The New Mac Pro: A Compelling Purchase for High-End Users

The new Mac Pro has been released to the market, and as expected, it comes with a hefty price tag of $6,000. While this may seem like a lot of money for a desktop computer, there are some features that make it an attractive option for high-end users.

One of the main advantages of the Mac Pro is its expandability. It has PCIe slots, which allow users to add more storage and graphics cards as needed. Additionally, it has tons of RAM slots, making it easy to upgrade the system with more memory. However, I'm not sure if $1,000 less would be a good option for those who want better performance right now. While it's true that the Mac Pro can be upgraded in the future, I don't think it should cost significantly less than other comparable systems.

In fact, I think Apple has overpriced this Mac Pro compared to its base model, which is still a very popular choice among professionals. The iMac Pro, for example, starts at around $1,799 and offers similar performance to the Mac Pro, but with the added benefit of being an all-in-one device that's hard to compare to a build-it-yourself PC. This unique design makes it appealing to some users, but it also means that it falls into the same trap as the old Mac Pro: it's still considered a standard desktop by most professionals.

Speaking of which, I have to say that I'm not impressed with the new Mac Pro's pricing strategy. The base model starts at $6,000, and while it's true that this includes some powerful hardware, such as an RX 580 and a quarter terabyte SSD, I don't think it offers good value for money. Especially when compared to other systems on the market that offer similar performance at lower prices.

One of the things that does stand out about the new Mac Pro is its compact form factor. It's designed to be as small as possible, which makes it easy to fit into tight spaces. However, I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed by this design choice. The old Mac Pro was also designed to be compact, but at least it had the excuse of being built in a cheesegrater shape, which made it look like it was intentionally designed to be small.

In terms of actual performance, the new Mac Pro is certainly powerful, with options ranging from 6-core processors to 18-core processors. However, I think that even the most basic model starts at around $10,000, which is a pretty steep price tag for anyone who doesn't need the absolute most power. This pricing strategy may attract some high-end users, but it's likely to alienate many others who are looking for a more affordable option.

For those who do want to spec out their Mac Pro with more powerful hardware, I think they'll find that it's still not the best value on the market. Even with an RX 580 and a quarter terabyte SSD, which are certainly powerful components, I don't think this system is worth $6,000.

Conclusion

So, who will benefit from the new Mac Pro? Well, for those who have plenty of money to spend and want the absolute most power, this system may be a good choice. However, for anyone else, especially those who are looking for a more affordable option or who don't need the absolute most performance, I think there are better alternatives on the market.

One thing is clear: Apple has made it very clear that they're targeting high-end users with this new Mac Pro. They've also made it clear that they're not as interested in appealing to middle-ground professionals, who may be looking for a system that's more affordable but still offers great performance. For those who do fit into the "prosumer" category, I think Apple has taken away an entire tier of potential customers with this pricing strategy.

