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What Would It Cost To Build a Windows Version of the Pricey New Mac Pro?
zacharye writes "The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and flexible computer Apple has ever created, and it's also extremely expensive — or is it? With a price tag that can climb up around $10,000, Apple's latest enterprise workhorse clearly isn't cheap. For businesses with a need for all that muscle, however, is that steep price justifiable or is there a premium 'Apple tax' that companies will have to pay? Shortly after the new Mac Pro was finally made available for purchase last week, one PC enthusiast set out to answer that question and in order to do so, he asked another one: How much would it cost to build a comparable Windows 8 machine?"
Why do I think they ordered those parts from the most expensive sources possible?
Now, suddenly, the 7,500 dollar ASIC Bitcoin Miner seems cheap. You could buy that miner then mine some bitcoin then buy that Mac Book then have both... and not feel like Apple was ripping you off...
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
This is a business level product.
While you can build one cheaper using DYI parts, however the time spent in wages, for souring the hardware, software and doing the software can add up very quickly
.
Then there is also support and maintenance - will having a custom built machine cost more in the long run?
The more you spent on the machine - the bigger the margin for the DYI version - however at the end of the day - is the cost worth it for business?
Simple, add $199 for a copy of Windows, and you have an equivalent Apple machine, duh.
Why would you put Windows 8 on a work computer?
I bought my Mom a Mac Pro for Christmas.
She says GMail runs so much faster now.
Site is starting to get Slashdotted.
The Mac tax has always been about the actual parts they use and that there are cheaper alternatives. For this comparison, they try to match the parts exactly. That of course is going to cost more because you are paying 3rd party markup prices while Apple is being direct from the manufacturer. The article even admits that you can buy things like a different video card that is equivalent for half the price. The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
They've speced a machine with half as much RAM, and the Mac has server grade ECC RAM. They've replaced PCIe storage with SATA. It's not a comparable machine. For a fair comparison, compare the Mac to a similarly speced HP server. Alternatively, at least spec the Mac lower to match, rather than maxing out everything.
Also, the Mac includes little niceties, some of which the HP will match better. I have the Macbook Pro, not the newer Pro, but by way of analogy compare Apple's reversible magnetic power cable vs. everyone else's barrel plugs. Apple does a lot of little things better on their computers. (Unlike their iOS iPhone and iPad, which I wouldn't buy.)
Your "apple tax" will come in the form of support costs. Help Desk jockeys and NT admins are a a call to TekSystems away. Admins with experience on a Mac enterprise are a touch more scarce.
"But on the list of cons is the fact that you pretty much have to purchase the system configured the way you plan to use it for its lifetime. This is because of the proprietary nature of the primary components which even include the GPUs and possibly the CPU (which looks like it is soldered in or “decapped” like the previous gen)"
Crapple.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
With a Windows (TIF: anything but Apple) machine YOU CAN BUILD WHATEVER YOU WANT not just what Apple try to sell you !! The question is
What machine do you wany for the money you want to spend ??
Whether you can build a Mac Pro equivalent and save even 50% is irrelevant. The costs of the folks that offer the talent necessary to "git 'er done" in a lot of the film and graphics industries (to use popular examples) times the efficacy of the software they harness for their best productivity is all that matters. The fact that the majority of pro-level (compositing/whatever) apps are Mac-aware and optimized - and now more so or soon to be for the new Mac Pro, pretty much close the book. Have built large Linux clusters to crush a number of large computational tasks, and have always argued the "yahbbut... I could build that cheaper" case, but I think this one hits the mark *for its target market*. Buy it and get the job done. ...but damn, those monitors... ;-)
Of course you pay for the brand, what do you think Apple is, a charity?
And these comparisons are always stupid. You can get incredibly cheap hardware for windows/linux, or you can get really expensive hardware.
A compatible windows machine can be the same price, or even a lot more, or you can always build one for 1/4 the price or less.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
E pluribus unum
The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and flexible computer Apple has ever created
Apparently the author hasn't had to service a Mac recently. It might be flexible in some directions, but maintenance friendliness is not one of them.
Now if it was saner like the older Powermacs, then things might be different.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Spec out a $5k mac. How much does the PC equivalent cost?
Also, I think "as small as we can" is bogus. If this is supposed to be a business product who gives a fig about smallness. Make it functional and normal looking.
why limit to Matx? it's a high end system not an mini system.
and there low end system has a better CPU.
It is stated that the $10,000 mac pro has Windows equivalent ATI cards (dual) costs over $7,000!
Also the Mac Pro has an SSD PCI Express card that is insanely big (1 TB) that can delivery gigs per second! That is pricy on the Windows equivalent cards too.
Bare in mind Windows 7 is showing its age. I know its cool here to be conservative and love XP/7 since Vista came out on slashdot, but TRIM is not supported for SSD PCI cards or in raid :-(
I do not think Linux is either. Of course those who are smart like to say it doesn't matter as they run Cron jobs and other hacks to get around this which is nice on a server but a little unpractical for 99% of users.
The real question at the end of the say is not that what it would cost a PC equivalent, but why would you need it?
Yes, some geek here will say (insert fringe case scenario for their mathmatica or engineering assigning or crappy SQL database) but that is becoming more and more fringe. 10 years ago when computers took 30 damn seconds to launch OpenOffice, 8 tabs in Firefox took all your damn ram, autocad would not run very well at all on your gaming card (which was just a 2d card with 3d features and not a real GPU) then workstations were more popular. 20 years ago pcs were expensive and just for light typing and simple spreadsheets where every accountant at wall street just had to have a damn $20,000 sun workstation at his desk, or photo artists needed $4,000 macs for photoshop effects etc.
If I was given a free $9,995 Mac Pro I would think it is cool for a little and maybe get a few more fps in SWTOR but nothing else. ... ok Vmware would be fucking sweet! but with a single ssd on my 3 1/2 your old PC with upgraded 16 gigs of ram they run just fine. Why bother to upgrade?
I do not think these are going to sell well at this price point just like PC workstations do not sell well. They sell in niche markets and that is it.
http://saveie6.com/
About 4 - 5 thousand, and if you use Linux you can squeeze even more performance out of the hardware. That really means that the Mac Pro at its fully loaded state is marked up about 100% from what is fair, which knowing Apple makes sense.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/24/apples-new-mac-pro-a-better-value-than-the-sum-of-its-parts
But this has happened before.
Initially Apple gear can boast this kind of disparity; then, in fairly short order, PC hardware which exceeds Apple specs arrives and sells at a cheaper price point due to economies of scale.
Apple then holds onto the original specs for years (the last Mac Pro being a perfect example), until they are forced to retool. I'll even go out on a limb and predict a five year interim before we see another significant revision.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The Mac tax has always been about the actual parts they use and that there are cheaper alternatives. For this comparison, they try to match the parts exactly. That of course is going to cost more because you are paying 3rd party markup prices while Apple is being direct from the manufacturer. The article even admits that you can buy things like a different video card that is equivalent for half the price. The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
So if you can build a cheaper equivalent... why aren't you in business, building cheaper equivalents and getting rich off the fact that it's costing you less to build equivalent hardware?
These are like portable SGI machines. What's the point? Nobody is going to walk around with a $10K machine. They'd be appealing if they had functional cases, though. This is the kind of machine that needs to be easily upgradeable and customizeable.
I don't respond to AC's.
Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).
See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).
We already know you can replace the three major components people generally replace in systems - so it's not like you have to max out any of those three initially. Except for the fact Apple is generally charging you less than you'd have to pay on your own for that part right now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does anyone else think it is strange that Broadwell is on the way, and they have an Ivy Bridge processor in this thing (Xeon E5-2697 V2)?
I know. This is what Intel sells, but still. It just feels "old".
AppleInsider had a similar article a few days ago.
Their conclusion was $14k, somewhat higher than the Slashdotted article... it would be interesting to see when it comes back up how the component choices differ from the real thing and AppleInsider's.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you were willing to budge on the form factor, shop for bargains, and substitute various components (such as a Quadro card instead of the FirePro, as suggested in the article), then you probably could build a comparable DIY system cheaper. But people who buy the Mac Pro really don't care about that. Businesses, in case you haven't noticed, tend not to go with DIY systems for the most part. They prefer having them purpose-built by OEMs. This system is aimed squarely at businesses in the creative sector: graphics design, modeling, rendering, and so forth. (Presumably a lot of them will be dual-booting with Windows 7.)
You'd be hard-pressed to build a system that has this much power at the same low noise levels (remember, you've got two graphics cards with about a 200W TDP each, plus a powerful Xeon CPU). You might be able to pull it off with the right case (most likely a Silverstone FT02 or FT04) and some careful use of fan controllers, but this would be a lot bigger than the Mac Pro, and you'd likely need to keep it under your desk instead of on top. No DIY system is going to match the Mac Pro's combination of high power, very low noise, tiny footprint, and excellent fit-and-finish. It just isn't possible within the limitations of the standard form factors of DIY parts.
Let's let grandpa tell you kids a story since the Apple bashing has reached a bit of a frenzy lately with the introduction of a professional-grade computer.
First things first. This is not a computer that little Billy is buying so he can run the latest warez torrent of today's game du jour. This is also not a computer that dad is buying for the family to sit in the living room and run quickbooks on. No, your average neck beard is probably not looking to max one of these out so he can whip up the the latest build of the development branch of his custom linux kernel.
