New Mac Pro Deliveries Begin, European Orders 'Assembled in China'

[amartinez1660]

11k for a base computer... yikes..

Interesting that a product assembled in and shipped from China, costs a UK buyer £2,000 more for the base Mac Pro and XDR Display (with stand) than it does for a US customer.

#Robbed

And this so-called “pro” computer can’t even play RE2 remake or RDR2. Can’t even use it to stream my Twitch show. My gaming rig DESTROYS this pathetic excuse for a computer.

Great points made by other members on these... yet these continue to rack up likes and ends up being on the top comments front page of the article based on straight up lies.
Second one could be sarcasm though, but in case... no, a gaming rig doesn’t destroy this, a gaming rig wouldn’t be able to hold a several hundreds million polygon scene to be gpu rendered on, say, Houdini. The gaming rig would probably crash or start swapping assets in and out to main memory making it order of magnitudes slower. And yes, it can play RE2 or RDR2 just fine.

My guess is they are both built in China, then some get the case cover(or some other part) removed and shipped to the USA. Then they slap the cover back on, and say "it was assembled in the USA". Car manufactures have been doing this for years.

Woah really. That extra cover disassembly/assembly for cars must be quite a costly waste of resources operation nevertheless... I think laws should try to backtrack a bit to amend for these things. The fact that’s been several years exploiting these loopholes makes me thing lawmakers take a one-shot no follow up approach to making them.

 

[mw360]

The UK is indeed now a crazy expensive place to live. Property around my home town has tripled in the last 10yrs.
What are we to do? The elite? Who are they? How do you rebel? It’s impossible. We are so monitored now and freedom of speech is so stifled that the only way out, is to get out of the uk.

UK house prices have risen about 25% over the last 10 years. For 3x you need to look over 20 years. As for all the monitoring, the government can't even afford to monitor convicted terrorists just out of jail. I think your real problem is misinformation and paranoia. There are certainly happier countries in the world, but the US isn't one of them, and many of the top scorers are in the EU, which as the UK has told itself, is a nest of evil elites intent on making us fill in forms, interfere with our cheeses and straighten our bananas.

 

[cjbryce]

Interesting that a product assembled in and shipped from China, costs a UK buyer £2,000 more for the base Mac Pro and XDR Display (with stand) than it does for a US customer.

#Robbed

This is actually not correct - the real price difference is less than £250. The delta you see is between UK post-VAT and US pre-sales tax advertised prices.

Also within the EU, if an individual or corporation pays VAT for goods/services and is also registered for VAT (i.e. charges VAT to customers) then the VAT is effectively refunded as the expense VAT is offset against the income VAT and only the difference is due to the authorities.

In fact, in the UK at least, if your business makes a loss or the amount of sales VAT is less than the amount of purchase VAT in any given VAT period, the difference can be reclaimed as a cash payment from HMRC.

With the target users of Mac Pros being, erm, professionals, I'd be very surprised indeed if any purchaser was not VAT-registered and therefore able to claim the VAT back.

 

[shaunp]

The base model is not $11k, actually. Plus, for the people this machine is targeted at, it’s actually not as outrageous as everyone says it is. It’s cheaper than some other computers with similar specs, and the build quality and performance are awesome. I wish people would stop complaining about the price, because for people who need this Mac, it’s not bad.

At the high-end that statement is definitely true. However at the base spec it isn't, it's around 3K more than it should be. At the low end most of the price is for the engineering and the balance only begins to shift once you add more cores, LOTs of RAM and multiple GPU's. Then the Mac Pro makes sense. It's not that some users aren't professional enough, it's that the base price IS too high. Ignoring the form factor for one second, for 6k there isn't much performance benefit over a 3k iMac. It's only when you go beyond what an iMac or iMac Pro can offer that the Mac Pro makes sense, and this without getting into the PC argument.

