The only other data point I have is that a $1,000 iPhone XS cost about $300 to make.
I think the real answer will be some fraction of whatever the nicest knockoff ends up charging. Granted, that won’t have to factor in Apple’s engineering time.
Your angst seems misplaced. No argument about the Ryzen, but have you priced Xeon workstations from other vendors? List price for Dell’s 7820 workstation with an 8 core Xeon and a 256GB SSD (which is the stock SSD size) is $8222, available on sale for the low low price of $5747.
That’s just the state of the Xeon + ECC Workstation market. AMD has driven the prosumer market ever closer (and Intel has been forced to follow) but it doesn’t seem to have affected workstation prices much… yet.
What Internet complainers always overlook, and this isn’t just about Apple, is that a company is not trying to sell its product to everyone in the world.
Apple knows that the price of the Mac Pro means they are limiting the market. They know that if someone is looking for the cheapest-possible solution for their audio/video/photography project then they are not going to spend $50k. They know that you can build an acceptable PC that offers acceptable performance for everything that a Mac Pro can do for much, much less.
But there’s a reason why $200k cars exist. There’s a reason why million-dollar boats exist and homes that cost hundreds of millions of dollars exist. Yes, you can buy a $20k car. You can buy a $10k boat and a $70k house. If you are the customer for those things then you are definitely not a customer for the ones that cost so much more.
Maybe Apple has made a gigantic mistake and built a product that nobody wants. It has happened before. The $10k Apple Watch was a dumb idea to be sure.
But it’s clear here the mandate for the Mac Pro team: build a Mac Pro that offers the best-possible solution for our target market regardless of price. It needs to be both high performance and stylish, and should not have any equivalent that runs Windows.
None of us, nor anyone who frequents the PC Master Race subreddit, have any clue whether this is actually too expensive for the people Apple wants to purchase it. We’re thinking like consumers and not the guy at a record label mixing Taylor Swift’s next album, or the color grading specialist at Jerry Bruckheimer’s production company working on movies with $250 million budgets.
What I’m pretty sure of is that by next year, all of the edit bays at Skywalker Sound, for example, will probably have one of these Mac Pros in them.
So think of the Mac Pro and that dumb expensive monitor as supercars. You’re not in the market to buy one, but there’s someone out there who is. Probably.
To some extent, yes. But the real problems they’re facing with the mac are the same as with iPhones.
They have a solid base of loyal customers, but that base is not expanding over time. Everybody in the developed world already has a cellphone; the only way to expand your userbase is to make cheap products for less wealthy markets. Android people stick with android and iPhone people stick with iPhone. Same with laptops.
These devices last longer. Everybody used to replace their cellphone every 1-2 years, now it’s 3-4. Laptops easily last 5 years, assuming their keyboards don’t crap out.
Apple is a public company, so they need to show increasing revenue. How do they do that? Two approaches.
Focus on services. Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud storage, cuts from Apple Pay, the Apple credit card, etc.
Charge more money. Make more expensive, premium products, which can be used to increase margins.
From what I understand, the expensive monitor and stand are targeted at professional editors, who usually are using monitors that cost $30k+. In those editing environments, it evidently is common to swap out monitors to see how the film looks on a variety of screens. The magnet in the stand is supposed to allow for easy monitor swapping in that type of environment. It also puts a high quality monitor into a more reasonable price range. So… no, those aren’t really meant for your average consumer.
The press go bonkers over anything Apple. I’m not sure whether Apple really tried to hype the monitor as a consumer device, but it was somewhat of a marketing fail (I guess?) that it’s being spun as something it wasn’t intended to be.
The real disconnect there is that this Mac Pro, like EVERY Mac Pro before it, isn’t what most consumers actually want to buy. What we actually want is a well-built mid-tower PC with a ton of ports and PCI-e expansion slots, running standard consumer CPUs like AMD Ryzen or Intel core, priced at a reasonable 35% premium over Dell and HP.
That’s the xMac. But Apple doesn’t want to make it.
That said, it’s 2019 now. Laptops are fast as balls for everything but gaming. If you want to game you aren’t running MacOS anyway, and if you’re just gonna gosh-dark insist, you can get an eGPU box for a $300 premium.
They’re selling their users more devices, too. Going from a phone every year to a phone, watch and Airpods, or to phone/TV/HomePod, or whatever, keeps them closer to the old one upgrade per user per year range just from hardware.
Also, they pull in more Android users than vice versa, but that’s a much slower growth rate, and unfortunately slow growth is unacceptable even if it has long-term benefits.
Sorry, I had that wrong. I was thinking of Apple’s retention rate, which is highest but of course a lot of people who abandon Samsung move to Pixel, etc.
If this trade war continues Apple will end up only being a company for the ultra rich. 25% or greater additional tax on all their pricey goods? Criminy. And that’s the best case scenario if China doesn’t cut the legs out from under us with rare earth minerals.
