A. Ludicrously priced in this configuration new to begin with
and
B. Have been thoroughly "osbourned" by the ARM macs.
although we don't have a direct replacement machine (e.g. ARM mac with PCI-E slots), a Mac Studio off the Apple store floor will outperform it in so many tasks at a fraction of the price, power consumption and size.
I wouldn't want to buy this computer 2nd hand at any price other than fire sale low, personally. For those of us who lived through the PowerPC to Intel transition, the speed at which G5 PowerMac towers became worthless was pretty impressive and I suspect the same happens for the intel - ARM transition, if not more so.
This! Why would I buy a used Intel powered Mac Pro instead of a brand new Mac Studio? Even a maxed out M2 Pro Mac Mini looks like a better value proposition for a lot of workloads.
Workloads the Mac Studio just can't handle. Like anything that needs more than 128GB RAM. Although I'm not sure why you'd buy the Mac Pro and not a PC workstation with newer parts for something like that.
I'm not arguing they should delay anything? Merely pointing out the availability of much cheaper and faster ARM Macs has accomplished an Osbourne like effect already - that Mac Pro is outdated and overpriced right now, and buyers on the new and used markets know this.
Almost no consumers bought this thing. The only buyers who would be using the trade-in are companies... and then it suddenly makes more sense. You get your IRS depreciation, and a quick $1K instead of sending them to the recycling center (because it's sometimes not worth employee time to figure out eBay, handle shipments, check which ones work and how well, handle returns...).
> Why would they want it? I'm surprised they offer anything.
I was thinking the same thing as I read, and wondering if the trade-in price was just a token to get a customer to turn the machine into e-waste, but later on the article notes Apple sells similar refurbished machines for tens of thousands of dollars, a fact that I verified:
I wonder if the refurb stock at Apple is a result of the AppleCare-style trade-method where they give you a replacement machine and they repair the old one and then have to somehow get rid of it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the trade-in program isn't actually dealt with by Apple but is actually fulfilled by a third party for Apple so they don't have to deal with it.
I expect you are right. The few times I've used Apple for a trade-in, I recall that the actual trade-in is to a third-party. I'm not at all convinced the hardware ever makes it back to Apple themselves.
The comparison to a car salesman is apt. If I were to trade in my 6 week old Model 3 to Tesla right now, they'd offer around 20 grand less than I paid them for it.
Though to be fair, that's probably true of any random car dealer, because of what Tesla did to the used market a couple weeks ago.
This is a very 2021 take. Outside the limited-time pandemic-related supply chain issues, every new car drops in value the second you drive it off the lot. Nothing to do with Tesla.
If anything, the last 2 years of sky-high used car prices have more to do with production capacity than any intrinsic value in used cars. (The value in the last 2 years coming from immediacy, not intrinsic value.)
It doesn’t disrespect customers, it’s a signal from Apple saying “we don’t want to refurbish and resell your old computer because it’s not worth our time”.
If you don't want to refurbish them, then just stop offering the option to your customers. Acting in a different way than what you're signaling is in itself disrespectful.
There is no reason to think the price a buyer is willing to pay a seller has any bearing on the price a seller is willing to pay a buyer to buy it back.
That may be true. What we are discussing though is the illogical position that the author has that the buyback price is disrespectful while not feeling the initial sale price was disrespectful. There's clearly a disconnect for the author on what their opinion is and the machine is objectively worth both on the used market (ebay) and in comparison to machines with similar capabilities.
> There is something strange going on if an offer offends you. Perhaps a fundamental misunderstanding of what price represents?
Offers definitely can be offensive. E.g. you interview for a corporate software engineering role and get an offer to work for minimum wage, well below market. You won't take the offer of course, but how would it make someone feel?
I haven't gone through interviews prior to talking numbers before, so I can't draw on personal experience, but I expect you would feel pretty foolish for putting the cart before the horse and wish that you put a little more thought into what you were doing before acting. Offended, though?
