I still think Apple should have kept it in the Store. If somebody is willing to spend the money, then dammit, let them spend the money. It said exactly what it was and who it was for, so you couldn’t even call it fraudulent.
They "still have unrevealed Intel Macs" as per the keynote; given that the 2013 iMac is still supported for Big Sur, we almost certainly still have 7 years of support for both architectures in MacOS.
Jobs said the same thing (about new Macs) about PowerPC in 2006. By 2007, Macs were all Intel, and the Intel-only Snow Leopard debuted in 2009. Complete abandonment of Leopard in 2011.
It seems like they’re maybe Apple-exclusive so it’s possibly they’re drastically marked up. The Titan RTX is $2500 apiece and seems somewhat comparable.
I think your issue may be with the exponential scaling of GPU cost at the highest end. As a consumer, you wish that a card ~2x the Titan in tflops only cost twice as much, but it doesn’t work that way for either platform, and of course isn’t helped by the workstation card market being smaller by unit than the retail/ORM gaming card market.
That said I did not downvote you; it’s an understandable frustration.
They threw a silly amount of RAM in it, so ended up using one of the AMD server CPUs/mainboards rather than a threadripper, since the threadripper could only leverage 256G of RAM. $1200 a stick... woof. I doubt the workload they put on things used that much memory. Would have been interesting to match a cheaper 24 core CPU ($1300) and 256G ($1000) or less of memory with that same test.
If we're going for comparisons, the $43k+ refurb Mac Pro linked at the top of this page still has 50% more RAM than that PC does.
I think the video's conclusion is spot on -- blindly comparing specs isn't really helpful for judging real world usability of hardware that is this high end. You should get the specific resources matched to your workload. That might be a Mac Pro, it might be a server in a closet with a TB of RAM, or it might be a PC with a couple of Quadros in it. Or maybe it's just a netbook with a Celeron :)
> They threw a silly amount of RAM in it, so ended up using one of the AMD server CPUs/mainboards rather than a threadripper, since the threadripper could only leverage 256G of RAM. $1200 a stick... woof.
Are you arguing that no one needs >256G of memory? Or are you arguing that no one needs ECC memory? Or are you arguing that server chips and motherboards shouldn't exist? Or is your complaint that Apple sells a workstation? Or maybe you think workstations should be illegal?
Should car makers only sell cars that you, personally, would like to buy? Should all manufacturers only sell things that you personally find useful? And if you don't find this computer useful how valuable is it for 100 people to chime in to say that? (IMHO opinion polls are better suited to that level of commentary.)
> I doubt the workload they put on things used that much memory
All anecdata to the contrary some workloads do in fact benefit from obscene amounts of memory. And if you've ever looked into it supporting >1TB of memory requires expensive dense memory modules because there are only so many memory busses on the chip and only so many sockets you can put on a bus.
> Are you arguing that no one needs >256G of memory?
For context, I'm working in cloud infrastructure. Due to customer demand (esp. from customers with large in-memory DBs), our newest set of ultra-large VM flavors goes up to 3 and 6 TiB RAM. I'm not directly involved with compute, but from what I gather, it's an interesting challenge esp. on the operations side. You can migrate a 4 GiB VM in a pinch if the hypervisor is looking bad. Migrating a 6 TiB VM, however, takes a substantial amount of time (22 minutes if you have a 40 Gbps link and can saturate it, which you usually can't).
I'm looking at what a workstation class machine likely should be, I guess. All things being equal, I'd love there to be no (realistic) upper limit on memory. ECC should have been supported by threadripper too, IMHO. I've only got a 128G on my workstation and already considering filling that extra four slots. 64-512G is likely pretty normal memory space for a workstation class machine.
My complaint is the testing methodology. Server vs server is a different problem/requirements. They compared a workstation and then built a workstation with memory requirements that were more common to a server class machine. I suspect a cheaper 'non-server' CPU, with a memory footprint that was more typical for a workstation load, a cheaper option would have held up. One of the likely reasons they gimped the threadripper was to ensure it did not compete with the epic product line.
