Those of us who are slightly older may still remember how much real workstations (as in a Sun SparcStation or an SGI Indigo) cost back in the day, and are less shocked by the pricing :-)
Computing has really been democratized over the last 25 years.
Those workstations were substantially different (and faster) than commodity x86 hardware at the time. Today you can buy a latest-gen 8-core CPU for $300 or so.
The sad truth is they really weren't that much faster. Sun workstations were using the same 68k processors that Macs were using. There is a reason the Unix Workstation market didn't survive.
That said, this Mac is not as overpriced as it appears on the surface. A server class motherboard with ECC RAM support and an 8 core Xeon aren't cheap components. I'm guessing they aren't using the bottom of the barrel SSDs either. 32GB of ECC memory aren't exactly free either. I wouldn't be surprised if the BoM on this was over $3k.
Sun's mid-1990's SPARCstation models used a SPARC CPU (hence the name). The single-core workstations were a bit faster than the top of the line 386 or 486 available at the time. As I understand it, the draw was the CPU and OS compatibility with Sun's million dollar servers.
Not necessarily that much faster. What people mostly paid for was not the hardware itself, but the whole package, including the operating system.
Which is exactly what people pay for when getting Macs, especially on the high end. You can get an Intel CPU in a box for cheap, if that's what you're looking for.
And look how great Sun and SGI are doing with their workstations today :). The list of companies, who are willing to spend 10k or more on the workstation of a single employee is growing short. And some of those still need NVidia graphic cards.
Sure, this is not a mass-market product. But I'm actually glad that the concept of a high-end workstation is making a comeback. Not everything needs to be dirt-cheap, we should not necessarily feel entitled to every product on the market being in our price range, and I'd love to see some competition on the high-end.
Yes, it is great that they have a real high-end product. But in the past, at least the starting price of the Mac Pro was in enthusiast-range. There should be a product between the Mini and the Pro which supports a desktop graphics card.
On that, we agree. I write code, and I used to own a 2008 "cheese-grater" Mac Pro. That one was affordable enough for developers, came with a low-end video card (which was fine!), supported lots of RAM, and provided a rock-stable machine for development. The new one, not so much, it seems to be mostly good for specialized applications (like video editing).
But on the other hand, I don't think I'd want to buy this Mac Pro anyway, because of the display situation. There are no good external 5K displays, and most of the PC world is stuck in 1080p (or thereabouts) because of gamers. So, if I am to get a computer with a fast CPU and a good 5K display, I will be well served by the iMac or iMac Pro.
I am stuck in the same situation. I am using my Mac for development and photo processing. Currently I am using a late 2015 5k iMac. The screen is beautiful, I wouldn't mind a somewhat larger screen though. From that sense, the new 6k screen has the perfect size. The big problems I have with my current iMac are:
- disk space, I need more disk space and have no good solution for that
- I would like to have a real graphics card, StarCraft even struggles in 1920x1080 resolution.
Even the iMac Pro doesn't really solve either of that, at already a too high price. I would have been willing to spend like 6k on a basic Mac Pro with a display, which wouldn't sound impossible considering that in older times the Mac Pro started well below 3k, but the new one is in an entirely different league. I am not sure why Apple thinks that "Pro" users are a synonym for video makers. There are photographers, there are software developers and many more.
Computing has really been democratized over the last 25 years.