This seems to be what everyone forgets when airing their grievances towards Apple's "Pro" line.
It's unfortunate but the number of people that may dislike this because of a lack of upgradability, etc is probably smaller than the number of people that just want a cool looking "pro" computer and have money to burn.
My rule of thumb lately has been that if something is marketed as 'Pro', it is usually intended for average joe who wants to feel pro, not to meet the requirements of people that are actually professionals.
My favorite thing about coming into these threads is constantly being told that I'm "not actually a professional" because I'm able to use a Macbook Pro for my job.
I'm not in any way saying that a macbook pro (or any 'pro' thing) can't/shouldn't be used by professionals, or that people that use them are not professionals. It is just that I find more often than not when 'Pro' is used to market something, the primary audience appears to be consumers that want have a pro feeling, regardless of whether or not it was designed primarily for the requirements of a professional. If you are a professional and a Macbook Pro fits your requirements, great! It just feels lately that the 'Pro' moniker doesn't mean it is specifically designed with professionals in mind as the primary audience.
"Being able to use a tool" does not mean that it's the best choice for you.
People here are saying that these new "Pro" computers are actually really bad choices for Professional, mainly because of the lack of modularity and high price.
If you feel offended by those comment, that's on you, no one is actually judging you.
Most corporate computers are never upgraded. In part because computers are just not nearly as expensive as people seem to think.
So, modularity is useful just not not as important as people assume. Computers are also not getting faster as quickly so using the same computer for ~4 years is now completely reasonable. Spread out of that period these start at ~80$ a month. You might drop that price some, but not as much as you probably assume without sacrificing.
They might not be optimal, but it's a reasonable option.
I disagree. The idea that a Macbook Pro does "not... meet the requirements of people that are actually professionals" inherently says "if you're a professional, you don't use a Mac", and inversely, "if you use a Mac, you're not a professional". There is no reason to make that statement unless you are looking to strictly define who is and who is not considered a professional in your opinion, and that definition most certainly leaves a lot of people out in the cold.
Now it might be a true statement that "if you're a professional video editor working with lots of files and 4k video, the Mac Pro doesn't meet your needs" or "if you're a professional data scientist working on cutting-edge machine learning with CUDA, the Mac Pro doesn't meet your needs".
But "professional" is a broad term. Very broad. It's hard to imagine a broader term. Even if we restricted that to "IT professional" or "professional programmer", it's still a very broad range of needs within that statement. And the Mac Pro lacks a very specific set of things that "professionals" may need, depending on their profession.
I'm willing to bet the number of professionals who need a Unix machine with a nice GUI that's well-supported by major software vendors and also well-supported by the manufacturer with retail stores (including tech support) in every city of any size far outweighs the number of professionals who need anything specific the Macbook Pro or Mac Pro are missing. Why, then, are they not considered "professionals"? And what other machine meets those very broadly applicable requirements?
Or how about this one? I need a Unix machine with a serial port and an Ethernet port for my job, and I also need the machine to be lightweight because I travel constantly, it needs to be able to be held with one hand as I'm standing in a datacenter, and I need long battery life because I can't carry a ton of cables through the datacenter as I'm moving around. What meets my needs as a professional? Sure, my needs are very specific... so are the needs of this hypothetical gold standard "professional" who needs what the Mac Pro doesn't have. I certainly don't need a powerful video card. Guess I'm not a professional, then?
It's the constant gatekeeping of "Mac(book) Pro computers aren't made for professionals because I made up my own definition of professional and you're not in it" that really grinds me the wrong way. I don't need to upgrade my RAM because by the time I need more, my work will just buy me a new one. Guess that means I'm not a professional?
It still meets the requirements of a lot of professionals, and a lot of professionals are still going to use them. I'm not trying to say 'whether or not you are a professional is directly related to whether or not you use a macbook pro'. It is just that apple seems to be slowly targeting their "pro" lines more towards the consumer who like pro stuff side to capture more of that market than they are trying to move toward the professional side to capture more of that market. Instead of getting more ports and longer battery life at the sacrifice of weight, we get things like the touchbar and ever thinner machines that have trouble living upto the battery expectations. For a bunch of professionals that doesn't matter, it isn't what makes a macbook pro fit their requirements. But there seems to be a very vocal segment of professionals who sit on that left most edge concerned that what apple calls 'pro' is moving further away from meeting their requirements than closer.
Edit: it might be more clear to say the green circle is people who find a macbook pro to meet their requirements.
I disagree. This is all workstation hardware. Even when people spend $6,000 on a gaming PC, they don't put ECC RAM, Xeons, and workstation GPUs in it. And if you read the page, it's clearly being marketed as a workstation rather than as a high-end computer.
Maybe clueless people will buy this as a consumer machine, but it's designed and marketed as a workstation.
While I love my MacBook pro's for dev, if I needed beefy machines for work, presumably 3D graphics related, I can't imagine paying those prices. That is really, really rough. Especially considering that you could make a monster of a machine for $5k, let alone $13k.
Like, I justify my $3k laptop, because it's a quality piece of mobile hardware. Yet, I don't lug around my desktop everywhere.. The "quality" that I interact with is the OS and the keyboard/mouse, nearly nothing with the monitor/computer. So.. what am I getting for that $13k? It just feels so crazily over priced.. am I wrong?
Hell, my $3k laptop is blatantly overpriced imo, but I pay it because there's not many options on my personal ranked list. This however... I can't help but feel there are a ton of options. So I'm honestly asking, what am I missing here? Clearly they think that some people will feel $13k is reasonable.. but why, specifically, is it reasonable to those people?
Did you check to see what the $13K gets you? 18-core Xeon with 4.3GHz Turbo, 4TB SSD, 128GB of fast DDR4 w/ECC. The option price for the Xeon alone is almost as much as your entire laptop. Same with the SSD.
Oh it's a beast of a machine that you'll get for that wedge but I feel like they've rounded all the component parts up to the nearest $1,000 just because they can.
That display panel, that motherboard, that case, that PSU, that graphics card, that memory, the CPU – would you expect to pay the bones of $14K?
From Amazon:
- 18-core Xeon $2,826.20
- 128GB of ECC memory from Kingston in 32 GB chunks $1,569.63
- can't find the GPU but the Vega Frontier Edition with 16GB is $999
- Samsung 850 EVO 4TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD $1,469
- Apple's own 5K monitor is $1,350
That's $8K – which means that the motherboard (which Apple make design and source themselves), the case, the peripherals and cables, the assembly and testing, and software make up the other $6K …
I am not going to buy one, but I suspect many people will love them. Really PRO is just a marketing term.
Though, 5k screen, 10Gbit Ethernet, 600$ graphics card, 1TB NVMe SSDs are also ~$600 etc that's far from a normal office desktop.