This computer is a business computer. It is designed and offered at a price range that will appeal to a customer who uses the computer to make money. No, not some bit coin mining operation, but real tangible money. These are designed for professionals who bill out to real paying customers for between $200 and $800 per hour. Yes, you heard that right. In the grown up world, highly productive and effective professionals bill their clients real money. When people grow up and begin to afford products like this, they are not wearing skinny jeans and sitting in Starbucks trying to look cool on a financed Macbook.
So, this is a $10,000 computer. So what? For a business purchase, let's evaluate this whole thing.
This is a computer that based on its speed and performance may allow that professional mentioned above to be 1.5 - 3 times more productive. That means more money. At $200 per hour, that's only 50 hours to recoup the cost. That's one billable week. It's a drop in the bucket. One client engagement. But wait, there's more
You see, in the business world, there's also this neat thing called depreciation of assets. It's an accounting thing. I know, I know, they aren't elite computer dudes, but the accountants do stuff with numbers and things like that. Anyway, in a basic system, the business that buys the computer gets to take the money spent off their taxes based on certain formulas. One way they do this is taking the acquisition price minus the residual value at the end of the effective lifespan (5 years) and then take the total left and divide it across the total period. Say the company buys a $10,000 computer and estimates it will be worth $1000 in 5 years time, it then takes the remaining $9000 and divides it by 5 years, which gives $1800 per year. The company can then take $1800 each year as depreciation expense on the asset. (Disclaimer for those with some accounting background, this is straight-line depreciation and there are other allowable forms that handle things different)
This means that not only does the company get to reap the rewards of more productivity but they also get to reduce their tax liability on the money they earn from it. I know, evil capitalists are keeping the man down by denying tax money. However, this is how the world works.
That is why a company will happily spend $10,000 on a high end Apple computer that some of you can't wrap your head around.
But, can't it be done cheaper by building it themselves? Probably yes. Although TFA was a non starter in that regard. Here's a hint for you just beginning your career. Business does not care that you can twist a screwdriver and put something together off newegg. Apple, for the money, provides someone that will happily offer mature support and a one-stop shop to handle repairs and other needs. Yes, the genius bar is not perfect nor is it what is usually considered enterprise level support (believe me, I do know the difference). But, it's a good option.
Move past the point that things are upgradeable or hackable or DIY or whatever. These things are productivity appliances. They are like the big screen televisions in the conference rooms or the phone systems. If something breaks, it gets fixed or swapped out by the vendor. It's cost effective and gives management someone to yell at when things go south.
So, y'all can continue to bash the product. You can happily laugh with derision at Apple while
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
I recently specced a system quite similar to the Mac Pro. I used a SuperMicro motherboard, a similar Xeon 6-core CPU, 128 GB of ECC RAM, two Samsung 512 GB Pro SSDs (primary and a local backup), and an NVIDIA Quadro GPU. All the other components (case, power supply, CPU cooler, fans) are top quality. My supplier ordered the parts and charged $100 to assemble and test it. The user is running Linux and he's happy with the system - happy enough that he's demoed it around his department and says it has generated much interest. In any case, a new Mac Pro wasn't an option for him as he's using CUDA rather than OpenCL.
The total cost was $4,150. The system has twice as much RAM as the Mac Pro supports, an upgradeable GPU, space for many more drives in the box, and a savings of about $1,500 over an equivalent Mac Pro with 64GB RAM. OK, the box doesn't look as nice, but since it's under the user's desk that's not so terrible.
The cost saving is not the biggest improvement over the Mac Pro. The big items are having an upgradeable GPU and expandability inside the box - Thunderbolt just doesn't have the product base yet. I'm beginning to doubt it ever will with higher speed USB in the pipeline.
There might be incompatibilities with linux on Mac (I don't know firsthand, I'll take your word for it). On the other hand, they didn't design and test it for that purpose.
It's been my experience that Apple's notebooks work very well when used as intended.
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
This is exactly what people seem to not understand. Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ). When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
Granted, not all software will be fully tweaked off the bat with the new mac pro, but its a system that no doubt the big players (The Foundry, Autodesk, Maxon, Avid, Adobe, etc) will target for testing and make sure their software works and takes advantage of as much of the hardware as is possible. As opposed to testing on randomly built DIY solutions.
For the price, how can you really beat a high end system thats custom built (down to the pcb level), using mostly off the shelf stuff (just assembled in a way thats not convenient to the DIY/tinkerer), supported by a single company, and is / will be used in testing by the actual companies that write the software you want to run on it?
The Mac Pro was updated every year from 2006-2010; it was only the 2010 version that was stuck in place, probably in part due to the development of this new machine.
There is no way that system is the same, or even close to the same as a Mac Pro. Either the storage is slower (very likely), the GPU is slower (very likely), or some other aspects are also not really the same (you say "similar" Xeon CPU).
The Mac Pro *does* have an upgradable GPU. It's proprietary but that doesn't mean Apple will not be offering an upgrade later, or that third parties may do so (they have with Apple's custom storage chip interface in the past).
It's great you can build a powerful and flexible system, but it does no-one any good to claim it is really comparable. And would it really be nearly as good as even the cheapest Mac Pro configuration?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple spent much effort in making the Mac Pro power efficient, drawing at most 450W. And, I would guess far less on average. If you're paying about 11 cents, per kWh and using it 8 hours a day, at most it's going to cost you about $144. With all the fans and other things in a typical PC, I have to imagine that it would be possible to double or triple the annual power consumption costs of the Mac Pro.
Betteridge's law says the answer to this question is, 'no'.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
"How much would it cost to build a comparable Windows 8 machine?"
Your soul.
I thought that too (specced one out), but recently I found out they are in fact shipping to people already. The two months is just for new orders as they are in heavy demand...
It still may be possible to pick one up at an Apple store though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes but high society won't be impressed by your machine you built and will think you are a mongrel.
They will point at you in horror like a Roman pointing to a barbarian and say things amongst themselves and think you hideous and definitely not one of their kind.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
Oh really? I didn't realise it ships with 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini, Nuke, and Adobe CS.
Here is a breakdown of diy.
:Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 12 core - $2,524.00 :480 GB - $1007
Cpu
Motherboard: ASUS Z9PA-U8 - $277.99
64GB 16x4 (4 slots still free) - $720
PCIe ssd
Power supply 1500 Watt - $374
Case: $274
Video cards: ??? not currently available
Total: $5,176
Apple with similar specs: $7,899
So that leaves $2,723 for video cards, I can't find any suggested prices on the D500 or D700, except that Apple charges $300 per card to upgrade from D500 to D700.
Of course if you wanted 12 cores you could save a bundle and just get a dual socket board and 2 6 core cpus. Also the MB supports a lot more ram etc, but is a lot bigger.
Sources:
CPU: http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=BX80635E52697V2&vid=211&src=14
MB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131915
RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147307
HDD: http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-Drive-Series-Express/dp/B0058RECOU/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1388118274&sr=8-9
PSU: http://www.amazon.com/SILVERSTONE-ST1500-CrossFire-Certified-Modular/dp/B002BH3Z84/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1388118413&sr=8-2&keywords=1500watt+power+supply
Case: http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Obsidian-Series-Performance-CC-9011035-WW/dp/B00EB6O4N8/ref=sr_1_1?srs=2529199011&ie=UTF8&qid=1388118511&sr=8-1
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
[...] (Unlike their iOS iPhone and iPad, which I wouldn't buy.)
Why not? The sandbox works decently and privacy is not broken by design... unlike... let's not name names :-)). They work perfectly well for their purpose and target audience. Unless you're not the target audience... but even then, what are the alternatives? I keep dropping apps on my Android phone because of the access requirements. I don't have to do that on my iOS device and still have a fully functional app which works well in every aspect except for the shitty stuff than I don't want it to do to begin with.
I've seen JavaScript heavy sites that make my i7 laptop's extra fans kick on...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Recently, we built a Supermicro Workstation 7047GR-TRF configuration. I am revising the system configuration to update the parts to get a comparable overview:
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2643 v2 (fastest available) - $1552
Memory (4GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $240
Firepro W8000 (x2) - $2560
Intel SSD 910 400GB - $2000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $7,172
The base system will be pretty much high vs the $3,999 cost
In another comparison
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Firepro W9000 (x2) - $6800
Intel SSD 910 800GB - $4000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $15210
The configured system is still pretty high compared to $9599 from Apple pricing
Although specifications cannot be matched one is to one, I believe that the Windows workstation can be reduced in pricing by changing the Intel PCIe SSD and GPU to avoid using the top of the line products.
For example, using the following
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Quadro K5000 (x2) - $3200
Intel SSD DC S3700 200GB - $500
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $8110
The configured Mac Pro is $8119 for the 256GB Storage and Dual D500.
So I guess the configuration will depend on the system.
For us though, we have found a more cost efficient alternative by buying a Supermicro 7047GR-TRF dual Intel Xeon socket and not using the top of the line for everything. But we are able to achieve 12 cores 2GHz, 64GB RAM, Nvidia K4000 for Display, Dual GTX680 GPU for compute, 8Gb FC Celerity HBA for around $5,000.00.
It will really depend on the applications to be used at the end. For us though, most of the applications are available in Windows and Linux configurations will limited Mac exclusivity so the PC solution is economical for us.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Am I really the only one who finds it embarrassing to use an Apple product? They're just so garish and flashy.
