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Mac Pro Build-to-Order Upgrade Pricing Revealed

rosalindavenue said:
Meanwhile I'm agonizing over $300 bucks on storage and RAM for a macbook air. Not even a Mac Pro rounding error.
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Welcome to the big leagues. Keep in mind, those do not line up to buy these machines, they can afford to hire someone to line up for them.

While I'm sure the custom, high-end, PC types will balk at this price, the professional media editors that most of these units sell into don't even blink an eyelash at this price.

For the cost of a top end Mac Pro and a third party multi terabyte disk array, you have the hardware to edit a major motion picture, television show at the fraction of the cost just five years ago. I expect to see a big boom of independent films and other shows come about with this tool on the market.
 
ShinySteelRobot said:
I just want a computer that's faster than a Mac Mini and which has a video card that I can upgrade myself when faster ones come out. I don't need a $3K powerhouse.

Also I don't want an iMac since I don't want to re-buy a monitor whenever I upgrade my computer.

Apparently I'm alone in this, since Apple offers no such computer.
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You're in a very lucky position then, give it a couple of weeks and Ebay will be full of bargain basement early 2013 MacPros at drastically lower prices than Apple charged for them!
 
td2243 said:
Soooo..... the $2999 model kicked up to 6-core should be $3499-ish, correct? Does that change it from D300s to D500s? What I'm asking is there a 6-core D300 model, or does 6-core automatically bump the D300 to D500?
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According to the tech specs the basic 4-core model can be upgraded to 6 cores so that would indicate you can leave the GPUs at the D300 level. I'm hoping for that, at any rate, as my intended application doesn't need higher than the D300 level and I'd rather sink my hardware budget into RAM and storage.
 
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NachoGrande said:
That's just insane....
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"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do."

-- Steve Jobs
 
CFreymarc said:
While I'm sure the custom, high-end, PC types will balk at this price, the professional media editors that most of these units sell into don't even blink an eyelash at this price.
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Oh, I'm blinking, but I'm also game. I've squirreled away my nuts over a year of animation gigs to have cash on hand to buy into this new rig. I will sweat as I spend it, but I do have it available.

CFreymarc said:
For the cost of a top end Mac Pro and a third party multi terabyte disk array, you have the hardware to edit a major motion picture, television show at the fraction of the cost just five years ago. I expect to see a big boom of independent films and other shows come about with this tool on the market.
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This is touching on the why of my upgrade. I have the opportunity to break into some nontrivial VFX gigs with my little independent studio but my current hardware won't cut it so I need to add this rig to my arsenal.
 
naborneo said:
HTML5 killed Flash not iOS.
With GPU render engines popping up for 3D software rendering and raytracing being used in after effects, all of these are CUDA enabled solutions. So either AMD needs to make some friends with these software vendors, or the remaining 3D and motion graphics artist might be moving to Windows... Or at least the downgrading to 2012 Mac Pro
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HTML5 was the tool used to kill Flash after Steve Jobs signaled that iOS would never support Flash. It made HTML5 the only viable platform considering the mobile web was quickly set to overtake the desktop web. Up until then, developers didn't have the willingness to move away from a platform that had so much inertia. In fact, all you heard at the time was how HTML5 would never be a suitable replacement for Flash.
 
mozumder said:
[...]

Remember, these use Xeon-class CPUs - ECC memory, ECC cache, etc.. They're high reliability devices to protect against soft bit errors. These aren't desktop CPUs at all.

[...]
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And yet still the shabby HFS+ instead of a modern, reliability and integrity-focused filesystem.

Glassed Silver:ios
 
I spent too much on Christmas gifts. I will need to save up for a few extra weeks before getting to get one.
 
michael_aos said:
$400 to bump to 32GB of Apple RAM doesn't sound so bad -vs- spending $400 on 3rd-party RAM and tossing the OEM RAM in the junk drawer.
--
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Yeah, that was the one that really shocked me. Apple offering a RAM upgrade at a reasonable price!

It's less to get the upgrade than to buy from Crucial and toss the replaced RAM. Of course. that still represents a pretty big markup for Apple, since their cost is determined by the difference between the cost of 16GB and 32GB which is around $240 (and that's retail, I'm sure they pay less). Still, that upgrade may be hard for me to resist.

