new in the U.S. But that doesn't bother Apple, they're used to setting up new lines for radically different products and it's a one off cost anyhow.
I work on such a electronic handheld device product line, not too unlike what Apple does. It costs anywhere between $10k-$50k. We needed to add some software that would add a $30 license to each unit. After adding in profit margins do you know what a big deal that was? We don't even sell the device with a battery and make customers buy that separately.
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I am also pretty sure they save a good deal on the new MacPro. The old one is certainly not a "budget design", more "built to be best".
The new one looks like there have been put a lot of effort to cut costs, and keep the features to a bare minimum. We´ll see in a couple of years if that was a good or bad decision.
It might also be important that the smaller footprint will make it more efficient to transport.
I agree with your estimation that Apple got a steep discount. But purchase prices and retail prices are two different stories.
Maybe AMD did give a discount with the limitation that Apple may not sell the top configuration Mac Pro under a certain price point. Just to make sure that the perceived value of the dual W9000 setup is comparable to the prices of dual W9000 workstations of other vendors.
Because if Apple would sell their nMP several thousand dollars below HP, Dell and other ... this would put price pressure on AMD Firepro brand. So I guess, AMD will rather give Apple a huge profit margin than devaluate their brand. Call this huge profit margin that AMD hands over to Apple an advertisement payment for the Firepro.
Look at the "Graphics" section of the annoying gratuitously animated preview on the website. "Dual GPUs standard". The "dual workstation-class GPUs as standard" was stressed in the keynote, too.
You can pretty much tell what the good/better/best options are going to be by looking for the phrase "Up to": CPU cores, VRAM, PCIe bandwidth (presumably tied to CPU model) RAM and SSD.
...but whatever Apple classify as a "workstation-class GPU" (quite a long piece of string, really) it sounds like its gonna have two of them.
AMD have shown willingness to create special GPUs based on current products for MS and Sony, hence why there will be no Nvidia in the next generation consoles. A similar deal is clearly in place here with Apple and you can bet that the pricing will be substantially cheaper in comparison to retail pricing on equivalent traditional graphics cards.
There are no retail prices for GPU chips. They are not sold that way. So this difference you are trying to point at is nonexistent in this case. Apple isn't buying cards from AMD they are buying components. Apple buys lots of components from a variety of folks ( e.g., VRAM for MBP's and iMacs ).
You are missing the blatant limitation that these GPUs sold will ONLY work inside of a 2013 Mac Pro. (OK maybe the next version, on the boneyard used parts market ). It is a embedded GPU. There is generally no sales market. Definitely not for new. Used is limited to cannibalizing a used Mac Pro for parts.
AMD has likely tacked on some licensing fee to use FirePro brand and some surcharge so that the BootCamp drivers work in Windows. Piled on top of the typical "OS X" mark-up these cards won't be AMD mainstream priced.
AMD doesn't sell very many W9000's. Most of the workstation system vendors don't carry it. Perceived value isn't doing much good for AMD if almost nobody buys them. Far more likely Apple is going to sell more W9000 equivalent cards than any other system vendor that AMD currently has signed up to sell them.
How? Does the W5000 put price pressure on the brand? The mobile cards put pressure on the brand? It doesn't put pressure on the overall brand at all to have a range of price points.
For the individual FirePro cards it isn't new pressure either. The GPU chip itself is largely the same as the mainstream AMD cards. There are differences in VRAM , drivers , and on some versions ECC but there is already "Not buying going cheaper" pressure on FirePro already.
For HP, Dell, etc workstation users they can not use the Apple card. So it isn't an option. They would have to dump their whole workstation and buy a whole Mac Pro to get these more affordable FirePro "cards". Far more likely those folks are wedded to various PCI-e cards , internal bulk storage , etc. that will segment them. Those who were only buying a classic form factor solely to get a FirePro card and have a completely OS independent software base is likely small.
B.S. If AMD mandated a huge profit margin they would take a huge share of it themselves. They wouldn't "give" it away. What is highly dubious is that these huge profit margins only really matter if actually SELL the card. AMD's share of the Pro card market has been slipping over the last couple of years.
Rather than devalue this is far more likely a way for AMD to pump up its deployed unit volume presence without having to lower its standard form factor PCI-e cards prices much at all. AMD gets higher volume sold and still makes much higher than Apple margins on the standard PCI-e cards they still do sell.
The Mac Pro "after market" add-in card market dropping to zero is not a major problem for either AMD or Nvidia.
If AMD wanted to do something smart they'd have Apple pay for FirePro tagged GPU chips with VRAM. Apple uses its higher buying power to get cheaper VRAM and pass that along to AMD. AMD then uses that lower VRAM to boost the already sky high margins on the standard FirePro cards they do sell.
