Last week at Apple’s iPad keynote, Phil Schiller finally unveiled the baseline price for the Mac Pro will start at $2999, to the surprise of many. Keep in mind that’s only for a quad-core unit and the six-core units start at $3999. However, Apple announced 12-core units will also be available as a customized option, meaning that baseline price is just the tip of the iceberg for how deep Apple will reach into your pockets for a maxed out Mac Pro.
Apple still hasn’t announced official pricing for those hefty upgrades, but pros should expect to pay upwards of $10,000 for a top notch Mac Pro. According to the estimations of Unbox Therapy, a top-of-the-line Mac Pro with max upgrades will probably cost around $14k!
Watch Unbox Therapy break down the numbers in the video below:
Via: Gizmodo
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
6 responses to “A Top-Of-The-Line Mac Pro Might Cost You $14,000 [Video]”
Even “maxed out” at $14,000 you only get one 1TB SSD for data storage. If you then need a RAID unit or any additional storage, it will cost extra. I really don’t understand Apple’s direction on the new Mac Pro. They’ve managed to make it so exclusive that even baseline users will be paying through the nose for a fast machine but with relatively little storage and RAM. Mac Pro’s have always been the most expensive Macs because of their processing power, but $3000 to $4000 for what amounts to a relatively base model machine is going too far. I’ve always used Mac towers from 1993 onwards including the G3, G4, G5 and Intel Mac Pro’s. It looks like when I upgrade my 2006 Mac Pro to a newer machine so that I can run Mavericks, it will be a used or refurbished 2010 or 2011 model and NOT the newest Mac Pro.
I suggest you head over to HP and configure yourself a Z Series.
Two of those very same 12 core processors. Two of the latest 12GB Nvidia K6000 GPU’s and up to 512GB RAM. Easily $25k before you add in monitors and drives (plus it comes in a big black box so you won’t have spaghetti hanging out the front, back and sides). Not sure why you’d need all that power, but I suspect this rig will complete jobs 5 minutes before you start them.
The world’s least desirable computer. Retrograde Apple so much less for so much more. A Woz suppository.
Your solution is based on specs and leaves out the most important attribute: the operating system. “All that power” is specifically the point. This is a professional user’s Mac for video production/editing, music recording/mixing, professional graphic designers who work with huge files, scientific studies and analysis, etc. I’d love to have the power but not at the cost of going modular where I’m forced to have my hard drives and additional cards in separate external boxes.
One thing you can be sure of, the solution is definitely NOT moving to Windows or Linux. The Mac OS is elegant, fast, familiar and solid as a rock. It’s a very mature OS that is a pleasure to use. I’ve NEVER heard any Windows user tell me how much they love the Windows OS, whereas Mac users routinely do so, simply because of the excellence in the way the Mac OS has been thought through and has been made so intuitive.
I’ll stick with the old “cheese grater” Mac Pro’s that will run Mavericks (early 2008 or later) and trade in my well-used and beloved 2006 original Mac Pro 2.66GHz. Maybe Apple will change their minds at a later date and bring back the concept of a customizable tower for professionals that doesn’t cost a fortune.
A few points to consider.
• If you are cutting simple 1080p from DSLR or video cam using a compressed format (AVCHD, H.264, HDV, etc) an quad core i7 iMac or MBP is plenty powerful. Sure they’re not true workstations, but for the basic wedding video production, local web marketing shop, they’ll do great. Hell in many benchmarks the i7 iMac has been beating the Pro for years on most metrics. If you are a graphic designer, MBP or iMac is plenty. Most design firms I work with kit their staff out with MBP and a monitor. Mac Pros are in the studios and edit bays.
• IT HAS ONE FAN! IT HAS THE SAME NOISE LEVEL AS A MAC MINI! Sorry to yell, but I getting so frustrated with the people whining about the new Pro without acknowledging the designs stated goals. I suspect some of you complainers (especially in the music biz) were going on and on about how loud the old Mac Pro design was and all the isolation casing needed to make it useable in a production environment.
• There comes a time when we have to think about our work flows differently. HDD in the same box as the CPU is about to die. Uncompressed HD, 2K, 4K make it impractical to crack open a big loud box in order to switch between projects is wasteful. The firms that are going to actually utilize the power of this new Mac Pro already have large network storage and Thunderbolt drives to ferry footage to and from set. AJA and Blackmagic have had breakout products for the MBP and iMac for some time now.
I was always a PowerMac/Mac Pro guy. iMacs were toys for grandma to get to her AOL. Hell, one place I worked got CRT iMacs for production back in 1998, it was a disaster. They overheated and self-rebooted all the time. Those days are over. Times have changed. I got a 27″ quad core i7 iMac 3 years ago because it was more powerful than the Mac Pro of it’s time. I had to get over my status based mindset because deep down I realized I wanted a Mac Pro because it was a status symbol. It said I was serious and did serious work. When I looked at the numbers it was clear I was being childish. HDD are now a line item on my invoices to clients and internal storage is moot.
I’m not saying that some of you wouldn’t be better served with a big box. I am saying that most of you are standing on tradition because of how you do things now. A lot more than this one model of computer has and will shift under your feet, better get real agile, and quick. Apple actually thought this one out really well, and has positioned themselves well for the future. It’s a good design, expensive sure, but if it works like they say, it will rule.
If you ever priced out the previous generation, you could max it out over $10,000