Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#71

Post by save_ferris » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:54 PM UTC

onebyteman wrote: post #51

wongarsu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> switching to complaining that Apple's definition of "Pro" is too "Pro" for us. If by too Pro you mean someone using an 8 core CPU with 32 GB of RAM ... The higher end models might be great, with some genuine innovation in the GPU interface that to some will justify high prices. But I don't know who the target demographic for a $6k PC with those specs is supposed to be.

It’s the rich people who can afford not thinking more than twice to make the purchase. If that excludes almost everyone, thats fine. Apple is making a statement that they are still the premium of the premium

That may be, but their recent decision to no longer disclose per-unit sales for any of their products on earnings calls moving forward doesn't necessarily signal good times ahead. Their revenue for the last 2 quarters is down from the same period a year ago, and there doesn't appear to be anything on the horizon that's going to catapult their earnings back up. iPhone sales have been in decline for a few years now.

They're banking that the margins of these new, higher-end products offsets the sales lost by shrinking their market. The problem with this strategy is that it isn't very sustainable and leaves them vulnerable to losing market share.

Microsoft keeps getting more serious about Linux compatibility, and if they ship a surface pro or something similar that can seriously compete with the MBP, things will get interesting.

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#72

Post by happytoexplain » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #16

ITT: people who don't know how luxury branding works. Without the stand, all headlines would have been on how Apple finally listened and produced a great MacPro - something only us geeks care about. Whereas this $1k-stand trolling generates mainstream headlines which reinforce the luxury-brand image that actually makes them the big money. It's entirely possible that people will now buy this monitor even if they don't…

The articles are about how this hurts their PR. The threads may be full of people who "don't get it", but the key point is that the threads are full of them, providing strong evidence for the thesis. Your assertion is a little like Skinner blaming the children.

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#73

Post by bredren » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #46

wongarsu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My $200 pivoting stand came with an entire screen for free. Granted, it's not nearly as nice as Apple's stand. But I suspect the reception would have been a lot better if the narrative was "the $5000 screen comes with an ok stand, the great one is $1000 extra" instead of "lol, the $5000 screen is useless unless you buy a $120 Vesa mount plus some off-brand stand, or the $1000 official stand"

My $200, 6 year old stand came with one too, and it even includes the ability to raise and lower the screen, plus the 90° rotation. And wait, there’s more! It also pivots. Underwhelming indeed.

My Dell P2715Q also came with its own stand, and it is sufficient for me.

But if you are using a six year old, $200 monitor you're not the market for a display like this.

Counterbalanced, Humanscale stands go for $400+ Nice equipment is expensive--it is the whole point of this release.

https://www.humanscale.com/products/product.cfm?group=m10

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#74

Post by snazz » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

aloer wrote: post #64

save_ferris wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was somewhat surprised with their entire Mac Pro strategy. With a base tower configuration starting at $6k (about twice what I was expecting), they seemed to signal a shift in what they consider a “pro” user to be. They’re pretty clearly chasing after the commercial, high-end computing market, but they’ve kinda left the high-end consumer market behind in some ways. Still no definitive fix to the fly switch keyboard…

I have not yet seen any speculation about what a full spec mac pro might cost but I would not be surprised if it approaches 100k$. It can also connect to up to 6 screens for 5k$ which means this thing might go up to 130k$ in price, fully specced The mac pro itself might have never been meant for everyone. Most of the people in the "pro" group didn't know or didn't care that they might only be on the lower end in term…

A hundred thousand dollars? Where are you getting that from? It has got to be expensive, but $6k base ($12k with monitor and stand) to $130k fully specced seems exceedingly unlikely. Are the GPUs and 28-core Xeon that expensive? What component causes the sudden jump in price?

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#75

Post by wongarsu » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

jamexcb wrote: post #70

All of you are seeing this from the wrong side! Apple is opening a new market. Premium monitor stands. ;)

I know you are joking, but this already exists. I can get a cheap table mount for two monitors for $40 from Amazon, or I can get a really nice one for anything from $500 to $2000 (HumanScale's configurator has some great options [1])

1: https://www.humanscale.com/products/mflex-m10-monitor-arm-co...