Perhaps what you are suggesting is that in messing up by not finding out if the arrangement was broadly compatible before wasting your time on the minor details, but being afraid to blame oneself for the glaring mistake the mind might go to inventing that it was offended by their actions as a mechanism to sooth itself? I guess... Seems like stretch. I don't really understand the need to blame others, though.
Regardless, I'm not sure that transcends to the computer case. In that case the price was asked for upfront. Apple gave their offer and that was the end of it. No unwarranted time was wasted. Just a simple: "Looks like we won't be able to reach an agreement. Have a nice day."
This past weekend I took a 2018 Mac Mini w/i7, 32G RAM and 1T SSD the the Apple Store to trade it in for a new MacBook Air my wife wanted. Before the Apple person looked up the trade in value she told me, "I can tell you right now it's not going to be a good offer. You'll get a much better price using Facebook Marketplace or something like that." It wasn't as dramatic a difference as this Mac Pro, but they offered us only $185 for it. It's still a hugely useable machine, so of course I declined.
It's a 5 generation old laptop processor-based machine so Apple's interest in it is probably only as replacements for existing machines. You'll get a far better price on ebay where like-new in-box machines like yours sell for $700-900.
How can $52,000 go all the way down to $1,000 in just 3 years?
Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place.
The hardware inside is nothing special... Xeon 28 core CPU, 1.5TB RAM, dual Radeon Pro GPU's, and 8TB storage. Sure it's fast, but it was only worth ~$20k-30k when it was new.
The Apple Tax is very real, folks. Flashy case goes for ~$30k apparently...
> Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place.
It was worth $52k to the buyer that bought it at time t.
The price a different buyer (or even original buyer) is willing to pay at time t+3 years is irrelevant to how much it was worth to the original buyer at time t.
>> How can $52,000 go all the way down to $1,000 in just 3 years?
I'd be curious to see a depreciation chart. It is widely known how cars depreciate 10-20% the exact minute you purchase them and drive them off the lot.
I wonder if anyone has analyzed Facebook Marketplace and other locations to put together a depreciation chart of these MacPro's over time. I wouldnt be surprised if it dropped 30% immediately on sale.
Now, to be fair, this is an INTEL mac, not M1 and not M2, so that is also a huge depreciation driver (60%+?) This should be easy to figure out...just look at current alternatives with the same horsepower.
> Because that $52,000 computer was never actually worth that much in the first place.
It clearly was, else the transaction at that price would have never taken place for there to be a machine once worth that much to sell three years later.
However, the $1,000 transaction did not take place. That tells us that it is not worth $1,000 three years later – and is probably worth much, much more.
The moral of the story: Don't let clickbait headlines fool you.
https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished (I jest) But we all know Apple products are severely overpriced per specification. It's how they sustain their profit margin, and in turn are also not currently laying folks off because of their war chest.
> we all know Apple products are severely overpriced per specification
Do we? Every time it comes up, invariably the comparisons are all something "largely similar" but not exactly equivalent, frequently in a meaningful way. It seems like the real truth is that Apple doesn't really make budget configurations in the first place, they only cater to different levels of the premium market.
In particular, when it comes to the Mac Pro over the years, it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be a pretty good deal for what you actually get. Another well known example is when you could by the 27 inch 5K iMac for the same price as you could buy just the panel if you were building a PC.
Whenever someone makes a really nice laptop, aluminum, great touch pad, great screen, the whole nine yards, it ends up being close to the same price as a macbook.
$999 Monitor stand. I dont want to argue or nitpick each and every product (just like good discussion and it's their company they can charge what they want and people can spend their money as they deem fit). But look at their profit margin, look at their lock-in for accessories, look at their repair prices (they are slowly being clawed away from them legally), they've only recently created good laptops after about 12 years of not good laptops (see keyboards, touchbars, lack of upgrading for years and still charging the same price for tech that was 5 yrs old). But there is a reason they have so much money on hand, for much of the 2000-2010 they were the wealthiest company (public that we know about ignoring nation state oil companies, etc...) in the world.
