Yes you are reading that headline correctly, Apple is trying to sell us a $999 monitor stand! Yesterday at their WWDC 2019 event Apple announced their new Mac Pro, Pro XDR Display, and yes a $999 monitor stand! Let’s just skip over the fact that the monitor itself is $4999 (without a stand), but please tell me how you justify a monitor stand being $999?
Apple’s $999 Monitor Stand
From what it looks like the stand is a piece of metal. It allows you to adjust the monitor up and down, adjust the angle, and switch the monitor into portrait mode. All things that a $100 monitor arm can do! Also look at the cable management, its horrible. I single hole in the stand and no real cable routing in the back? So again please tell me why this stand is $999?!
Image Credit: TechRadar
Even when the Apple rep was talking about the stand during their press event he said the price so quickly and skipped to the next slide, even fumbled his words a little bit. Also notice that the $199 VESA mount adapter got its own slide, but the Apple Monitor stand shares a slide with it.
Also why are we paying $199 for a VESA adapter? The reason we have standards like VESA is so we can use whatever stand we want with our monitor if we choose to do so. But with Apple we have to pay a $199 premium, but the funny part is if you pay $199 for the stand and buy one of the best VESA stands / monitor arms it will still cost less than their stand!
The $6,000 Mac Pro
Apple also announced a $6,000 (to start) Mac Pro computer. Before we even get into hardware who designed this thing?! Apple used to be a company that had great design, but the new Mac Pro looks like it is from 2003! The tower looks like a damn cheese grater and what is with those handles, its plain ugly! This is what you want sitting on your desk at your office?
Image Credit: TechRadar
Getting to the price, the base cost of the Mac Pro is $6,000! That includes a 8-core Intel Xeon processor, 32GB of DDR4 ECC memory, an AMD Radeon Pro 580X, and a 256GB PCIe SSD. Not sure how this equals out to $6000?! You could easily build either an Intel HEDT or AMD Threadripper system for far less, have it not look like a cheese grater, and likely get better performance out of it.
Image Credit: TechRadar
Apple has not listed what the top-spec’d Mac Pro would cost, but The Verge is guessing around $35,000 – $45,000. That would come with a 28-core Intel Xeon, 1.5TB of DDR4 ECC memory, an AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo, this mysterious Afterburner ProRes and ProRes RAW accelerator card, and 4TB PCIe SSD. Getting into this realm of hardware would be Intel’s W-3175X ($3000) a board that supports it ($2000), two NVIDIA Titan RTX’s ($5000), 192 GB of DDR4 ($1100), etc. And still you would be far under the cost of Apple’s Mac Pro. On top of that most people who actually want this thing never need that much power.
What do you guys think about the Mac Pro, we think its an overpriced cheese grater…
