> I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either.
Apple on the new Mac Pro that I got a month ago: 192GB memory? That will be $3,000. NewEgg? We'll sell you the same specced memory from the same manufacturer for $800. And you get to keep/sell the baseline 32GB memory.
8TB SSD? $2,000, thanks. OWC and NewEgg? Here, have a PCIe 4xM.2 card and 4 2TB SSDs for $1,100. Oh, and they'll be 50% faster, you just can't have them as the only drive on the system (my Apple SSD runs at around 2800MB/s, the alternative, 4500MB/s).
So they are entirely marked up, and look in any forum - by far most people are not doing what I'm doing, and just "going straight Apple for convenience", though the memory installation was less than 1 minute, and the SSD installation less than 5, including unboxing, seating the 4 drives, reinstalling the heatsink on the card and installing. I get "my time is money", and "it just works" (which, as we know, more and more is less the case with Apple), but really, for me, that was a $3,100 savings for <10 minutes effort.
Apple on the new Mac Pro that I got a month ago: 192GB memory? That will be $3,000. NewEgg? We'll sell you the same specced memory from the same manufacturer for $800. And you get to keep/sell the baseline 32GB memory.
8TB SSD? $2,000, thanks. OWC and NewEgg? Here, have a PCIe 4xM.2 card and 4 2TB SSDs for $1,100. Oh, and they'll be 50% faster, you just can't have them as the only drive on the system (my Apple SSD runs at around 2800MB/s, the alternative, 4500MB/s).
So they are entirely marked up, and look in any forum - by far most people are not doing what I'm doing, and just "going straight Apple for convenience", though the memory installation was less than 1 minute, and the SSD installation less than 5, including unboxing, seating the 4 drives, reinstalling the heatsink on the card and installing. I get "my time is money", and "it just works" (which, as we know, more and more is less the case with Apple), but really, for me, that was a $3,100 savings for <10 minutes effort.