Apple’s reinvented Mac Pro will shred your workflow

[amarshall]

The price saddens me. The $6K base is twice the base of the 2013 Mac Pro when it was released. Some quick spec-ing for a somewhat-equivalent DIY build gives somewhere around $3K.

I hope at least that the SSDs are standard M.2, but looking at the pictures I’m not sure they are.

[NikkiA]

They're behind the T2 chip, it'll be bare flash not M.2

[tracker1]

The pricing on this is more insane than Mac ever has been... Holding out for a Zen 2 16-core or Threadripper myself, and will almost certainly be jumping to Linux for good this time around.

[effie]

Wow, Apple with its customer base is ripe for some disruption. One can get the same performance as the cheapest version of this product for $1000, instead of $6000 (except for the afterburner card, whose benefit is not so cleat to me now). I have a hard time believing that Apple ecosystem and its applications are so good to audio/video creators that they pay 6x as much as the value of the hardware. It seems to me those buyers are actually paying for the design and for the status symbol, like people pay for suits or expensive watches. Not because they need this machine and its ecosystem for production.

[brokenmachine]

Apple's customer base seems to be suffering some kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome, they definitely "think different" and bend over and cough when requested.

[erikpukinskis]

This is like saying you can get the same calories as a high end steak by eating $0.50 worth of table sugar.

Technically true. Yet not a useful substitution for anyone but hummingbirds.

[amanaplanacanal]

Can I just comment on the title without reading the article? I don't know if shredding my workflow is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.

[isoskeles]

The "joke", which is part of the headline but not in the submission, is that the new Mac Pro resembles a cheese grater, hence the shredding.

[hising]

It will shred my wallet for sure

[drivingmenuts]

Goodbye, savings account ...

[Simulacra]

OMG An Apple product has finally made me feel excited! It's going to be pricey but I've dreamed up this for some time.

If it's truly repair and upgrade friendly, this would definitely be something that will pull me back to the Apple world, after leaving in disappointment around the touch bar.

[effie]

I do not understand this positive excitement. The market price for the performance they offer is a fraction of what they ask. Why not build your Xeon system for fraction of the price? Or buy workstation from small builders, more expensive, but hassle-free and still fraction of the cost.

[hooloovoo_zoo]

Is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more compute from the cloud?

[blurbleblurble]

My question would be: is there still a market for these very expensive workstations when you can get much more by building the machine yourself?

Yes, because a lot of media people are scared away from the thought of putting together their own machine (and a lot of them also depend on Mac OS)

[aaronarduino]

In industries where latency matters, there absolutely is a market.

[oflannabhra]

Yes, many media workflows. No one rents cloud servers to edit 8k video.

[pjmlp]

You mean placing critical data in someone's else computer?

No, many businesses are a bit more clever than that.

[Kye]

How am I going to run 1000 Serum instances live in the cloud? Latency is killer.

[boromi]

I love the design, too bad they don't just sell the case so I could DIY a proper PC that's half the cost with the same specs ...

[minikites]

Why did this take more than two years to design and produce?

[adolph]

They didn't spend much time on the grill--its basically the 2007 MacBook packaging styrofoam.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/chromedecay/568037457/

[chihuahua]

Finding the perfect placement for the 3.5mm audio jack took most of the time. The rest was easy.

[tlholaday]

> Why did this take more than two years to design and produce?

Measure twice, cut once.

[threeseed]

It wasn't just the computer but the display and Afterburner card.

[noir_lord]

They pulled off their best hardware engineers to work on laptop keyboards.

[amedvednikov]

6 years actually.

[Kye]

Is it dishwasher safe?

Kidding! I'd buy it if I could afford to pay for style over optimizing for cost:power.

[threeseed]

You would find it pretty hard to spec a similar machine for similar cost.

And then you would still have to find an alternative to the Afterburner card.

[jseliger]

A lot of my workflow is in Word and Textmate, so a lot of different Macs will "shred" my workflow.

[freehunter]

Any time Apple announces a Macbook, there are hundreds of comments saying how they've abandoned the true professionals by only supporting quad-core processors and 16GB of RAM and expansion only through USB-C. Then they announce a machine that has 1.4kW of power and 28 cores and 1.5TB of RAM and we see comments from people complaining that they don't need that much power and any machine will work for them.