I would not be surprised if and when the MacPro drops the top-tier machine will crest at $10,000
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The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming
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... drops the top-tier machine will crest at $10,000
You can take that as given, no doubt
I would not be surprised if and when the MacPro drops the top-tier machine will crest at $10,000
I think that is way too low, probably more like $20,000. Just went to Apple's site, selected the top options for the iMac Pro and it cost $13,000.
You know ... a $20,000 machine would need to produce $200,000.00 in profit in the first year for me to consider that ... and if I had the potential for that kind of profit someone else would be doing the work so I hope someone sets up a MacPro kiosk for those who presumably need that kind of power ... by the way, what order of magnitude in computational power is needed to get to Mars... somehow I doubt a MacPro would be needed based on what was used to get to the Moon.
A 20K machine .. really?
With more and more desktop functionality emulated in iOS and $1000 iPhones who on God's Green Earth needs to spend that kind of money.
So .. in the Apple kingdom
$1000 - $5000 = Consumer
$5000 - $10,000 = Pro-sumer
$10,000 - $20,000 = Pro
When you consider the life of a Apple desktop and/or it's ability to stay current beyond 7-years those "Pro" costs look like liabilities and then there's the MacPro track record.
It would take a huge set of balls after casting out the "pro-community" and failing to maintain their "Pro" machine to bait them without first having a leg to stand on. It may be smart for Apple to delay the MacPro until they nail the new Mini and make us beg for more.
Man - when I look at the retired Apple gear in my basement and the quality that now erodes I get very pissed - very pissed indeed - it's disgusting. I have, without exaggeration, (4) 48" x 24" x 24" crates filled with obsolete cables and connectors used to support my systems over the years.
If I had kids I'd build an Apple museum.
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I have no idea what it will cost, of course. But I just think it will “crest” above the price of the loaded iMac Pro. Everything Apple has said about the new Mac Pro suggests they don’t plan to make any compromises and are going to offer a really powerful machine for people who won’t even ask what it costs. I seriously doubt if that target audience is hanging out here in the Mac Mini forum.
All the same, I’d guess that the base Mac Pro would have an pricetag somewhere between the cost of the current base Mac Pro and the base iMac Pro. But your guess is certainly as good as mine.
All the same, I’d guess that the base Mac Pro would have an pricetag somewhere between the cost of the current base Mac Pro and the base iMac Pro. But your guess is certainly as good as mine.
really powerful machine needs at least to split the video / cpu line. To have an low base for CPU (as low as 1) and video as low as 1 low-mid range card.I have no idea what it will cost, of course. But I just think it will “crest” above the price of the loaded iMac Pro. Everything Apple has said about the new Mac Pro suggests they don’t plan to make any compromises and are going to offer a really powerful machine for people who won’t even ask what it costs. I seriously doubt if that target audience is hanging out here in the Mac Mini forum.
All the same, I’d guess that the base Mac Pro would have an pricetag somewhere between the cost of the current base Mac Pro and the base iMac Pro. But your guess is certainly as good as mine.
Maxing out at 2 cpus and dual high end or more video cards.
But there work loads where 1 cpu + high video cards are good and other where it's dual cpu and 1 mid range video is ok.
As for storage Base line needs to be 256-512G pcie-SSD OS / app disk. With open m.2 slots and sata ports. NO forced raid 0 and no putting 2-3+ disk on an X4 pci-e linked T2 chip.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. They have hyped the new Mac Pro for over a year, and said it will take until 2019 because it's aimed at "demanding pro customers." Then they introduce a new mini in 2018 and say "mission accomplished"???
Apple hasn't said that much at all. First, they really haven't talked in any significant detail about the next Mac Pro at all. Characterizing that has "hype the new Mac Pro" is a huge reach when they really are not talking about it at all. Apple talked in detail about what went "right" and "wrong" with the MP 2013, but besides saying that it won't have a Graphics monitor (so they need to work on one ) and that it needs to address "high" bandwidth and performance workloads they have said very little else. The most definitive points they have made have been which year the new Mac Pro would not appear in. That's been the primary point of detail.
Second, no way thee Bloomberg articile says "mission accomplished" at all. In Apple's meetings they had sad that the MacBook Pro , iMac , and Mac Pro in order cover the pro market. The Mac Mini covered some corner cases too. Those mini corner cases ( entry app developer system , server colocations , and media/file serving ) is all they really said in the context of this new mini. Those are not what they were talking about in the general market frame for the Mac Pro.
This new Mini isn't a replacement at all for the Mac Pro space. It probably is appearing befeore the new Mac Pro because Apple started working on it before the new Mac Pro ( which appears they really didn't start until Q2 2017 or so. ). It never was on track to fill that Mac Pro space. The Mac Pro space is empty most likely because Apple wasn't working on anything solid for a long term.
$20,000 is chump change. With mid-tier dual Xeon Skylake SP CPUs and a decent amount of RAM, you could be looking at $40,000 easy.