In conclusion, while the new Mac Pro is certainly powerful and well-designed, I don't think it's worth the price tag that Apple is charging for it. The base model starts at $6,000, which is a pretty steep price for anyone who doesn't need the absolute most performance. Unless you're a high-end user with deep pockets, I would caution against spending this much money on a desktop computer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enokay the new modular Mac Pro or the 2019 Mac Pro or whatever you want to call it is a very interesting device hi there what's up so in today's video I want to have a bit of a discussion about this new computer what does it mean for the Mac Pro is it even going to be good you're really in the way okay so obviously there's a lot to unpack with this new Mac Pro so let's just jump right into it by talking about some of the specs the Apple gave us at the keynote which were frankly mind-blowing so let's start with the CPUs this thing is gonna start with an 8 core Xeon I imagine that'll be a slight upgrade from what you'll find in an imac pro but not you know hugely more powerful from there we go to a 12 core Xeon then we step it up to a 16 core and then a 24 and then a 28 now that 28 core is what they showed off running logic pro with a thousand virtual instruments and tracks going all at once with 56 threads just an absolute screamer so I expect that that's gonna cost an arm and a leg and probably a couple more arms and legs you might have to rope some friends in on that transaction so that's definitely gonna be expensive but you know what I think is actually going to be more expensive is the RAM so the base configuration is gonna come with 32 gigabytes of RAM but from 32 we go to 48 gigabytes of RAM and then 96 gigabytes of RAM and then 192 gigabytes of RAM and then from there apples like oh no no we're not done 192 give us more of your money 384 gigabytes of ram 768 gigabytes of ram and finally the most expensive one-and-a-half terabytes of ram to be specific that's gonna be 12 128 gigabyte DIMMs for a total of 1536 gigabytes of ram 128 gigabytes of ram on its own is a lot of RAM and that's just in one dim in that MacPro you're gonna have to take out a mortgage that's gotta cost that that upgrade alone has to cost 30 grand 20 grand they charge over five thousand dollars to upgrade to 256 gigabytes of RAM on the iMac Pro that thing is gonna be unbelievably expensive so next up is the graphics it's gonna start with a Radeon Pro 580 X which is kind of a matte graphics card but up from there you get to a Radeon Pro Vega - this is a new chip based off of the seven nanometer architecture it's not Navi it's not quite Navi we're running second-generation Vega but it still is looking like a pretty solid performing chip so the Vega 2 is gonna have 64 compute units 4096 stream processors 32 gigabytes of HP m2 and it's like 14.1 teraflops that's a respectable card that's a really decent but that card alone is not where it stops because this whole mag pro seems to be you know indulgence of excess and a ton of power packed into a relatively small package we'll get into that in a little bit so basically they've got these new double proprietary PCI slots that allow what they're calling an MP X unit this is basically a double graphics card that's going to be sort of SLE ID but not a selects that's Nvidia obviously so they're calling this the Infinity fabric link which sounds kind of like a magical cloak that you can put on and then have you know and then you become a wizard is what I think of but in reality what it does is it ties these to Vega twos together and it also allows extra power up to 500 watts as well as a Thunderbolt controller to allow you to have Thunderbolt on that card but it doesn't stop there because you can actually have two of those modules now for those of you who are following along at home the Vega 2 is the individual GPU the Vega 2 duo is the MPX module with two of them on it and then you can have two of those so two Vega 2 duo that's a lot of twos and it works out to be 4 Vega twos that's a total of 256 compute units 16384 stream processors and 50 6.4 teraflops that is kind of insane what could you do with all of this power I mean I'm sure that there's a use cases for this stuff there's gonna be plenty of people who can repay guys it's me future Luke and I'm here to tell you that this guy right here is has completely lost his mind and he's not talking sense so I'm just gonna skip through it come on keep it going there fella okay all right that should be good enough I'll be on my way now enjoy the rest of the video see ya subscribe I think my brain just kernel panicked all right so let's bring this video back down to earth because obviously that is an absolutely insane amount of power to be putting in a machine that's insane it's absolutely crazy but obviously it's not gonna be perfect because this is Apple and I mean mainly when it comes to the price there's a lot of problems that I have with this machine so let's start by talking about the base configuration so this thing is by far the most expensive Mac you can buy and that's the starting price let's not forget it starts at $6,000 so you'd think what with all of those crazy specs that we were talking about $6,000 starting price it's probably