Industry pundit Nick Carr is taken aback by the $13,000 price tag on our new top-end Mac Pro with an eight-core processor, 16 gigs of RAM and 4x750GB hard drives. "Didn't anyone tell Jobs that these things are supposed to be commodities?" he writes. (I can hear his hands wringing from all the way across the country.)
Not sure I get it. Oh wait. I guess $13,000 is a lot of money for some people? I don't know. It's been so long since I carried cash or actually paid for anything that I don't really have much sense of prices anymore. And living out here in the Valley where everyone basically has more money than they can ever spend, well it kind of skews your perspective.
Thing is, Nick Carr, here at Apple we don't build to price. And unlike a lot of other companies, we don't sit around trying to guess what customers want or -- worse yet -- asking customers what they want. God only knows what they'd come up with. Probably they'd just sit there shrugging and eating donuts in the focus group room. Fact is customers never know what they want. If they did they'd all be running tech companies right? They're looking to us to tell them what they want. That's what we're here for. That's our job. So you know what we do? We build what we think is cool. We build the products we'd like to own. And yeah, a $13,000 souped-up Macintosh is gonna be pretty popular in the centimillionaire-Silicon-Valley-engineer crowd. Trust me. We know what we're doing.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
How dare you rip us on our pricing?
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18 comments:
as fake bugs bunny would say ... what a maroon.
that box is nowhere near a commodity, which as i understand his meaning is "something that should be so cheap as to be affordable to all" -- the way bread, milk or marijuana is nowadays.
that mac pro is a serious piece of computing hardware that not too many people would ever need. but those that do -- they sure do.
Here's an early reaction from someone who will actually use these machines, not just armchair about their value:
http://www.artofadambetts.com/weblog/?p=185
Funny, a quick look at Dell's site and you can get a similiarly configured setup for about $2k more.
If you're doing high-end graphics, audio, video or animation commericially $13K is a bargain considering the time it will save.
Yes and the Dell machine will come with that super reliable Vista OS.
This guy doesn't think he's the first to figure out you can spend $13K on a Mac is he?
First thing I did when the big tower went to Intel is select every option to see what the price came too: Assload of cash.
Nice point about the Dell option above. If anything is a commodity, it's Dell.
steve, your persian friend is outdoing you in the "one more thing" stakes for his keynotes:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6527233.stm
Chill out a bit, guys. Nick Carr didn't mean it as serious criticism. It was more like, "Hey, wait a minute -- I thought these computer-gizmo-thingies were supposed to be commodities by now!"
Dry humor, which is mostly lost on us Apple fanboys when we're on a rampage.
On a serious note, if RSJ ever heard anyone refer to his precious hardware as a commodity, he'd jack up prices until that term disappeared.
I am writing this on a $30 G3 PowerMac which originally cost my employer $6000. The depreciation is horrendous but tax deductable, which you can double up on if you lease it off your own Bahamanian holding company, or something like that, so Secret Steve, don't feel so bad about it. The only people stung by the price are the ones who don't have good personal equity managers.
I am typing this on a $30 G3 Power Macintosh which originally cost like, $6,000. The depreciation sounds terrible, but think about it. My financial advisor said I could claim back depreciation on the asset if I leased it from my own Bahamanian based holding company and declared that as a foreign income, or something like that. The only people stung by the premium price are the ones who unfortunately can't afford good personal equity managers. So don't feel bad about it Secret Steve, these people probably load Ubuntu on them, anyway.
*Drools at the machine*
Huh what?
Oh yeah terrible, with the commodity calling and all...
*goes back to drooling*
I was just at the Apple UK Webstore (more expensive because you know you're worth it, and your tax man does too). I fancied configuring one of these the sane way: max the cpu to 8 core and leave the overpriced RAM and hard drives alone. Boom! One killer computer for less than my worst fears:
8 core, 3GHz, 30 INCH DISPLAY, and a heap of change from £4k.
If anyone wants to compare this to the bad old days (cough PowerPC) then go ahead and look like a frigtard. Sweet times!
sargasso:
Worse than Ubuntu … I know one with Fedora. Bleugh.
2 22" displays, 1 24" display, 6GB RAM, 4 500 GB HDDs, 2 optical drives, 1 7300GT video card, and 1 1900XT video card. I'd upgrade my Mac Pro to the new eight core Mac Pro but I think I can just pop out my old processors and push in the new ones and save a bundle. Thanks for making everything backward compatible! =)
Pfft. That's nothing. Has he priced Ferraris lately? It's an outrage!
Actually, before the 4-core announcement, I priced out a fully loaded (max RAM, max disks, etc.) MacPro at something around $17K. I then started thinking about how I could buy it. Seriously.
Guess the price just went up. Hmm...need to adjust my plan accordingly. ..bruce..
For people that read a blog by a fake person, you people need to a) develop some critical reading skills and 2) get a sense of humor. Carr's post was a very dry joke, lost on the humorless, hypersensitive Mac-fans (of which, btw, I count myself among -- hypersensitive Mac-fan that is.)
Re: the price of a similiar Dell. You can only get 2.6GHz from them vs. the 3.0 GHz you get in the MacPro.
Guess that means Apple's getting special deals from Intel.
Those prices are more than I wanted to see, but at the same time, you have to put it in perspective. The processors, if my memory serves, are $1,100 each.
Based on that, I think the $4,000 base price is about right. Keeping the earlier $3,000 price point and I don't think you'd see a dime of profit out of the machine.
D
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