Check out the HP Z8 G4 if you want to get a feeling for Xeon workstation pricing. $20k processors x2 is $40k just for the CPUs. Only 384GB RAM will set you back around 13k, 768GB is almost $30k. Again, x2 for dual CPU so $60k for RAM. The video cards can get rather pricey as well; a pair of Quadro GP100 will set you back close to 15k. Dual CPU models can be configured with up to 3 TB of RAM, but even a single CPU model with “only” 768GB of RAM can price at over $50k.
I’m not at all saying this is where the Mac Pro is going, but be prepared to pay top dollar for the highest performing hardware. The Mac Pro could be very, very expensive; it just depends on “how pro is Pro”. (I hope it is dual socket.)
I pretty much agree with your assessment. The one kicker, and one which no one really has a good grasp on, is just what exactly the few odd comments about a "modular" Mac mean in terms of the future of the desktop line. Will there be a headless line that ranges seamlessly (and thinly!) between a Mini end and a Pro end in some progressive fashion? Will the Mini be outside the modular line? Or what? A roadmap for the raggedy-assed masses would be very nice.
For Business Class computing incl. editing, production, content creation etc. this may be acceptable. This is the perfect time then for Apple to also set the stage for a realignment of the product categories. I could accept these ridiculous (corporate) prices from a company that has invested heavily in a roadmap with a successful lineage behind it but for a niche company that will and can change direction like watchband colors I would not even consider hoisting my wallet out of my pocket for that kind of money. I would almost certainly buy from a company that has a long workstation history with the invested penetration to support it for 10-years plus.
As for a new Mini topping out at $1700 - $2200 would be the new chump change.
Look, if you buy a car for 40K you've got resale value - you've got something that does the same thing it did the day you bought it. Imagine due to a mandatory ECU software upgrade you could not drive your 40K car or it no longer drove in reverse with the new upgrade or the speed was now limited to 30 mph.
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Except for large image-libraries, iMovie stuff and general "downloads", this would actually be cool.
People could still use NASes for the above stuff, but all the super-critical documents could be stored off-site with no effort.
The problem is that I'm probably not alone in having accumulated so much "stuff" over the last decade of Apple that I can hardly sort through it nor make a decision to delete it....
It will surely go higher than the current mini, but like MBP it will be due to new, larger capacity configurations. (Just like a higher starting point would be due to dropping the lower-priced configs.)
No idea what you’re talking about. Is this your version of “Snow Leopard is the greatest OS of all time, every version after that is worse than the last, High Sierra sucks”?
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Nine years ago you could buy a cMP with $2.2k and use it almost a decade in demanding tasks with few upgrades over its lifetime.
Well, those days are surely over. I just hope the starting price won’t be much higher than with nMP. Also hoping that innovation doesn’t come from somebody’s ass this time...
Well, those days are surely over. I just hope the starting price won’t be much higher than with nMP. Also hoping that innovation doesn’t come from somebody’s ass this time...
No not at all ... it's my version of $40,000 is far too much money to give to a company with no roadmap - no lineage - who may limit the functionality or discontinue the product far before it's time.
Remember the Mac IIsi, successor to the IIci? IIvi? IIvx?
IIcx pissed off a few people that layed down serious cash too. Luckily, I bought the IIci, and could hold out for the 7500's
All dead within 4 months to 2 years. No obvious successors. No obvious update path.
Apple did it back then. They will not hesitate to do it again.
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Sure. No doubt there are those who never bought the 2013 Mac Pro cylinder and chose instead to drop the platform. Likely they’ll never be back. Some may have even tried to hold off for few years for Apple to fix the problem. By now they too may well have given up, also never to return. That’s what happens when you screw up your product management as bad as Apple did with Mac Pro.
Can they recover? They think so. They’re going to a lot of effort to try to get the 2019 Pro right for the market segments that are still interested in using Macs. It should be interesting to see what they come up with.
It may or may not be what their (remaining/ potential) customers want; my guess is that they’ll have something users will want to buy. It may or may not be enough to bring some back into the fold.
At least Mac hardware has the advantage of being able to run Mac/Windows/Linux. Along those lines, I strongly believe Apple needs to support nVIDIA HW for those needing CUDA. I think the cylinder at least taught them the (expensive) lesson that users have to be able to run the graphics hardware they want to run. Two PCIe slots (minimum x8, x16 better) would be awesome. I’m sure they’re well aware.
I suppose there’s a waiting for the 2019 Mac Pro thread this discussion would be more suited to.
I just ordered a handful of drives a couple of weeks ago-a 250gb Evo 860, a 500gb Evo 860, and a 2tb WD Blue.
The WD Blue is now in my MBP 9,1(2012 15" non-retina) that serves as my main computer. The 1TB Evo I put in it two years ago is getting uncomfortably tight, so I pulled the optical drive and decided to go the spinner route for a secondary drive. The spinner IS in the factory HDD bay since the sudden motion sensor doesn't work in the optical bay, and fortunately the speeds are the same on both buses. The OS, all my programs, and my "recent" documents/files are on the SSD, though, and I can't imagine going back.