I'm not an Apple fanboy, even if I'm probably starting to sound like one. I thought the stand price was only scandalous because so many of us were unfamiliar with what competing hardware in that market niche normally costs? Wasn't it competitive compared to what the competition was selling? It's been a while, but I vaguely remember that being the outcome of that.
I have less opinion on their repair prices in general, though I have to say that what they charge for display replacement is not much more than the cheapest third party. It might be argued that this means the hardware is overpriced, but I don't have a basis for that claim so I won't make it.
I do wish they had ditched the unreliable keyboards faster. I actually like the touchbar when I'm using the laptop as a laptop, but I'd prefer it was in addition to the function keys rather than replacing them. Although on my M1 the ESC key and power button are real, so I'm 95% good with it as is. I wish they'd have found a way to keep it, but maybe the PR damage had already been done. For certain use cases it sure is handy.
Not so long ago I got significantly more than the current trade-in for the $52,000 Mac Pro, for a 27 inch 5k iMac Pro also with the mega-Xeon and a ton of RAM, etc.
I think they wanted to get them off the market and get those people onto the Apple Silicon, which was going to rapidly eclipse the Xeon iMac Pro for those more 'general prosumer tasks', video editing et al.
Not at all the same situation with the top-end Mac Pros with the Xeon: all the outboard stuff is the point there, and you can't as easily eclipse that outboard stuff. Put simply, the $52,000 machine might as well remain in service doing what it's doing, because Apple isn't directly replacing that. They were very much directly replacing what my old Xeon iMac Pro did, so they put more pressure on the trade-in scenario to motivate that happening. They apparently have no interest in pressuring those top-end Mac Pros to get off the market, so the trade-in is completely pathetic: hang onto the thing and keep it in service, they have no special replacement targeted or perhaps even planned.
The problem is they're paying the Apple Tax, like others are pointing out. More specifically, paying it three times:
1) For the base system. Ok, this is unavoidable if you're buying Apple.
2) For the upgrades. The problem is that Apple machines used to be easy to upgrade yourself, like 8 years ago with the iMac. You could buy the base memory model and max it out yourself with sticks in a few minutes for a fraction of the cost. If you cared about money, you'd do this; people with money to burn could presumably pay Apple and not worry about it. Unfortunately I don't think this can be done anymore.
3) For the trade in. Yeah, you will do much better selling it yourself.
Presumably they could be used. The point is it is not a direct dealership business. I am not even sure if the used parts are fed from primarily from the trade-in pipeline (as opposed to AppleCare/warranties). I’m totally speculating here but I suspect the trade in pipeline is primarily sold to a third party vendor and not touched by Apple (they accept Androids and such too, for example)
Sorry, “not in the business of” does not mean to me that they never do it. I’m aware they sell refurbished. I’d imagine margins are not all that great because it’s not a huge part of their business, there’s a fair amount of labor, and a fair number of new components.
If they were in that line of business and could benefit from economies of scale, they’d likely offer more. As it stands, they’re likely offering a price that allows for them to be a disposal option or make a profit on recycling, but isn’t meant to grow that segment of their business.
I think the moral of the story is that you shouldn't be paying $50k for a machine that can do essentially the same stuff as a machine that costs 10x less. You didn't get screwed on the trade-in, you got screwed on the purchase.
> I think the moral of the story is that you shouldn't be paying $50k for a machine that can do essentially the same stuff as a machine that costs 10x less. You didn't get screwed on the trade-in, you got screwed on the purchase.
Lots of companies (and sometimes people) pay up the nose for hardware, because their software has a dependency on it. See all the weird "new model" mainframes that just run an emulator on Intel chips (e.g. Unisys Dorado 8590 https://www.unisys.com/siteassets/collateral/pi-sheet/pi-200...).