This is the problem with the Mac Pro is it is only worthwhile if you are running applications that only run on Mac OS (Logic, Final Cut) and you require more grunt than an iMac Pro. If you run the Adobe stack for example you'd be better off with a PC. The old Mac Pro cost less to make and there was less 'engineering' cost in the base price making it accessible to more users, yet still scaling for the power users. And I know someone is straight away going to say 'this machine isn't for you, buy an iMac'. Nonsense. It's too expensive at the base price for the spec on offer, but nobody would buy the base spec. A PC which would support my workload (Adobe) would cost around 6k and a Mac Pro would cost around 12k, and I'm not talking about a crappy bedroom build here, I'm talking custom workstation with next day onsite support. An iMac pro would cost me around 7-8k and I'd accept that difference because of the screen. 12k for the Mac Pro, no chance. Mac OS isn't worth 6K over Windows, which is effectively all I'm getting over the PC. And yes I can lease the Mac, but I can lease the PC too at half the price.

So the Mac Pro can be a bargain, if you run the right apps, otherwise it IS too expensive compared to the competition for mid-tier users. Remember not everyone needs 1.5TB RAM and 28 Cores.

 

[kengeon]

Apple has always been expensive but they used to always provide real value for that expense. While the seriously spec'd out Mac Pro does offer something, the base version is an awful deal. Especially today with Threadripper parts which can offer 24 Cores and 32 Core parts which blow the Intel equivalents out of the water for significantly less cost while offering value and features such as PCIE 4.0.

I'm glad that Apple has pulled away from the brink of insanity by building machines that could actually have good thermals, now make them competitive again instead of just rent-seeking from those who are stuck with Mac OSX apps.

 

[pertusis1]

For the price of ownership for one of these things, you should be able to game. My gaming PC can do everything this thing can and plus play RDR2, RE2, Demon Souls.

That’s like saying that for the price of a F1 car, you ought to be able to ship corn with it. How do you spell non sequitur?

 

[Digital Skunk]

well this Apple fan will explain rather than defend cos it doesn’t need it.

Well it was too secret till it was announced.

the dual vega 2 GPUs are not available to anyone else and no motherboard has the connectors to allow the same sort of PCIE bridging.

Only server motherboards are capable of that sort of ram and they don’t have 8 PCIE slots.

or a 1.4kw PSU.

or an afterburner card

the 580x is perfectly adequate for musicians who don’t need more graphics

Thank you, and let's not forget that the 580x is perfect for anyone whose going to rack mount this thing or doesn't need the GPU.

On the flip side, users who need the Vega can fork out the cash for it and benefit more from it than say .... more cores or 96GBs of RAM.

The rig is built from server parts and custom made hardware meant to utilize TBolt 3 the way Apple has always said it should be used. Add to that the options that most other companies DO NOT HAVE.

And NO gamer who claims to be such should even be considering buying a Mac let alone any pre-built PC.

 

[NoNothing]

What's wrong with trying to steal as much as possible? I doubt a single human being in this world would be willing to pay for every single product they want.

Do you just equate following the law with breaking the law? Did you seriously just equate that?
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Please show me any court decision that’s a final ruling (as in not under appeal or being challenged).

Actually, in the EU case, it wasn’t that Apple wasn’t following the law, it was more that the EU found Ireland’s law did not follow the EU’s nebulous guidelines. The nice thing about UU’s guidelines is they can mean whatever they need them to mean to squeeze a bit more cash from (mostly) foreign companies.

 

[NoNothing]

Because tax is what makes the government afloat. Without it you don't have a functioning government. Normal people are paying their fair share of tax to make the countries economy moving and for that a trillion dollar company should not run away from its responsibility.

Nice dog whistles. “Normal people pay their fair share...” Actually, 44% of US adults don’t pay any federal income tax. What does “Normal people” and “fair share” mean to you?

