When Phil Schiller Apple's vice president of worldwide marketing made the first public presentation of the new Mac Pro, at WWDC 2013, nothing was said about the price. We just came to know the new base value at the special event in late October, and it evidently impressed: starting at $ 3,000 in the United States.
Although the multiple of the value defined for the national market is even within the average that Apple usually works, it is not easy to swallow a computer, no matter how good it is, costing from R $ 13,000 in our dream configuration, we reached a trifle of R $ 48,975.
But the basis of this post does not even consider the price of the Mac Pro in Brazil, but how much it would cost to assemble an equivalent PC.
Does that $ 3,000 have the famous “Apple tax” built in?
Stephen Fung, from Futurelooks, decided to dive in and made a rather incredible discovery: a $ 3,000 Mac Pro equivalent assembled PC would not cost less than $ 3,995, while a $ 9,600 top-of-the-line Mac Pro configuration would represent an expense. $ 11,530 on a PC with comparable technical specifications.
And not only in the cost that Apple earns: a compact case (shown on the side) to hold the selected components for the PC would still have more or less twice the volume of the Mac Pro and nothing even close to its beauty; the configured Mac Pro still has twice as much RAM (64GB) and six Thunderbolt 2 ports; a Mac buyer would not have to worry (or maybe even spend even more) with the assembly of the machine or with possible hardware / software incompatibilities; and the Mac Pro certainly works more quietly and with much less power consumption.
The advantages on the PC side are the flexibility to change / update components (in the case of the Mac Pro, we are basically restricted to memory and flash drive), as well as the fact that the user may not need the exact same components chosen by Apple there are processors and graphics cards on the market much more affordable that would do the job quite satisfactorily, for example.
I confess that I was surprised by Fung's discovery. If you still consider that the Mac Pro is capable of running both OS X and Windows natively, Apple deserves applause for what it managed to build.
(tip from Thiago Martins, via BGR)