There was a time when Apple was cool, but that was several years ago. /IMO
Max.
Apple gets creamed by Wintel in that market space, so it's not really much surprise that there's no Apple tax. otoh, I'm looking at a Mac mini for some entry level Mac development I want to do porting my Firefox Plugin to IOS and almost cry. The Mac Mini all blinged out with an i7 and 16 gigs of ram will set me back almost a grand and doesn't compare that well with my 6 year old Athlon XP 3000+ and GT 240 (albeit with the DDR 5 on the 240). Comm'on Apple, at least run Street Fighter 4 at 60 fps and 1600x1050...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When is the last time anyone paid full retail for any PC part? Using a meaningless measure like that to run up the price on the hypothetical PC is is total Mac fanboy-ism. Let me know when someone does the comparison using the best price for a comparable product across amazon, newegg, tigerdirect, and frys.
You can replace the first two things via a PCIe card attached through Thunderbolt.
Why would you WANT to replace the fan which is perfectly tailored to the system and for noise levels?
But why would you replace the first two? It already has two GigE ports. You can get Thunderbolt to FiberChannel adaptors if that's what you were after. And it already supports a pretty modern WiFi stack, 802.11ac.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
when buying equivalent hardware
Even in the example that is "only" 11k instead of 10k from Apple, there were significant shortcomings in the hardware used compared to what Apple ships. It's not going to be equivalent - probably not even to the cheaper Mac Pro configurations that are just $3k-$5k.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your infographic is outdated by nine months. Windows 8 has probably stolen quite a chunk of Windows XP usage share since then. But then I'm typing this into a PC that's part of the 2% "Other", so what do I know?
It was however a generation+ behind state of the art despite charging state of the art prices for most years 2007 onwards.
The title of this story is "How much would it cost to build a Windows version of the Mac Pro", so I described a system I specced that is very similar.
The user wanted a system, I specced it for him. It was built and he's happy. Your comment notwithstanding. And I am hideous :)
NT admins? What is this, 1999?
No, but Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 still run on an NT 6.3 kernel.
I have the Macbook Pro, not the newer Pro, but by way of analogy compare Apple's reversible magnetic power cable vs. everyone else's barrel plugs. Apple does a lot of little things better on their computers.
Meh, I have a macbook pro too, but I'm more than a little non-plussed by the newest one... no ethernet without dongle is a joke in a pro level product. But on the upside its the first time they've finally had the sense to put a video port on it that anyone actually will be able to use without an adapter. (Mine has mini-displayport... I have encountered the ability to use it with someone elses equipment without an adapter that I brought myself exactly 0 times.)
So yeah, I like the magsafe adapter a lot, but I wouldn't say Apple does a lot of little things better. They seem to have their head up their ass just as much as the others.
As for the comparison, its meaningless. The number of people who would need or could need those mac specs is vanishingly small.
Lets look at a mac that compares to my current workstation. Oh. No. Can't do that Apple doesn't make one at all.
The mac mini is woefully under powered compared to my desktop. The imac gets closer, but still falls well short in key areas that can't be upgraded. The Mac Pro... ok that hits it out of the park... but its overkill and has a price to match.
THAT is the problem. Lots of perfectly normal people need and want to exceed the limitations of a mac mini or imac but jumping into a mac pro is absurd.
To use a car analogy Apple makes a VW Golf Hatchback (mac mini), a VW Jetta Sedan (imac), and an 18 wheel semi tractor trailer (mac pro).
Lots of people out there need or want something with more power and capacity than a Jetta or Golf but they need a semi tractor like they need another hole in their head. Does apple make a pickup truck? an SUV? Nope. Yet lots of people want those sorts of vehicle.
I specked an "equivalent" at newegg and crucial (newegg didn't have the 16GB RAM DDR3 1866 ECC chips that apple uses). It comes between $9800 and $12000 depending on what SSD you are going to stick in. $14K is a bit excessive. Apple's price is in the ballpark, considering that they save quite a bit on whole sale prices and large scale manufacturing, but have invested considerable amount of money in a design for a niche market. What is more interesting is their effort to "encapsulate" the workstation the same way they did with the laptop and the desktop. I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals. Making upgrades possible only using external attachments is pretty transparent effort to create a market for expensive accessories. I am curios how this will turn out.
Actually, Thunderbolt on Macs deviate from the specification a fair bit. The Thunderbolt spec is simple: Expose devices as hotplug PCI-E, let the BIOS do everything.
Thunderbolt Macs go out of their way to... not that. Read more at http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html.
For most users, the biggest expense on high end workstations like this are the video cards. If you work at a smaller firm and want to save a few thousand dollars on your new workstation, my advice is to read the online forums for others users of whatever key software you need to run and find reports of what consumer level video cards work. For example, we run Revit at my office. Autodesk only certifies Revit to run on a select number of high end Nvidia and AMD cards. The reason for this is because Autodesk doesn't do the certifying themself. They give Nvidia and AMD a copy of Revit and tell them to send back a list of cards that will support Revit, and surprise, surprise, Nvidia and AMD only send back a list of their most expensive professional level cards. They do this because they know that a user who is dropping $5000 for a seat license for Revit is going to bend over and take it when they're told they need to buy a $1500 video card as well. The thing is, though, plenty of Nvidia's and AMD's consumer level gaming cards will run Revit just fine, and some of them will actually run it FASTER than their pro level cards. You can usually pick up a consumer level card for around a quarter of what you would have payed for the comparably specced "professional" level card. Autodesk isn't the only computer that does this, too. If you're at a big firm, it's probably a better use of time to just buy a standard, pre-built workstation, but if you're at a smaller firm, telling your boss you can put together four new Revit workstations for $10000 less than you'd pay if you ordered them from Dell will definitely score you some points.
They don't even make Creative Suite anymore, wisecrack.
Typing on a Macbook Air that has the imprint of the keyboard on its screen because of the way the screen closes. It drops out wifi periodically. I had a Macbook before where the plastic started cracking after 6 months and Apple refused to replace it, saying it's normal wear. So no, I don't buy that a newegg component will be less well designed.
Why would Apple create a super overpowered desktop machine when all services are being moved to "Cloud-based"? Certainly you don't need that much power to run a web browser. All you need is a Pentium 4 and a super fast internet connection.
Yet the Mac Pro is ...
a) Round
A shape chosen for better cooling characteristics - they can get away with a smaller case, and a smaller fan to cool the same components that a square case would use.
b) Shiny
This is the only one of the items that really has little practical use. Yet what case maker WANTS a butt-ugly case? And in a design shop it looks better to have better looking gear.
c) Cool looking
This is only because it's small, but small has utility too. It means it's much easier to move around, and modern workers change workspaces more frequently than they used to. Have you tried moving one of the older Mac Pros? They looked great too but you sure wanted to leave them where they were.
d) expensive
That's not even right. For what you get it's NOT expensive, which is the whole point of the Slashdot story to begin with. It gives you a lot of power at a fair price, and some people do in fact need that much power. Anyone who does not can just buy an iMac.
There are a few rich people that will buy one just for fun, sure. But most of the people buying this system will do so because they have a PRACTICAL need for the power the system offers in a smallish form factor.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
An AMD server at that price is 64 cores, 512GB memory.
I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals.
Well, they probably will find out they can, then they won't care.
You can upgrade the RAM, storage, and video cards. Yes they use proprietary connectors for the last two but third parties have offered upgrades for apple proprietary connectors before. It also means Apple could well offer GPU upgrades in the future.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Thunderbolt has only a passing acquaintance with pcie. It most certainly is not just a pcie bridge over wires rather than on board connectors. Thunderbolt is a switched packet network transport, and can route data packets of many types (including video, pcie, raw thunderbolt dma, etc.)
In addition, every thunderbolt port is a switch, using source-embedded routing to decide whether the packet ought to be forwarded n hops or whether it's destination is local - so the local CPU only gets involved if you're traversing thunderbolt controller chips, or if the packet is for the local machine.
There's a lot more to thunderbolt than just pcie, so if linux just treats it as pcie then linux is getting it wrong.
Physicists get Hadrons!
With a vendor built, a component failure means a 2 week minimum turnaround where you're out of a machine
Not with Apple, and AppleCare. If they have the same system in an Apple store often they'll just swap it out if something is really wrong...
But the way the Mac Pro is built, it would be pretty easy to swap in replacement storage or GPU or memory to fix one of those items going bad. Or two switch all your custom cards into a set of cores they had stored in the back for replacements.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).
Are you saying that Apple has to use cards that work with various other OSes? very wishful thinking of you.
I'm not sure how you got "a pcie bridge over wires rather than on board connectors" from "Expose devices as hotplug PCI-E". Presenting devices to the operating system as PCI-E hotplug in no way implies they actually are PCI-E devices or are in any way electrically similar (much like how "file descriptor" hardly means "file").
In short, I agree with everything you said in the second paragraph, and I think it supports my point. The OS (local CPU) only gets involved with the Thunderbolt controller for communication relevant to it. The controller chip hides all the complexity of packet switching and routing etc. Unless you're on a Mac, which takes all that brilliant design and says "We're going to require the kernel to manage everything the controller chip should be doing for us".
Source: same as before, from someone who has read the relevant spec and implemented a driver - http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html
That's a whole lot of sanctimonious bullshit just to be wrong there, pal.