Of course, the upgrade to 64GB is the typical Apple RAM gouging: you can buy that from Crucial for half the price of the upgrade. I'm not going to spend an extra $800 for the minor convenience of having it pre-installed.
 
calaverasgrande said:
exactly.
Another thing that hackintosh fans pave over in the exuberance is that you aren't paying $2999 for a pile of parts. You are paying for an engineered system. In broadcast we buy/rent stuff that we could probably engineer ourselves, if we had the time. We use a Dejero box for some of our remote shots. It's basically an ITX motherboard in a Pelican case with bunch of Cell modems (think MyFi or mobile hotspot). The parts involved total less than $2k easily. But we paid several times that because it is an engineered system.
Point being that it is supposed to work in mission critical situations where you can't just "try again".
I don't think Macs are perfect by any means, but they certainly are better engineered than what you get if you just mash together parts in your newegg shopping cart.
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Except Dejero sucks, all the video is a pixelated mess almost 99% of time. I guess it's good for live but it's not reliable to have a clean feed live. But if your not using it live your much better off just sending off HD video with a laptop and a LTE mobile hotspot.

Not to say the Mac Pro would be unreliable. But really the hardware is over kill for broadcast users. My Mac Book Pro laptop totally destroys my 2008 Mac Pro desktop. How much power do you really need for cutting HD video and doing a bit of After Effects? I guess people doing a lot of 3D or 4k would need this. Computers are so fast nowadays you can cut HD video on any computer with no issues.
 
MacVista said:
So that's is how overpriced looks like! (sorry for my $6,199.02 cents) :D
I hope apple will offer i7's for the prosumer market. It would be an awesome value at $1,500.
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1500? Even the iMacs run more than that assuming the cost of the iMac screen is $700.
 
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AndyUnderscoreR said:
You're in a very lucky position then, give it a couple of weeks and Ebay will be full of bargain basement early 2013 MacPros at drastically lower prices than Apple charged for them!
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I don't know… don't Mac Pros typically have a high resale value? Do you suspect that this redesign will really have that much of an effect on the resale market?

Mac Pros seem to hold their value even better than Mac Minis. Well, I take that back. I bought a used SSD Alu-Mini on eBay three years ago that went *up* in value $300 several months after I bought it. :eek:

Still Mac Pros are so big and heavy, so shipping costs won't be cheap. They also use a lot of energy, so there's that to consider. I'm really just looking for reasons to buy the new Mac Pro now, lol.
 
spaz8 said:
If these prices are accurate, its less than i expected. The D700's are not as crazy as the mac Quadro options in the past.

I can put together a decent machine for 6500, I thought it was gonna be more like 8.

Wish there was 768 GB SSD option.

An i7 or E3 won't cut it. I need more than 4 cores, more than 6 even, and more than 32 GB of ram.
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Yeah. I'm actually impressed with the price. Getting the 8-core 32gb d500's

As for 768, why? $800 for a 1tb pciex is really good, the 768's on an iMac used to cost $1000 for the upgrade.
 
NewbieCanada said:
I was thinking that too, but they're using 4x8 and Crucial is using 2*16, which is better if you might want to upgrade to 64 some day.
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I don't want to make too big of a deal about this, but doesn't this Mac Pro have four memory channels? And don't you only use two memory channels if you leave two slots empty? (This was a reason Apple got slammed by some people on these forums for leaving a slot empty in the base model.)

Might not be too big of a deal to some: these Intel chips have fairly large L3 caches, so depending on the applications you are using you might see only a little impact or moderate impact. It might be worth it to leave those slots empty if you think it is likely you will want to upgrade to 64GB. I'm just saying it's a tradeoff to keep in mind.

BTW, since I am splitting hairs on memory issues, it might be worth mentioning that, according to Crucial's site, the 8GB sticks are unbuffered and the 16GB sticks are registered. That means you definitely cannot mix them (all 8GB sticks must be removed before installing 16GB sticks). Also, if you have a preference for one or the other, well, there you are.
 