As for the questions: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no. :)
I was curious as to whether this indeed would be possible. But the CPU (W-3275M) itself starts at $6k, the Vega's are $8k each, I can't find any catalogue prices but each slab of ram comes in at around $600 which puts us at $30k. Not unthinkable that the remaining hardware can add another $5k to the bill and you're looking at a $35k machine.
You can probably replace some of these with consumer grade parts, but I'll be impressed if you can create a machine with two titans, 28 cores, and 1.5tB of memory for under $10k.
My takeaway is that somebody, somewhere, had to get a 50k mac replaced and apple has one to refurbish. I suppose it's not that surprising given that used luxury cars are a thing, but a used workstation at this price point is rare.
Curious about the low (comparatively to the rest of the specs) amount of SSD storage, given that raw video tends to be very large. I guess they would be using networked storage for everything?
If you're really doing video, I suspect you'd use storage arrays (perhaps arrays of SSD for high-end) instead of trying to cram it into your workstation, not to mention you'd want redundancy (and sharing) for production-type work
A lot of editors will keep all of their footage on some form of networked storage until they need to work on a specific piece of it. Bring it to the machine, edit it, and send it back to the storage array.
I work in the same industry, and will say you don't need to max out every component on a PC for real-time graphics peak performance. Yeah, you might need to max out a few parts, but not every part.
Going through Apple's buy site, the previous owner maxed out every single configuration except for storage (2TB not 8TB) and then skimped on purchasing a Magic Trackpad, opting solely for a Magic Mouse 2. If they were going to spend all this, they should have gone all in!
Pretax cost as configured: $51,999
Cost fully maxed out: $53,948
BTW, this refurbished Mac Pro represents a savings of 15% off of $51,999.
We don’t know if the previous owner got the trackpad or not. For example, if there were a problem with the computer and it was swapped for a new one, Apple probably wouldn’t ask for the Magic Trackpad. Or even if it was returned, I imagine those two products have different pools of stock.
I do too for most stuff, but I decided to try out a Magic Trackpad for a while and now I actually keep both on my desk. Having full gestures available right next to (or in my case directly above) the mouse makes for a surprisingly pleasant experience in macOS.
I was wondering if there was a refurb mac mini for sale the other day and I saw these machines (I think the cheapest one they had was $12k)
A little voice in the back of my head wondered... are these really used machines?
I thought this because a lot of new products on amazon have a fixed MSRP, but the same product used can be lower, so folks sell "used" products at a discount that still have all the shrink wrap.
> Compatible with Mac Pro (current generation)
PCI Express x16 card
> Accelerates ProRes and ProRes RAW codec in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party applications
> Supports playback of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW
So if there’s an NVIDIA card that does all that, great, happy to hear it. I heard Adobe Premiere was recently updated to support the Afterburner as well so hopefully it also works with NVIDIA’s equivalent.
If somebody is willing to prove that they can build equivalent hardware to this monster for only $5K, I am willing to overlook the operating system entirely.
Looking up on NewEgg DDR4 128GB ECC, I see 2x128GB for $1650 so the 1.5TB configuration of the Mac is $9,900.
The processor is around $3,150.
The Afterburner is not available for Linux at any price. It only contributes $2,000 to the price anyway.
The AMD Pro Vega II is not available for purchase. Finding an equivalent card would require substantial amounts of guesswork. The only recent GPUs I can find with 32GB are around $7,000. The configuration has two of them.
You're up to $27k by this point and you don't have a computer yet, and I'm not so sure that the equipment above is comparable.
Not a lot of people are going to order this machine and return for giggles, so I guess the standard return policy applies, 14 days very few questions asked.
First scenario that comes to mind, because someone mentioned the probably replaced SSD, is that there was an issue suspected with the machine when it was new, and Apple replaced it with a new one right away and did diagnostics after.
That’s just the RAM cost, though. The threadripper TRX40 platform supports 256GB max RAM, and the epyc you linked tops out at 1TB. Just finding a cpu and mobo that will host 1.5 TB is a multi-thousand dollar expense all on its own.
