Mac Pro Price Point "speculation"

RoastingPig said:

what do you think the 2013 entry level will be? i am so hoping sub 2500$ anything more and ill be putting back the credit card

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Sub $2500 is the most likely case. Unfortunately, it will be by only $1 at $2499, the same as the current base price. It is unlikely Apple drops the Mac Pro price below its current pricing point. If they do much of a redesign, it may well go up.

The trend seems to have been to keep the price at (or perhaps a shade above) the price of the outgoing model while upgrading the spec.

I think a lot will depend on what the new model really is - a COMPLETE redesign, or is it modifying the existing design (again)? That's one of the biggest issues with speculation at this point...

The $2500 entry point SEEMS to be critical. Regardless of what the machine is worth as "parts", it's still an investment for companies and individuals at that price point. Then consider a monitor and even basic "upgrades" and you're easily looking at over $3000-$4000 for a newly configured workstation. With constantly tightening budgets, I don't see a new model being successful at a higher entry point, but maybe that's part of the overall strategy as well? It's hard to tell, right now it's just a guessing game.

$2499 with their base config, a 5770, and a 320gb spinner.

Hey, they have to get rid of some of their old stock somehow...

/pessimism.

Maybe this time the base model will be a 6 core, midrange model 8 core and so on. Prices may be slightly more expensive than the outgoing model specially if new hardware will be added.

Macsonic said:

Maybe this time the base model will be a 6 core, midrange model 8 core and so on. Prices may be slightly more expensive than the outgoing model specially if new hardware will be added.

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Not likely. The Xeon E5 1620 is still a 4 core offering . Where intel corrected this this time is that the base rate on the 4 core is higher than the 6 core offerings. Those looking for singlet thread drag racing can just use this.

E5. 1620. 4 cores 3.6 Ghz.
E5 1650 6 cores 3.2 Ghz
E5 1660 6 cores 3.3 Ghz.

For the dual package offering they already start with 6 each.

There lots of posts about the 6 core being a sweetspot for some apps. That is a rule of thumb that will not track as well with new offerings where the 4 core model is not throttled orlagging back a couple of generations.

P.s. so far nothing to indicate that ivy bridge v2 options will change the core count later the year. New headroom would be higher clock speeds and wider turbo zones. Again for those with throttled single thread apps this is a better allocation. The dual package model might start at two 8 cores though. If apps scale going up by 4 is bigger bang for buck. However clock rate would go nowhere.