gonna be pretty well equipped but I'm actually kind of surprised by the way that they chose to equip the base model so to start you're gonna get an 8 core Xeon you're gonna get 32 gigs of ram 256 gigabytes of storage and a Radeon Pro 580 X now I know what you're thinking $6,000 are you sure that's right Luke its $6,000 for that yep that is what we start with and it's it's very puzzling to me I mean $6,000 you would think you could get more than essentially a two-generation old mid to your graphics card 256 gigabytes of storage that's what the old Mac Pro started with and that came out six years ago why are we still starting with 256 gigabytes of storage more importantly if we look at that the storage and the graphics specifically why should I spend $6,000 to get less than what the iMac Pro offers which costs $1000 less so for those of you who don't remember iMac pro $5,000 you get a terabyte SSD 32 gigs of ram 8 core Xeon and a radium pro Vega 56 so the storage is four times as much and the graphics are objectively better and it's $1,000 less no sure I get it the Mac Pro has expandability we've got PCIe slots you've got tons of RAM slots it's really easy to get inside this thing but the last time I checked you don't pay $1000 for less performance but it could be better performance later if I'm gonna spend an extra thousand dollars right now I want better performance right now it's great that it can be upgraded down the line but if it's gonna be more expensive than another piece of hardware it should be more powerful than that other piece of hardware that's that just seems kind of basic to me and honestly that kind of gives me some pause when it comes to the other upgrades because obviously you can take this thing to the stratosphere but most people aren't going to do that just like most people aren't buying the 18 core iMac probe the base iMac Pro has been a very popular machine it's it's actually pretty well priced I think Apple has to make up for that pretty decent pricing by overpricing this Mac Pro and for people that shop for the base model and the base model and I Pro as I said is super popular this is not a compelling purchase the thing is the iMac is an all-in-one it's an interesting it's a unique device it's hard to compare to a build-it-yourself PC because it offers a different I talked about that a little when I reviewed my trashcan MacPro so this new Mac Pro falls into the same trap it is still as cool as it is and as well engineered as it looks to be and as much work as Apple has put into this thing it is still a standard desktop as far as most pros are to be concerned so why should they spend $6,000 on something with essentially an Rx 580 in it and a quarter terabyte SSD that is not good value and also unlike the trash can Mac Pro you can't make any exception for like oh well it's a really compact form factor so it's got this like powerful hardware that's packed into a really tiny package like the 2013 Mac Pro was if you use apples AR kit tool on Safari you can actually see how big the Mac Pro is in your environment so I put it next to my five comma one Mac Pro and it's pretty much the same size so if you have one of those cheesegrater Mac pros then this thing is pretty much the same size now that's not necessarily a problem but that's one less excuse you can't say oh well it's engineered to be as small as possible because it's clearly not it's a very large machine so I just don't really understand why that base model exists let's say we just want to spec it up a little bit from that six thousand dollars we want to get something like the twelve core processor maybe 96 gigabytes of RAM maybe one terabyte SSD and one Radeon Pro Vega - that's comparatively can considering how much room we have to upgrade this thing from Apple a pretty modest upgrade but I guarantee that a machine with those specs is going to break $10,000 and that's just a crazy amount of money ok so conclusion time do I think that the new Mac Pro is bad know for production studios people with a lot of income that they can use to invest in these absolutely outrageously powerful higher-end use of the MacPro are going to be very very happy about this people will still buy these Trash Can Mac Pros and spec them out and put them in racks people buy the old cheese greener Mac Pro's and cut the legs and the the handles off and they put them in racks and just have rows and rows of them spend a ton of money on that people that love doing stuff like that getting the absolute most power that have plenty of money to spend are gonna be very happy about this Mac Pro but if you're a little bit lower level I think they've kind of knocked off a whole tier of people that really enjoy the Mac Pro the old Mac Pro as flawed as it was started at three thousand dollars it was at least somewhat attainable you could get into that Mac Pro for three thousand dollars to have it start at six grand I think takes a lot of the edge off of this product and removes a huge audience that could potentially be interested that could give Apple a lot of sales if they were willing to price it more fairly so only time will tell if this ends up being a flop or a success for Apple but I think it's good for them to care more about their really really high end consumers but the sort of middle ground