Massive realtime video renders (think multiple simultaneous 8k in real time), compositing, scene rendering/animating, transcoding. Or computations on extremely large scientific datasets.
You are color grading a $200 million movie and want to apply various tweaks to the video and see the effect in real time. With a regular PC you have to render and then view... with something like this you could render in real time at 8k.
In which case 50k seems like a pretty reasonable price.
It's surprising that there are enough of those kinds of use cases to justify an entire production of a product like this. Something about the depth of certain markets being way bigger than they appear.
>> Afterburner is a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC. With over a million logic cells, it can process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second.
Interesting -- didn't realize FPGAs were commonly used in graphics development flows. Does anyone know what software is used to customize the FPGA to accelerate tasks in macOS?
It’s programmed to function as a ProRes and ProRes RAW video accelerator, so is more useful for video production. Apple has it locked down though, so while they can update it, 3rd party devs would have to find a way to hack it to do anything useful with it, and I’m not sure how appealing a target the Afterburner is with other FPGAs around.
Doesn't really count as 'an FPGA', how it's implemented is really a minor detail. Lots of consumer and prosumer hardware out there is based on FPGAs, but programming it isn't something you're allowed to do. At least two pieces of hardware hooked up to my PC are powered by FPGAs.
Part of the logic here is that if you're only gonna sell 20000 units, it's probably better to just slap an FPGA in there than build out a fully custom board with a bunch of dedicated chips. The FPGA is easier to update after release, too.
Apple has a very generous return policy. There are so many refurb Mac pros due to return for incompatible peripherals or whatever reason it was returned.
It's definitely a machine optimized more for throughput than latency. Though 1.5TB of RAM can go a long way toward hiding storage latency for some workloads.
I wonder if the number of people who would are willing and able buy a refurbished Mac Pro is higher or lower than the number of people who are willing and able to buy a used Bugatti.
It seems that once you have the kind of money to be getting those items, you would want to get it new and customized exactly how you want it.
A Bugatti is bought as a status symbol. This Mac Pro was bought for high end video editing. They were willing to pay $50k because it's for editing multimillion dollar projects. They'll probably be paying thousands of dollars per day for this editing work. The refurbished one does the job just as well as the new one.
It's only 500GB away from being able to load the entirety of the SSD's contents into RAM.
Of course, I say "only" when that difference alone is nearly 16× the amount of RAM I have in this here Threadripper rig on which I'm typing this comment.
Even if you needed these specs and macOS, you could easily save thousands by buying the RAM yourself. You could save even more with by using the W5700X GPU (or even off-the-shelf 5700 XT).
While I'm sure AMD's latest high-core count chips may be giving us new cheaper options, high priced Macs have typically been reasonably priced for their specs.
More recently when the 27" 5K iMacs came out, I looked at the price of a 27" 5K IPS DCI-P3 monitor on Dell... it was only $100 less than the iMac, despite the Mac having a full computer in it, in addition to the display. People still complained that they were expensive.
The Dell was the only 5K IPS DCI-P3 monitor I could find. That's why. DCI-P3 was new to consumer space. 5K was new to consumer space. IPS further limited the the ability to find a comparable screen.
Yeah the point is Dell ain't the cheapest. Clearly it is the only one from what you have added. I was making the point that saying something is cheaper than Dell ain't saying much.
Because you're looking at manufacturers that primarily cater to enterprise. There is a big difference if you look at MSI or Acer for monitors generally and build your own PC.
Except typical MSI and Acer monitors are not remotely on par with the professional monitors mentioned prior. MSI and Acer's professional monitors that are approximately the same specification, amazingly, cost approximately the same price.
Yes they are. Once you look at the actual specs beyond the name brand, you can get much better deal. Dell and Apple monitors are also going to usually be higher response time and lower hz as well, so worse performance for more money.
Response time and frequency are not the metrics that are most important for professional monitors. Colour accuracy, colour space and panel uniformity are the important metrics.
