Is Apple’s New Mac Pro With Nehalem Processor Cheaper?

Gnomie Luke Scott writes:

Hey Chris,

I have been planning on getting a Mac Pro for a while, and since my last Mac purchase with the first-gen Intel MacBook, I’ve been keeping an eye on MacRumors’ “when to buy” page and other news to make sure that any future Apple purchases don’t happen right before a release.

I just heard about the new update today, and was quite excited to hear about the new release. While browsing through message boards, and looking at articles, the excitement started to build after seeing quote from Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president:

“The new Mac Pro is a significant upgrade and starts at $300 less than before,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The Mac Pro features an advanced system architecture, new faster processors and our best-ever graphics options to deliver a faster, more powerful system that our professional customers are going to love.”

I finally got to the Apple store purchase page online only to find that the new “base model” is a single Quad-Core 2.6 GHz Xeon with 3 GB of RAM. The “advertised” model is indeed $300 cheaper, but the previous “base model” for $2799 has two Quad-Core 2.6 GHz Xeon processors for 1 or 2 GB of RAM.

On top of that, the previous “base model” was not the cheapest model as you could also previously select a single Xeon processor system, or a slightly slower two-processor set. As I recall you could knock $300-$500 off the $2799 price to get a single processor system.

Another interesting thing is when selecting Apple’s pre-configured choices, the configuration page was identical. You could get the cheapest 4-core system, or get the best 8-core system all on the same page. Now it seems to have segmented them into two separate configuration pages: one for the 4-core system, the other for the 8-core system.

The same 8-core system that used to cost $2,799 is now $4,699. And it gets worse — on the 8-core system configuration page the minimum amount of RAM you can get is 6 GB. Apple is well known for charging ungodly amounts of money for RAM. That’s why most people get the least amount they can get, and purchase the rest from a third party or from Newegg. Last I recall, you could get 32 GB of RAM for the previous Mac Pro model for $1,000-$3,000, where Apple charged an additional $9,000 for the upgrade.

What really upsets me about all of this? The vice president of the company claims that the price was cut down by $300. In reality, the price more than doubled. On top of that, Apple is forcing you to buy 6×1GB RAM sticks with a base 8-core system, and 3×1GB RAM sticks for the base 4-core system. The minimum you could get for any Mac Pro regardless of configuration was 1 or 2 GB.

Yes, I know… I can hear some people screaming “but it’s different architecture. it’s actually twice the speed.” The fact of the matter is, regardless if the new architecture is twice as fast, Apple is charging the same amount for four processor cores that they changed for 8-cores just a few days ago. And the fact that it’s forcing you to buy 5 GB more RAM just because you want an 8-core system is ludicrous.

I was really looking forward to buying a Mac Pro for work. But at that price, and with the declining economy, there is just no way in hell that I’m buying at this point in time. It’s like Ford coming out with the new Focus and deciding to charge double for it. Of course it’s better; it’s just not that much better.

Would love to hear your comments about this one.

To which I replied:

Just get the last model at a discount?

And Luke wrote back:

I thought of that, but Apple doesn’t seem to be offering it on its site anymore. If I can’t find them in stock at a local Apple store, it’ll be a bit harder to find. The reason for me waiting was to get the latest model anyway. I expected the price to go up a small margin, but I did not expect it to be doubled. As I’ve said before, what really gets me is:

• The vice president claims the price is cheaper than before, but in reality it’s much, much more. I’m not sure if the guy just doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or if he thinks he can outsmart the general audience into thinking that a 4-core is just as good as an 8. Either way, a geek knows better. 
• Apple force you to get 6 GB of RAM, all of them single 1 GB sticks. If I wanted 16 GB or 32 GB in increments of 2 or 4 GB per stick, the 6 GB that I would have to pay extra for would be completely worthless. And given that you can get the same RAM for 1/10 of the cost that Apple is charging on top of the fact that it would be considered used, reselling that 6 GB would be almost worthless (spending 10 times more than market, and getting only 5-8% of that back). Spending extra for RAM at these marked up prices is even worse.

If the price went up a couple hundred dollars, I could live with that. But for Apple to increase the price by this margin, and force a minimum purchase of 6 GB for the 8-core system, is ridiculous. Perhaps I feel this way because I was looking to buy a new machine. But I’ve read comments on many articles about the Mac Pro, and I’ve seen similar concerns and quite a few people in the same position saying the same thing.

A lot of people were really upset when Apple significantly dropped the price of the iPhone because they had already bought them at full price, and anyone else could get one for significantly less. Compared to that, I see this as worse. Apple doubles the price and tries to lie about it and trick people into thinking it’s actually cheaper.