“run away from their responsibility”? Apple paid $38 billion in 2018 federal taxes. What is their “fair share”. $100 billion? $250 billion? $500 billion?
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Sure, but that SGI machine, if it was real, was a lot of bespoke hardware plenty capable than anything you could buy off the shelf elsewhere. The new Mac Pro on the other hand doesn't have anything of significance, outside of the OS at least, that isn't completely off-the-shelf hardware.

It's really just an off-the-shelf CPU, and RAM, a PCIe SSD only so bespoke that you can't save money by literally buying replacement and upgrade parts off the shelf, a set of GPUs that again are only so bespoke that you can't save by buying them literally off the shelf in a somewhat off-the-wall case.

SGI workstations from back then came with bespoke CPUs, GPUs and a whole lot of other things with very large development costs. Those machines absolutely had some major development costs to recoup to develop all of that bespoke hardware. All of the genuinely expensive-to-develop components on the Mac Pro are completely off-the-shelf and available to Apple for not much more than the cost of manufacturing said components.

My machine at work (Ryzen Threadripper box with 64GB of ECC DDR4 RAM, Quadro RTX 6000 and 4000 GPUs, 2TB 970 Evo Plus SSD, etc.) basically kicks it's ass in just about every aspect and is cheaper too as soon as you begin bumping up the Mac Pro from it's paltry base spec (8 core CPU, single RX 580 GPU, 32GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD).

I’m betting your work machine could not even limp on multi stream decoding of 8K video when compared to the newMac Pro with it’s bespoke (word of the day toilet paper) Afterburner card.

 

[Freida]

Exactly. If I post something silly I get banned or warned by moderators but when people post stupidity beyond believe they get nothing.

The last post did make me laugh. Does he think Apple, HP, Dell and all the other workstation makers create these computers for fun.

The best thing about the whole situation is this guy doesnt realise professional people spend $8 - $10k on software per workstation [at least they do in my world]. Freeware....... unbelievable.

 

[SarcasticJoe]

Your snark is unnecessary.

It was a real machine, and came with a very expensive, equally real seat for Pro/Engineer.

The point was that those machines, while definitely real, were way more rare than the Mac Pro and unlike it had genuine reasons to be as expensive as they were. A lot of people who were around back then only dreamed about having one compared to the few that actually owned them. Hence upon closer inspection it's more of an argument for why the price of the new Mac Pro isn't justified rather than your defense of it.

Mind you I work as a software engineer doing visualization work on high end workstations so it wouldn't have been completely out of question that if I had done this job back then to be working on something similar or at the very least one of SGI's lower end workstations.

 

[Mr. Awesome]

If you run the Adobe stack for example you'd be better off with a PC.

I use Adobe CC (specifically Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier Pro, Lightroom, and XD) and I use a Mac for it.

 

[brdeveloper]

Nice seeing Apple producing the Mac Pro in China with the same quality as if it was made in USA. Sadly they are priced the same, despite the very different exchange rates between USD and yuan.

 

[Elitegate]

I’m 47, not that it matters. My PC is more than capable of A/V. You don’t need Final Cut when Windows has plenty of freeware. YouTubers often use movie maker.

Yeah sure. Because you can compare a Hollywood Million Dollar Blockbuster with a simple YouTube video. You have no clue how these people work and what hardware/software they need.
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And this so-called “pro” computer can’t even play RE2 remake or RDR2. Can’t even use it to stream my Twitch show. My gaming rig DESTROYS this pathetic excuse for a computer.

Oh btw, can your gaming rig also process & edit 3 8K Movie Streams at once? I wanna see that, live on Twitch.

 

[Toratek]

The point was that those machines, while definitely real, were way more rare than the Mac Pro and unlike it had genuine reasons to be as expensive as they were. A lot of people who were around back then only dreamed about having one compared to the few that actually owned them. Hence upon closer inspection it's more of an argument for why the price of the new Mac Pro isn't justified rather than your defense of it.

Mind you I work as a software engineer doing visualization work on high end workstations so it wouldn't have been completely out of question that if I had done this job back then to be working on something similar or at the very least one of SGI's lower end workstations.

