Image: Apple
In 2019, Apple launched the Mac Pro, a monstrous modular desktop computer designed for professional users. A year later, in 2020, it announced that it was abandoning Intel in favor of independent processor development, and Tim Cook announced that within two years there would be no Macs with Intel Inside. But the year is 2023, and the goal has not been reached, with the Mac Pro being the very last computer you can find in an Apple store with an Intel processor. Recently, Apple also shows you exactly what it thinks it’s worth, and spoiler: it’s really not much.
98% crash in computer value
David Immel, who you may know from MKBHD’s Waveform podcast, tried to take the Mac Pro his team had in the studio and trade it in at Apple to buy other products. As usual in the studio of the world-famous tech YouTuber, they went for the best (which we only assembled for sports after the launch): a Xeon W processor with 28 cores and 56 threads capable of reaching up to 4.4GHz in turbo mode, 1.5 Tera RAM memory 2933MHz RAM that is fully composed of less than 12 units of 128 gigabytes, a storage capacity of 4 Tera SSD, consisting of two 2 Tera drives, two graphics processors of the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo type that are actually 4 graphics processors of 32 gigabytes each and an encoding and decoding acceleration card of video files. For this pleasure Apple charged them $52,199 (not including wheels!).
Source: Apple
When Imel entered all the details on Apple’s website, he was surprised to find that if he sent their Mac Pro back to the company, he would receive a purchase credit for – hold on tight – $970. This means that in just 3 years, the Mac Pro has lost more than 98% of its value. Imal signed the the tweet His on the subject as he asks followers if they know of anything else that has lost so much value in so little time, with the exception of cryptocurrencies.
What’s even weirder about this story is Chappel Still sells the same Mac Pro in her store, and she Still Asking $52,199 for it. Even in Refurbished versions, you can find models on Apple’s website for $37,000 and up.
Although Apple devices tend to hold their value better than the competition, when it comes to trade-ins, Apple is pretty notorious for offering only hundreds of dollars on thousands of dollar Macs in good condition. However, many prefer to avoid dealing with the sale of gadgets on various second-hand websites and the various risks involved, and choose to exchange their devices directly at the store from which they purchased to receive an immediate credit for the purchase.
Why hasn’t Apple introduced the M1/M2 Mac Pro yet?
What still bothers us is the work that Apple did not meet its goal of replacing all Intel processors with home-made M processors, with the Mac Pro being the last step in this very significant revolution. Meanwhile, Apple has released very successful processors that already manage to overtake the performance of the Mac Pro, especially in the performance of the graphics processing cores. At the launch of the Mac Studio, another Apple desktop computer, the company claimed that the M1 Ultra was 80% faster than the Mac Pro with Radeon Pro W6900X.
The Mac Studio (or all other Macs), compared to the Mac Pro, is clearly not modular, so it is particularly interesting to see how Apple will take the modular concept to the new era of M processors, where all the computing components are on a single SoC. Will it be a computer where you can install more and more Pro, Max and Ultra processors? Will Apple introduce a completely new concept for its processors? In this case, we will have to wait for the day when Apple will actually introduce the new Mac Pro – assuming there is a need for it at all in 2023.