Is the Mac Pro WAY overpriced?

[Tesselator]

One issue I do tend to have with Dell's consumer models (most vendors though, if not all), is the internal configuration/ease of installation of upgrades. But I think I've just gotten spoiled from my familiarity with the enterprise gear they churn out.

I agree. When I have to deal with low end DT boxes from any of the bigger names I feel like I'm working with a cracker-box. Using them for 2 or 3 years usually feels stable but after that you just know something is gonna bust (usually the PSU ) - a feeling of impending doom. This is limited to the lower end of the consumer lines tho. I think Mac too. The iMacs and Mini maybe? But upper DT, WS, and servers are not like that at all. And the higher up you go usually the better it gets. Apple with their quality is about the same and from 2004 ~ 2007 (only?) I think their case layout and case materials were superior. MP feels very much like any WS I've owned from Dec or DELL. Apple's server blades look, feel, and sound a little under-designed to me in comparison. Also if I compare Apple machines (PM ~ G3 [before the aluminum monolith case]) to the Dec, Dell, HP, IBM, and etc. WSs then the Apples were a little low in the quality department. And the farther we go back in time the worse it gets. Apple's motorola based systems were plastic-y junk that couldn't be easily serviced when no one else in the industry was using any plastic parts at all - until you meet up with machines like the Amiga 500, 600, 1200, and the Atari ST models or other KB-consoles like that.

 

[rich2k4]

someone can just buy a fairly good quality pc. trash windows, and install their favorite linux distro. Then all the windows complaints can be thrown out the window.

 

[Eidorian]

someone can just buy a fairly good quality pc. trash windows, and install their favorite linux distro. Then all the windows complaints can be thrown out the window.

Don't agree to the OEM license and get your money back on the OS.

 

[nanofrog]

I agree. When I have to deal with low end DT boxes from any of the bigger names I feel like I'm working with a cracker-box. Using them for 2 or 3 years usually feels stable but after that you just know something is gonna bust (usually the PSU ) - a feeling of impending doom. This is limited to the lower end of the consumer lines tho. I think Mac too. The iMacs and Mini maybe? But upper DT, WS, and servers are not like that at all. And the higher up you go usually the better it gets. Apple with their quality is about the same and from 2004 ~ 2007 (only?) I think their case layout and case materials were superior.

It comes back to "You get what you pay for". But it is getting worse on the bottom end, due to extremely aggressive cost cutting.

MP feels very much like any WS I've owned from Dec or DELL. Apple's server blades look, feel, and sound a little under-designed to me in comparison. Also if I compare Apple machines (PM ~ G3 [before the aluminum monolith case]) to the Dec, Dell, HP, IBM, and etc. WSs then the Apples were a little low in the quality department. And the farther we go back in time the worse it gets. Apple's motorola based systems were plastic-y junk that couldn't be easily serviced when no one else in the industry was using any plastic parts at all - until you meet up with machines like the Amiga 500, 600, 1200, and the Atari ST models or other KB-consoles like that.

After the first Mac, I hadn't come into contact with Macs at all until the early 90's, and those were only showroom models (didn't get to mess about the internals). Actual usage was '08, for a whopping 10 days. I've never touched a Mac blade (XServe) ever.

I can't remember the last time I even had access to Atari or Amiga computers. Those where even rarer for me.

Dell, HP, IBM, DEC, Compaq (pre mergers & post), Gateway (older), Sun, and SGI where the primary brands I've had access to over the years. I've always had an affinity for SGI in particular (internals), original DEC as well. But those are all gone now.

 

[RebootD]

Dells are terrible. Period. The Mac Pro just works. It's hardware is better than the Dell's by miles. And another thing is, it's a Mac. It just works. Dell does not work. Another thing that the Dell lacks is quality. The Mac Pro is extremely high quality. I think that that is the answer. Quality.