There are "genuine reasons" for the pricing of the Mac Pro. First and foremost, Apple has every right to price the product to what the market will support. Full stop.

 

[Macs4u]

UK house prices have risen about 25% over the last 10 years. For 3x you need to look over 20 years. As for all the monitoring, the government can't even afford to monitor convicted terrorists just out of jail. I think your real problem is misinformation and paranoia. There are certainly happier countries in the world, but the US isn't one of them, and many of the top scorers are in the EU, which as the UK has told itself, is a nest of evil elites intent on making us fill in forms, interfere with our cheeses and straighten our bananas.

Maybe in your area. In my area houses 10yrs ago were indeed a third that they are now and they are climbing at an alarming rate. The media do try to frighten people and I’ll all aware of that but you’re right, they don’t seem to monitor terrorists as they should. You go put a comment on twitter slating then though and you’re found in hours. The EU thing is tricky as somebody who absolutely LOVES European countries and holiday there multiple times a year, I still voted out. I voted out for 2 reasons. The city closest to me has changed beyond belief. I’m not the only one to say that. What was once a decent town is now absolutely full of rough sleepers (mostly romanian) and there are 2 agencies that pay minimum wage (I have my own career but know a lad who works there) and they purposely favour immigrants. That is just wrong. What happened to the local people just come out of school that can’t get a job?
Secondly I genuinely feel that the UK is too full. Im all for genuine people wanting to live here and would never mock people struggling to have a good life but there are far too many people coming here for benefits and benefits alone.

If we had trustworthy politicians and had a pledge to stop that then I would change my vote.

 

[confessJason]

Yeah sure. Because you can compare a Hollywood Million Dollar Blockbuster with a simple YouTube video. You have no clue how these people work and what hardware/software they need.
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Oh btw, can your gaming rig also process & edit 3 8K Movie Streams at once? I wanna see that, live on Twitch.

3 8K streams? Who the hell needs that? I have never once in my life said to myself, Gee, I need 3 8K streams at once. Gee, I would love to rotate my friggin monitor into portrait mode.

Bruh, hop off the Apple marketing train and get off at Reality. These are gimmicks, plain and simple.

 

[tongxinshe]

You can explain until you’re blue in the face but types like the one you responded to just don’t get it, or maybe they don’t want to get it. They cannot get their minds around the fact that this Mac Pro is not a consumer machine. It wasn’t design with consumers in mind. It wasn’t designed with so-called prosumers or even lower level professional users in mind. It was designed for high level professionals like movie studios, science based research where extreme number crunching is paramount. Perhaps Apple should have named it Mac Workstation instead. No matter, the disgruntled users who were expecting a tower with slots starting at $1999 will keep pounding away at the “overpriced” mantra as long as they can.

Maybe Apple should make a version for prosumers, it's a market much larger than the high-level professionals.

 

[richinaus]

Maybe Apple should make a version for prosumers, it's a market much larger than the high-level professionals.

I can say for near certain that the Mac Pro will not be any architects or designers offices except in the largest ones with in house rendering [and that’s if they use macs at all].
HP and Dell sell lower end workstations that are perfect for what is needed at about half the price of the new Mac Pro.
I am not saying the macpro is overpriced as I understand the market, however Apple seem to have ignored a massive opportunity for a lower end model. I wouldn’t define them as ‘prosumers’ but more like the average professional workstation level. And no, the imac is not it.

 

[Elitegate]

3 8K streams? Who the hell needs that? I have never once in my life said to myself, Gee, I need 3 8K streams at once. Gee, I would love to rotate my friggin monitor into portrait mode.

Bruh, hop off the Apple marketing train and get off at Reality. These are gimmicks, plain and simple.

I told you, A/V Professionals (Hollywood Movie & Music producers) need that kinda of power. Not me, not you.

 

[richinaus]

I told you, A/V Professionals (Hollywood Movie & Music producers) need that kinda of power. Not me, not you.

