This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] Mac Nvidia/CUDA drivers [Now New Mac Pro cost]

Monday, June 17, 2019

Re: [Avid-L2] Mac Nvidia/CUDA drivers [Now New Mac Pro cost]

Yes, the Quadra 950 was the penultimate Mac at the time, best of the best.

There is another part to my point here. The machine without anything but a Floppy Disk was $5,300.00 in 1992 dollars.

I was able to get competitively priced ram and HD to put in myself. The Quadra 950 had slots for upgrading and adding cards…pre PCIe or even PCI, (five NuBus slots and a Processor Direct Slot) but there were 3rd party cards you could get.

We haven't been able to upgrade the core penultimate machine offered and supported by Apple for over 6 years. (2013 Mac Pro Trashcan). The Cheesgraters have been off support for a long time, and Apple doesn't even like to acknowledge their existence.

Now, with this new Mac Pro tower, we have the ability to upgrade our HD, RAM and PCIe slots, even make different choices in graphics (as long as they aren't Nvidia), and we can install 3rd party PCIe cards for expansion, I/O, Fibre Channel, other tech.

We don't have the exact pricing yet, but people keep talking about these fully configured options like they are all Apple. A stick of 128GB ram from a third party vendor for this and other top end machines is several thousand dollars. In one link, I saw that they are currently going for $2,800.00 each. 12 of those sticks of RAM is $33,600.00. That is a big part of the price of these so called fully loaded machines and would be true if you bought an HP or a Lenovo or Dell, if offered.

We have gotten back the choice to shop around for many of the components of a high end machine once again, which I for one am quite glad has happened.

If someone wants to buy bleeding edge hardware it will ALWAYS be expensive. It's just nice not to have to spend several thousand dollars on an expansion cage or other peripheral systems just to be able to add some PCIe cards. It's also nice to be able to buy my own RAM again.

Dave Hogan

Burbank, CA

On Jun 15, 2019, at 9:49 AM, mbrockns2@yahoo.ca [Avid-L2] <Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Was that a top-of-the-line Mac in 1992, Dave? I believe the new Mac Pro tops out somewhere around $50,000.

What was the cost of an Avid system in the 90's? $150,000 or more? The fall in cost of the total system over the next 20 years probably tracked Moore's law pretty nicely. But now the software component is so cheap, any declines in software cost are swamped by increasingly expensive hardware. So instead of expecting the cost of an edit system to decline over time, we seem to be in a new era where it will be rising.

Unfortunately, Moore's law broke down about the same time as camera resolution really started escalating.

Cheers,
--Michael Brockington