Are there not alternatives, including other cheaper MacOS devices? If someone "needs" it, they should know that a $50k PC is basically a rip-off and are paying that money knowing it's never coming back. Electronics in general depreciate spectacularly fast.
Mainframes are a completely different class for which a $50k bill would be quite low. It's a different paradigm. Companies know they're using it until it's obsolete, or will get pennies on the dollar.
> Are there not alternatives, including other cheaper MacOS devices?
There are always alternatives, but sometimes buying "overpriced" hardware is the cheaper/better option, at least in the short/medium term.
If you want/need the fastest Mac and/or one with certain expansion options, this machine is probably it.
> Electronics in general depreciate spectacularly fast.
Apple itself is selling a refurb today for $37,939.00. That is a lot more than $1,000.
> Mainframes are a completely different class for which a $50k bill would be quite low. It's a different paradigm. Companies know they're using it until it's obsolete, or will get pennies on the dollar.
Look at the spec sheet I linked. It looks like that "mainframe" machine is a 4 CPU Xeon server. I don't know how much one costs, but I'm guessing it's orders of magnitude more than similar "commodity" PC hardware.
"There are always alternatives, but sometimes buying "overpriced" hardware is the cheaper/better option, at least in the short/medium term."
That's fine, but the people buying it should realize they aren't getting that money back. If they're complaining, then they should probably have made a different choice.
"Apple itself is selling a refurb today for $37,939.00. That is a lot more than $1,000."
And Ebay has them around $5K-10K.
"Look at the spec sheet I linked. It looks like that "mainframe" machine is a 4 CPU Xeon server."
You don't know how much it costs, because as I said, it's a different paradigm. You can pay fixed cost or by performance/use. You also would be going through a sales pitch. There is some research out there suggesting that hardware costs are higher, but software costs are lower for mainframes when compared to similar server farms. So when comparing similar solutions the costs would not be orders of magnitude higher.
> That's fine, but the people buying it should realize they aren't getting that money back. If they're complaining, then they should probably have made a different choice.
I think they do. No one's expecting to get dollar for dollar.
The issue is Apple seems to be low-balling to an almost offensive degree. Pointing to other hardware, that you think would have been a better deal to buy in the first place, is a distraction and doesn't address that issue.
I think the right choice would be for Apple to stick with Intel for the Mac Pro. Its a vanity project focused on a tiny market that wants full expandability and compatibility. I thought apple learned their lesson with the Trash Can Mac Pro.
You think Apple should bear the cost and support burdens of maintaining compatibility for two CPU architectures across their OSes, app stores and in house applications for the benefit of a few thousand Mac Pro sales?
There is simply no way this strategy makes sense at Apple's size, I'd argue, especially for a "vanity project focused on a tiny market" as you correctly put it.
Just as with 68k and PPC before it, MacOS will eventually drop x86 CPU support and it will be fine - the process of migrating the entire computer line is already almost complete.
> You think Apple should bear the cost and support burdens of maintaining compatibility for two CPU architectures across their OSes, app stores and in house applications for the benefit of a few thousand Mac Pro sales?
They sorta already do this via Rosetta..
But more to your point, yes they need to treat this like a leak in a damn and plug it even if it takes seemingly disproportionate resources.
Across Apple, to continue making x86 machines alongside ARM, is going to need a lot more than just the Rosetta software layer.
Rosetta doesn't help hardware design, R&D expenditures for this tiny handful of x86 machines OP is proposing Apple keep in the lineup. Those R&D expenses for just x86 development work are much harder to justify when its just the Mac Pro that benefits, not the entire computer line, too.
There might have been a case for staying with Intel/AMD on all Mac desktops, on the grounds that power efficiency is less important and the latest x86 chips beat M1/M2 in absolute performance. But keeping Intel in only one model used by a tiny fraction of users isn't at all feasible. You'd get the opposite of compatibility because Mac development would focus almost entirely on arm64, with Intel as an afterthought or not supported at all.
It's nice of them to consider buying it at all. Very few manufacturers want their product back. They are in the business of producing new stuff, not shuffling around used stuff.
