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Apple releases a 12 core Mac Pro
TOYMAKER FOR THE WELL HEELED Apple has swung its doors wide open to fanbois who want to blow thousands of pounds on a Mac Pro.
The update to Apple's Mac Pro range was revealed a fortnight ago, however the firm decided it best to give fanbois a little time to save up before releasing its latest way to lighten its faithful fans bank accounts. While the cappucino company has touted its Mac Pro as some sort of 12-core wonder, the reality is that even the most ardent fanboi will find it hard to afford the headline system.
Instead, Jobs' Mob starts the ball rolling with a quad-core single chip box for just £2,000, a mere pittance for Mac users. For that you get Intel's previous generation Nehalem Xeon 2.8GHz processor and 3 whole gigabytes of RAM. To understand how thrifty Apple has been, that colossal amount of memory is made up of three 1GB sticks. Storage is provided by a 1TB Serial ATA (SATA) drive that's worth about £45.
As The INQUIRER reported, Apple has ditched Nvidia. Now all Mac Pro models come with the same AMD Radeon HD 5770 graphics card. While the 5770 isn't a bad card, it's not quite what you would expect from a machine that costs £4,000 and is intended for CAD/CAM work.
If you feel like taking a trip in some far off fantasy land where money is measured like grains of sand, then the 12-core range topping model can be had for a laughable £4,000. You get pretty much the same internals except for two Westmere Intel Xeon chips running at 2.66GHz. Apple decided, through the goodness of Steve Jobs' heart, to throw another three 1GB RAM sticks into the mix. Other than that you get the bog standard 1TB hard drive and a 'Superdrive', or to those not blinded by the halo above Jobs' head, a not so super £10 DVD writer.
Of course these are 'professional' machines so the price doesn't include a monitor. While that is common practice for workstations, typically those machines offer hardware such as seriously large amounts of RAM, serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives, certified graphics cards such as AMD's Firepro or Nvidia's Quadro models and real customer support. With these boxes Apple offers a whole 90 days of "complimentary" telephone support for those worried that the shine on their Mac Pro might wear off.
Those worried that those SATA drives cannot fulfill their high performance storage requirements should fret not, Steve Jobs has got your back, and wallet, covered. Each Mac Pro can have up to four 512GB solid state drives for £4,500 extra. Feh, a quick rummage behind the sofa should take care of that. Interestingly, the first SSD costs £120 less than the subsequent ones.
Forking over a few grand does mean that Jobs' Mob will deliver a Mac Pro for free, presumably carried by angels born especially for this particular delivery. You might scoff, but that was about the case with Apple's "20th Anniversary Mac" a machine so useless that you'll be hard pressed to find one, even on Ebay.
Apple's Mac Pro range is an embarrassment even for Apple, a company that prides itself on its high markups. While the Imac offers a good mix of style, value and functionality, the Mac Pro is little more than consumer grade hardware with a sprinkling of workstation-like parts, packaged up to attract the technologically vain user willing to pay far over the odds for the logo on the box.
We'd love to hear the most expensive configuration of a Mac Pro you can be bothered to create on the Apple Store. We'd also be curious to know what, short of a lobotomy, would be required for you to want to actually splash out the cash for such a machine. µ
Tags: Apple
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Lol, I have to read the TI comments more often
the ability to run OSX is a feature?
Any COMPARABLE AND ON THE MARKET PC is going to cost you $4,000-4,500 US dollars.
Is Apple expensive, yes. HOWEVER not nearly as much as you make them sound like that they are!
Macs can run Windows too. Along with running Mac OSX. So let's not forget that feature.
Correction:
I will be happy to assemble it and install an OS for AN ADDITIONAL FEE OF $2566.00!
Below is a Mac Pro configured as close as I can get it to what I use at home running Linux. I'm not using hexa-core XEONS. The price is from Apple's Canada online store.
* Two 2.66GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (12 cores)
* 12GB (6X2GB)
* Mac Pro RAID Card
* 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
* 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
* 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
* 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive
* ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB
* One 18x SuperDrive
* Magic Mouse
* Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) & User's Guide
$7,209.00
Notable:
- $160/each for the 1TB SATA drives.
- $840 for the RAID card, which "...supports Mac OS X only."
- A 24" monitor would cost $849.00.
- A second DVD-RW drive would cost $110.00.
---
Or you could run win7 or Linux on this (which includes a very pretty and reassuringly expensive Lian Li case!):
Tyan S7002G2NR-LE
2x Intel Xeon X5650
Corsair XMS3 HX3X12G1600C9 12GB DDR3 6x2GB
4x WD WD1001FALS
XFX Radeon HD5870 HD587XZNFV
3WARE 9650SE-8LPML
Samsung SH-S223C 22X DVD Writer
Logitech Wireless Laser Performance Mouse MX
Logitech K340 Wireless Keyboard
Lian LiPC-A71F
$4643 @ ncix.com.
Some assembly required. I will be happy to assemble it and install an OS for $2566.00!
