Posted on 06/05/2017 12:38:58 PM PDT by Swordmaker
It does for lots of high-end 4K video editors. That's it's purpose.
The Lisa was targeted to office work. . . and then priced out of that market by Apple management. It did not do well. Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh development and had management overprice that as well. His target price was $1695 but Management decided it had to sell for $2499. That made the sales numbers not meet projections.
NeXT sold more units than the Lisa. . . and then changed focus to software.
What the people who yell about the over priced Mac don't tell you is that IBM-PCs of the period were selling with one floppy and a green screen monitor for $2795. Adding a 10MB hard drive to either cost about $1295. So it was pretty much of a wash when looking at pricing.
Apple devices are fully integrated into the cloud. . . more so than most others. iOS 11, and macOS.13 High Sierra will move even more function sharing through the cloud between devices. Make a change on one device it is mirrored on all of your devices. Files are shared. iOS 11 will now have files and folders that are the same as on the Mac. . . and changes there are echoed on the Mac and iCloud.
As I recall, if I'm recalling correctly, Apple manufactured 100,000 Lisa units but the majority wound up in an undisclosed landfill in Nevada and Apple took a major loss on those unsold units.
Correction, it’s a late 2009. I bought the 2007 new, with Applecare, but had a hardware issue so they gave me a new machine. It had 2gb of ram which I upgraded to 8gb to give Sierra some more comfort room when it came out. Still going strong now but with some minor hardware quirks. I’ll be upgrading to a newer model this year.
I recall that as well. Most were buried, brand new machines and parts. The reason first-year Lisa machines fetch so much from collectors is that most users upgraded their early Lisa machines to later model versions via an Apple upgrade offer. The early ones had dual slots for 5-1/4 inch floppies. Apple buried all the early Lisa dual-slot face plates along with their remaining inventory. I have two Lisa machines, one of which is an early model that was upgraded (unfortunately). I forgot where, but I was somewhere where a guy was showing us a dual-slot cover and said he wouldn't take less than $2500 for it (probably much more now). I don't know how many Lisa units remain, very few, and of those very few are operational.
Why wouldn’t I go for a Surface Pro? It has a sane aspect ratio.
And assuming it runs Linux decently, very important!
P. T. Barnum was right...
sounds great... oh to have the mad $$ to spend!
wonder if it has a CD /DVD/ Blu Ray capability.. doubtful Blu Ray but having the CD is good.
My Imac24 is still good. I got the last model of MacPro that did discs for that reason. Still happy with it and using it now.
Love my mac products. Have the first iPad that came out & still works. Updated my phone to a 7 this winter.
Thanks for pings and updates sir!
The Surface Studio features a 3:2 aspect ratio — 4500x3000 (192dpi).
But it runs Windows.
Comparable "loaded" PC built from similar components:
This is a comparison of the top end components anticipating what similar top end fully action-packed components would be in a loaded iMac Pro. I'm sure that screamer pro specs will bring both PC and Apple systems around the $10k mark.
But thank you.
... and side note, I recollect the Late 2015 MacBook Pro Retina was integrated with OEM components surpassing PC notebook manufacturers' system component capabilities at a price ~$200 less than what Dell, Samsung, ASUS, HP, and Lenovo top end notebooks offered. That was a time where professional level dev and engineers bought the r-MacBook Pro to run MS Windows.
You should refactor for a Xeon, not an i7 Extreme. Though there's no selectable tech specs in the Apple Store for the iMac Pro models, there is an 8-core Xeon presently available that retails for $2900. Account for an Intel price drop on this CPU to split your i7 estimate against mine and we're looking at $2000, not $1080.
As for the AMD Vega Frontier price point, we'll have to wait until SIGGRAPH 2017 for the details. End of next month.
You are comparing Apples to oranges. The Surface Pro is a laptop made with laptop components. This is a Workstation class machine utilizing Workstation class parts.
Just comparing a 16:9 aspect ratios gets you nowhere near the power of the iMac Pro which is not available in the Surface Pro line. First of all the iMac Pro runs on a minimum of 8 core Xeon processors using ECC memory. You are not going to find that kind of processing power or error correcting RAM on a laptop. There is no way you could even cool those class of components in a laptop form factor.
The screen resolution of the Surface Pro 4 is a mere 2736 x 1824.
The screen resolution of the Apple iMac Pro 5K is 5120‑by‑2880
There are almost THREE times the pixels on the iMac Pro than on the Surface Pro 4.
Why run worry about running Linux on a limited PC when the iMac Pro runs Unix™ natively. . . and macOS, OS X, Windows, MS-DOS, various flavors of Linux, THEOS, AmigaOS, and a host of others.