Sony can sell 1080p, 60hz monitors with 5ms response time for $3k because their colour accuracy, colour space support and panel uniformity are unparalleled outside of that price bracket.
- 4x Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11 GB, 4352 CUDA Cores each)
- $ 53,356
I've never used either or anything remotely close to either that or the mac pro, so I could be missing something, but the system76 seems like much better value than the fully maxed Mac Pro at $ 53,899
It may be better value for your particular use case. It depends entirely on the requirements, surely? If you need the faster SSD, hardware disk encryption, ability to run MacOS or some other feature that the Mac Pro has over the system you specified, that might have a different answer than if you need the maximum number of CUDA cores.
The only thing you've mentioned that a mac actually has over any other machine is the ability to (legally) run OS X. Maybe you think that's worth a few thousand euros. Most people don't agree with you.
And, from my understanding, run it with something akin to stability. Am I wrong that Hackintoshes today are still for people who don't mind regularly chasing down pretty significant bugs (like "bluetooth doesn't turn on" style)?
That’s often the case. Apple is way better than Dell and HP on supply chain stuff, but their range is narrower. Dell has like 10000 configurations and Apple has like 100, with 80% of sales being stock SKUs. Even with laptops, they tend to offer at least one model that is an incredible value due to scale. If you need to configure, however, forget it.
Back in 2008/9, I bought about 300 cheese graters at a net savings of about $180k vs other workstations if memory serves. It was a happy coincidence that our need matched Apple’s config.
They didn't make the profit on the first sale. They made the profit on the next sale after the user finds it nearly impossible to upgrade and buys a new computer instead.
What I'd contest on this is the fact that almost nobody needs best in spec in every category... Yeah, building the exact spec might not be cheaper, but it's also not what's needed to match the performance in any 1 or more particular use case.
Also, nothing will every justify a $1k monitor desk mount.
That article is incorrect; their guess of equivalent GPUs was about $5600 too high.
The FirePro D700 used in the Mac Pro was essentially a rebadged consumer card. (It's surprising, but none of the GPUs in the Mac Pro officially supported ECC.) Instead of two FirePro W9000 cards ($6800), they should have specified two HD7970 6GB cards ($1200).
I am still very surprised vast majority people dont know how to compare. And that is why branding and marketing matters.
I used to be furious at marketing. They are always hype and spin. But the older I get the more appreciate I have for it. Not because I agree with them now, but generally speaking consumers just aren't very good at judging values and knowing what they want. Marketing helps that, and push things forward.
It was terrifying to click this link and have it open up in the Apple Store app, with my payment info already available, and a big blue "Add to Bag" button under my thumb.
The bank would immediately decline a $43,000 purchase on my card. Not only is this way over my debit card’s daily anti-fraud limit, it also exceeds my bank balance. I would recommend keeping a small balance in any account used for online purchasing.
I never purchase items with a debit card. A credit card always beats a debit card if you are able to pay it off every month.
If there's a wrong transaction with a credit card, the company will 99.99% of the time immediately take your side, and all you have to do is click dispute, and the money is instantly credited to your account.
With a debit card, in the past I have had to go through a week or so long process to get fradulent charges removed.
Plus other benefits, there are perks like automatically extended warranty on purchases like this one (amex), and all sorts of discounts.
I purchased something with a credit card, and returned it, but it was "lost" in shipping even though they signed for it. It took a while to notice, then it took a while to investigate and then a specified time period had elapsed and my cc company wouldn't reverse the charge. I cancelled the card.
172 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadNote: for anyone wondering why it's so expensive, look at the amount of RAM it has
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/tower#
Express delivery to my location is an additional $8.
I give it 5 years at the most.
That said I did not downvote you; it’s an understandable frustration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_IHSRPVqwQ
I think the video's conclusion is spot on -- blindly comparing specs isn't really helpful for judging real world usability of hardware that is this high end. You should get the specific resources matched to your workload. That might be a Mac Pro, it might be a server in a closet with a TB of RAM, or it might be a PC with a couple of Quadros in it. Or maybe it's just a netbook with a Celeron :)
Are you arguing that no one needs >256G of memory? Or are you arguing that no one needs ECC memory? Or are you arguing that server chips and motherboards shouldn't exist? Or is your complaint that Apple sells a workstation? Or maybe you think workstations should be illegal?