Of course a used product dealer is going to pay you less than the next consumer will. They have to sell to the same consumer and need a margin to justify their time acting as the middleman. Same reason the used car dealer will give you less for your used car than the next driver buying direct will give you.
If you wanna resell your Mac, get one of the stock configurations. Unusual configurations are presumably annoying for Apple to handle in the refurb/resale program; if you want more for it, that's what eBay etc. are for.
What's an unusual configuration? When you buy an Apple, you have a limited number of customization options - disk space, memory, CPU speed/cores, and pre-installed software usually. Hard to see how any of that could be non-standard or unusual.
If you walk into an Apple Store, you can buy specific configurations off-the-shelf. If you pick the boosted RAM or faster processor or whatnot, they have to ship it to you.
52k Mac Pros are probably <0.5% of Apple's unit sales and just not representative. Why even bother writing articles about subjects like this, it's such a niche issue that affects virtually nobody, is written to generate clicks, and is a complete non-issue for the obviously ridiculously loaded individuals out there buying 50k Macs and selling them shortly after, and are unwilling to use any of the million alternative sales channels that are available to them. It's a free market, just ignore a passive offer for the opportunity to resell a purchased product for very little and continue on with your life.
I mean I've literally never, ever, in my life, sold a product I bought, to the company or person that sold it to me. The fact that one of these companies happens to offer a ridiculously low-ball price is not news, it's completely irrelevant.
It's a funny thing, sure. Feel free to mock Apple for it. But the whole outrage with words like 'disrespecting customers' is just silly.
If you think it's so easy and straightforward to pay significantly more than Apple and resell the things for even more, enjoy the free profits with your new business. I happen to have met a guy who's been reselling Macs for the past 10-15 years or so, to the tune of a low seven figure profit annually at a NYE party a few weeks back. Be less outraged and enjoy the business opportunities, I'd say.
Every time I refresh my gear I try to figure out which is more cost effective - buying top tier stuff and getting another X years out of it before obsolescence or buying mid-tier stuff and just refreshing more often.
I end up just getting the top(ish) tier because once I start clicking on things I can't resist but obviously given the rate technology develops any 50k machine was bound to lose its value fast.
Depends how much you value your time.
Creating the listing, negotiating and shipping isn't trivial. That's why refurbishing programs are still a thing.
Usually when I sell PCs or PC hardware, people just come pick up the stuff at my house. The listing takes a few minutes for each item but other than that it's barely any effort
I will also note that there is such thing as dissuasive pricing. “Go away” pricing. “We’ll do this, but it’s not really our thing so we’re going to make it expensive for you.”
Not sure if that’s what’s happening here. But sometimes when you see a bad offer what you’re really seeing is “we’d rather not.”
I wonder if it is for companies who had lots of Mac Pros, in many weird configuration, eyeing Apple Silicon. In which case, because many of them don't want to deal with eBay or customer service, it is often quickest and cheapest to send them to a recycling center. But if Apple will take them all for a quick $1K each and no extra employee effort... why not?
More likely it is for nobody. This is Apple saying: "We really don't want to deal with this, but if you will pay us many thousands of dollars in value to take it off your hands I guess we can bend this time." They have made it clear that their preference is for you to leave them alone if you want to sell one of these machines.
But ... this is right. It's three years old, it's been written down to $0 (ish) for tax reasons. $1k is the book value.
I don't know why you'd trade it in to be honest. The Mac Pro is all about high bandwidth shovelling of data across PCIe for edit suites. I don't think there's any real replacement.
Apple's happy to give you a pretty decent trade-in value in most cases, because you're a) buying a new device as part of the process and b) it keeps it off the third-party resale market.
So keep that in mind when you buy the next $52K computer from Apple, and/or sell it on the open market if the $19K convenience fee feels like it's too much.
(… boy that would have been easier to find if journalists would just cite the source and not a random re-tweet…)