prosumers I think are not going to be too happy about this update so I hope you guys enjoyed this video as usual make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luke VI and I will see you all in the next videookay the new modular Mac Pro or the 2019 Mac Pro or whatever you want to call it is a very interesting device hi there what's up so in today's video I want to have a bit of a discussion about this new computer what does it mean for the Mac Pro is it even going to be good you're really in the way okay so obviously there's a lot to unpack with this new Mac Pro so let's just jump right into it by talking about some of the specs the Apple gave us at the keynote which were frankly mind-blowing so let's start with the CPUs this thing is gonna start with an 8 core Xeon I imagine that'll be a slight upgrade from what you'll find in an imac pro but not you know hugely more powerful from there we go to a 12 core Xeon then we step it up to a 16 core and then a 24 and then a 28 now that 28 core is what they showed off running logic pro with a thousand virtual instruments and tracks going all at once with 56 threads just an absolute screamer so I expect that that's gonna cost an arm and a leg and probably a couple more arms and legs you might have to rope some friends in on that transaction so that's definitely gonna be expensive but you know what I think is actually going to be more expensive is the RAM so the base configuration is gonna come with 32 gigabytes of RAM but from 32 we go to 48 gigabytes of RAM and then 96 gigabytes of RAM and then 192 gigabytes of RAM and then from there apples like oh no no we're not done 192 give us more of your money 384 gigabytes of ram 768 gigabytes of ram and finally the most expensive one-and-a-half terabytes of ram to be specific that's gonna be 12 128 gigabyte DIMMs for a total of 1536 gigabytes of ram 128 gigabytes of ram on its own is a lot of RAM and that's just in one dim in that MacPro you're gonna have to take out a mortgage that's gotta cost that that upgrade alone has to cost 30 grand 20 grand they charge over five thousand dollars to upgrade to 256 gigabytes of RAM on the iMac Pro that thing is gonna be unbelievably expensive so next up is the graphics it's gonna start with a Radeon Pro 580 X which is kind of a matte graphics card but up from there you get to a Radeon Pro Vega - this is a new chip based off of the seven nanometer architecture it's not Navi it's not quite Navi we're running second-generation Vega but it still is looking like a pretty solid performing chip so the Vega 2 is gonna have 64 compute units 4096 stream processors 32 gigabytes of HP m2 and it's like 14.1 teraflops that's a respectable card that's a really decent but that card alone is not where it stops because this whole mag pro seems to be you know indulgence of excess and a ton of power packed into a relatively small package we'll get into that in a little bit so basically they've got these new double proprietary PCI slots that allow what they're calling an MP X unit this is basically a double graphics card that's going to be sort of SLE ID but not a selects that's Nvidia obviously so they're calling this the Infinity fabric link which sounds kind of like a magical cloak that you can put on and then have you know and then you become a wizard is what I think of but in reality what it does is it ties these to Vega twos together and it also allows extra power up to 500 watts as well as a Thunderbolt controller to allow you to have Thunderbolt on that card but it doesn't stop there because you can actually have two of those modules now for those of you who are following along at home the Vega 2 is the individual GPU the Vega 2 duo is the MPX module with two of them on it and then you can have two of those so two Vega 2 duo that's a lot of twos and it works out to be 4 Vega twos that's a total of 256 compute units 16384 stream processors and 50 6.4 teraflops that is kind of insane what could you do with all of this power I mean I'm sure that there's a use cases for this stuff there's gonna be plenty of people who can repay guys it's me future Luke and I'm here to tell you that this guy right here is has completely lost his mind and he's not talking sense so I'm just gonna skip through it come on keep it going there fella okay all right that should be good enough I'll be on my way now enjoy the rest of the video see ya subscribe I think my brain just kernel panicked all right so let's bring this video back down to earth because obviously that is an absolutely insane amount of power to be putting in a machine that's insane it's absolutely crazy but obviously it's not gonna be perfect because this is Apple and I mean mainly when it comes to the price there's a lot of problems that I have with this machine so let's start by talking about the base configuration so this thing is by far the most expensive Mac you can buy and that's the starting price let's not forget it starts at $6,000 so you'd think what with all of those crazy specs that we were talking about $6,000 starting price it's probably gonna be pretty well equipped but I'm actually kind of surprised by the way that they chose to equip the base model so to start you're gonna get an 8 core Xeon you're gonna get 32 gigs of ram 256 gigabytes of storage and