It never ceases to amaze me how people cannot understand that people do different things to them and that their requirements may differ. And that the options these powerful computers offer have a direct relationship to how much they can earn by enabling more work to be done.

 

[Zdigital2015]

3 8K streams? Who the hell needs that? I have never once in my life said to myself, Gee, I need 3 8K streams at once. Gee, I would love to rotate my friggin monitor into portrait mode.

Bruh, hop off the Apple marketing train and get off at Reality. These are gimmicks, plain and simple.

Three 8K streams may be on the fringes in 2019, but the equivalent three to six 4K streams of ProRes RAW isn’t at all, whether for a live events or editing a live event previously recorded.

FYI, the 2020 Olympics is being broadcast in 8K, so NHK is who the hell needs three 8K streams - https://www.newsshooter.com/2018/12/01/8k-is-now-being-broadcast-in-japan/

Portrait mode is useful to many users, but mostly photographers and developersust because you don’t use it, doesn’t mean others don’t either.

Who the hell needs that? Plenty of people. You’re living in a very small, very insular world if you’re unable to conceive of this in the year 2019. None of it is Apple PR/marketing fluff, it’s how people are using Macs in the here and now.

 

[Tucom]

And this so-called “pro” computer can’t even play RE2 remake or RDR2. Can’t even use it to stream my Twitch show. My gaming rig DESTROYS this pathetic excuse for a computer.

And I'm guessing your pathetic excuse for a pro-machine is built with tacky sheet metal, maybe a little generic tempered glass and probably some cringe RGB, and doesn't come close to the processing power of this beast - it's a GPU upgrade away from ROFL-stomping the bejeezus out of anything you can do w/ your Windblows box, and if you actually knew anything about computers you would know this fact.

Do you really sit there thinking pro-machines are only used for frivolous crap like gaming? I'm a gamer myself, but I appreciate my since-sold Windows rigs for it when need be, and use something serious like this (older model) for everything else.

Good joke though.


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...you have a gaming computer with a processor that beats an octa-core xeon and more than 32gb of RAM? and you had a need for purchasing ECC ram? (i really dont think so.)

whoa there daddy warbucks, you got completely taken for a run at checkout because not only are those specs unnecessary, anything more than that is wasted space.

something you missed along the way when you badgered some poor friend of yours to build a PC or whichever company you purchased it from, is that a computer used for gaming is not necessarily also a computer used for professional work.

you also entirely missed the part that someone buying a computer like this really, really, and i mean REALLY does not care at all for the ability to play the remake of a 10+ year old title, or read dead redemption. and if they really wanted to, they could install a bootcamp partition and probably do it pretty effectively.

im also going to wager your twitch show doesnt even come up on anyone's radar if you're having to post about it on macrumors.

tl;dr - the extent of your computer knowledge is below basic if you think that the lack of gaming ability has any reflection on the usability or overall value of this machine.

Jesus dude, destroyed. Hate these squirmy little PC clanks though, so well written! Maybe he'll learn someday, or maybe it'll come to him when he's busy doing serious life work of playing horribly unoptimized PC ports of games my 2010 Mac Pro could plow through w/ a decent GPU, and gives up on them 30% of the way through.

 

[Zdigital2015]

3 8K streams? Who the hell needs that? I have never once in my life said to myself, Gee, I need 3 8K streams at once. Gee, I would love to rotate my friggin monitor into portrait mode.

Bruh, hop off the Apple marketing train and get off at Reality. These are gimmicks, plain and simple.

This guy does - http://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/art...eal-world-projects-by-james-tonkin-at-hangman

 

[shaunp]

I use Adobe CC (specifically Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier Pro, Lightroom, and XD) and I use a Mac for it.

I'm not saying you can't. Mac is a perfectly good platform. what I'm saying is if you need the performance of a Mac Pro and you run Adobe CC you would be better off running your work on a PC. Purely from a price/performance point of view as there is no difference in operation (other than speed) once you are in the application.