Are you perhaps a political speech writer? Your mastery of empty rhetoric is beyond measure! Now that you mention it I can almost taste the 'Quality' in the air surrounding my Mac!

I love my mac and all but the day the lies and ignorance ends will be one of the happiest days of my life.

 

[Dr.Pants]

It comes back to "You get what you pay for". But it is getting worse on the bottom end, due to extremely aggressive cost cutting. .....

Dell, HP, IBM, DEC, Compaq (pre mergers & post), Gateway (older), Sun, and SGI where the primary brands I've had access to over the years. I've always had an affinity for SGI in particular (internals), original DEC as well. But those are all gone now.

So... quantity>quality in the computer world?
Friggin' Wal-Mart.

The only thing that I think I've even TOUCHED that was quality before the G5 was a Tandy.... Heck, idk if that was even quality. A little later was the Performas at ICRS, which were old to begin with...

 

[TheStrudel]

someone can just buy a fairly good quality pc. trash windows, and install their favorite linux distro. Then all the windows complaints can be thrown out the window.

In theory, yes. But in practice, except for a very small percentage of computers now being shipped with Linux pre-installed, you still paid for windows. This probably doesn't bother a lot of people, but it would bother me. They get their price in blood for just about all the PCs shipped, and they'll slash prices to nothing (see: China and Netbooks) to do it. It's kind of outrageous to me that they've been competing with a free product this long, credibly, but The Great OS Market Fragmentation is coming. Just you wait. Google's Chrome OS won't shake things up too much, but it'll prop the doors open wider for other companies to start making credible alternatives.

 

[Tesselator]

It comes back to "You get what you pay for". But it is getting worse on the bottom end, due to extremely aggressive cost cutting.

Yup!

After the first Mac, I hadn't come into contact with Macs at all until the early 90's, and those were only showroom models (didn't get to mess about the internals). Actual usage was '08, for a whopping 10 days. I've never touched a Mac blade (XServe) ever.

My first side job in Japan was managing a page layout house and all the artists wanted Mac everything. I think that was like 1987 so I got to know all the models inside and out from then. As a professor people (students and collega) kept giving me their old machines as they upgraded (in Japan that was annually) so i think I've had or still have just about every model there is. Sometimes I tried to use them but mostly I just got the RAM and HDDs out for other purposes. I never had a G5 tho and my first aluminum monolith was this here 2006 2.66. I really dig OS X it's so much like Amiga DOS which was my favorite of all OS's I've ever used.

I can't remember the last time I even had access to Atari or Amiga computers. Those where even rarer for me.

I set up a distributorship servicing Chubu (central) Japan for Commodore Amiga from about the time the A2000 was released until they folded. Atari's were nice too GEM is kinda neat. The music applications available on that platform taught me a LOT about music production (Jan Hammer style) - which came in handy later.

Dell, HP, IBM, DEC, Compaq (pre mergers & post), Gateway (older), Sun, and SGI where the primary brands I've had access to over the years. I've always had an affinity for SGI in particular (internals), original DEC as well. But those are all gone now.

Yeah I like SGI as well. IRIX is maybe my third favorite OS after AmigaOS and OS X. My friend had a distribution level smallish firm here with SGI so I got to see most of the goods and wares. We had a bunch at the Uni I worked for too. Very nice. I know Solaris but not much about Sun's system offerings. Older Gateway and Compaq full towers were monsters aye? Back in the Pentium Pro and DX2 33/66 days. Dec Alphas were sweet! After my Amiga Beowulf the 533XL boards comprised my first home render-farm. I think it was 24 nodes. Yeah, ancient history...

 

[Tesselator]

In theory, yes. But in practice, except for a very small percentage of computers now being shipped with Linux pre-installed, you still paid for windows.

I thought everyone offered a Linux option these days?

 

[Dr.Pants]

As a professor people (students and collega) kept giving me their old machines as they upgraded (in Japan that was annually) so i think I've had or still have just about every model there is. Sometimes I tried to use them but mostly I just got the RAM and HDDs out for other purposes.