a Radeon Pro 580 X now I know what you're thinking $6,000 are you sure that's right Luke its $6,000 for that yep that is what we start with and it's it's very puzzling to me I mean $6,000 you would think you could get more than essentially a two-generation old mid to your graphics card 256 gigabytes of storage that's what the old Mac Pro started with and that came out six years ago why are we still starting with 256 gigabytes of storage more importantly if we look at that the storage and the graphics specifically why should I spend $6,000 to get less than what the iMac Pro offers which costs $1000 less so for those of you who don't remember iMac pro $5,000 you get a terabyte SSD 32 gigs of ram 8 core Xeon and a radium pro Vega 56 so the storage is four times as much and the graphics are objectively better and it's $1,000 less no sure I get it the Mac Pro has expandability we've got PCIe slots you've got tons of RAM slots it's really easy to get inside this thing but the last time I checked you don't pay $1000 for less performance but it could be better performance later if I'm gonna spend an extra thousand dollars right now I want better performance right now it's great that it can be upgraded down the line but if it's gonna be more expensive than another piece of hardware it should be more powerful than that other piece of hardware that's that just seems kind of basic to me and honestly that kind of gives me some pause when it comes to the other upgrades because obviously you can take this thing to the stratosphere but most people aren't going to do that just like most people aren't buying the 18 core iMac probe the base iMac Pro has been a very popular machine it's it's actually pretty well priced I think Apple has to make up for that pretty decent pricing by overpricing this Mac Pro and for people that shop for the base model and the base model and I Pro as I said is super popular this is not a compelling purchase the thing is the iMac is an all-in-one it's an interesting it's a unique device it's hard to compare to a build-it-yourself PC because it offers a different I talked about that a little when I reviewed my trashcan MacPro so this new Mac Pro falls into the same trap it is still as cool as it is and as well engineered as it looks to be and as much work as Apple has put into this thing it is still a standard desktop as far as most pros are to be concerned so why should they spend $6,000 on something with essentially an Rx 580 in it and a quarter terabyte SSD that is not good value and also unlike the trash can Mac Pro you can't make any exception for like oh well it's a really compact form factor so it's got this like powerful hardware that's packed into a really tiny package like the 2013 Mac Pro was if you use apples AR kit tool on Safari you can actually see how big the Mac Pro is in your environment so I put it next to my five comma one Mac Pro and it's pretty much the same size so if you have one of those cheesegrater Mac pros then this thing is pretty much the same size now that's not necessarily a problem but that's one less excuse you can't say oh well it's engineered to be as small as possible because it's clearly not it's a very large machine so I just don't really understand why that base model exists let's say we just want to spec it up a little bit from that six thousand dollars we want to get something like the twelve core processor maybe 96 gigabytes of RAM maybe one terabyte SSD and one Radeon Pro Vega - that's comparatively can considering how much room we have to upgrade this thing from Apple a pretty modest upgrade but I guarantee that a machine with those specs is going to break $10,000 and that's just a crazy amount of money ok so conclusion time do I think that the new Mac Pro is bad know for production studios people with a lot of income that they can use to invest in these absolutely outrageously powerful higher-end use of the MacPro are going to be very very happy about this people will still buy these Trash Can Mac Pros and spec them out and put them in racks people buy the old cheese greener Mac Pro's and cut the legs and the the handles off and they put them in racks and just have rows and rows of them spend a ton of money on that people that love doing stuff like that getting the absolute most power that have plenty of money to spend are gonna be very happy about this Mac Pro but if you're a little bit lower level I think they've kind of knocked off a whole tier of people that really enjoy the Mac Pro the old Mac Pro as flawed as it was started at three thousand dollars it was at least somewhat attainable you could get into that Mac Pro for three thousand dollars to have it start at six grand I think takes a lot of the edge off of this product and removes a huge audience that could potentially be interested that could give Apple a lot of sales if they were willing to price it more fairly so only time will tell if this ends up being a flop or a success for Apple but I think it's good for them to care more about their really really high end consumers but the sort of middle ground prosumers I think are not going to be too happy about this update so I hope you guys enjoyed this video as usual make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luke VI and I will see you all in the next video\n"