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 …
The base hardware is just generally expensive.