You're a professor?! The plot thickens!

Well, guess I'm gonna have to start learning more 日本語 if prof's get last years tech en masse! Jeez, I hope you, well, haven't gotten any of these, or else I know my future profession. I can just imagine how fast physics simulations would fly on those.

I thought everyone offered a Linux option these days?

Mmm... Not so much in the States. There is A Linux laptop specialty vendor and some low-cost computers (mainly nettops/netbooks) come bundled with it - major sites like Dell AFAIK have no BTO option for Linux. In fact, for OpenSolaris, the only thing my Dell laptop doesn't support is the wireless card, humorously enough (making it more a movable desktop then anything else). But that's beside the point - everything here has Windows. DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS. Its a mantra.

 

[MacLover4491]

It is overpriced. People dont need to justify their purchase or support apple. The OS only worth no more than $300. Subtract $300 for the totall price and its still way expensive. I dont like to be ripped off. I cant believe people think its okay for apple to rip them off. They must be very stupid.

 

[-hh]

-hh

I appreciate the effort but I'm afraid it's a lost cause. Everyone here knows or should know what the computer market is like.

For a lot of the comments, I'm of the opinion that they're merely illustrating how the USA has lost its manufacturing base, so people no longer inherently understand the basic rules of manufacturing of hardware 'things'.

It's a mixed situation with vendors trying very hard to monopolize and proprietarize. A few (AMD, MS, Apple, Intel, Nvidia, etc.) have gained such status and what variety exists keeps them each competitive and in line.

I'd characterize it as a marketplace that is manifesting bimodal extremes: its either a huge volume commodity, or a tiny niche...no middle ground, and thus, very difficult to use the one as a basis of comparison to the other.

Add into that the presence of some functional monopolies which can have partnership deals ... eg, the rumor that Intel may have offered steep Xeon chip discounts if Apple gives up PPC ... which aren't necessarily obligated to ever become public knowledge ... and you have another major challenge in trying to ascertain true costs, etc.

Apple in 2009 is the bad boy who decided to step out of line and not play fair. Usually doing so costs - either rep points, market share, or other. In Apple's case we'll just have to wait and see.

Claiming 'bad boy' status is being judgemental. They had a business decision to make, and there will invaribly be trade-offs that ensue. Personally, I'd expect that Apple's decision was to choose to lose sales (market share), since achieving a larger share has not appeared to have been a particularly high ranking strategic objective for some time, plus this price hike no only avoided a "lose money" situation, but it also gave them some data (insight) on the degree of consumer (in)flexibility on the Mac Pro product line...although it will be a bit of a challenge to differentiate between marketplace factors (economy) and the larger trend of sales migrating from desktop to laptop.

For fans of the Mac Pro, the best thing that we can realistically hope for is the confluence of two factors:
#1 is for its sales to be really off during this past Fiscal Quarter while sales of laptops are up...thereby demonstrating consumer price-sensitivity;
#2 is for the high-end desktop to remain as part of Apple's strategic vision such that they cut the price on the product instead of dropping it.

It comes back to "You get what you pay for". But it is getting worse on the bottom end, due to extremely aggressive cost cutting.

Agreed, and I sincerely hope that we retain a sufficient "critical mass" of knowledgable consumers who are wisely able to resist these typically false economies. The lowering of the quality bar is insiduous, not unlike how China got a black eye from suppliers who knowingly adding melamine and cyanuric acid so as to falsify product quality tests, resulting in poisonous baby formula, poisonous pet food, rice & wheat flour, etc.


-hh

 

[Tesselator]

You're a professor?! The plot thickens!

Well, guess I'm gonna have to start learning more 日本語 if prof's get last years tech en masse! Jeez, I hope you, well, haven't gotten any of these, or else I know my future profession. I can just imagine how fast physics simulations would fly on those.

