Mac Pro Build-to-Order Upgrade Pricing Revealed

[AppMann]

Mac Pro is coming tomorrow

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/12/18All-New-Mac-Pro-Available-Starting-Tomorrow.html 🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂

 

[Digital Skunk]

Very excited about the system and the GUESSTIMATED prices.

Personally, I think the machine will sell well, and will be a great boon for those that want to help higher end shops offload a bunch of antiquated hardware.

It does suck tremendously for large post houses that have closets filled with MacPro towers needing multiple Fibre Channel inputs and other PCIe cards . . . . but they've the money to either figure out how to integrated the new Mac Pro, or to switch over the an HP workstation.

For users that have the iMac/Macbook Pro system with tons of external boxes, this little box isn't bad. Not what we were expecting nor what we asked for but not bad.

 

[Spinland]

For users that have the iMac/Macbook Pro system with tons of external boxes, this little box isn't bad.

This is why they might as well have designed the nMP just for me. All my studio's stuff is already in external USB3 boxes so this little gem is going to slide right into my workflow with hardly a ripple.

 

[MacKing69]

The configure-to-order pricing has NOT been revealed yet...and that's the end of it.

I've just had a formal quote for the top spec 12 core - just shy of £7250

 

[Scissors]

I've just had a formal quote for the top spec 12 core - just shy of £7250

Don't suppose you were given an indication of the price in Sterling of any of the upgrades individually?

I'm hoping to go for a 8c/D700/1TB/16GB once the online store opens tomorrow. I'm expecting it to be about £5,000 but it would be ideal if it was less.

 

[deconstruct60]

If the nMP had a slot for a 2nd internal SSD I'd probably do that. But in reality I will probably partition the internal SSD into 2 or 3 pieces. 1 for OS and Apps, another for media etc. Or are you saying to spend another $1000 on a J4 with SSD's so I can have a slower connection. I want mari using the fastest I/O it can.

if want the fastest I/O possible then shouldn't want to use a flash based SSD. "spill over" scratch space on a disk isn't the fastest alternative to put that data into.

A twice as fast SSD with double workload will perform like a slower SSD. Part of getting speed-ups is paralleling the workloads so they can be worked on concurrently. OS/Apps on the J4 and scratch on the internal SSD would likely be faster over a broader range of the workload. The J4 being "fast enough" for human response times and the internal PCI-e SSD being better matched to non-human demands for response times. Placed on different I/O channels the workloads and latency demands of one don't impact the other.

 

[ratsg]

Mac Pro's have a high resale value because they are upgradable and customizable.

with past Mac Pro's, you are absolutely correct.

I think that the jury is still out on exactly how expandable and upgradable the new trashcan Mac Pro's will be, with the confines of staying in the case.

 

[MacKing69]

Don't suppose you were given an indication of the price in Sterling of any of the upgrades individually?

I'm hoping to go for a 8c/D700/1TB/16GB once the online store opens tomorrow. I'm expecting it to be about £5,000 but it would be ideal if it was less.

I think 5k will be about right.

 

[Omek]

I'm finally building a Hackintosh...

The release of this new expensive Mac Pro along with the glued together Macbook Pro, and the completely un-upgradable iMac (except the RAM I think) has finally forced me to consider building a Hackintosh. I've bought and supported Apple's PCs for years now, but I'm definitely going with a Hackintosh PC as my next computer.

Don't get me wrong, the Mac Pro is incredibly well engineered and has great specs, but there is no way I can afford that price tag. I've waited years now for Apple to offer a mini-tower or something more affordable in between a Mac Pro and a Mac Mini that is fully user upgradable. Apple is missing out on a huge chunk of the market there, and they have been for years. I know several Windows PC users that might actually consider getting one if they ever released it.

I'm a gamer and graphic designer. And Apple really needs to make Macs more competitive in the gaming arena with better software support for graphics cards, and they need to keep up with the latest graphics cards. The ones they choose for their machines always seem to lag behind what current Windows PCs are offering.

