Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Quietly Adds 3.33 GHz Quad-Core Option to Mac Pro
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Tell me about it. At these prices it might not be worth the wait. The quad 2.93 suddenly looks more attractive to buy now instead of waiting a few months just to get a heart attack from the gulftown prices lol
Holy f***
WoW just f***ing wow...
Where do i start here:
1200 dollars to upgrade to 700 mhz of clock speed only (same architecture, same processor) to get a merely 4 - 10 % speed increase on those 3 apps that even support multiple cores. God help us when core i9 comes along. Guys just think about this You can buy an MBP 13" for that price.
And then we go to my favorite fu**ing topic: A 2 TB 7200 rpm hard drive which costs f***ing 550 dollars. Holy F***. I called apple today (and im not joking) and asked them if these drives were gold plated cuz there is no other f**king reason for them to be 550 even if they were caviar blacks from WD.
Lets say we want to fill all those 4 bays with 2 TB hard drives.
We have 2 options:
1 - We can go with the ones our cult offers us which are made by jesus and have gold in them. An that will set us back only 2200 dollars. And we wil be happy since we payed another 1200 $ for the 700 MHZ speed bump wooo-fu**ing-hoo.
2- We can go to newegg.com and get 4 internal WD 2 TB Caviar Black for 1200 dollars which i guarantee you are gonna be better that the ones our cult offers for 2200 dollars and run forever and ever at full speed.
Advantages of that: We just saved 1000 F***ing bucks and got ourselves the best hard drives out there. Now we can go back to newegg.com and with that 1000 dollars we can get ourselves 2 intel x25-m ssd 160 GB - 1 to significantly speed up our boot time in our mac pro and the other to speed our mbp pro wich we all have one because we have a mac pro
Disadvantages - We shall be called Dell-ists and get publicly hanged to death.
GUYS JOKES ASIDE THIS IS F***ING RIDICULOUS
WoW just f***ing wow...
Where do i start here:
1200 dollars to upgrade to 700 mhz of clock speed only (same architecture, same processor) to get a merely 4 - 10 % speed increase on those 3 apps that even support multiple cores. God help us when core i9 comes along. Guys just think about this You can buy an MBP 13" for that price.
And then we go to my favorite fu**ing topic: A 2 TB 7200 rpm hard drive which costs f***ing 550 dollars. Holy F***. I called apple today (and im not joking) and asked them if these drives were gold plated cuz there is no other f**king reason for them to be 550 even if they were caviar blacks from WD.
Lets say we want to fill all those 4 bays with 2 TB hard drives.
We have 2 options:
1 - We can go with the ones our cult offers us which are made by jesus and have gold in them. An that will set us back only 2200 dollars. And we wil be happy since we payed another 1200 $ for the 700 MHZ speed bump wooo-fu**ing-hoo.
2- We can go to newegg.com and get 4 internal WD 2 TB Caviar Black for 1200 dollars which i guarantee you are gonna be better that the ones our cult offers for 2200 dollars and run forever and ever at full speed.
Advantages of that: We just saved 1000 F***ing bucks and got ourselves the best hard drives out there. Now we can go back to newegg.com and with that 1000 dollars we can get ourselves 2 intel x25-m ssd 160 GB - 1 to significantly speed up our boot time in our mac pro and the other to speed our mbp pro wich we all have one because we have a mac pro
Disadvantages - We shall be called Dell-ists and get publicly hanged to death.
GUYS JOKES ASIDE THIS IS F***ING RIDICULOUS
Just last month we paid over 1000$ for a 9 GB (yes, 9 Gigabytes) Seagate SCSI hard drive at my work to replace a dead one in a out of contract SUN machine.
550$ for a 2 TB drive sounds mighty cheap.
(For those who don't get it, that's the difference in the Pro vs Consumer market, warranties/service is more important than unit price).
550$ for a 2 TB drive sounds mighty cheap.
(For those who don't get it, that's the difference in the Pro vs Consumer market, warranties/service is more important than unit price).
Just last month we paid over 1000$ for a 9 GB (yes, 9 Gigabytes) Seagate SCSI hard drive at my work to replace a dead one in a out of contract SUN machine.
550$ for a 2 TB drive sounds mighty cheap.
(For those who don't get it, that's the difference in the Pro vs Consumer market, warranties/service is more important than unit price).
I'm pretty sure I paid $1k for a 9gb scsi drive 10 years ago! No way in hell paying that now is a good deal no matter the platform or if it's "pro" or not. Apples prices are more to do with them wanting rediculously high margins than anything else. Sure people expect a markup but $550?
And what were we supposed to do ? Last 6-10 months without a mirrored drive on a critical machine (projects to replace servers, while already started, aren't going to take just a week) ? Find a cheap part on newegg that will get blamed everytime we require SUN service on the box ?
All this for a machine that runs an application that brings in about 30k in revenue per day...
1000$ is cheap for piece of mind. That's the pro market. Unit price doesn't matter. Reliability, serviceability and uptime are all that matter.
Same applies for the Mac Pro. Yeah that W3580 3.33 ghz sounds expensive, along with 2200$ in 2 TB drives. However, with Applecare, if something happens, it gets fixed right away. If you have a bunch of self-installed 3rd party components, watch Apple give you the turnaround for a few days before getting your issue fixed.
If you're using your Workstation for something other than e-peen on the Internet, that 3k$ you just spent on a BTO means nothing when it breaks down the first time and Apple fixes right away instead of 2 days later. 2 days at 30k revenue per day means 60k$ you just lost to save barely 3k$. Good job, I hope you get fired.