NOBODY in a real, "serious" big company which truly *requires* that much power would use Apple hardware. They'd use something which is adaptable to customized environments, can run the last 25 years of their code base, can actually communicate with vast majority of those $200/hour clients, and be serviceable/upgradeable by the average IT department using non-proprietary parts and no need to drag gear down to see a "genius". -And which will still be a good deal for the power offered this time six months from now.
Any big company which needs high level hardware of this sort and invests heavily in Mac computers is being incredibly irresponsible and needs their Mac-drone buying officer replaced, pronto, for being an idiot.
This computer, as all others, was created to cater to the Apple customer; the iPerson with self-identity challenges and a successful enough business to be able to afford expensive toys. It was designed from the get-go to serve as a status symbol for professionals wrapped up with the *idea* of being the kinds of grown-ups you describe.
Real adults put getting the job done ahead of fancy desktop aesthetics, which I think was your point.
TL;DR: $11,530.54
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).
See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).
And of course that could only ever be Apple's fault, it's not as if Linux ever had crappy drivers.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Having had to replace my MacBook Pro's power adapter each of the last three years (never once having to replace one before this model), and it being very low-rated both on Amazon and Apple's own site, I don't think that's a particularly good example of a nicety. Among other things, it doesn't rotate so instead the wire itself receives torque; and despite the connector being such that the cable ends up parallel and in very close proximity to the port, the covering on the wire quickly degrades from even mild warmth such as that from of sitting beside a laptop that has a power port on it.
This sounds like an advert for Apple, simply. Already for that reason alone, I am not going to read the articles.
Calling what I suspect is just a souped up fashion statement a "work horse", is probably just a symptom of cluelessness. And wanting to do the same with Windows supports that diagnosis. A "work horse" is a big, sweaty and dirty animal, not a dainty thing to take on a fashionable stroll along the promenade; and a souped up Macintosh or PC is more like a rich kid's toy car than a tractor. I don't know if you have noticed, but you don't often see a Ferrari pulling a plough - there's a reason for that.
As for the price - for $10000 you could get a decent sized Dell PowerEdge server; or even a Sun SPARC, IBM pSeries or HP if that takes your fancy. All of them are real work horses and all run operating systems that are meant for real work. True, you can't play games on them, and they don't pull chicks, but it is amazing how often that is not a major concern when you need to hold down a job.
The Mac was cheaper.
I don't see how you can implement a lower-level protocol (eg: raw thunderbolt DMA) using a higher-level abstraction of that protocol (eg: pci-e traffic). That's like saying you'll implement Internet-layer frames only using TCP. Similarly, I don't see how you can expose something that doesn't conform to anything remotely like pci-e as a hot plug pci-e device - the latency tolerances to remain in spec are way different for a start.
I too have implemented a driver, from a high-end FPGA to the Mac, and the OSX kernel does not get involved unless you're traversing controllers within that Mac, or the route cannot be expressed within a single transaction, or if the destination is local. It just doesn't. These are to my knowledge the only 3 reasons for the local CPU to get involved:
[1] If you have a machine with devices (1,2,..) on multiple thunderbolt controllers (say A and B), it's possible to have a route like A2 -> A1-> A0 -/-> B0 -> B1, and of course the kernel is involved then because the individual controller chips A and B are not bridged together in any other way. The kernel has to route between A0 (local) and B0 (also local).
[2] The initial spec for thunderbolt allowed a lot of flexibility with source-defined routing tables, but it wasn't taken advantage of, and the later chips from Intel removed some of that functionality (or, more likely, just reassigned the chip real-estate to something more useful). There are now potentially valid routes that can't be expressed within a single frame, and the kernel has to be involved at that point as well, to make sure packets get to their correct destination. It is, however, unlikely that users will see these routing issues in real-world scenarios, you have to have a lot of devices on multiple busses before it's an issue.
[3] The destination is the local machine. Of course, the kernel has to get involved then.
I have a lot of diagnostic code that monitors bandwidth, packet lifetime and routing, and latencies. I've run massive stress tests on multiple machines and devices connected via thunderbolt, and so far, the above 3 reasons are the only ones that an OSX machine enters the kernel for any thunderbolt-related cause. It is quite clear when the kernel does get involved compared to when it doesn't, so I'm confident that if it doesn't have to get involved, there is no interaction.
Physicists get Hadrons!
In a similar vein, there is a Gamespot.com comparison of the Steam Box price versus the retail prices of the parts:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-machine-teardown-reveals-1300-price-for-components/1100-6416814/
"The sum of the system's various components--including its processor, motherboard, and hard drive--came out to around $1300. The most expensive component was its Zotac GeForce GTX 780 3GB video card--estimated at more than $500. It's important to note that the 300 Steam Machine units available today for beta testers are prototype systems. Specifications, and thus price, could change before the system launches publicly in 2014. It's also important to remember that several boxes will be available, featuring an array of specifications and price points. We've asked Valve to comment on the $1300 price point, but haven't heard back."
The Steam Box, a Gabe Newell subsidized bargain or will they just minimize profit as can be done to gain traction? Newell vs Jobs, I sense a difference.
(BTW, I still think Apple sucks, even if I have to admit the new Mac Pro design is nice.)
Sure they do, they just don't sell it. They rent it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You, sir, are daring to bring facts to a gunfight.
The audacity!
Only a moron who has no clue about the real world would claim that nobody would buy Apple hardware to do real work.
You are so stupid of a Windows fanboy that you can't think of a single company that uses Apple products to do real work ... like:
- Publishing companies.
- Disney/Pixar, Dream Works and Sony Animation
- Music / Entretaiment companies
- PROFESSIONAL Video editors
So please, spare us the BS because you are a complete idiot.
All this means that Apple has committed a pricing blunder by under estimating competitor's pricing. They are unlikely to repeat this next time. Don't expect any pricing reductions any time soon.
Just because you claim it doesn't make it true.
If the components are not as close as possible then they are not similar.
DarkTable isn't a clone of LightRoom. It is a program that is used for the same sort of work and the UI has a lot of resemblance with LightRoo, but that's about it. While LightRoom has some features that aren't (yet) implemented in DarkTable, DarkTable has many features that don't have anything equivalent in LightRoom. For instance the equalizer and the profiled denoise are absolute killer features that make working with DarkTable give you results that would require much more work in the Adobe creative suite. Also, DarkTable has openCL support, making it one of the fastest tools ever to do complex manipulations on large images in (near) realtime.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Why do AMERICANS keep writing 'and' instead of 'an', and 'an' instead of 'and'?
Why do AMERICANS keep writing 'then' instead of 'than', and 'that' instead of 'than'?
How did you get to be so incredibly stupid?
This Mac is not the most expensive Apple Computer. To tell you true true, is in the historical average for its class: in the nineties, the Quadra 950 was sold for 7200USD - something as 11200USD nowadays, as calculated by http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ .
Apple Computer was never a cheap computer shop. Since the Apple II era, their computers was far more expensive than the competition. It's a computing niche, where quality and user satisfaction worths more than money.
The cost/benefit ratio is far from reasonable, if you ask my opinion. But the same can be said about Ferrari cars, and you can bet your damn mouse I would drive a Ferrari if I could.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
"If you cannot INSTALLATIE a modern version of Windows in ONDER 30 MINUTEN these days I would consider you TOP dumb to be even let NAAR a computer."
So many LOLs. You idiot. Don't you ever look at what you've actually typed?
It would be about $100 more than a Linux version.
"Or TWO switch all your"
Americans...
Sure, if you try to match size for size, spec for spec as closely as possible, you have a problem.
However, the article notes that if you went with nVidia chips rather than AMD - which may be preferable for some workloads - then you have the GPU bill, and immediately bring it below the cost of the Mac Pro.
And if you don't care to much about the size, changing the case and motherboard will likely bring your costs down further.
That's without taking advantage of what is good about DIY- the ability to make your own trade-offs as to where it is important to spend your money. Which is my biggest gripe about Apple hardware - to get the one or two things you really *must* have, you end up spending an awful lot more than you would for a PC, because you have to take a load of other things you simply don't care about.
You can really really use all the RAM you can get with video editing. The same applies to the 1TB SSD. If you're a pro photo or video editor, you're wasting time waiting on your computer processing and time is money. In a 3 year write off period, you can make a business case for spending $5K more on a computer that will easily save you over $100 a week in hours you can bill a customer. I bet that if these were supported hardware for Linux, AutoDesk would waste no time whatsoever getting these tested and certified as hardware for their Discreet Logic video editing product line. They use HP stuff now and those are more expensive than this apple with less video editing power in them.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The “chushkopek” (pepper roaster) is a *patented* Bulgarian household appliance with a cylindrical shape; its wall is lined with a heater, and in the middle it can fit 1, 3, 5 or 7 peppers depending on the size and type of the appliance.
http://tinyurl.com/ocmq4sx
Two new Russians get together for a business lunch.
- bro, I got this new PC, is costs $5000
- idiot, Apple makes exactly the same one for $10,000
And I had a plastic Intel Macbook years ago, that was discoloring, cracking and out of warranty, and when I took it into the store, the Genius just took it into the back room and came back out 10 minutes later and it had a new palm rest. Free of charge.
> On the other hand, they didn't design and test it for that purpose
Bro, when they didn't design and test hardware for running linux, linux ran better.
Powerbook Titanium II, converted to linux in 2003. 3d and wireless and gigabit ethernet and firewire working out of the box with free drivers. Only thing that did not work was the wintel modem and I did not try very hard. Tell me which current laptop in either apple or MS land does that.
