two days ago, Apple released its Mac Pro and the Pro Display XDR screen. The new tower format computer from the Californian firm displays muscular configurations and is intended for very special professional activities. Its first price is 6,500 euros, and in maximum configuration,as seen there, it rises to around 62,000 euros, which is impressive for the general public who are not used to seeing such prices, at Apple on the one hand, and in the world of computing more generally.
© Dell
On the other hand, professionals in virtual reality, cinema, video editing, post-production, or even computer servers are really not surprised by the price of the power monster offered by Tim Cook and his engineers, and with good reason. ! Other manufacturers of these computers called workstations offer configurations costing several tens of thousands of dollars. We therefore wanted to see if Apple's Mac Pro is more expensive than the competition, with identical or almost identical configuration. To the question “Is the Mac Pro too expensive?”, here is the beginning of an answer:
The maximum configuration of the Apple Mac Pro
We use the key components of the most powerful Mac Pro configuration as a benchmark:
- 2.5 GHz Intel Xeon W processor, 28 physical cores, 56 logical cores, with Turbo Boost up to 4.4 GHz and 66.5 MB cache
- 4TB SSD storage
- 1.5 TB of 2933 MHz RAM
- Dual AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics card with 32 GB of memory each
Total price:61 939 euros.
What does Dell offer for business?
Without being able to copy the configuration of the Mac Pro seen above component by component, we tried to align ourselves with the characteristics of each of them at Dell, a reference for computers intended for professionals.In the configurator, we therefore designed a machine as close as possible to the apple machine. The computer thus obtained is equipped in particular with the following components:
- Intel Xeon Platinum 8280M processor at 2.7 GHz, 28 physical cores, 56 logical cores, with Turbo Boost up to 4 GHz and 38 MB cache
- 4x 1TB PCIe M.2 SSDs, for 4TB of storage
- 1.5 TB of 2666 MHz RAM
- Dual NVIDIA Quadro GV100 NVLink graphics cards with 32 GB of memory each
We arrive at a price of 114,000 euros, on which Dell applies a reduction of approximately 40,000 euros, to obtain the final price of74 000 euros.
© iPhon.fr
And at HP, another big competitor for the Mac Pro?
Like Dell, Hewlett-Packard is also a recognized workstation reseller in the business world. Here is the reference to the highest price that we could find, on the American siteCompsource.com. This is a setup for HP Z4 G4 computer. Here are its notable features:
- Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 processor at 2.1 GHz, 24 physical cores, 48 logical cores, with Turbo Boost up to 3.7 GHz and 33 MB cache
- 256 GB of RAM
- Stockage HDD de 6 To
- Nvidia Quadro graphics card, model not specified
The machine is sold for around 42,000 dollars, or almost 38,000 euros. Except that the processor is much less powerful than that of the Mac Pro, not to mention the amount of RAM, also well below. 1,500 GB of RAM is very expensive in all the configurators we tested, easily raising the price from +10,000 to +20,000 dollars. We would therefore easily get closer to Apple's 60,000 euros here with a similar amount of memory and processor power.
© HP
What does Titan Computer say, builder of custom workstations?
We tried to configure a machine similar to the Mac Pro at the AmericanTitan Computer, specialist in PCs for professionals. Here are the characteristics of the computer sticking as closely as possible to the reference:
- 3.3 GHz Intel Xeon Platinum W-3235 processor, 12 physical cores, 24 logical cores, with Turbo Boost up to 4.4 GHz and 19.25 MB cache
- 4TB SSD storage
- 1.5 TB of RAM
- Dual Quadro GV 100 32 GB graphics cards with 32 GB of memory each
Here again, we only reach 50,000 dollars, far from the 63,000 euros of the Mac Pro. But it should be noted that the processor of the Titan Computer machine is well below what Apple offers, both in terms of number of cores and cache memory. Modeling the processor from the top configuration of the Mac Pro could easily increase the bill by $10,000.
Thus, the price would once again approach that of the most expensive Apple computer.
A competitive Mac Pro?
It's difficult to conclude on the price of the Mac Pro without being able to stick to the component ready for the most expensive configuration offered by Apple. All the same, our comparison allows you to have an idea of the positioning of the machine compared to different competitors.
And we can see it clearly, particularly against Dell and HP, the most muscular Mac Pro remains within the market prices with its very high-end components. We cannot really say that Apple's new beast is more expensive than other workstations of equivalent power, even if all this deserves even more in-depth investigations.
In any case, this is a good way to realize that the Mac Pro is definitely not a machine intended for the general public, as a 13-inch MacBook Pro can be, for example. Apple's new computer plays in another category, that of professionals who are used to using machines costing 5 figures.
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By : Keleops AG
Editor-in-chief for iPhon.fr. Pierre is like Indiana Jones, looking for the lost iOS trick. Also a long-time Mac user, Apple devices hold no secrets for him. Contact: pierre[a]iphon.fr.