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/12454-12454-296719-307907-4050865-3718645.html?jumpid=re_R295_prodexp/busproducts/computing/hp-z800-wkstn&psn=desktops_workstations/workstation
The and the web site is horrible, but I did manage to configure with same CPUs but different graphics cards.
You can save whole $100!!! The price was $4900.
I'm not kidding, I actually did order in an 8-core Mac Pro January 2009 edition (or whatever it was), with the 2x i7 920s. The reason was that they were the only "reasonably priced" 2-i7-processor systems at the time. We bought the 12GB of RAM from a third party vendor at far lower prices.
We ended up just wiping the computer of its OSX and installed Windows XP 64-bit on it, because it was being used for processing with applications that would not even bother with OSX.
But this is different. You can source and get 2-processor slot motherboards now. The 2.6Ghz doesn't matter, and is actually cheaper because you can overclock them to much higher ranges than you'd ever be allowed to on a Mac. One of the severe disadvantages of buying a Mac Pro, or any Mac for that matter, is that it is a pain to overclock the systems to get more out of your money. For example, on that 8-core Mac Pro, the i7s could be easily overclocked by 800Mhz, yielding far better performance for its use. It's just a shame that the other manufacturers didn't have anything else to buy.
I have to bow to your unmatched IT knowledge.... so I beg you, tell me: what use does one have for a 64 bit OS on a machine with only 3 Gb of RAM? Plus, since you're so in the biz.... where the heck did you pull the fact that a 64 bit OS comes at further expense? It has the same price in the consumer box, it has the same price when you get it from an OEM.
And even if dell SUCKS (hard), they at least included a 350 quid graphic card (with certified drivers), not the 100 quid card that's sitting in my machine!
Man, get a life.... or switch to Scientology (it's cheaper)
12-core for $4k... why not a dual 8-core G34 AMD for $2k. Horray for newegg!
$280 2x AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz 8 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3
$440 ASUS KGPE-D16 Dual Socket G34
16cores + board for under $1k
"We'd also be curious to know what, short of a lobotomy, would be required for you to want to actually splash out the cash for such a machine."
No lobotomy would work well enough, but if the machine came with free superpowers I'd buy one. I've always wanted to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Buy apple stock.
No.
Are you really trying to tell me BMW use the same engine, seats, doors etc as fiat?
It's one thing to compare apples to apples & another to compare dog shit to strawberry.
Besides, real men drive a Nissan Micra.
Anyways, there are always enough dumb bastards to buy a Nissan Micra at BMW prices.
I see this as a credit to apple, they know their customers well.
Buy apple stock.
...on a so-called Pro machine? And how much was that SSD? About 400$ more than New Egg and other online retailers. But should a fanbios opt to buy his SSD from another source, he will void the warranty so he better pay that extra 400 just to get a SSD with the sticker that has a little apple on it.
The other day I priced ECC memory and found Apple to be charging 4 times what the memory should cost.
I wonder what applications are available that can use all 12 cores? and especially on Apple. I'm guessing Premiere, Lightwave and a couple others. Needless overkill at an astronomical price.
"I seriously cannot believe anybody purchases BMW's cars. Who in their right minds pays 2-3 times more than they have to for anything? Especially a car, when hardware becomes obsolete so fast."
Why, we could all drive around in Fiat Unos. After all the average speed in London is only 30 mph and they both do the same task, right? Look, even my Uno has a Blaupunkt radio and aircon. OK, if I turn everyone on all at once, then the Uno slows down to a crawl but still it's got the same parts hasn't it? Seat - check. Doors - check. Engine - check. Yup, all there, just like the BMW.
I love all the flame war crap that comes up on any Inq post about Apple. It's hilarious.
On a more serious note though..
Ever since Apple dropped the Power Architecture and went with Intel chips, they haven't had any remarkable computers. Their performance numbers are the same as any regular desktop PC with the same hardware. Give me an Apple with a Power7 chip in it and maybe we'll talk again.
And thats with 2x 6-core E5640's, 12GB of RAM, a single 1TB HDD, a HD5870 with 2GB onboard and a copy of W7. Not forgetting the case, PSU, Mobo or ODD. Some people dont know where to shop.
Andy
Seriously, I just tried to pick a realistic system for myself using the Mac Pro and I tell you what. The cost was just over £13,000, I'm sorry for that kind of money I'd go to Ebuyer and build a whole home network of computers that would be faster than that.
Seriously, When it comes to computers the only thing that I would seriously consider a Mac for is Logic. However due to the ridiculous price of the machines I'll stick with Cubase.
You honestly have to give Steve Jobs and Apple credit.
"A fool and his money are soon parted"
http://www.thefoolandhismoney.com/05-the-fool-and-his-money/index.htm
When you can get people to spend 10x the cost for a last generation CPU and GPU, you know its one powerful company.
A 5770 GPU? iN THAT RIG THAT COSTS THOUSANDS? And some people think this system is priced right?