Hardware producers do not like linux just like apple and ms, because it makes planned obsolescence impossible.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Testing/stability, I'll give you, though the type of problems you describe are rare in the real world. It would be the reduction of 5-10% odds of ever being affected to 2% (all numbers made up and only representative).
Tweaking? It's still a PC with PC hardware. ECC and PCIe are as fast as they are on every machine. Odds are you can buy even faster hardware than the Mac Pro has.
Support and maintenance are never worth a damn.
Our company has been purchasing hardwares for government more than 10 years, we have yet encountered any problem that would require hardware manufacturers to fix (NOT replacement - that we could do by ourselves), and most of customer services in hardware departments are pure garbage - I mean, look at the people who try to support you - what can they do? Can they debug windows kernel or analyze memory dump when you have a BSOD due to their hardwares? Of course not, they don't even know how to edit registry and all they can is to follow some idiotic manuals written by 3 years-old and tell you to reformat and reinstall.
It's the same for Dell, ASUS and basically all server vendors, and I assume it's also same for Apple although I never bothered to call them.
That kind of cost make absolutely no sense. All it gives is a phone number which would answer NO to all your problems.
I bet you know better than Greg does. I mean, he's only a kernel engineer with access to the docs.
-- Linux user #369862
web apps are a bad idea.
There are similar problems with booting linux on (non-trashcan) mac pros due to a not-quite-normal EFI boot process, and running linux at all on the retina macbook proes due to a not-quite-normal ACPI implimentation that crashes the kernal during hardware detection. Both can be worked around, it's just awkward having to resort to complex hackery for something that should be so simple as booting an OS.
When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
Because what you really want to do when you have a project due is to send off your entire machine for repairs and not have it back for roughly two weeks.
The thing is, the kind of people who do sound editing, video editing and so on, usually aren't very techy and wouldn't be able to troubleshoot a custom build PC in a meaningful way. But if you are techy, you can quickly find the faulty part, send it off for repairs, replace it with a spare and continue working on the project.
But I can understand people who prefer Macs for their support - I wouldn't be able to fix my car so I'm paying extra to have it serviced by professionals. But that doesn't mean my Honda is in any way better than my neighbour's custom build muscle car.
And this whole price comparison thing is just silly. People who build custom PCs aren't doing it to match the Mac Pro specs. They are doing it because they know what works for them personally, and with that in mind: Yes, you can build a cheaper PC that will allow you to do the same tasks you are usually doing at the same level or better than on Mac Pro. You just need to know what those tasks are and what their relationship with PC hardware is. And be a bit techy.
PS. I've never had any significant problems with Adobe suit, or any other piece of software (ok, 3ds Max is a different story) on a PC that's well put together. But again - you have to be a techy to know what you're doing.
It's Apple's fault.
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html
The person doing the comparison failed in his logic.
he didn't contact each manufacturer of each part and asked for massive quantity pricing (as Apple does when it makes/purchases stuff). Had he done that, the PC equivalent system would be cheaper than the Mac Pro.
So in summary you are saying; Extending the PCI-E bus to peripherals is a better option for data than SATA because there is less CPU overhead? Or are you saying that Thunderbolt is like a "networked" version of PCI-E?
And what is everyone arguing about beyond which end of an egg to open first?
Then I read "ustolemyname" say; "Actually, Thunderbolt on Macs deviate from the specification a fair bit." I was under the impression that it was Apple and INTEL that worked on Thunderbolt to CREATE THE SPEC in the first place -- so does that comment have any validity?
I'm just curious -- this is a low level discussion but I can't really tell so far what it means other than that Thunderbolt and PCI-E extensions are implemented fairly well in the real world.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ).
This myth has to fucking stop. This notion that anything built with DIY components is going to run through 20 iterations before you find compatible components is IDIOTIC and IGNORANT. This may have been the case 25 years ago; it is has not been true in any real sense in the last dozen years, and certainly not now. Speeds, timings, socket layouts, RAM configs, whatever, everything is documented and easily determined - right at the point of sale, if you're on a decent site like newegg.
Yes, you can get a bad DIMM - no different than getting a flaky Dell - it happens. If you are constantly burning through HW either you are picking bottom of the barrel suppliers (and are making DYI eMachines, congrats) or you are frying your hardware with dodgy power and a cheap power strip instead of a proper conditioned power system.
I knew someone who worked at an Apple store for a while, as a 'genius'. He said that when there were software/driver bugs there was basically nothing they could do (obviously) so they were told to just say that Apple were going to fix it in the next software update. Pretend like they know about it and Apple is on the case.
I really don't think Apple tech support is going to be much help in the scenarios you describe. Worse still if your business is a monoculture based on Macs they may all have the same problem, where as at least with a variety of PCs the chances are greatly diminished.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
tbh most flaky ubuilds are because of bad static electricity mitigation, bad CPU mounts or bad grounding.
its more complicated than you think.
Windows pro @ 99 yeah right. They need to add 30.00 for the actual cost of an oem license plus shipping for all of the components.
You state pretty much why you gave ME crap here then:
"Yeah, your posting style and that website scream "INSTALL MY TROJAN HORSE" I'll simply copy a hosts file manually and avoid your file." - by Lumpy (12016) on Wednesday December 11, 2013 @03:25PM (#45663431) Homepage FROM -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4539709&cid=45663431
Too bad the verifiable PROOF I supplied shut you up there VERY FAST, eh? Not -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4539709&cid=45664491
* Man... you are SO easy to see thru, it's not funny!
(Is your favorite color "transparent", or what?)
You're a moron that couldn't do the same, giving me crap the same way you speak of those doing so regarding personal computer choices!
APK
P.S.=> You also avoid the question I kept asking you that yes, you had coming, & here it is again... answer it:
QUESTION: How does "eating your words" taste, especially when flavored with your FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH & "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat"?b>
... apk
The Mac Pro line is assembled in the USA. The argument is moot, I'm more then happy to pay the premium for premium quality; if I were a mechanic I wouldn't hesitate to buy professional tools, and the same is true for the mac. The mere suggestion of building your own system is insane, professionals don't have time to tinker around with a piece of shit personal computer. It's not easy to assemble a production system from off the shelf commodity parts, and anyone suggesting as much has never done professional systems engineering and integration; assuming you have the knowledge, I'd think there would be revenue generating projects you could be working on instead.
This is stupid and pointless. Frankly you can keep your commie windows system, it's the mac operating system that I want anyways.
It was obvious from the day the Mac Pro was announced that a system containing Xeon, ECC RAM and dual FirePros would cost $6 - $10k if you priced up the components, and that if Apple brought it in at a comparable price to the old Pro it could be made to sound like a bargain, and putting it all into a tiny tube was the icing on the cake.
The real issue is whether those features bring any real advantages to you - particularly those two GPUs. What seems pretty well established is that 'workstation class GPUs' like FirePro and Quadro are nothing special unless they're paired with pro applications that have been optimised for them, and that part of the 'premium' is for the pro (windows) drivers, and stability features like ECC RAM. We're really still waiting for the in-depth teardown to determine what those Mac Pro GPU cards really are, how they compare to PC FirePro cards in terms of clock speed, ECC RAM etc., whether the OS X drivers are any good and whether they can do Crossfire (which might make them more impressive for games). Otherwise, 'FirePro' is just a sticker (which Apple will leave off rather than sully the shiny case).
I suspect the vast majority of Slashdot readers, if they built a PC, would just go for an i7, a couple of 'consumer' GPUs and non-ECC RAM unless they really, really needed that secret 'workstation-class' sauce - which would be a fraction of the cost, and isn't something Apple really has an offering for (unless you want an iMac with built in display, or a Mac Mini reliant on the integrated GPU). The reason that Apple don't offer such a thing is that there's no bloody money in competing directly with such generic commodity low-margin hardware - it would look expensive c.f. Dell et, al. and/or cannibalise sales of higher-margin laptops, SFF and workstation systems. It will be interesting to see what happens with the next iteration of the Mac Mini, though.
The interesting thing about the new Mac Pro is whether it will encourage more general support for OpenCL in Mac software - one thing the reviews so far seem to agree on is that OpenCL optimised software such as Apple's Final Cut goes like shit off a shovel.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"(blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. )" To be fair... even Apple has BSODs these days...
And why bang your head against the wall trying to run Linux on it? A primary advantage of having a real Apple is being able to run real OS X on it.
Great, if you really NEED Xeon processors, Firepro cards, and in a NON-expandable box. It's laughable... but seriously, who make theese kind of assinine comparisons trying to match or exceed the specs on the Mac "pro".
Task; Buy a Mac that beats this in;
- Gaming
- Surfing the web
- Compressing video
- Expandability within the case
- Quietness
- etc etc
Case: Fractal Design Define R4
Power Supply: Corsair AX760i
MB: Asus deluxe z87
Processor: Intel i7-4770k
Graphics: Nvidia 780ti
Samsung 840 Evo
memory: Cosiair vengance (4x8 GB)
Screen: 2x2560x1440
Let's say you get $2000. Good Luck
I just find it hard to trust a comparison of most likely consumer prices vs bulk order prices.
I've had my for over a year. You rarely use it and in places you need to plug in you just attach the dongle and leave it for weeks.
Finally not that many people need more power than the iMac either. More over it isn't a joke to jump up to the Pro because the price spread isn't that large.