Nope, no IBM's. A buttload of lab-grade microscopes, lasers, and what-not though.
My microscope collection is in the high 20's somewhere and goes from something like this to this - the later being the Nikon E600 worth several times a fully stuffed Mac Pro and a heck of a lot of fun to mess around with. A few Olympus's too.

Mmm... Not so much in the States. There is A Linux laptop specialty vendor and some low-cost computers (mainly nettops/netbooks) come bundled with it - major sites like Dell AFAIK have no BTO option for Linux. In fact, for OpenSolaris, the only thing my Dell laptop doesn't support is the wireless card, humorously enough (making it more a movable desktop then anything else). But that's beside the point - everything here has Windows. DOS, DOS, DOS, DOS. Its a mantra.

So the fad didn't last long? From 2004 ~ 2007 every OEM and VAR offered 2 to 5 flavors of windoze and 1 or 2 flavors of Linux in the configuration options. Apple probably being the only exception - though OS X is kinda Linux you might say.

 

[thepawn]

IRIX is maybe my third favorite OS after AmigaOS and OS X.

Ah, I so loved my Amigas...reminds me, I still need to hook up my SyQuest 88mb and get some stuff off it. lol. I have an SGI Indi in my "old school" collection still.

 

[TheStrudel]

The fad didn't last too long. Probably for business reasons, when the machines just didn't sell in bulk. Part of that is the software void/usability concerns with linux. Was probably more time/effort than it was worth for some vendors to bother with.

After all, linux wasn't designed with end-users in mind, if it could be said to be "designed" in the traditional sense. And that's really what separates OS X - and macs in general - from windows and linux, I think.

It can be argued that it's just software - and there is truth to that statement - but 's got a reputation for vicious simplification, which is not always friendly to the consumer, but has turned out for the better in the end.

As an aside, given how much of the personal computer OS is based on the original 1984 Macintosh, I have to wonder what it would be like if it were never made, or if there actually were real competitors to .

I'm still waiting for actual competitors. You want to know what the real root of the problem is?  isn't competing. They haven't been for years. How hard is it for them to maintain a better OS? They're leading in popularity, not struggling for feature or performance parity. When there is a credible competitor,  hardware and software is likely to improve. Until such time, we have to be content with what they give us.

 

[gugucom]

You want to know what the real root of the problem is?  isn't competing. They haven't been for years. How hard is it for them to maintain a better OS? They're leading in popularity, not struggling for feature or performance parity. When there is a credible competitor,  hardware and software is likely to improve. Until such time, we have to be content with what they give us.

1+

It seems that a good OS and shiny case design is sufficient to carry them over any other issue like pricing and service. A good example that focus on strengthes can allow you to goof in other areas as long as there is no competition on the OS.

Btw, Mac sales went up in numbers again. 2,6 million for the third quarter. I'd love to see abreak down into segments though.

 

[thepawn]

Btw, Mac sales went up in numbers again. 2,6 million for the third quarter. I'd love to see abreak down into segments though.

It's probably 90% laptops.

 

[MacLover4491]

It's probably 90% laptops.

yeah sales went up because of the BIG cut in price haha

 

[gugucom]

The actual figures look like this for the March Quarter of 2009 and 2008:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Three Months Ended March 28,2009 March 29,2008 Change

Total net sales $ 8,163 $ 7,512 9%
Total Mac unit sales 2,216 2,289 (3)%

Net Sales by Product:
Desktops $ 1,050 $ 1,352 (22)%
Portables 1,895 2,142 (12)%
Total Mac net sales 2,945 3,494 (16)%
iPod 1,665 1,818 (8)%
Other music related products and services 1,049 881 19%
iPhone and related products and services 1,521 378 302%
Peripherals and other hardware 358 412 (13)%
Software, service, and other sales 625 529 18%
Total net sales $ 8,163 $ 7,512 9%

Unit Sales by Product:
Desktops 818 856 (4)%
Portables 1,398 1,433 (2)%
Total Mac unit sales 2,216 2,289 (3)%

Net sales per Mac unit sold $ 1,329 $ 1,526 (13)%
iPod unit sales 11,013 10,644 3%
Net sales per iPod unit sold $ 151 $ 171 (12)%
iPhone unit sales 3,793 1,703 123%

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Laptops were appr. 65% of Mac unit sales. They declined 12% in sales volume and 2% in units.

