Was having a play on the apple site the other day and had a look at the computers that cost the same as a house deposit. It got me wondering about who is the target market for these computers? Not in a ‘this is a ridiculous object why does it exist’ way, more just a realisation that I don’t really know what people would want so much power on their desktop for and I’m curious. I’m also curious as to why folk wouldn’t just rent time on a big fast computer somewhere else?

TV/MOVIE SFX

It would be amazing for editing ppt slides, for sure…

Yeah, serious movie and music folks would use a lot of the power I think.

Specced a Mac Pro for myself, 28 core processor, 1.5TB of RAM etc etc – with the new screen and fancy wheels the total was around $59K. Yowsers!

You think STW would run nicely on that?

Pro visual and audio people. Also amateurs with disposable income (just like bikes on here)

You think STW would run nicely on that?

Fan would still kick in when the adds loaded.

Machine Learning eats memory and CPU (and GPU) for brunch!

Top sales people 😉

Money well spent?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/mac-pro-teardown-finds-a-largely-traditional-desktop-inside/

I’m also curious as to why folk wouldn’t just rent time on a big fast computer somewhere else?

Because time is money, why would you travel to use a computer when you can own one yourself? Or you just lease it knowing that the hourly charge for an edit or grading suite in soho means it’s first 2 hours of the week pays for the machine.

Last time I upgraded computers I worked out I gained nearly a day over 7 days work in save times and backup/read/write time working purely on fast ssd’s.

A friend of mine is high up in the movie versioning, subtitling and delivery world. Again time is money and they will probably be buying several for particular jobs, they also run high end pc’s for specific tasks.
I’m sure there are other areas outside film/tv/motion/imaging that will see some macpro sales

I’m also curious as to why folk wouldn’t just rent time on a big fast computer somewhere else?

Because time is money, why would you travel to use a computer when you can own one yourself?

I assume the original suggestion is to use a similarly specified machine in the cloud, where you only pay when it’s actually running. No travelling needed

Some of them will also be purchased for use as servers

This is the first time In 6 years apple have made rack mountable hardware that’s even close to suitable for running Mac OS server as anything other than a hobby

They used to make xserves (and then rack kits for the old Mac Pro) on which there was a loyal user base of people running OSX server (usually for ease of use or OSX specific features).

Apple flicked them the Vs when they cancelled the xserve line and then flicked them the Vs again with the last Mac Pro. ( I’ve also read that the quality of Mac OS server has also gone down hill)

Most of them have moved over to BSD,Linux or Windows but Some of those users will be gluttons for punishment with to much money spare in the IT budget and probably got and buy some of these.

Definitely for video editing. I can’t see how cloud works for that (but happy to be informed) – surely shuttling the files around is an insurmountable bottleneck (plus expensive).

As someone who does a lot of traditional high-performance computing and deep learning, I’m not the target market for the MacPro. That’s despite using Macs for about 15 years.

As a kind of answer to who would need that much computer and also to why not rent a cloud machine.
I’m using a PC with one or two intel Xeon 3.1GHz processors (all I can see is 40 cores), 128Gb of ram and a Nvidia quadro k4200 with 4Gb ram.
Making silly CG FX for film and TV.
It’s a Dell machine. I don’t think the company will ever pay the Apple premium.
I wouldn’t have fun trying to use some cloud machine for graphics heavy programmes.
Some of the other offices don’t have a machine under the desk like ours, they have some beefy rack mounted things and a few people connect to each from a thin client machine. They are on premesis things so not as laggy as a cloud provided thing, but going by the support tickets I see, not as nice as a machine under your desk.

Video and sound people. Projection mapping. Theatre also spends big then runs them for 15 years as no money in between!!

A friend of mine has a PC he uses for his work which he is allowed to do at home one day a week. He can just about do his job at home with his own PC which has this graphics card in it. His own machine is probably about £8-9k, his work machine is much more powerful.
He creates 3D renders for things like catalogues and stuff. You know those pictures of kitchens in B and Q brochures? They aren’t real kitchens, he actually created them all in a 3D digital environment.

Another friend does computer animated walkthrough videos for architecture projects of all sizes.
He has 7 PCs boxes running in his home office (his own business) 100% of the time rendering videos but they can sometimes take days to render full videos (especially in 4k) so if a client has a rush job he can send it out to a render farm online who (last time I asked) might charge £1-2k for rendering the video overnight for him but he can pass that onto the client. His showreel is here https://www.sourcevisualisation.com/showreel

Home PC users have no idea how much computing power some people need to do what they do – it’s insane. My friends have nothing on film and tv stuff but they alone have spent tens of thousands on kit.