First, it is highly doubtful that Apple is going to take the much higher than corporate standard profit margin. Apple is going to take less money, so it won't be profit. AMD gets less money but they also don't have to take any risk (or expense ) in selling the whole card.
Second, it is a different market segment. Your assumption is that some significant wave of Windows/Linux workstation owners are going to shift over to the Mac Pro. Not going to happen.
Lower FirePro card prices are largely going to help the new Mac Pro tread water the number of Mac Pros sold. A minority subset of current Mac Pro folks who require dual CPU package set ups are actually going to increase the number of HP, Dell, etc workstations sold. Similarly some users will have preferred a single GPU. Dual normal FirePro priced cards would also drive many of those folks to HP, Dell, etc. also.
So sure they may peel a small few off mainstream workstation sales but they are also going to loose folks to mainstream workstation sales. If more people flee AMD has a bigger opportunity to make even higher money by directly selling them the standard FirePro card. If an even swap then again AMD loses nothing. Even if there happens to be a small net shift to Mac Pro ... again AMD gets higher volume. Those are also sales not going to Nvidia and AMD's Pro market standing goes up. Again AMD wins.
The design choice to make dual GPUs standard means the far higher than Apple mark up must be shaved off the cards to make the overall system a viable product.
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That's an interesting point. But I think there is enough separation between the market for the New Mac Pro and the market for PCIe-based workstations that this probably isn't going to be an issue for AMD. And it's not like AMD has to make any special demands for Apple to take a certain margin!
The price of the new Mac Pro is a very interesting question.
I think it will have a lot to do with whether this form factor for workstation succeeds or fails.
This style of workstation gives simplicity but takes away the ability to customize and upgrade individual components.
And I don't think the value of simplicity should be ignored here, as some are doing. Pros actually don't want to have to figure out how to construct their workstations from drives, CPUs, GPUs, etc., so that they perform well. And pros don't want to upgrade or otherwise service their machines. We've gotten used to it out of necessity, but we'd actually like to spend our time on money making activities. (E.g, rather than spending time learning about the latest developments in video cards, maybe spend time learning a new programming/video editing/audio engineering technique). The implicit promise of the New Mac Pro is "don't worry about it--we've figured it out and have you covered, you can concentrate on your stuff." If they pull it off, that's a really nice thing.
So, the simplicity is a very nice thing, but to make up for what's lost and to get people over the hump of thinking differently about their workstations, I think Apple has to deliver a very competitive price in terms of computing power per dollar. That's especially true because Apple intends on delivering a lot of that power in the form of GPU+OpenCL, which is very much just emerging.
Thunderbolt without video is not Thunderbolt. There is already an external PCI-e standard. Without video TB would be highly redundant. There is a corner case in Thunderbolt were there is a chain ending dongle that only needs data. (e.g., the Firewire or Ethernet dongles that Apple sells) but that a chain ending "sink" , not a host (source ) PC node.
Furthermore, TB v2.0 is DisplayPort v1.2 complainant. Again there is reasonable user expectation that they can daisy chain two monitors off of a single socket. 2 ports covering 4 sockets isn't going to work.
The W5000 card may be gimped and the internal chip has more than just two DisplayPort outputs that just aren't hooked up. However, I wouldn't count on it. Trimming the far higher than Apple mark-up off the card makes alot more sense to bring the W7000 into the reasonable cost range than going with a GPU that is worse than the iMac's top end. Especially when that GPU choice is normally the choice of GPU for the system's productive lifetime. "Go cheap now and replace later" isn't really a sound GPU strategy for the new Mac Pro.
As I pointed out the 11" Air is down around the $1,000 price range. The 11" Air is being placed below the 13" models generally in price. There is far more a priced over issue for the Mac Pro and the rMBP 15".
Apple is not trying to price the rMBP 15" under the 13" models (or the regular 15" model). It is likely just as true in the desktop segment of their product line up. Apple isn't going to trying to have the new Mac Pro engage in fratricide with the iMac.
Obviously you didn't want to spend the money to pay for the extra 2GB so it was far from ridiculous pricing in that you bought the MBA at the lower price. Your short term value evaluation is not Apple's problem.
I'm not sure you actually learned the lesson. The root cause issue there was that the memory was soldered to the motherboard. That means you should consider buying enough for future needs and when will be retiring/upgrading the device at the time of buying.
The Mac Pro has removable memory. That means should consider whether need to buy memory from Apple at all. For example, buy the minimual amount in standard configuration and then replace some (or all ) of it with 3rd party memory ( crucial , OWC , etc. ) later. You only need to buy enough for the immediate future. For reasonably medium-long term memory needs are cheaper when buy that memory a couple of years from now when it will likely be cheaper.
Those are completely different contexts.
I hope youre right, because I would hate to see Apple pricing the nMP out of the marketthus killing a nice product.
