E5 Xeons already shipping?

[Chris Harlan]

[Andrew Richards] “Maybe the iPad 3 isn’t the only new hotness coming out of Cupertino next week.
“

Dude! That would be good news.

[Andrew Richards]

Of course, if the cynics are correct and Apple has indeed given up on the Mac Pro, new Xeons could just be the final nail in the coffin.

Best,
Andy

[Craig Seeman]

[Andrew Richards] “final nail in the coffin.”

So it’ll be a coffin shaped MacPro?

They’re going to have to come out with some dongle to sell those Thunderbolt Monitors to.

[Andrew Richards]

I’m not one of those cynics. That Thunderbolt Display argument is the best evidence we have in favor of something more than a Mac mini.

The suspense for me is not if there will be a new Mac Pro, but rather what it will look like. We both want roughly the same redesign on the case.

[Phil Hoppes]

Really? I really do love Mac. My MBP is simply the best laptop I’ve ever owned bar none. I’ve jacked the memory to 16gb and thanks to MacSales added a second internal HD for plenty of space and with Bootcamp it’s the best Windows 7 laptop you can get to boot. That being said, my home built Win7 Desktop that I use for the majority of my work, at the time I built it and compared it to what was available to getting a MacPro was 20% faster and 2.5x cheaper. Mac Pro’s are simply crazy in price especially for what you get. Now, in general on spec for spec comparisons of an iMac to a HP or Dell machine, I continually show nay sayers, that Apple hardware is really not that much more expensive …… but in the case of MacPro’s these boxes are simply way stupid overpriced.

I’m a cynic. I’ll eat the crow if a new one comes out but I think Apple is going to push iMac’s and Air’s. The MacBook is gone and should the rumor be true, MBP’s are moving to the Air form factor. From a business perspective and marketing perspective I think it is brilliant. Par down the lines. Make a few things and make them really well. Spread your inventory across as many product lines as possible to maximize your purchasing power and reduce your costs as low as possible. A MacPro line shoe horned in between iMac’s and Air’s make no sense to me…. but what do I know.

[Ben Holmes]

Comparing the price of high-end workstations to Mac Pros the price difference is never what is suggested – of course you can buy and spec something a lot cheaper.

As there are no Mac Pros out with even an i7 chip, you can’t make price comparisons.

Given the trend on pricing, I would expect a new model to encompass a (lower starting) wider price range, making it more volume product, with a smaller form factor, or a rack mount pro beast, or both.

If there is a new model. 50/50 on that.

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[Phil Hoppes]

I beg to differ. A MacPro is simply a motherboard with 2 Xenon CPU’s, Ram, Ports, Slots, HD’s an a power supply. This is not rocket science. Tyan, Asus and SuperMicro all make Xenon motherboard that are very high quality. Apple limits the speed they run their Xenon CPU’s at as they don’t want hot boxes with noisy fans. Thats fine. My machine has faster Xenon CPU’s 24Gb of ram, SSD drives and a 1Kw power supply. It runs rings around any MacPro at a significantly lower price.

My point on iMacs is that on that line, I feel, and rightly so because I’ve done the price point comparison numerous times, Apple is actually quite competitive. On MacPro’s they are out to lunch, even compared to an HP or Dell workstation of equal specs.

For my Mac Video work it’s all exclusively my MBP and FCPX and now with 2 internal HD’s that setup is very, very sweet and runs extremely fast. My other work is all 3D CGI and there it’s all about threads and CPU speed. The more threads I can get for the fewer dollars is what I need. I can get a workstation AND a server for the price of one Mac Pro.

[Andrew Richards]

[Phil Hoppes] “On MacPro’s they are out to lunch, even compared to an HP or Dell workstation of equal specs.”

This is simply untrue. HP and Dell offer specs you can’t get on a Mac Pro (GPU’s particularly!), but similarly spec’d systems are similarly priced (as of this post):

HP Z800 = $3,443
Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5645 (8 cores, HT, 12MB L3)
6GB (6X1GB) DDR3-1333 ECC RAM
1TB 7200-rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
ATI FirePro V4800 1GB
One 16x DVD-RW

Dell Precision T7500 = $3,409
Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5645 (8 cores, HT, 12MB L3)
6GB (3X2GB) DDR3-1333 ECC RAM
1TB 7200-rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
ATI FirePro V4800 1GB
One 16x DVD-RW

Apple Mac Pro = $3,499
Two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5620 (8 cores, HT, 12MB L3)
6GB (6X1GB) DDR3-1066 ECC RAM
1TB 7200-rpm SATA 3Gb/s hard drive
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB
One 18x DVD-RW

Best,
Andy

[Craig Seeman]

As Andrew shows, Xeon based system are similarly priced across computer manufacturers. There’s some value added based on case design, expandability, etc.

Given the profit on the systems Apple would want, they’re most likely to focus on the value added to such system. They may also focus on trying to hit a wider audience which is why I’d agree with Ben.

Apple has been very successful at moving things into the mass market. Their target isn’t “consumer” so much as multipurpose. They’ve taken a product categories that were generally small (tablets, ultraportables) and grew them tremendously. I can’t help but think another big surprise will be how to make Xeon based systems more desirable to a wider market.

There’s no way an Xeon based system is going to be an iPad or even a MacBookPro but a system that can range from a rack mountable server to a high end workstation would move in that direction. I think Thunderbolt will be key to that. The ability to move peripherals between laptop and desktop, to be centralized on a network as needed, will be part of the “value added” in the new MacPro IMHO.

[Phil Hoppes]

[Craig Seeman] “Their target isn’t “consumer” so much as multipurpose.”

You can’t be serious? Ok, I stand corrected on the current price quote but I did do a comparison when the last update to MacPros came out and at that time there was a considerable difference especially when you factor that from HP and Dell both offered 3.3Ghz machines and Apple won’t and your graphics card selection is MUCH wider from HP or Dell. That being said, I’m a “build it myself” person when it comes to Windows machines so I really don’t care what HP and Dell offer I can pretty much make anything substantially better and substantially cheaper.

… but back to your “…target isn’t “consumer”…” Let’s just break down their revenue here. Ok… 109 Billion for last years revenue of which 108.8 Billion could be classified as consumer and being very gracious, 200Million was MacPros which I would not call consumer.

No…. I really think Apple is a consumer company.