I’m also curious as to why folk wouldn’t just rent time on a big fast computer somewhere else?

Because there are too many things that can go wrong, and it’s highly unlikely anyone could get a pipe that’s fast enough.
An ISDN line might be fast enough, but we’re talking multiple Tb of storage that someone else controls.
One thing, the sort of costs people are raising their eyebrows about are for a full-fat build, absolutely maxed-out RAM, etc, but it doesn’t have to go that far, which is the beauty of a modular machine.
Similar comments were made about the Pro monitor for the Mac Pro, at £5000, but that’s designed to be an alternative to professional monitors made by Sony and Flanders Scientific that cost £30,000.
It’s worth pointing out that back around 1995 I was using a Mac Tower with a 21” monitor that cost north of £5000 for the combination, and the monitor had to go in the skip five years later after it went on the fritz and the company didn’t support it any more. I couldn’t even find a company who would recycle it!
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/apple-pro-display-xdr-preview/

Some STW users have no idea how much computing power some people need to do what they do – it’s insane.

FTFY.

Similar to the posts up there, an old school friend of mine does those animations you see on huge screens at genevea motor show and car launches (and other similar displays) he doesn’t use a Mac but I know his video cards are silly money, and he still has to wait for stuff to render.

But like a lot of these high end usages the daily cost is actually quite small compared to income. And while you might bill by the hour it’s not about saving your client money by using faster kit, it’s about doing more work for other clients 🙂

Thanks for the replies everyone. It hadn’t occurred to me just how many folk would be needing to do loads of 3D rendering and stuff. Had kind of assumed it was just the people making StarWar movies. Every day is a school day!

According to this guy, if you are shooting 8k video or 150 megapixel stills, it makes quite a difference. Probably not so noticeable for editing gopro clips then!
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-the-mac-pro-has-revolutionized-video-editing/

Right, the top spec Mac Pro is entirely for the visual professionals: the money is almost entirely spent of vast amounts of RAM, storage, and graphic processing power.

People who buy consumer-grade hardware have no idea how expensive pro-grade hardware is. I’ve a moderately powerfuly machine under my desk for work (software engineer), it was £9K, and it doesn’t even *have* a graphics card. The build cluster in the office was just refreshed, 10+ machines which were over £20K *each*.

The other point to note is that as replacement assets of a business they are deductible against tax so it’s not such a big deal for some companies.

The Same people who buy workstations from Dell and HP (creative professionals working in film, FX and music) which can easily be spec’d in excess of £70K Apple is not unique in creating high-end workstations it’s just that when they do it people go **** ME have you seen the price of the Mac, when HP and Dell do it the industry doesn’t blink.

Quite expensive but sometimes you need that power. A friend runs a 5000+ Teraflop machine.

What mickyfinn said. Just for fun I randomly picked a high spec Mac Pro and a somewhat similar Dell workstation. Vast amounts of everything but wasn’t maxxed out, both were within £1000 of £38k.

What kinda music production needs this type of power?

Working in TV I had 4 HP Z840 workstations at my desk. Not so much a house deposit, but the average value of 3-bed house in quite a lot of the country!

Basically you’re into the realms where you don’t just want ‘fast’ but also accurate and reliable. For example we were using them to record 4x HD camera streams on each machine. A £300 DVR can do that. But can a £300 DVR do that with uncompressed footage, save it to two different drives, in two different formats (so 4 recordings of each stream, 16 in total) without ever having a glitch? And that was just HD, at 4k they would only do 2 cameras per PC!

I work in a cancer research lab, we generate Terabytes of data from sequencing tumour dna

The bioinformaticians in the lab do some heavy mathematics, we run most stuff on big clusters but they all use macs, mostly coz they like macs

The bioinformaticians in the lab do some heavy mathematics

Back when I did science all the heavy maths folks just put their stuff in a queue on some giant computer the size of Sunderland. I had been working under the assumption that’s what everyone did. Turns out I was wrong.

Oh, and I hadn’t even considered the notion that other computer-makers would also sell boxes that cost similar amounts. Kind of want one now*.

Subsidiary question – one of the reasons people like macs is that the hardware and OS are supposed to be designed for each other (in contrast with windows/linux machines that have to cater for a broader mix of components). Would this be the case for super-duper pro machines like these?

*I’ve got some fairly big excel files. Hundreds of cells.

Check out the price of infaband network cards…

Most of the people doing high end calcs used whatever platform they preferred are.most productive with (window Mac Linux) but the calculations or rendering where done on a some sort on *inx based group of PC’s. Usually Linux.

I doubt the price difference is proportionaly as much on these super high end machines as the cost is pure hardware.