Heltik said:
As a "prosumer" this really takes the MacPro out of range. I wonder how much of this price is a result of "made in America".
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Probably about -5%, i.e. its probably cheaper to mac the mac pro in the US than it is in China. My guess is you know very little about logistics.

Yes, the labor is cheaper in China, but it is getting more expensive, and more to the point China is pretty far away from Apple's main mac customer base in the US. Now for popular and/or small computers, this isn't a problem. If the computer is popular enough you can just make a bunch in bulk(because you know they are going to sell) and ship via boat, with custom orders or supply shortages being made up via expensive air shipments. However with the mac pro this model really isn't cost effective.

The biggest reason for this is demand, it isn't steady like it is for iMacs or macbook airs. Demand tends to spike then plummet, and its not always easy to plan for that months ahead, which you need to do if you are shipping by boat. You either tie up massive amounts of capital making a bunch of units and shipping them, and of course hoping that all these expensive machines sell, or have to eat a not insignificant charge for shipping each and every one of them by air from China. Couple that with the fact that you tend to have more advanced machining and factory automation tech in the US and I would actually be surprised if making the mac pro in the US wasn't actually cheaper than doing so in China.

Of course that being said, I doubt manufacturing of any of Apples other products, save for *maybe* the iMac will be moving to the US any time soon. For things with steady demand where the per-unit cost is relatively low, China is still cheaper than the US, as the cost of surface shipping is still less than the differentials in labor costs(also keep in mind that unlike the mac pro, iPhones and iPads are quite popular in China and neighboring countries, so they will continue to be produced there for the foreseeable future)
 
demars said:
I don't want to make too big of a deal about this, but doesn't this Mac Pro have four memory channels? And don't you only use two memory channels if you leave two slots empty? (This was a reason Apple got slammed by some people on these forums for leaving a slot empty in the base model.)

Might not be too big of a deal to some: these Intel chips have fairly large L3 caches, so depending on the applications you are using you might see only a little impact or moderate impact. It might be worth it to leave those slots empty if you think it is likely you will want to upgrade to 64GB. I'm just saying it's a tradeoff to keep in mind.

BTW, since I am splitting hairs on memory issues, it might be worth mentioning that, according to Crucial's site, the 8GB sticks are unbuffered and the 16GB sticks are registered. That means you definitely cannot mix them (all 8GB sticks must be removed before installing 16GB sticks). Also, if you have a preference for one or the other, well, there you are.
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I think with the new e5's p, you have to have at least one chip in each channel. So the new Mac Pro has 4. Have to use 4 Dimms same size. And yes, you cannot mix unbuffered/buffered and all have to be ecc.
 
naborneo said:
HTML5 killed Flash not iOS.
With GPU render engines popping up for 3D software rendering and raytracing being used in after effects, all of these are CUDA enabled solutions. So either AMD needs to make some friends with these software vendors, or the remaining 3D and motion graphics artist might be moving to Windows... Or at least the downgrading to 2012 Mac Pro
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Guess you missed the memo, they are also OpenCL enabled solutions and Adobe has pledged its full support to OpenCL.
(Oh and the OpenCL benchmarks are FASTER than CUDA ;) )

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TennisandMusic said:
Except for that that no, they aren't better than custom parts PCs you can build from NewEgg.

I don't think you realize how good "parts pcs" can be, and I would certainly trust one far more than any Apple (or other) OEM computer I could buy. The reason being that Apple uses the cheapest components it can. Hynix RAM anyone?

The top of the line motherboards you can get from NewEgg are extremely overbuilt and quite impressive.

I agree about paying for an "engineered system", but to then try and throw the custom stuff under the bus is way way off the mark.
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I think you missed the point. Most corporations don't have the time to deal with custom boxes.
 
petsounds said:
The BTO upgrade prices aren't surprising, but the base price is almost a $1000 more than I remember my 2008 Mac Pro being. Perhaps this is related to American manufacturing versus Chinese, or costs associated with the new design, but it does seem to be more expensive.
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Or it could be that you had limited RAM, a spinning HD and a very poor GPU in 2008. This time they don't have to be upgraded straight out of the box.......the nMP is off and running.......could that be the explanation?
 
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