When you bought the 7.1 Mac Pro, you made a deal with the devil. It's processors were overly expensive and not top of the line. Their RAM offerings were decent but realistically overly expensive, and their anemic base dGPU offering was incredulous. They're giving "professionals" a Radeon 580? A card that was not top of the line even in 2017? Good God. It's not like the 5700XT wasn't out and about when they pumped out the Mac Pro to the market, so what gives? Apple totally crapped on the professional with it's distastefully expensive and underwhelming Mac Pro 7.1, and I urge you to rid yourself of it and buy or build a Windows/Linux workstation.
It fits my needs quite well.
-It's for music production
-Needs to run MacOS as my main software is logic.
-Hackintoshes or not as robust as native Macs. Some say they are, but I have alot of real world experience with colleagues running them and this is not the case on the ground. In the middle of a project I cant lose a day to fix a hackintosh. An example, The latest version of Logic requires Mojave or later. A colleague of my upgraded his Hackintosh to be compatible with me and broke it. About a week turn around to get it sorted out with the guy who built it for him.
-The Mac Pro is an incredibly robust machine. It multitasks incredibly well. It's outside my expertise on why, but all 4 generation's (Yes inc G5) have always been more solid and dependable than any "consumer" Mac I've owned. This isnt obvious using paper specs but become apparent after having one for a while.
-Older tech- being on the bleeding edge of tech is not where I want to be. I need hardware that is guaranteed to work well together.
-If the system dies, I can buy a new one, restore my workstation from a clone disk, send the broken one in for repair, get it back within a week, re-clone, and return the new one for a full refund.
-It's very quiet under load, which is a big deal in my studio.
-Video cards, agreed that PC's have that side of things down, but it doesnt matter as I dont work on graphics card intensive tasks.
-RAM, I never buy direct from Apple. Their prices are indeed a joke. Just as hilarious as the mice they design.
-Looks great for clients.
-Doesn't get as messed up when shipping it around as PC's I have built. It's put together more solidly.
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I do feel it is crazily expensive overall, but I remember people running the numbers of a similarly specced Dell machine and it came pretty close price wise. Plus i saved $500 off sticker through BhPhoto and also saved the 9.25% tax by using their Payboo card. I also save 20 - 25% from the Tax deduction