BTW, calling others opinions B.S. shows a significant lack of courtesy.
Surely there is no other product on the planet (apart from virtual ones like software/content) where the price of production is so heavily weighted towards the R&D and just getting that first working example. The MP might not be a huge seller but I'll bet that it could triple the sales of the W9000 chips as they seem to be very low volume at the moment. AMD could halve their wholesale price for them, and still see close to a 50% increase in profits on them.
David
David
Drug development is probably at least an order of magnitude higher in costs pre vs post "first working example", assuming you mean "first working example" to be first part shipped to a consumer. If you stop at first drug/part designed and before testing though, it might be a similar ratio. As the huge difference between tech and pharma is termendous amount of data needed ot prove a drug is both safe and effective.
Probably true. As said before, it will be interesting to see how what the pricing stratagy is.
While I agree that it seems to be their intended direction, it's possible that Apple previewed the new Pro early to get feedback, after all it's quite a departure from the previous model!
Having seen people's reactions it wouldn't take much for Apple to offer a model with a single GPU as I can't think of any technical reason they couldn't do it.
It is possible that a giant asteroid will fall out the sky and blow up the entire Apple HQ. It is not very probable. Apple doesn't do product focus groups. They certainly don't do them as a PR stunt. What they showed is is what they are going to ship. They didn't show all the configurations, but this absolutely not a "This is what we might do" demonstration or ill timed 'April Fools' joke.
A single FirePro GPU can't drive 6 DisplayPort outputs along with a HDMI one ( 7 total )
None fit that criteria:
http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati-firepro-3d/Pages/product-comparison.aspx
Most of the people's reactions are irrational or attached to alternative agendas. There is no pricing. If Apple delivers a Mac Pro with two GPUs in approximately the same old Mac Pro price points what is the big, widespread problem with the premise of having two ? The whole "two GPUs" has to drive the cost into the $3K range is not well grounded at all. The core issue isn't that two GPUs are "bad". It is really just a proxy about price. Well, there are no prices. Apple's long term trend has been to offer new Macs at about the same price as the last one they replace.
If it is about "single CPU/GPU could be priced like the xMac" and iMac fratricide pricing strategies...... again not really about 2 GPUs and it is unlikely Apple will find that compelling feedback. [ Haven't for last 8 years ... not sure why it would be new now. ]
[ Yes folks with proprietary CUDA code will grumble. Some folks who wanted a dual CPU will grumble. Again other competiting agendas other than what is 'bad' about 2 GPUs. ]
The facts are the current Mac Pro wasn't doing very well in terms of unit volume and growth. I don't see how Apple can rationally put a "revised replacement" into the market at substantially higher prices and expect success. To set it up for failure? Sure... but success not really.
Apple didn't "have to" go dual FirePro. They could have gone dual
HD 7870 2GB ( vs W7000 4GB )
HD 7950 3GB ( vs W8000 4GB )
HD 7970 6GB ( vs W9000 6GB )
If FirePro wouldn't have fit the normal Mac Pro pricing zone. They didn't. They aren't going to be separate 'pro' video drivers for this so the gap is really primarily to get to bigger memory footprints.
Two 7870's is about $500 retail. Double that to cover the extra 4GB of VRAM and pad it out to a substantively high margin ( i.e., much greater than 30% ) and get $1000. For a $2,499 system price that leaves 1,499 for the rest of the system (and margin on those components). It is all quite doable
CPU $382 ( $294 + 30%)
RAM $100 ( $78 + 30% )
TB+USB3.0 $100
Power Supply + misc elect $260 ( $200 + 30% )
Case+infrastructure $170 ( $130 + 30% )
SSD 637 (512GB $490 + 30% )
That's $1,649 but there is alot of slop in the $1000 GPU price to get back $150.
The W7000 is about 3x the price of a 7870. If just drop down to 2x there is still gobs of profit left in the pricing. 2x is still much higher than Apple's target corporate rate.
It is always entertaining how assertions and guesses turn into opinions (that don't have to be correct in any way) when how completely disconnected from reality they are.
It would be fiscally irresponsible for AMD to hand/mandate to Apple profit margins at least twice as high as Apple's corporate targets. If there is actually that much money on the table AMD should take a chunk of that for themselves.
But beyond that the value of the product is primarily an property of the product not the brand. Apple can't slap 2x or 3x competitive market rates on something and sell something in high volume numbers purely because it has an Apple logo on it. Apple commonly commands 30-40% like markups not 100-200%. People use products not brands. The utility of using the product is what brings value across a broad spectrum of users.
Uh, deconstruct.... Guessing a perfectly reasonable part of opinion formation. That's a big part of how something is an opinion and not fact in the first place...