Good. That bumps you down the road another two years on the upgrade cycle before you will really have to retire that computer due to security issues.
No need. If you need one, external optical drives, either DVD or Bluray, are only about $30. Apple doesn't want to force people to pay to have a useless, idle optical drive they'll never use just because less than 1% of Mac users might need one. It's bettering cheaper to have an external peripheral available for those who need one. it's also more profitable for Apple.
No, Svartalfiar, he is trying to build a PC comparable to the HIGH END iMac Pro using PC components, not a low end iMac Pro. YOU are the one who is making the false comparison. Here's part of the reason why your component list is wrong:
So, you are trying to build a DESKTOP computer, not a WORKSTATION. There is a huge difference in the quality of the machines. You demonstrate your ignorance in your statement about the monitors when you say: "I don't understand why people would buy that much resolution in such a small screen, it's useless" because the people who are going to be working on these workstations are going to be working on video and graphic in real-time, real resolutions. That means they NEED the pixels, not a mere representation provided by a smaller screen simulating the full image or video. They also need the full gamut of colors that the iMac can produce. . . but that cannot be produced by that $1500 monitor that The KG9 Kid's selected for his build.
Even so, your build comes to a total of $4750 before you add in case, power supply, keyboard, mouse, operating system, software suite, miscellaneous parts, labor, warranty, overhead, etc. What in hell have you proved?
You've proved that Apple can build and sell a $4995 WORKSTATION CLASS computer and make a profit for less than what it costs a dilettante amateur to build his own desktop class computer, which still doesn't have the same power or capabilities from off-the-shelf parts, even counting all the free labor the dilettante puts into building his machine. I've shown this time and time again to these home-brew PC builders.
Svartalfiar fails to grasp that there is a vast difference between a consumer grade computer that he can build out of the parts that he has priced out (and as he claims he can find even cheaper versions to include to get the price down and also lower performance) and a professional grade workstation computer, one which are seldom built from the ground up but are most often bought with support contracts from major computer manufacturing companies, which are willing to stand behind their reliability.
Tim Cook stated in the Keynote presentation that the iMac Pro is utilizing the latest Xeon, one that is not yet available for any other manufacturer but Apple. I am pretty sure, however, that by the time the iMac Pro is shiping, the new Xeon will be available for everyone else as well. Frankly, I wish Apple would have these available to ship the day of the announcement, or at most a week after they make the announcement. . . not five months later. That is either poor planning on Cook's part or I suspect it has something to do with regulatory environment and the FCC licensing due to all the new product hoops required by the government. There would be no way to keep it secret for those months anyway.
They list the RAM as 2666 MHz. The only Intel Xeon processors that can drive that fast a RAM are the new Kaby Lake generation Xeon Gold and Platinum processors. Apple gives another hint in the TurboBoost speed of 4.5GHz.TurboBoost speed is at most half again in addition to the regular clock speed. Ergo, the standard clocking of the processor has to be around 3GHz or so. The 8 core Xeon Gold processor runs at 3.2 GHz while the 18 core Xeon processor runs at 3.0 GHz. Both support 2666 MHz ECC RAM. . . But the Platinum has too many cores.
. The 2 ½ year old (Jan. 2015) $3400 version 3, 2.4GHz Xeon E5 processor you selected for your top end is nowhere nearly in the ballpark of being the equivalent of either of those processors. That 2.4 GHz could probable TurboBoost to only 3.4 GHz, and the ECC RAM is slower. I suspect that the retail cost of these new processors is easily double what you quoted for that much older version 3 E5. Last years' E5s (now called Gold) that come close but don't support 2666 MHz RAM are over $7700 per unit according to Intel! The Gold and Platinum processors are not yet priced.
“That’s the thing, people complaining as if $5K is a lot, when that was the norm in the early 1990s.”
My first (generic) 20 MHz 486 cost me $5K, and IIRC I splurged and got a massive 4 MB of RAM.
These iMacs will have a substantially longer useful life than five years, simply because processor fab technology is hitting physical limits and we’re not seeing the massive speedups in a short time we used to. That’s why the trend now is towards multiple cores.
These are priced in line with similar workstations from other companies. A high end pro graphics adapter alone can easily run in the $2000-$4000 range.
If Apple is smart (and as a company it sometimes is, heh) the new “modular” Mac Pros will be able to be joined together locally in clusters using Thunderbolt, forming a small supercomputer. Apple already has the software framework to distribute a workload in a setup like that. That approach would get a lot of content creators, scientists and engineers really excited!
These new iMac Pros look nice, but I’ll wait and see what the new Mac Pro brings to the table...
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