The other two drives were for 13" MBPs. One of the two-the one that got the 500gb drive-was my first Mac and I still use it some. It's been used little in the past few years, though, because it felt agonizingly slow with the stock 5400rpm drive. It's like a new computer with the 500gb in it, and I can go back to traveling with it...
In any case, the least expensive of the bunch was the 250gb SSD-it was a bit under $80. The 500gb wasn't that much more expensive-maybe $115ish. The spinner was between the two in price.
Also, it's worth mentioning that Samsung drives are pretty much the gold standard in the consumer realm both in terms of speed and in rated read/write cycles. They do carry a premium over most other consumer class drives, although in smaller sizes it's only a couple of dollars.
Interestingly enough, the Evo 860, which came on the market in January, is selling for prices a fair bit lower than the older but still available Evo 850.
That's not an usual price for a top end workstation, regardless of manufacturer. Top end workstations aren't for people to buy and sit around with at home, they're for design studios/corporate environments where such figures are just the cost of doing business.
Here’s some people, still trying to explain to you that using SSD vs HDD has nothing whatever to do with component cost, but everything to do with average selling price:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/26376504/
In fact, Apple would willingly pay an extra $10 for a 500GB HDD over the price of an SSD, and still price an HDD machine for less. If that doesn’t make sense to you, re-read the linked post as many times as it takes until it does. But really, Apple’s tiering and upgrade pricing strategies aren’t that complicated, even if you don’t like them.
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Exactly ... and after pissing those folks off who have the dollars for heavy-lifting (exactly what have they been doing the last several years) Apple needs to focus more downstream ... say in the $3500-$5000 range which is more than enough for the consumer market even in this day and age ... minus the add-ons.
So actually a high-end Mini is right where they need to focus. A low-end MacPro costing $7000 would be overkill for most and insufficient for the Pros creating a "dead spot" and low appeal. If they scale the MacPro way up that would make sense while providing several enhanced iterations above the "standard" top-tier Mini.
Essentially the Mini becomes the scaleable headless desktop for the masses and the MacPro becomes the niche performance machine for blowing the doors off all processes while laying claim to innovation and courage. I know they teased the MacPro as modular but that should not infer affordable.
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and then the $999-$1500 min needs to have an i7 OR ryzen 7 cpu (desktop) class cpu and at least at the $1299-$1499 level an mid range desktop video card. Maybe an $1799-$1999 one with high end video card.
Wow just read about Bloomberg.
So it is almost certainly coming after all.
What if the Pro Mini is used by apple as a test bench for some technologies (in terms of cooling, connectivity, modularity, even biometrics like an off-angle FaceID built-in the chassis) to last minute test before the big Mac Pro prime time launch? That would be interesting.
Also, 10GbE is a given if it’s marketed as a “Pro” desktop, in nowadays apple. Good. It will be one of the few if not the only compact NUC type thing with built in 10GbE.
So it is almost certainly coming after all.
What if the Pro Mini is used by apple as a test bench for some technologies (in terms of cooling, connectivity, modularity, even biometrics like an off-angle FaceID built-in the chassis) to last minute test before the big Mac Pro prime time launch? That would be interesting.
Also, 10GbE is a given if it’s marketed as a “Pro” desktop, in nowadays apple. Good. It will be one of the few if not the only compact NUC type thing with built in 10GbE.
I’m not sure Gurman has any real info, he might just be channeling Ming-Chi Kuo.
I don’t think Apple will use the Pro moniker; in the desktop space that currently means workstation: a Xeon CPU, ECC RAM and decent GPU capability.
A mini refresh could just be as simple as Apple using both the 28W quad-cores and the 45W hexa-cores from the most recent MBP refresh. With a 64GB RAM option (+1,400) and a 4TB SSD (+3,400) you could see a wide range of price/ performance, from $999 to around $6,000 at the highest end. I could easily see an entry level 28W dual-core 8/128 at $699-799 as well.
Gurman and Gruber at this point are Apple’s controlled leaker and spin doctor...what I gather is
- new Minis are coming 100% and Bloomberg has first hand info (no product leaked on Bloomberg ever fails to show up)
- a Pro oriented Mini is probably coming
That doesn’t rule out a non-Pro mini in the lower tiers.
Having distinct lower tiers allows Apple to get creative in the upper tiers, you’ve seen it with iPhones (8) and Macbooks (no touchbar).
- new Minis are coming 100% and Bloomberg has first hand info (no product leaked on Bloomberg ever fails to show up)
- a Pro oriented Mini is probably coming
That doesn’t rule out a non-Pro mini in the lower tiers.
Having distinct lower tiers allows Apple to get creative in the upper tiers, you’ve seen it with iPhones (8) and Macbooks (no touchbar).