A Fully Loaded Apple Mac Pro Will Cost You $52,600

#1

The Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR officially went on sale today, allowing us to answer the question that has been on everybody’s mind ever since Apple’s desktop powerhouse was announced: how much will it cost to buy a fully spec this monster out? The answer: a cool $52,600.

When Apple first announced the Mac Pro, the company only revealed the price of the base model, which was already somewhat … controversial… at $6,000 for an 8-core 3.5GHz Intel Xeon W CPU, Radeon 580X GPU with 8GB of video memory, 32GB of ECC RAM, and a measly 256GB of SSD storage. But that is the proverbial tip of the ice berg.

Fully specced, the computer can handle a 2.6GHz 28-core Intel Xenon W processor with turbo boost up to 4.4GHz (+$7,000), a mind-blowing 1.5 terabytes of RAM (+$25,000), two Radeon Pro Vega II Duos with a combined 128GB of dedicated video memory (+$10,800), and up to 4TB of SSD storage (+$1,400). Oh, and let’s throw in the special Apple Afterburner accelerator card that’s capable of decoding up to 6.3 billion pixels per second (+$2,000), allowing you to play back three 8K ProRes RAW video streams simultaneously, and throw on some wheels (+400) to the frame.

#2

Mybe hi-end users can justify this price?

#3

Ten years from now the answer will be “no way”.
So be patient and wait for the inevitable trickle downs.

#4

Half of that cost is the 1.5 TB worth of ECC RAM - although $400 for wheels is definitely pushing it.

Maybe worth it if you are a die-hard Final Cut editor, otherwise, lots of poor choices in terms of silicon IMHO.

#5

As a former Mac OS die hard
I used to think I would never Leave FCP

I recently migrated my 90+ minute animated fan film from FCP to davinci resolve.
On windows 10 for the delivery edit.

No hard feelings.

This Mac pro is perfectly in line with Apple’s market position as luxury brand for the affluent… Like the Maybach automobile.

Apple is an American success story.

I wish them well.

#6

Long-time FCP user here too (on a 2009 Mac Pro): once you get used to the new timeline of FCP X, it’s really hard to go back to Premiere. Looked at Resolve last year at Siggraph for some technical reasons, but haven’t used it yet (hobby-level editor here…)

IMHO the article is click-baity, because a similarly configured workstation from HP is probably going to be running into similar rarefied price-ranges. With that said, i skipped the ‘darth-vader ash-tray’ generation because it was a ridiculous product, and i will likely skip this cheese-grater too, because it is still not what a ‘pro’ workstation should be.

No hard feelings indeed :slight_smile:

#7

“a fully loaded Mac Pro will cost 52.000$”

So what?
HP workstations can cost more than 100.000$ and I do not see anyone opening post about that.

#8

3.8GHz 32 core 88-Lane PCIe 4.0 threadripper cpu, $1399
2.6GHz 28 core 44-Lane PCIe 3.0 xeon upgrade $7000

Oh heavens, choices, choices, however will I decide.

#9

It is the 24-core model, the 32-core costs 2k.

#10

I love that I got the price so wrong, but it’s still bargain of the century in comparison.

#11

Not that Intel is not getting a run for its money with Threadripper, but there is a lot more to CPU choice for a renderfarm than raw core # & GHz.

#12

Could you elaborate please?

#13

For example? Thread ripper beats it out on pcie lanes. Memory speed. Power consumption. A more modern process. Future upgradeability. Memory bandwidth.