I would be willing to bet the other site used a SSD with a PCI interconnect. These fools used a SATA raid setup.
This is exactly what people seem to not understand. Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ). When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
Yep. Do you know how that works in the Apple case? You leave your laptop to support and get a new one so you can start working immediately. Forget about that project you were working on, you are not going to get to keep your data.
This is true if you go to an apple store, and perhaps if you call the regular support lines. Companies generally get their own sales reps who can put them in touch with higher level support people, sometimes even the developers.
A local school had some issues with afp (who doesn't? ;-) and it got to the point where the local rep, regional rep, a few developers and the head of the group that deals with afp actually showed up to trouble shoot and fix it.
Old Graphics Designer leaves and new person is hired. New person walks in and looks at 7 -10 year old Mac Pro and says I have never worked on that old of a version of Adobe CS but I can probably figure it out. Marketing Director inquires to IT on cost to upgrade to new software. A shiny new Mac Pro with an updated version of Adobe CS is installed the following week in a rush job by the IT staff.
That is the real world scenario as it happens. Why does it happen? Billboards get created and put up on time, newspaper ads have that zing they need, in-house signage looks nice, those brochures look really good and those thousand other things you didn't know that person worked on get created. The extra cost for the Mac Pro is a tiny fraction of the lost revenues from not having the products the User delivers on the machine.
Could I, Would I enters your mind for about 2 seconds in the real world. Then reality sets in and a new Mac Pro and Adobe CS land on the desk for the end user to do their job.
goddamn i love that little magnetic power thingy. it's like the difference between wine made in a prison toilet, and champagne
Tweaked off the bat? How about no weaking whatsoever has been performed.
Right now Adobe Premiere uses the CPU on the Mac Pro. Apple has been working on this hardware for a long time. You would think the companies you mentioned would have optimized already for the set up. So unless you are using Final Cut Pro X (many professionals jumped ship after 7) this machine is slower than the previous generations Mac Pro. Adobe is not on great terms with Apple, and may be inclined to drag their feet on this one.
I actually performed a similar study for cars. A new Porsche cost about $60k. I was trying to see if this was a good value, so I spec'd out how much it would cost me to build a brand new Honda Civic from scratch by buying all the parts individually from different places around the internet and putting it together myself. The answer - it cost me way more than $60k - not to mention to time it would take me to build it, plus having to flatten all those darn cardboard boxes before I put them in the trash! Conclusion - buying a Porsche is way cheaper than a Honda Civic, so whoever buys a Honda Civic is a moron!
What the article says is that no, you can't create the exact device for less money.
What the article implies is that this is the machine that real systems people buy and everyone else is just buying bargain basement crap and pretending to be real admins.
What the article leaves out is that 99.99999% of all applications don't need anything near this level of power. This is a great machine, but unless you have a specific application that requires all of this speed, space and through-put, save your money, or buy two high powered PCs.
This guy chose crappy shit. "Can't find a 1TB PCIe SSD, so, raid-0 two SATA SSD" and other cheap tricks.
Is this how we're doing news stories now? Just sit around and think of "what ifs"? Tomorrows breaking story, "What if Bill Gates still worked at Microsoft?"
Also do not need a $400 pair of jeans to cover them. Sorry, Apple - you're hip and trendy and build a very capable device, but I don't NEED one...
Page 1: http://www.futurelooks.com.nyud.net/new-apple-mac-pro-can-build-better-cheaper-pc-diy-style/
Page 2: http://www.futurelooks.com.nyud.net/new-apple-mac-pro-can-build-better-cheaper-pc-diy-style/2/
Page 3: http://www.futurelooks.com.nyud.net/new-apple-mac-pro-can-build-better-cheaper-pc-diy-style/3/
Well you could get it from the cheapest sources possible... However that may mean you got parts the fell off the truck.
The idea of the Apple Tax is a myth.
The reason for Apples higher cost per class, is the fact that they don't have as many options as their competitors have.
For Dell, HP there are dozens of models that allow you to pick and choose what you want and don't want. Apple has less models and the features are grouped together. Don't need a back lit keyboard on your laptop, if you getting an apple you may have to pay for it anyways.
So if you build a System that matches the specs as closely as possible to an Apple system you more or less pay the same price.
However if you try to match an Apple system with one of the many PC specs chances are you will find the PC cheaper, because Apple with have features that you are not caring to match up.
It isn't the Apple Premium tax, but the fact there are less options to choose from.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Dude, I'm just describing what I see. I have the docs too, for both protocol and controller chips, and I have the code and measurements to prove it.
There's a clear difference in the time taken to process packets once the kernel gets involved, and (within experimental error), that time difference is nicely quantized.
I can't say it any clearer, when the kernel doesn't need to get involved (see above for criteria), it just doesn't - at least on a Mac. Perhaps the bios's Greg is using are not implemented well, I don't know (I have no experience there) but the Mac does it intelligently.
Physicists get Hadrons!
What I'm really saying is that thunderbolt is like a transport layer protocol, and pci-e, Ethernet, video, etc. are all protocols layered on top of this transport protocol. It's very like the OSI stack, in as much as there's a link-level protocol and service-level protocols building on that basic transport.
I have no experience with PC motherboards so I'm not *sure* what they're doing, but I suspect that they are exposing any pci-e level protocol traffic as hot-plug pci-e (as does the Mac), and that the OP is misunderstanding what the author of the HTML page he linked to is saying.
Thunderbolt itself is a lower-level protocol, but one that can be addressed directly which can be useful for particular applications. One example is raw dma, so any thunderbolt device can dma into any other device without the CPU getting involved (modulo the conditions I mention above).
I thought the spec comment was a bit odd as well, but I think he might be referring to the fact that the spec (and the hardware) has changed over time. There are several revisions...
Physicists get Hadrons!
If the headline asks a question, that question should be answered in the summary. Otherwise it is not a summary but a trailer.
Ok, building a comparable PC will cost nearly the same as what you'd pay for one of these Mac Pro's, give or take a few dollars since you cannot make an exact clone of this thing. The real question, in my opinion, is one more based on cost per performance.
When building out a PC, if you specifically set out to have top of the line, best at the time components you will pay a premium for that. Often, you can get 'the next best' component for a substantially lower price, which would only be a minor decrease in performance. From a performance per dollar perspective, getting the top tier stuff is wasteful.
I suspect that one could build a machine that generally performs 80%-90% in comparison, but cost half of the base model. It would've been nice had Apple offered such an option, but I can see why they wouldn't want to dilute their brand by doing so.
This configuration looks ideal for CAD applications - both the workstation, as well as the OS. Question - how many popular CAD applications are there for OS X? I recall when people would do HDL simulations & the like on such workstations: this looks ideal for that. If Cadence or AutoCAD or Parametric Technologies run their software on this platform, it would be just fantastic!
No.
Yeah, everybody knows that Microsoft and Apple support are different:
Customer: I have a problem...
Microsoft support: Try to switch it off and on and if its not working... call again.
Apple support: You are using it wrong. Bye.
It occurs to me this is Apple's way of spreading out the "early-adopter tax" over their product life cycle. Their new graphics hardware isn't available yet, but will be soon. In three to five years, a new Mac Pro will be at least a generation behind, graphics-wise. The generic hardware that follows will benefit from manufacturing and integration efficiencies, as well as driver support. Apple customers will have underwritten all that.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
What they call a "Mac" these days, is a PC that comes with OS/X preinstalled instead of Windows.
Have you not worked in an office before?
Office space is at a premium for any business of any size. Real estate costs money, so businesses squeeze as many people as they safely can into the space they have.
A custom built machine may be fine. A custom built mmachine is one data point - it may be fine or may have a lot of problems. Half of the servers in my rack have been custom built, half are top brands. The custom builds cost less to build. The top brands have engineered cooling, designed by thermal engineers, perfectly routed cables, and other niceties. The manufacturer lists certain hard drives and RAM that are thoroughly tested for compatibility and other drives that while they SHOULD be compatible, don't actually get along with the controller very well.
In my experience, the top brands are a little more reliable. For home use, the low cost of a custom build makes sense. If downtime is expensive, such as for a workstation or server, the extra 10% reliability of a professionally engineered system makes more sense. A $10,000 maxed-out Mac Pro is a workstation. You buy that for an employee who costs $3,000 / day in salary and benefits. You don't want that employee idle for a day because something overheated.
This is a $10,000 workstation, not the Acer your kid uses for their homework. Your data is on the Netapp or at least the Western Digital NAS.
I've built about 250 custom PCs at my shop and I'm thinking I can cut that by half to a 1/3 and still have a 10 year useable life rating on all the parts. So yeah, Apple Tax indeed.
True. One of the first things I ask with any piece of hardware is "can I put Linux on it?". However, Mac OSX machines come with a very Unix preinstalled, one tailored to the hardware. OSX can run all my favorite free software that I run on Linux, so I don't see any reason to put Linux on a Mac. It already HAS Unix.
What is your opinion/ideas/experience on how a ~$10K computer can generate a return for the investment for the average software developer?
$10,000 was the price of the first Lisa Computer from Apple - um 30 years ago. The Pro seems fairly priced in comparison:)
CPU power can't stop you "eating your words" http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4539709&cid=45664491 after my reply THERE, in that very link, to YOUR libeling of myself just before that, troll.