@ Gordon,
You can't go by Dell. They are basically the same as Apple. They overprice everything in a big way.
Build it out through Newegg or NCIX and see what kind of prices you come up with. Also, the vid card you chose is a real workstation card, not a 57xx series budget gamer card like in the Mac Pro. Big diff in price.
I've taken you up on your challenge and managed to completely spec out a Mac Pro for a mere £19,414.83 (incl. VAT). Hey, at least shipping is free!
Also, I completely agree on the "Superdrive" comment - £80 for a bog-standard DVD writer is a tad expensive. How dare Apple rip us off with those drives! If I ever found out they did that with other stuff, I'd be furious!
This is just getting ridiculous.
For the cost of one 12 core Mac Pro, you could build like three i7/Win7 based systems, and any of the three would be better than this Mac Pro.
I seriously cannot believe anybody purchases Apple's computers. Who in their right minds pays 2-3 times more than they have to for anything? Especially a computer, when hardware becomes obsolete so fast.
Oh, and a MASSIVE lol @ the part of the article which states:
"Each Mac Pro can have up to four 512GB solid state drives for £4,500 extra. Feh, a quick rummage behind the sofa should take care of that. Interestingly, the first SSD costs £120 less than the subsequent ones"
ROFLMAO!!
Oh Apple, how you love to FAIL.
Dell Precision Desktop T7500 workstation:
PROCESSOR One Intel Xeon X5650(2.66GHz,6.4GT/s,12MB,6C)-Memory runs at 1333MHz
OPERATING SYSTEM English Genuine Windows 7 Professional (32Bit OS) Recovery DVD included
MICROSOFT SOFTWARE Microsoft Office Starter 2010 ( Excel Starter 2010, Word Starter 2010)
SECURITY SOFTWARE English Trend Micro Internet Security(15 month subscription) Antivirus Software
BASE Standard Base Mini-Tower (Vertical orientation)(Westmere)
MONITOR 20in E2009W UK/Irish Black WIDESCREEN Value Flat Panel (1680X1050)TCO99 DVI-D
KEYBOARD UK/Irish (QWERTY) Dell Standard Quietkey USB Keyboard Black
MOUSE Dell Optical (Not Wireless), Scroll USB (3 buttons scroll) Black Mouse
HARD DRIVE 1TB (7200 RPM) SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache
MEMORY 3GB DDR3 1333MHz ECC-UDIMM (3x1GB)
OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD-ROM Drive and 16X DVD+/-RW Drive with Roxio and PowerDVD Software included
SYSTEM RECOVERY Roxio Creator 10.3 Media
GRAPHICS CARD 768MB PCIe x16 NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 (2xDP+DVI or DP+2xDVI or DP+DVI+VGA) Graphics Card
SOUND CARDS Creative SoundBlaster X-fi Titanium Sound card
HDD CONFIGURATION C1 All SATA Hard Drives, NON-RAID for 1 Hard Drive
SYSTEM RECOVERY Dell Backup and Recovery Manager for Windows® 7
ADAPTER DisplayPort to DVI (dual link)
SYSTEM MEDIA Precision T7500 Diagnostics and Drivers edit
SUPPORT SERVICES 3Yr Basic Warranty - NBD Included - No Upgrade Selected
WINDOWS LIVE Windows Live
Total cost, including VAT, £3,253.58
Okay, that includes a "value" monitor, but said monitor would probably be dirt cheap.
Additionally, it comes with a 32 bit version of Windows! If you want to actually use the processor to its fullest, you have to pay extra for a 64 bit version!
And this is for a machine with ONE Weremere 6 core Xeon, the Mac Pro has 2. Those cost 800 quid a pop, by the way, I checked.
And the 1TB drive you think is so cheap? Dell added nearly 60 quid, excluding VAT, to the build cost for it.
Okay, the criticism re the graphics card is fair, but some basic research, something which journalists are actually supposed to do as part of their job, reveals that the package as a whole is running at pretty much the going rate for a machine of this class.
Also, did you dismantle a Mac Pro to check the motherboard, PSU, chassis construction, etc and confirm that they really are "consumer grade"?
1) Learn the difference between "I can't afford it" and "It's too expensive". In the workstation world machines are expensive. The Mac Pro runs at pretty much par for the course price wise, as 30 minutes of research reveals. Which brings us to...
2) Research stuff before you publish it! The only embarrassment around here is your third rate blogging posing as journalism. If you want to have a go at Apple? Fine, just stick with the standard crowing over Antennegate, they frankly deserve all the shit they get for that one. Let the real journalists assess the value for money the Mac Pro represents.
I just made up an equivelant rig to the Mac Pro described at £2000 on an online PC hardware vendor. All the parts (including 3 individual sticks of 1GB because no-one does tri-channel 1GB kits) with windows 7 cost £1637.68!
Of course that's not including postage which will more than likely be over £400 because there's no way a Mac could be less cost effective than a PC.