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#76

Post by jvzr » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

snazz wrote: post #74

aloer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not yet seen any speculation about what a full spec mac pro might cost but I would not be surprised if it approaches 100k$. It can also connect to up to 6 screens for 5k$ which means this thing might go up to 130k$ in price, fully specced The mac pro itself might have never been meant for everyone. Most of the people in the "pro" group didn't know or didn't care that they might only be on the lower end in term…

A hundred thousand dollars? Where are you getting that from? It has got to be expensive, but $6k base ($12k with monitor and stand) to $130k fully specced seems exceedingly unlikely. Are the GPUs and 28-core Xeon that expensive? What component causes the sudden jump in price?

1.5 TB ECC RAM for a start. Then the 4 Vega II GPU cards. Add to that the Afterburner card, a terabyte or more of native SSD storage, and possibly more PCIe SSD storage through MPX slot. Yeah, I think you will hit that very easily!

Edit: I couldn't find a single 128 GB DDR4 ECC 2993 MHz DIMM, but the closest I found is the 128 GB DDR4 ECC 2400 MHz DIMM at 2249.99 a piece. Now imagine 12 of those, at higher frequency, with the usual Apple markup. That's already 30 to 40K alone.

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#77

Post by sametmax » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #11

sametmax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excatly. I never heard hate. Only laughts. "apple is doing a stupid apple thing" It's actually good PR: everybody talk about it, but they also they it's a good quality monitor, just that apple is over pricing an accessory, which is a cheap way of making the luxury brand perceptuon stronger... Huge com win for very little effet.

Call it what you like. But I’m pretty sick of having to have the apple is stupid conversation at work. I get it, but it comes up far too often. It’s severely impacted my professional career due to prejudice from the wintel guys...who I also run circles around within Windows and Unix/Linux. But because apple released yet another expensive shiny I’ve got to take time out of my day to deal with this crap.

I just ignore it and use ubuntu. It's not difficult.

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#78

Post by falcolas » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:46 PM UTC

bredren wrote: post #73

falcolas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My $200, 6 year old stand came with one too, and it even includes the ability to raise and lower the screen, plus the 90° rotation. And wait, there’s more! It also pivots. Underwhelming indeed.

My Dell P2715Q also came with its own stand, and it is sufficient for me. But if you are using a six year old, $200 monitor you're not the market for a display like this. Counterbalanced, Humanscale stands go for $400+ Nice equipment is expensive--it is the whole point of this release. https://www.humanscale.com/products/product.cfm?group=m10

I'm not talking about the monitor, I'm talking about the VESA compatible stand. It just happened to come with a really nice monitor as well. :)

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#79

Post by snazz » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

jvzr wrote: post #76

snazz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hundred thousand dollars? Where are you getting that from? It has got to be expensive, but $6k base ($12k with monitor and stand) to $130k fully specced seems exceedingly unlikely. Are the GPUs and 28-core Xeon that expensive? What component causes the sudden jump in price?

1.5 TB ECC RAM for a start. Then the 4 Vega II GPU cards. Add to that the Afterburner card, a terabyte or more of native SSD storage, and possibly more PCIe SSD storage through MPX slot. Yeah, I think you will hit that very easily! Edit: I couldn't find a single 128 GB DDR4 ECC 2993 MHz DIMM, but the closest I found is the 128 GB DDR4 ECC 2400 MHz DIMM at 2249.99 a piece. Now imagine 12 of those, at higher frequency,…

Okay, you’re not that far off. A similar HP Z8/G4 machine would come in at $53,325, so I could see the Mac with monitors nearing $100,000.

Re: Apple’s $1000 monitor stand is a massive and unnecessary PR fail

#80

Post by aloer » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

snazz wrote: post #74

aloer wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not yet seen any speculation about what a full spec mac pro might cost but I would not be surprised if it approaches 100k$. It can also connect to up to 6 screens for 5k$ which means this thing might go up to 130k$ in price, fully specced The mac pro itself might have never been meant for everyone. Most of the people in the "pro" group didn't know or didn't care that they might only be on the lower end in term…

A hundred thousand dollars? Where are you getting that from? It has got to be expensive, but $6k base ($12k with monitor and stand) to $130k fully specced seems exceedingly unlikely. Are the GPUs and 28-core Xeon that expensive? What component causes the sudden jump in price?

I used the hp workstation configurator for their highest priced tier and added 28c Xeon and ram and single v100 and it came out at 56k. I assume the Vega II duo x2 at 28 tflop will be similar to 4x v100 each at 9k so going from there it’s already at 84k.

Add a little extra because it’s apple and I could see it pushing 100k