After a long wait, Apple presented yesterday at the opening keynote of the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2019, the brand new Mac Pro. It seems to meet all the desires of professionals and companies that make a really heavy use of computers.
It’s like Rodrigo Ghedin put it in User manual:
Before you call me a bourgeois or any other heavy term like that, let me explain: we are talking about professional equipment. Nobody in their right mind would buy a Mac Pro to do CBT, play Fortnite or update Face from their uncle’s bakery. Anyone who buys this kind of thing renders heavy animations, performs simulations and complex engineering projects, compiles huge applications… you get the idea: they are the people who benefit from the processing power and expansion possibilities that the new Mac Pro offers. And rich people without a clue, but you can curse at will.
The big problem with the initial reviews of the new Mac Pro – and its Pro Display XDR monitor – is this: they come from an audience totally unaware of the need for equipment like this. The Mac Pro is at a level completely different from all other existing Macs, including the iMac Pro itself.
The Pro Display XDR follows the same reasoning. There are those who are playing with the fact that only its support cost the same as the complete monitor cost in 2011 (US $ 1,000), but the level here is different now. Apple is putting it in front of professional monitors with very high color accuracy – it cited a $ 43,000 keynote, but Jonathan Morrison brought here another example of just over $ 29,000 (the one with 4K resolution, not 6K). In this scenario, the $ 6,000 Pro Display XDR (already with its Pro Stand) was a bargain.
Having said all that, it’s fun to imagine how much a custom Mac Pro can cost to the maximum, since Apple only gave us the starting price of $ 6,000 for a machine configured with an 8-core Intel Xeon W processor, 32GB of RAM, AMD graphics card Radeon Pro 580X and 256GB SSD. With a Pro Display XDR and its Pro Stand, we have already reached $ 12,000.
THE The Verge made some estimates of how much should be left to customize the Mac Pro, obviously based on the American reality but considering some general market prices that are usually much more affordable than Apple usually charges directly (which is fortunately an option in the case of new Mac Pro, after all, no one will have to pay the “Apple fee” for upgrades if they don’t want to).
Well then:
- 12 sticks of DDR4 ECC 2.933MHz 128GB RAM each (1.5TB total) = $ 18,000 (Apple charges $ 5,200 for 256GB on the iMac Pro and is a lower RAM, 2,666MHz, so buying 1.5TB is more than $ 30,000 for it).
- Two 2TB SSDs each = $ 2,400 (Apple price same, based on iMac Pro).
- A 28-core Intel Xeon W processor with 2.5GHz and Turbo Boost up to 4.4GHz, with 66.5MB cache = $ 7,500
- Two AMD Radeon Pro Vega II graphics cards with Infinity Fabric Link and 64GB of HBM2 memory = $ 12,000
- An Apple Afterburner accelerator card = not yet known how much it will cost
Here alone, on top of the $ 6,000 base, we have already reached $ 45,900. With Afterburner, caster wheels (Mac Pro Wheel Kit) and a certain margin of error, we easily reach $ 50,000. But that, of course, is only the tower.
Since we are here to play with big people, we also have to consider six (!) Pro Display XDRs in the Nano-Texture version with one Pro Stand each, which then adds up to another $ 42,000. $ 92,000 total the kit. ?
Considering that the “Apple dollar” (currency conversion + taxes and other costs) is now around 7.5x, this unimaginable “kit” would arrive in Brazil for about R $ 690,000. There, now you have the rest of the day to digest this information.