But I doubt any of that is ever happening any time soon. So, I guess that has finally forced me to build a Hackintosh.

 

[ShinySteelRobot]

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.

What kind of work do you on your Macs?

Mostly app development and gaming, e.g., World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, etc.

 

[Essenar]

90% of designers could get by with the 6-core processor on all their work and they wouldn't notice the difference. However, the difference between the D500 and the D700 is game-changing and the prices for that upgrade is rather cheap compared to the CPU upgrades. I would gauge that the best configuration for most people would be:
Base high-end CPU (6-core 3.5 GHz)
12GB DDR3 ECC
Upgrade to D700 GPU's - $600
Upgrade to 512 GB PCI-Express SSD - $300

For a total of $4,899.00

It's important to note that the D700 is an exact specification replica of the FirePro W9000 which is around $3,200 each on Amazon. In gaming, it performs very close to the performance of a Radeon HD 7970 GHz. The Radeon pulls slightly better frames per second at higher resolutions but at 1080p they're very neck and neck. And you get two of them in sequence for only $600 more than the D500's. They have 523 more stream processors (34% more). Rendering and professional performance between the W9000 and W8000 isn't drastic, but if you do any gaming, the price difference is worth it.

I'll wait for a detailed tear-down from iFixIt before deciding if I want one based on the ram being upgrade friendly or not. If the ram isn't upgrade friendly, of course my opinion changes.

 

[Essenar]

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.

Put in the work and build an x86 rig yourself to supplement your MacBook or deal with it. I hate to be blunt but if there were money to be made with your idea, Apple would be all over it.

Desktops are a dying breed. The reason there's a surge in GPU purchasing is because of litecoin mining. Otherwise all the money to be made is in notebooks. And for anyone that needs this type of power, $3000-7000 for a production machine is "peanuts". My friend just bought an Epic camera, a few lenses, some lights, three shotgun microphones. His costs of investment? Around $100,000. Paying $8000 for the machine to edit the footage on is nothing to him. A Retina MacBook Pro is considered "guerrilla status" for serious film professionals (even at the amateur level). My other friend is a photographer. One lens cost him around $3,000. (There's no replacing that red strip) There's no "use for everything" lens. Outfitting just a set of lenses for street photography has set him back $6,500. I never understood what he meant when he said "The camera body is nothing to me" and now I know. For programmers, developers and the like, ask them how much a license costs for AutoCAD or Unreal Engine. Legally owned software could set you back $4,500 as a simple white hat.

I hate to belittle your desires and needs but there's just not a lot of money in the people like you. It costs money to develop and plan. I would know, I'm an engineer.

Just to give you an example of product development and the economics of "choice":

One of my internships had to do with designing a water purification process that would remove 99% of contaminants from waste-water which would make it drinkable. Essentially you could poop in water and turn it into Aquafina. We had the chemicals, the micro-scale process designed and it was going to work as designed. The problem? No one was willing to pay for it except a few clients. They cut the project because the money to develop it would'e been way more than the revenue generated.

People are cheap. Why design a product when you'd be lucky to even break even? We can criticize Apple all we want. They're a business and their goal is to produce revenue.

 

[osx11]

Mostly app development and gaming, e.g., World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, etc.

Makes sense. I love Apple products but their limited offerings can sometimes be a pain.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Makes sense. I love Apple products but their limited offerings can sometimes be a pain.

Agreed, and now is a much better time then when I first switched to the Mac . . . to switch back to the Windows or Linux PC. I've never been more satisfied with Windows than with Windows 8.1.

The hardware from the top 5 makers is solid across the board, and MS seems to have gotten the whole post-pc world down much better than anyone else. I see folks in post houses downloading apps from their 8.1 tablets and they show up in their laptops.

It's a very tempting time to move to the dark side.

