Oh my god. If I have to tolerate months of Mac Pro speculation on the front page before they're released, I think I might go mental.<p>I understand why people like to speculate. It can be fun. But I don't understand so much why people like to publish their speculation, and even less why people would upvote it.
I stopped building and overclocking systems many years ago. Too old for that shit, etc etc. But the funny things is...<p>CPU improvements have been so stagnant on the high end. Suddenly getting a 40% clock increase out of a chip isn't just a way to save money, it gets you the equivalent of a multiple generation leap.<p>A friend has a mid-range ($300 I think) Intel chip, now approaching 3 years old, but running at 4.5 GHz and it is STILL notably faster than even the most expensive Haswell part sold right now. Particularly in single threaded it crushes. Those 10% efficiency improvements each chip rev are nice, but they can't come close to a massive clock speed jump like that.<p>SO weirdly enough now I'm considering overclocking a self-built system because you can't just wait a year and buy a regular system that is as fast anymore.
What exactly are people doing with these Mac Books that could not be achieved on a $1500-1800 PC?<p>If you work for a film studio, then I can understand blowing 3 grand on a machine. But most folks I know are buying these to run photoshop and illustrator, then claiming that a PC simply would not do. My POS laptop runs these programs fine, and my $750 new PC box runs them like lightning.
Last thanksgiving I bought a Dell T5600 for lesser than the retail price of the two 8 core Xeons that were in it. Its very likely that OEM's get very different pricing from Intel as compared to retail.
This is exactly the price point they should be at. The majority of people buying these desktops are professionals and they are willing to pay big prices for performance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the new Mac Pro only allowed 115W TDP CPUs - they could provide 4/6/8/10/12 core models all under that speed.<p>I'm willing to bet that Apple won't even bother with the 4-core models, unless they want to hit a very low price point.<p>On the opposite, insanity side of things, I could easily see a >$10k Mac Pro with 12 cores, 128GB of RAM, 4TB of SSD, and 12GB of VRAM.
I'm pretty sure Intel gives Apple a huge discount vs. the retail prices that AnandTech posted.<p>Is it newsworthy that Mac Pros will be expensive? They have <i>always</i> been >$1000 more expensive than a comparable PC.<p>People who care about the price difference will run a Hackintosh. If you have more money than sense (or time, patience, etc) then the Mac Pro is a pretty sweet machine.
Does it matter? This Marco guy will buy anything with an Apple logo anyway - and sprout tweetable one-liners about how good and revolutionary said products are. I don't see why his articles are cross-posted here anyway, it is just fanboyism and praise. Nothing worth discussing. Here come the downvotes.