* :)
(Answer the question in my p.s. below that you keep avoiding by doing a "Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" from below bigmouth!)
---
A.) Cat got your tongue?
OR
B.) Are you just being polite, not talking with your mouth full?? (of your words you HAD to eat)
OR
C.) Is it "pride"??? For what???? For YOU being a libelous TROLL who puts down the work of others, yet doesn't have anything to compare to it himself?????
---
NO problem!
Since, in ANY event from A-C above, I shut you up with VERIFIABLE facts & proofs - just "too, Too, TOO EASILY - just '2ezly'"...
(VERY easy to do with "done zero" big talker TROLLS like you... every SINGLE time!)
However - The most amusing part is that you have to go "off-topic" with non-sequitur illogical libelous ac replies instead of answering the simple question below in my ps... lol!
(You did this, to yourself... own up to it, whimp - heh, you SEEM to *think* it's "ok" for YOU to f with others, but oh no... it's "not ok" for others to FLOOR you for it. right? Wrong...)
Don't answer, or pull your USUAL crap? The beatings WILL continue.
APK
P.S.=> QUESTION: How do your words taste now that you had to eat them? (Flavored with your FOOT IN YOUR MOUTH & "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat")...
Folks reading: I nearly guarantee (based on CHUMPY's history which anyone is free to verify also from his post history no less) that he replies via AC trollings loaded with non-sequitur off-topic illogical ad hominem attacks galore, & CHUMPY avoids answering that simple question to NO end - he's been doing it all week, since it's "the best he's got", nothing more - I've run into my share of such losers here, but this goof CHUMPY, takes the cake... lol!
... apk
You rarely use it and in places you need to plug in you just attach the dongle and leave it for weeks.
So you have to carry it with you wherever you go, just in case. That is not convenient.
Finally not that many people need more power than the iMac either.
Lots of people want more than an nvidia mobile graphics card.
Lots of people want multiple monitor setups (yes the imac supports it but its clumsy because you its difficult to match monitors or use the monitors you like due to having your computer glued onto one.
People defend the macpro's lack of room for internal storage by claiming that "anyone using one" is using rack mounted external stuff anyway... and that's fine... but I'm not using rack mounted external stuff and I want more storage than I can fit into an imac without having extra crap sitting on my desk.
There are lots of other scenarios where the imac falls annoyingly short.
Yes its enough for most people. But it falls well short for a lot of people.
. More over it isn't a joke to jump up to the Pro because the price spread isn't that large.
But its jump forwards in price, and sideways to what people actually want. I don't want a Xeon. That's a bunch of money for something I don't need at all. And I still can't put the video card I want in one... I can put a powerful video solution in it sure... but at an exorbitant cost that isn't at all what I want, nor priced at all where it makes sense to buy one.
Steve Jobs once said of adult content and Apple'attempts to keep it away from iOS a "people who want to see stuff like that should get an Android device". I took his advice. Apple truly believes that which web sites you visit in their business, that they should control or influence what you read. An iDevice is for listening to music you bought from Apple, the Apple approved version, for as long as Apple thinks is suitable.
On any other device, I just copy-paste my mp3 files. The Apple device also costs twice as much.
I realize there are counter-points to the above, but those are the reasons that I personally don't buy iOS, though I like my old Mac Pro and new MacBook Pro.
>DVDs .. external drives are invariably more costly and slower than internal drives
I tried about 20 drives and found that for optical, external is consistently faster with much lower cpu usage. I guess it's something about the controller that converts to USB and the few MBs of buffer in the enclosure.
This is the key point that we are disagreeing on. I don't see it. Let's say I put you in a high end iMac aiming the way you said:
3tb storage
Nvidia 780
32g ram
quad core i7
you are at $3300. You can throw a 2nd monitor on for a few hundred plus cables, so let's call it $3750. 30% above that puts you at $4875. So what minor change do you want to make that's an upgrade that a $4875 Pro setup can't handle? You wanted better video seems to be it and the pro has that.
____
If your point is that Apple has a limited number of configurations and doesn't let you choose exact components. That's absolutely correct. But frankly I don't see how there is a gapping hole between iMac and Pro.
I'm the one doing it. Yes it is. It goes in my laptop bag at the end of the ethernet cable I carry in there. No extra space and maybe a few extra grams. I'd love to dump the ethernet cable, that takes up space and adds weight.
I hate to say it, but the choices they made and tried to justify are absolutely shit. First off, the board doesn't suppport the selected CPU, meaning it probably wont even boot. Strike 1.
Strike 2 is the memory selected. It's not ECC or even the right amount.
From what the article title indicates, I expected them to show the parts to match the stated specs of the new Mac Pro but no, they screwed the pooch from the beginning for an Epic Failure.
Closest I've found is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182336 which is an ATX workstation/server board that supports (Certified List) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147307&ignorebbr=1 - these are 16GB sticks, so 4 of them matches the amount the Mac Pro has so you now have a size. Price ins't to bad.
For the rest of the hardware, I didn't bother as you have lots of choices. On the PSU front, I'd probably go with a Seasonic over the Silverstone. Case would be a full tower. Hell I want as many drive bays as possible and would use a pair of 64GB SLC SSD's in RAID 1 as the boot with the rest of the storage being the new 4TB Seagate drives - max the fucking case out as the drives are only $200 ea.
Add in a DVD drive for software installation (who bothers with that anymore when a flash drive is faster). Don't foget a Model-M keyboard or equalivent and a good mouse. Then there's the monitor and your good to go. Ballpark estimate is about the same if you go with some nice monitors (4K units with IPS panels).
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Meh, I have a macbook pro too, but I'm more than a little non-plussed by the newest one... no ethernet without dongle is a joke in a pro level product.
It seemed odd to me. I believe that their idea is that you should use an Apple display with the Ethernet provided via Thunderbolt. In this setting, you don't need the GigE connection on the machine, because it appears as soon as you plug in the display, and whenever you're not at your desk you use WiFi. I almost never use the GigE port on mine anywhere other than at work, so it's not completely silly (I don't have the Apple display, but I leave a Thunderbolt GigE adaptor connected to the network cable, so I just plug it in when I arrive).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
and why does apple have those mag power plugs ?
cause their prev gen was crap, while the HP stuff just chugs along
Never before has a trashcan ever looked this sexy!
It sounds like you know more about Thunderbolt than I. This statement seems odd, though:
> I don't see how you can implement a lower-level protocol (eg: raw thunderbolt DMA) using a higher-level ...
> That's like saying you'll implement Internet-layer frames only using TCP.
It's common to run lower level protocols on top of higher level, and I think you know that. PPPoE is just like that, isn't it?
Nvidia 780
The imac has a 780M. Maybe I want a 780. The 780M benchmarks at about half the 780. they aren't even in the same ballpark. A sub $200 GTX 660 ti as fast as a 780M.
You can throw a 2nd monitor on for a few hundred plus cables, so let's call it $3750.
Except that the 2nd monitor doesn't match at all. And maybe I want a 3rd or even fourth. Or maybe I want a narrower bezel for my multi monitor setup and I'm kind of stuck with the imac bezel since my computer is glued to it.
3tb storage
I can do triple that in a mini tower without breaking a sweat.
you are at $3300
Yeah, for a 780M and 3TB. I can build a desktop using premium parts and come in under 2k for the same performance.
For $3300, I can load it with 8TB put in an actual GTX 780 and still have cash lying around for a decent 2nd screen.
. So what minor change do you want to make that's an upgrade that a $4875 Pro setup can't handle?
See above. The desktop PC with 8TB and an actual GTX 780 runs about $3k, you now want me to spend $4875 on. And that doesn't include a screen, never mind two of them. And the dual firepro D300's? They're equivalent to the FirePro W7000, which individually benchmark even worse than the 780M in the imac. And the GTX 780 in the $3k PC is easily better than two D300.
But hey for $1000 more I can get dual D700 which is pointless as for $500 I could add a 2nd GTX 780 to my $3k PC ... so $3500 all in vs what $5500 now? And I'm still short storage and screens? So $6500?
The MacPro is better for OpenCL I would hope and the Xeons and ECC ram have their place... but its not what I need by a long shot. And it almost twice the price for the same performance I get from a $3500 PC? And that 3500 PC literally runs rings around the iMac.
I routinely use ethernet at home and work for larger file transfers. My home office is now GigE -- but even 100Base-T is markedly faster than my home office wifi, especially as my home wifi-AP is on a different floor from my office so as to give better signal to the tablets and toys (kids 3DS, WiiU, etc..) in the living room.
I still run into needing ethernet at client sites regularly. And in hotel rooms in many places. Lots of businesses do not deploy wifi. As someone who does a lot of IT I also use it routinely to program routers and other network devices too.
Its just plain silly to need a dongle for all that in a "pro" laptop.
Let me know what "boutique" you know of that pulls in $71 billion in gross profit and I'll happily invest...
Anything over $5K in current dollars is over-priced. I have a local white-box builder who can give me a custom-built system with latest tech for that amount of $$, including 2 CD/DVD/BD drives, dual hot-swapable boot/system drives, and a 12TB RAID-5 array for data. Includes a 1KW power supply and latest nVidia graphics card - monitors are extra (I already have 2 1920x1280 HD monitors).