Desktop sales declined 22% in volume and 4% in units. So Apple shifted dramatically towards cheaper desktops. This could indicate higher Mac mini and iMac sales versus less Mac Pros. That may have been a consequence of over pricing the Mac Pros.

If you compare iPhone and laptops with dektops you find 80% of sales for mobile units. The growth segments are obviously the iPhone, iTunes and Apps. Although Apple has done well over all it's computer business looks a bit shaken. The Mac Pro obviously is declining from a cash cow to cash out. Perhaps they will not bother with it in some years time.

 

[-hh]

The actual figures look like this for the March Quarter of 2009 and 2008:...

Laptops were appr. 65% of Mac unit sales. They declined 12% in sales volume and 2% in units.

Desktop sales declined 22% in volume and 4% in units. So Apple shifted dramatically towards cheaper desktops. This could indicate higher Mac mini and iMac sales versus less Mac Pros. That may have been a consequence of over pricing the Mac Pros.

...

Although Apple has done well over all it's computer business looks a bit shaken. The Mac Pro obviously is declining from a cash cow to cash out. Perhaps they will not bother with it in some years time.

Here's another source of data: http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q309data_sum.pdf

What's particularly interesting about this one is that it breaks out the desktop segment both in units sold and revenue.

Thus, we can see that 849K desktops sold for $1,129M ... dividing, we get an average price per unit sold of ($1,129M/849K) = $1,329.80 per unit

Similarly, for laptops, ($2,200M/1,754K) = $1254.28/unit


Given that the iMac is in the ballpark of $1330, its influence on the average desktop price is relatively minor (think "short moment arm leverage"). However, since the Mac Pro is substantially more, its sales have to be balanced by sales of the less expensive mini...at very roughly at least a 1:3 ratio.


FWIW, I also took a quick look at the USA market vs other markets:

USA: $3,827M for 1147K units ... $3,336/unit*
Europe: $2,006M for 626K units ... $3,204/unit*
Japan: $416M for 108K units ...... $3,852/unit*

Retail: $1,496M for 492K units .... $3,041/unit*

* - Before reading too much into the above, do realize that the use of "unit price" is misleading because the data isn't broken out by product segment, and for whatever reason, Apple used a 'units' value of just Macs sold, even though the revenue is for including iPods/iPhones, iTunes, software, etc.

I'm not really sure if this is useful or not...it seems to more be a "Normalized Total Sales per Mac Unit Sold"...perhaps it provides some insight into the degree of cost-realism for the non-USA prices for Macs which have been a source of angst?


-hh

 

[thepawn]

so if imacs and minis are laptops in disguise, 90% laptops. lol.

 

[gugucom]

more like 99% if you consider that iPhones are mobile computers now.

 

[senseless]

I normally would have bought a new MacPro by now, but the economy has changed how I think about non-essential big ticket purchases. Instead of a 4 year replacement, I'll stretch it to 6. Do you get the same feeling, like, do I really need this new thing...?

 

[gugucom]

I listened to the Apple analysts conference call. It is quite entertaining. All they want to know about are growth markets. The way the desktop segment collapses I reckon we will have 1 or 2 years until there will be no more Mac Pros at all. I'm glad I got one before Apple abandons the segment.

 

[Tallest Skil]

The way the desktop segment collapses I reckon we will have 1 or 2 years until there will be no more Mac Pros at all.

You should know that this is impossible.