Does the Vision Pro price seem a little steep? It’s just a fraction of a maxed-out Apple silicon Mac Pro – which itself is a fraction of the highest-end 2019 Mac Pro price. There’s a reason for that, however.
The price comparison between the Intel Mac Pro and Apple silicon Mac Pro is tough.
The top price for the last Intel Mac Pro from 2019 reached $52,599 – before adding the option for 8 TB SSD storage and more graphics card options. Apple’s Afterburner Card for offloading ProRes and ProRes RAW video decoding made up $2,000 of that total price.
These days, Apple builds that capability into every M2 chip. There’s still a galactic gap between the top price then and now.
The all-new M2 Ultra Mac Pro can be maxed out with these specs:
- 24-core CPU, 76-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine
- 192 GB unified memory
- 8 TB SSD storage
It’s impossible to overstate how tuned for Mac hardware Apple silicon is compared to Intel chips. That said, the highest-end 2019 Mac Pro at launch could offer a little more RAM.
How much memory are we talking about? The Intel Xeon W-powered Mac Pro supported up to 12 sticks of 128 GB RAM. Compared to 192 GB unified memory in the new Apple silicon Mac Pro, the final Intel Mac Pro supported up to a mind-melting 1.5 TB of DDR4 ECC memory. That’s a lot of Safari tabs. The machine also supported dual Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics cards with 2 x 32 GB of HBM2 memory each.
Personally, none of these astronomically high memory numbers make any logical sense to me, and I do know how baseline Mac performance feels on Apple silicon compared to Intel. However, I’m sure there are absolutely use cases where a terabyte of RAM is useful. If Apple silicon could support it within current chip design constraints, why wouldn’t Apple support it? It’s just not possible today, at least for any reasonable cost.
Back to cost, however, just how much is a new maxed-out Mac Pro? It’s less than $50,000.
$12,299 gets the rack-mountable Mac Pro with the M2 Ultra chip, 8 TB of SSD storage, and 192 GB of RAM. That’s still an increase from the $6,999 starting price, but it’s not $50K. You also get eight Thunderbolt ports and six PCI slots for modular expansion – and that’s on all models.
And remember how the 2019 Mac Pro required a $2000 Afterburner Card for decoding ProRes and ProRes RAW video? The M2 Ultra chip inside the Mac Pro has the power of seven Afterburner Cards. That’s a $14,000 value alone!
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