I remember the threads about "guessing" the MacPro announce/release date in which you made similar "arguments" about how Apple wouldn't announce so far from release. Guess what? They did. You know who was right? People you made similar statements to then as you're doing now. Just because you disagree, does not mean something is BS or "disconnected from reality". Further, here in reality, saying such things only makes your opinions look all the weaker, no matter how you try to disguise them as facts from on high.
After reading your posts for a long time, you often have great factual content, but the logical jumps (hint: this is were the opinion making process really starts) you make from those facts are often quite wrong, or not even logical to begin with.
So please, tone it down. Most of what you are saying is too just an opinion, and many people might also say its disconnected from reality at times. You're free to disagree, but you're not free mock and deride those with ideas you disagree with.
I see this "fact" mentioned over and over, but I don't recall seeing the actual numbers. Maybe Apple announces these or they are available from reliable third parties. Anyone care to share?
But they aren't cutting costs, they are transferring them to the customer. Not to mention the fact that they are shortening the life-cycle of the product by making everything non-customizable.
Had the same impressions too. I think Apple wanted it's customers to buy new Macs every 2-3 years. It's toug for us as money doesn't come by easily during these slow business climate.
Honestly, I think that this was a smart move on Apple's Part. Apple knew that the new design wasn't going to fit every organization's needs. So they introduced the new Mac Pro and gave those organizations time to upgrade to the current Mac Pro now. That at least buys them some time to figure out a transition plan (either to the new Mac Pro or to another platform). Plus, it has the added benefit of clearing out current Mac Pro inventory for people who do not want to live with the restrictions of the new form factor.
GL
Additionally, the long lag from announcement to introduction is giving people time to "warm up" to what is, conceptually, a different piece of hardware than what anyone else has made in volume. Apple doesn't want the new MP to be a flop at into and the extra time is helping in that regard (IMHO).
Guessing when there are already facts in evidence is not a reasonable part of opinion formation.
Really? Care to pull out the posts about how Apple was going to announce early because they were radically changing the form factor and cancelling the dual CPU option?
I'm sure you are going to find several about how Apple "has to" announce in advance for Pro products because that is just how things are done. I'm sure you will find a few more about how Apple had to announce at WWDC because the Mac Pro was a flagship. None of those were particularly right either.
Apple announces early on:
a. cancelled "Pro" level products (e.g., XServe discontinuation. In this case, dual CPU option being tossed in 2013. )
b. brand new never sold products ( stripped of the labels if show to common folks a current Mac Pro and the new cylinder how many do you think would think they are called the same thing? )
c. products whose logistical distribution are enormous ( new iPhone product shipments )
No I didn't think Apple would radically change the product. If anyone had said a or b was going to happen they I would have agreed would conditionally true, but didn't make alot of sense (numerous threads here wailing about the new form factor seem to concur.). If any said c I would have called BS. There is plenty of real quantitative evidence to back that up.
But if you think Apple is going give a 3-4 month lead time on Mac Pro 7,1 (in 2014-15) because this one got announced with a lead time and it is what Apple is going to do from now on, that's extremely dubious logic now as well as before. Numerous items that Apple has repetitively told people about their beliefs and methodology say otherwise. That isn't about my opinion, it is what they have said.
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Apple runs some of the leanest inventories in their industry. There is probably greater danger of Apple running out (e.g., iMac debacle late Oct-Nov 2012) than having to purge inventories. There are probably retailers who are holding inventories ( Apple quotas on how many Mac Pros have to carry to be authorized seller/distributor ) this isn't particularly motivated on that aspect.
If there is an Intel production hiccup on TB v2 chips or E5 v2 volume Mac Pro could go same state current as in with the EU Markets (but different underlying factors).
Here in reality, deconstruct, we never have complete information. You're always guessing about some part of your opinion on any issue.
Ah, how far are you willing to move those goal posts deconstruct? Many people thought certain parts of that redesign were very likely. Of course very few would have guess it was going to be what it was, but that doesn't invalidate the rational they were using to form that opinion.
Nope, I'm actually not going to pull anything. You can find them if you wish. I remember these discussions with you and I'm not going spend anymore time digging them back up. You believe what you want. Feel free to distort it, morph it, rationalize it all you want.
Wait, you made a opinion not based on a fact?
And of course, none of us where considering the very real possibility of a redesign when forming our opinions about the release date....please..... That's why there were so many topics about it, many people believed it would have some sort of redesign. Few predicted what it turned out to be (a cyclinder, really?). But many figured some sort of smaller, but not necissarily small, form factor was going to show up, meaning no ODDs, maybe fewer 3.5" bays, add some 2.5" bays, maybe using E3 parts, which of course comes with dropping the duel socket configuration. How many times did you here the three words "Mac Pro Mini" in those discussion...
Give yourself a big pat on the back for that one.