Should car makers only sell cars that you, personally, would like to buy? Should all manufacturers only sell things that you personally find useful? And if you don't find this computer useful how valuable is it for 100 people to chime in to say that? (IMHO opinion polls are better suited to that level of commentary.)
> I doubt the workload they put on things used that much memory
All anecdata to the contrary some workloads do in fact benefit from obscene amounts of memory. And if you've ever looked into it supporting >1TB of memory requires expensive dense memory modules because there are only so many memory busses on the chip and only so many sockets you can put on a bus.
For context, I'm working in cloud infrastructure. Due to customer demand (esp. from customers with large in-memory DBs), our newest set of ultra-large VM flavors goes up to 3 and 6 TiB RAM. I'm not directly involved with compute, but from what I gather, it's an interesting challenge esp. on the operations side. You can migrate a 4 GiB VM in a pinch if the hypervisor is looking bad. Migrating a 6 TiB VM, however, takes a substantial amount of time (22 minutes if you have a 40 Gbps link and can saturate it, which you usually can't).
My complaint is the testing methodology. Server vs server is a different problem/requirements. They compared a workstation and then built a workstation with memory requirements that were more common to a server class machine. I suspect a cheaper 'non-server' CPU, with a memory footprint that was more typical for a workstation load, a cheaper option would have held up. One of the likely reasons they gimped the threadripper was to ensure it did not compete with the epic product line.
As for the questions: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and no. :)
You can probably replace some of these with consumer grade parts, but I'll be impressed if you can create a machine with two titans, 28 cores, and 1.5tB of memory for under $10k.
Pretax cost as configured: $51,999 Cost fully maxed out: $53,948
BTW, this refurbished Mac Pro represents a savings of 15% off of $51,999.
A little voice in the back of my head wondered... are these really used machines?
I thought this because a lot of new products on amazon have a fixed MSRP, but the same product used can be lower, so folks sell "used" products at a discount that still have all the shrink wrap.
Only in cases where reprogramming capability or lack of initial cost of production make sense FPGA is used.
> Compatible with Mac Pro (current generation) PCI Express x16 card
> Accelerates ProRes and ProRes RAW codec in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party applications
> Supports playback of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW
So if there’s an NVIDIA card that does all that, great, happy to hear it. I heard Adobe Premiere was recently updated to support the Afterburner as well so hopefully it also works with NVIDIA’s equivalent.
Like, there are only two GPU manufacturers left in the world, and requisite macOS driver for the bigger and better one, flat out don’t exist.
> 1.5 TB DDR4 ECC Ram
This isn’t gonna cost less than 20k.
The processor is around $3,150.
The Afterburner is not available for Linux at any price. It only contributes $2,000 to the price anyway.
The AMD Pro Vega II is not available for purchase. Finding an equivalent card would require substantial amounts of guesswork. The only recent GPUs I can find with 32GB are around $7,000. The configuration has two of them.
You're up to $27k by this point and you don't have a computer yet, and I'm not so sure that the equipment above is comparable.
EDIT: Ninja’d like 5 times over. I see I wasn’t the only one that rushed to figure out what kind of discount the buyer is getting on this.
Did someone buy this and then not find it good enough?
Did someone want to test it and then get their money back?
Was something broken?
This is an expensive machine, comparable in price to a nice, new car. I'd want a history report if I were buying this.
That might be just enough time to render your student film.
64 gig DDR4 modules cost ~$300 [3] 128 gig DDR4 server modules can cost as little as ~$800 [4]
8x64 = 0.5 TB of DDR4 ram = 8300 = $2,400 16x128 = 1.5 TB of DDR4 ram = 16800 = $12,800
[1] https://www.amazon.com/TRX40-AORUS-PRO-Fins-Array-Motherboar... [2] https://hothardware.com/news/gigabyte-mz31-amd-epyc-7000-mot... [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007611%20601275379 [4] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100007952%20601324426
https://i.imgur.com/rbZB2uv.png
It's surprising that there are enough of those kinds of use cases to justify an entire production of a product like this. Something about the depth of certain markets being way bigger than they appear.