The article is either totally incompetent or totally biased. It chooses to put in the PC configuration 2 AMD FirePro W9000 cards at $3400 each. According to AMD though FirePro W9000 has 6GB of RAM and delivers 4TFLOPs whereas the more expensive of the Apple cards has 3GB of RAM and delivers 2.2 TFLOPs. A closer much to an Apple video card would the FirePro W7000 which has 4GB of RAM and delivers 2.4TFLOPs. That however costs not $3400 but $700. So the PC system price was overestimated by $5400 (2x$3400 instead of 2x$700).
I'll give you (some) mid range publishing companies and individuals running music/video editing software. But I believe I covered those already. Artists are generally taken in by the Apple spin; probably for the same reason they call the Phillips screwdriver head, "Star".
But Disney/Pixar, Dream Works and Sony Animation? Try again. Digital animation companies run massive server farms measured with the same metrics used for super computers. That ain't Apple, and those are the kind of big companies I'm talking about. They'd be crazy to invest in proprietary hardware which can't be easily written for, updated and maintained in house, and guess what? They don't.
Vux you are now arguing something very different than a hold in the lineup. What you are arguing is that if you want a configuration substantially different than Apple's you can do much better with PC hardware. That's always the case. Apple mostly offers a single line of improvement as Steve Jobs put it: the products should relative to a particular price point and features set line up: good, better, best. The idea being that there is essentially a line with each one gets faster, better and more expensive than the previous. Pricewise they need to be close enough not to leave a gap but not so close that the customer is making complex choices.
PCs conversely have a complex matrix of possibilities where customers weigh options and get a best fit.
Excellent point. Apple is making huge sacrifices for light and thin. I own a rMBP. I love my machine but I'm not sure that I wouldn't like thicker, more like the old Macbook pro form fact and some of those features. Not having a builtin DVD drive is a pain. I have a great external BlueRay writer but it isn't internal. Huge sacrifices for light and thin is now part of the brand across essentially the entire product line. You don't like that, you don't like Apple. You were unhappy with the lack of an ethernet port. Same thing. Light and thin is expensive, you either figure OSX is worth it or you go PC and forget Apple as a vendor.
As far as the 780 for a pro machine. According to online reports the 780 doesn't holdup well for some of the more expensive pro applications. Which is typical of consumer vs. pro-grade equipment. The AMD chips are not tweaked for gaming. So for example Apple's FinalCutPro works wonderfully doing 4K editing on this chipset in a way that would be impossible on your GTX 780s because those are tweaked for gaming not video editing and CAD.
And this is the same things Xeons. You seem to be talking about a $3k PC with high end consumer parts and you don't care about sacrifices for looks. Apple just doesn't make one of those. HP or Dell or Lenevo. What about Apple would you like? I'm having a hard time figure out why you don't just decide you are a bad fit for Apple entirely.
I think the iMac might support that via. Thunderbolt but mostly the idea is that iMac customers don't want that kind of setup. But mainly the assumption is if you want 3 monitors that's a pro setup you are supposed to be in the MacPro. Otherwise you are doing something funky (which Apple allows) and don't
Agree here. iMacs IMHO have gone from pricey to a total ripoff. I'm hoping that Macmini revision makes these practical for people. That being said lots of people love these computers for the look. And those good looks + OSX IMHO is what you are buying with the iMac.
if youre making "real" money in the "real" business world, and some $10k PC makes you ~3x productive, why use this POC mac?
a specialist (in-house, naturally, due to "real" money) can build you a PC with far more power (and therefore a greater productivity delta) if $10k is a "drop in the bucket".
PC $11,530.54 US
MAC $9,599 US
...is using a Mac Pro, OS X, or OS X Server. And for that money, it better come with a well-stocked "genius bar" meaning booze, boobs, and beats.
I own a rMBP. I love my machine but I'm not sure that I wouldn't like thicker, more like the old Macbook pro form fact and some of those features. Not having a builtin DVD drive is a pain.
I agree. The trouble is they had the formula right last generation.
The macbook air was extreme light and mobile.
The macbook pro was bigger, and did everything... and I bought one, and other than it having a minidisplay port instead of something sensible like HDMI I've been very happy with it.
So I WAS a good fit for apple's product line, but with the new generation I seem not to be, because I still care about ethernet, and I'd have rather they kept the form factor and used the extra space for an ethenet port and more battery and better video than intel integrated, but instead the new 13" mbp is now just a faster macbook air with all the "pro" sucked right out of it.
But mainly the assumption is if you want 3 monitors that's a pro setup you are supposed to be in the MacPro.
And that's the issue. Three+ screens is a godsend for doing even simple stuff like developing websites or accounting or trading stocks or any number of other creative or professional jobs.
But what on earth would one need a Xeon and dual firepro video cards to write HTML and CSS pages?
The mac pro isn't a general purpose computer, its not even a general purpose workstation... it feels almost like "Final Cut Pro Appliance" in the sense that its configuration options only make any sense to very very specific niche markets.
As far as the 780 for a pro machine. According to online reports the 780 doesn't holdup well for some of the more expensive pro applications.
Right. But the people buying the 780 aren't using it for those. If I wanted a FirePro because I was in the market for a FirePro optimized application then it would make sense... but I'm not... so I'm in the market for a desktop computer.
But apple doesn't make one at all. And that's the gap. They make a "professional film editing workstation" and they make laptops. Their so called desktops are just laptops. The mac mini is a laptop without a screen. The imac is a laptop glued onto the back of a screen.
They don't make a desktop computer and I call that a gap.
What about Apple would you like? I'm having a hard time figure out why you don't just decide you are a bad fit for Apple entirely.
Good question. I still run windows on my desktop computer. I'd like to have OSX on it too though, because I have other OSX devices, and like consistency from one computer to the next.
My brother faced the same conundrum, and he built a hackintosh.
The hackintosh market exists in large part not because people are too cheap to buy a mac, but because apple simply doesn't make a desktop computer, and it doesn't make sense to move into their film editing appliance just to get some basic flexibility and decent consumer parts that don't belong in a laptop.
Don't you mean net profit?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is exactly what people seem to not understand. Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ). When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
I can tell you've done this, tk77. Your description of what happpens is exactly what happens.
Before I retired, I was bombarded with this kind of crap. Every so often, someone decides those pesky Macs are just too expensive, and besides, anyone who uses a Mac isn't very smart about computers - Right?
But then reality intrudes. Updates hose the PC, Software isn't as good. Every different manufacturer blames every other manufacturer, and you're left with extra time proving what you already know is wrong. And sometimes, a deadline is missed, or a distinctly substandard product goes out the door.
All costing time and money. And for what? Saving a few dollars on the tool you are using. That's being penny wise, and pound foolish.
And there are a lot of people who do word processing and spreadsheets who belive that their knowledge base and experience translates exactly into the world of video and audio production.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The Mac Pro was updated every year from 2006-2010; it was only the 2010 version that was stuck in place, probably in part due to the development of this new machine.
Don't forget the G5, which was updated every year before that since 2003.
Or the Power Mac G4.
Or the Power Mac G3.
For CSS development the new mini or an iMac would be fine. You are right that Apple doesn't serve this market well. The PC market offers far more choice of hardware configuration.
That's fair. Though I'd amend according to the higher end video companies (i.e. software in the $10k-50k per workstation) it is a great fit. So your "professional film editing workstation" I used to always joke that Apple was SGI 10 years later. And the MacPro is a lot like the Onyx or Altix in terms of design and function (though obviously not cost).
Have you considered: http://synergy-foss.org./ Just run it on your windows box with the OSX box as a client. You can also use a KVM or just pop the monitor back and forth. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817399101)
interesting article ... in October i got a new box to replace a 2007 2P Opteron dual-core box (w/ 16GB of ram, 2 LSI SAS HBA's and all Seagate Cheetahs) that had cost me over $5K back then ... when i ordered the new box, i told friends that i was basically getting the new Apple Mac Pro ... i.e., my new box runs an E5-1650 v2 off a SuperMicro X9SRA mobo w/ 128GB of Kingston ECC ram, two new LSI 12Gbs SAS HBA's (9300-8i and a 8e) and is stuffed in a Corsair Obsidian 650D case, and runs their Hyrdo H100i water cooled CPU cooler and one of their AX860i psu's ... as the case only has 6 internal drive bays, i also added an Icy Dock ToughArmor 4 x 2.5" SAS/SATA cage module ... the 650D case is cool b/c it has a SATA docking station built into its top ... i have all Samsung 840 Pro SSDs ... a 256GB one as C: (for Win 7 Pro) hung off one of the mobo's 6Gbs ports (the other mobo port is used for the SATA docking station) ... all other SSD's are hung off the 9300-8i: 2 128GB 840 Pro's as a RAID 0 D: (for a remapped Temp space), another 128GB as E: (for all my programs/code -- i've been coding SAS [the software] since the 70's) and a 512GB 840 Pro as F: (where i relocate My Documents to) ... and i scored this for $6158 from a firm in Fairport NY (i'm in Sacramento) ... i then added 4 more SSD's that i already had in hand: 3 256GB 840 Pro's as G:, H: and J: (I: is another 128GB 840 Pro) .. all for SAS datasets (i do hospital/healthcare consulting) ... lastly ... the 9300-8e is connected to 4 of my older Seagate SAS drives: two 300GB 15.7 Cheetahs and two 2GB 6Gbs Seagate Constellation ES (7200 rpm) ... so far this new box is GOLD ... an amazing beast
It's Apple's fault. http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html
Says the guy writing the drivers that don't work.