And that's the first problem with the Mac Pro. People consider it just a "tower computer". It is not that at all. It's a professionnal workstation. You're not supposed to buy one just to play a few games and hang out on online forums. You're supposed to be making money with it. Same with the Dell Precision line. People who think the Mac Pro is overpriced probably don't need a Mac Pro anyhow (this includes the prosumers).
What piece of mind? With workstation hard drives you get piece of mind with raid and Time Machine - not with Apple Care.
I agree with the gist of your argument, but AppleCare is not enterprise SLA support. If you rely on it for mission-critical hardware, you're the one who'll get fired.
No - but that doesnt mean that they need a Mac either... Macs are mostly a choice and choice often requires sacrifices.You mean that they need an Apple mini-tower?
But how much is the cost of the tool compared to the value of the product it creates? Downtime is expensive - you have an idle computer, an idle project and an idle employee.
Also, by buying everything from Apple, it's all covered under one warranty. If you buy the PC from Apple, the RAM from OWC, the HDDs from Newegg and the display from ZipZoomFly, when something breaks, you first need to find out who you bought it from and then contact them. And then you have different warranty periods and different support channels and all that jazz.
You might pay 2-3x as much to get it all from Apple, but when it breaks, there is only one number to call and one vendor to deal with and if they can get your computer, employee and project back to work faster, that could easily pay for itself.
It strikes me as easier for Apple to just discontinue the model then keep building product at a price nobody will buy, filling up the warehouse with product that will never ship.
KnightWRX,
Step down from your soap box. Just because someone points out that Apple has obscenely high profit margins doesn't mean that they just want to brag to their friends that they can play WoW 5fps faster than them.
What great Apple support do you get from a $550 Hard drive? If you don't have Apple Care you just have 1 year of warranty. If your HDD fails ( less than <5% of the time, maybe <1%) all Apple will do is replace it with a new one. One that you already paid for with the profit margins. They won't recover your data, that's your own problem. If you're past the 1 year mark then you have to deal with the manufacturer of the HDD directly if they offer a longer warranty. This is all Apple provides in that first year. Give you the convenience of only dealing with them. Big wow.
Profit margins are fine, Apple is a company and has to make money, but as a customer it is your responsibility to be informed. Otherwise you get screwed paying $1K for a decade old part and you're left trying to justify it.
Step down from your soap box. Just because someone points out that Apple has obscenely high profit margins doesn't mean that they just want to brag to their friends that they can play WoW 5fps faster than them.
What great Apple support do you get from a $550 Hard drive? If you don't have Apple Care you just have 1 year of warranty. If your HDD fails ( less than <5% of the time, maybe <1%) all Apple will do is replace it with a new one. One that you already paid for with the profit margins. They won't recover your data, that's your own problem. If you're past the 1 year mark then you have to deal with the manufacturer of the HDD directly if they offer a longer warranty. This is all Apple provides in that first year. Give you the convenience of only dealing with them. Big wow.
Profit margins are fine, Apple is a company and has to make money, but as a customer it is your responsibility to be informed. Otherwise you get screwed paying $1K for a decade old part and you're left trying to justify it.
If you need 8 real CPUs (and 16 logical CPUs), then the dual socket is the right choice for you.
You mean that they need an Apple mini-tower?
Too bad there wasn't enough of them to justify Apple in keeping the production of such a computer running
.
I want a bigger, more expensive, mac tower, with more drive bays and more card and RAM slots. And cupholders.
Too bad there wasn't enough of them to justify Apple in keeping the production of such a computer running
I'm glad that you added the smiley, otherwise I might have believed that you were serious!
Bigger? The Apple maxi-tower is already the Hummer of computers....
KnightWRX,
Step down from your soap box. Just because someone points out that Apple has obscenely high profit margins doesn't mean that they just want to brag to their friends that they can play WoW 5fps faster than them.
If someone that isn't a WoW player points that out, then he hasn't been looking at the margins HP, SUN and even Dell bring down on pro-grade hardware. It's just a fact of life in that segment of the market.
Heck, looking at the Canadian pricing on a Sun Ultra 27 Workstation, I can see they have the 1 TB 7200 rpm SATA drive priced out at a mere 890$. Good thing they include the drive bracket with that.
Even better, they have the 3.33 ghz W3580 Xeon processor too, only for a mere 2245$ ! Wow, Apple is soooooooo overpriced.If you want to compare a Mac Pro to a Dell XPS tower, you don't understand the Mac Pro. It's not some gamer system or prosumer desktop PC.
I am serious. Why would Apple abandon a market they were in for so long if it was in anyway profitable ? People here, geeks and enthusiasts may scream loudly that they want such a system, but in the end, the mass-market appeal isn't there. Margins are razor thin and competition is fierce in the segment. Apple can't win there so they don't compete there anymore.
When did Apple compete under ~$1,499 with a tower? That was the starting point and we loved it.
BS.
Competition is fierce for laptops, and margins are thin - yet Apple's doing fine ignoring the under $1000 segment. (Fry's recently had a 15.6" dual core laptop with Win7 and 3 GiB RAM for $277....)
No rational person would expect a $400 Apple mini-tower. But a well-built Core i5/i7 mini-tower for $1000 to $1200 would sell well, and meet Apple's margin goals (since it would have the same components that Dell puts in their $750 systems).
If I can have Leopard on my eMachines I couldn't see why not. Just choose components Apple uses. To make it even easier, buy the license, then use a distro. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
But Apple doesnt play in the cheap laptop segment where cheap rules - where the competition is fierce and margins are slim. They participate in the segment where competition is less vigorous are profits are almost guaranteed. There are different portions of the overall markets.