Interesting -- didn't realize FPGAs were commonly used in graphics development flows. Does anyone know what software is used to customize the FPGA to accelerate tasks in macOS?
And I don't think you as the end user or third party programmer are given any options to customize it.
Part of the logic here is that if you're only gonna sell 20000 units, it's probably better to just slap an FPGA in there than build out a fully custom board with a bunch of dedicated chips. The FPGA is easier to update after release, too.
It seems that once you have the kind of money to be getting those items, you would want to get it new and customized exactly how you want it.
Of course, I say "only" when that difference alone is nearly 16× the amount of RAM I have in this here Threadripper rig on which I'm typing this comment.
Knoppix, damn small Linux, puppy Linux, slax, and a few, even older, firewalls and router distros that existed (exist?)
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/173695-apples-new-over...
While I'm sure AMD's latest high-core count chips may be giving us new cheaper options, high priced Macs have typically been reasonably priced for their specs.
More recently when the 27" 5K iMacs came out, I looked at the price of a 27" 5K IPS DCI-P3 monitor on Dell... it was only $100 less than the iMac, despite the Mac having a full computer in it, in addition to the display. People still complained that they were expensive.
That's why :-)
Are you arguing that Kia is also a luxury brand? Or are you arguing that luxury brands aren't a thing? I honestly can't tell.
I have never thought that. I would expect better parts from MSI.
P.S. I miss the ridiculous Alienware XP themes [2].
[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/gaming/alienware
[2] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IpMO_Mx-ARM/UYvCW7ikojI/AAAAAAAAA...
Not like...a desirable luxury brand to me even though I am a professional game developer, but it is a luxury brand.
Sony can sell 1080p, 60hz monitors with 5ms response time for $3k because their colour accuracy, colour space support and panel uniformity are unparalleled outside of that price bracket.
Consider https://pro.sony/en_AU/products/broadcastpromonitors/lmd-a24... and https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1029229-REG/sony_lmda... , Sony doesn't even list the pixel response time because it's not important for the market.
He was looking at one of the few available remotely comparable display.
- 2x Xeon Platinum 8280 (28 Cores each, 2.7 - 4.0 GHz)
- 2x 768 GB ECC DDR4 Memory (6x128GB per CPU, 1.5TB total)
- 1x 2TB NVME drive
- 1x 28TB SSD
- 4x Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11 GB, 4352 CUDA Cores each)
- $ 53,356
I've never used either or anything remotely close to either that or the mac pro, so I could be missing something, but the system76 seems like much better value than the fully maxed Mac Pro at $ 53,899
Back in 2008/9, I bought about 300 cheese graters at a net savings of about $180k vs other workstations if memory serves. It was a happy coincidence that our need matched Apple’s config.
Also, nothing will every justify a $1k monitor desk mount.
The FirePro D700 used in the Mac Pro was essentially a rebadged consumer card. (It's surprising, but none of the GPUs in the Mac Pro officially supported ECC.) Instead of two FirePro W9000 cards ($6800), they should have specified two HD7970 6GB cards ($1200).
I am still very surprised vast majority people dont know how to compare. And that is why branding and marketing matters.
I used to be furious at marketing. They are always hype and spin. But the older I get the more appreciate I have for it. Not because I agree with them now, but generally speaking consumers just aren't very good at judging values and knowing what they want. Marketing helps that, and push things forward.
If there's a wrong transaction with a credit card, the company will 99.99% of the time immediately take your side, and all you have to do is click dispute, and the money is instantly credited to your account.
With a debit card, in the past I have had to go through a week or so long process to get fradulent charges removed.
Plus other benefits, there are perks like automatically extended warranty on purchases like this one (amex), and all sorts of discounts.
Amex it is.