 

[aloshka]

Agreed, and now is a much better time then when I first switched to the Mac . . . to switch back to the Windows or Linux PC. I've never been more satisfied with Windows than with Windows 8.1.

The hardware from the top 5 makers is solid across the board, and MS seems to have gotten the whole post-pc world down much better than anyone else. I see folks in post houses downloading apps from their 8.1 tablets and they show up in their laptops.

It's a very tempting time to move to the dark side.

I'm a .net developer and iOS developer there just isn't a market for writing win 8 mobile software, at the same time the lack of apps is what is keeping me away from a win tablet. A bit of a catch 22, I know. But the iOS market is now so congested, that it's no longer a money maker either.

I do love outlook. Even on the RT. I'm thinking of going to the dark side as well but annoyed by one aspect of win 8. It's great for tablets, but running all apps full screen on dual 27's is annoyingly stupid. And vertically aligning them does not help (split). Great on tablet, horrible on PC and laptops. Maybe it's just me, but the desktop side was not thought through and needs a bit of work. And writing two separate apps, one for desktop mode and another for metro also is a stopper since the frameworks are vastly different (still .net but wpf is different).

I am thinking Microsoft will focus quite a bit on software for apple (office & RDP are examples). Their osx version of RDP is 50 times better than on the PC. It even does retina scaling properly, but on win 8 it's awful!! It scales down, but not up. So DPI is screwed up. DPI is another thing they need to fix, by the way. Half the elements are Too small, the other half is too big (on retina, and yes, I've tried the new 8.1 scaling). The other issue is their release cycle in osx software is 10 times faster than on windows. For instance RDP went through 4 iterations. RDP for windows is still 3 years old with only a minor update. And RDP is huge now that cloud computing, cloud workplace are becoming popular.

I ordered a Mac Pro. LOVE apple, but still looking back and seeing if anything good is on the windows side. I can always cancel before feb.

What is enticing you to switch? Would you do phone too? I think Nokia needs to get their act together and release a different looking phone. All their phones look identical.

 

[Digital Skunk]

I'm a .net developer and iOS developer there just isn't a market for writing win 8 mobile software, at the same time the lack of apps is what is keeping me away from a win tablet. A bit of a catch 22, I know. But the iOS market is now so congested, that it's no longer a money maker either.

I do love outlook. Even on the RT. I'm thinking of going to the dark side as well but annoyed by one aspect of win 8. It's great for tablets, but running all apps full screen on dual 27's is annoyingly stupid. And vertically aligning them does not help (split). Great on tablet, horrible on PC and laptops. Maybe it's just me, but the desktop side was not thought through and needs a bit of work. And writing two separate apps, one for desktop mode and another for metro also is a stopper since the frameworks are vastly different (still .net but wpf is different).

I am thinking Microsoft will focus quite a bit on software for apple (office & RDP are examples). Their osx version of RDP is 50 times better than on the PC. It even does retina scaling properly, but on win 8 it's awful!! It scales down, but not up. So DPI is screwed up. DPI is another thing they need to fix, by the way. Half the elements are Too small, the other half is too big (on retina, and yes, I've tried the new 8.1 scaling). The other issue is their release cycle in osx software is 10 times faster than on windows. For instance RDP went through 4 iterations. RDP for windows is still 3 years old with only a minor update. And RDP is huge now that cloud computing, cloud workplace are becoming popular.

I ordered a Mac Pro. LOVE apple, but still looking back and seeing if anything good is on the windows side. I can always cancel before feb.

What is enticing you to switch? Would you do phone too? I think Nokia needs to get their act together and release a different looking phone. All their phones look identical.

I am talking about the full desktop version.

 

[ShinySteelRobot]

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.

Put in the work and build an x86 rig yourself to supplement your MacBook or deal with it. I hate to be blunt but if there were money to be made with your idea, Apple would be all over it.

Presumably when you say "put in the work and build an x86 rig yourself to supplement your MacBook", you're talking about building an x86 Hackintosh rig?

That's a great option IMO.