Apple's new Mac Pro and Display combo starts at over $10,000
Apple’s new Mac Pro launched this week and the resulting hysteria about the gobsmacking price tag seems to be all tech experts can talk about. Sure, the computer and accompanying monitor are powerful, but they’re really not worth the price. You could buy a Tesla or a Porche for all that dough, and still have money left over. Apple has birthed a clunker, right?
Wrong.
Being a hot agency is, and always has been, about seeming cooler than everyone else.
With the new Mac Pro, Apple just raised the price of entry for being a hot creative agency. Despite technological advances in digital imagery pushing consumers to smaller devices, being a hot agency is, and always has been, about seeming cooler than everyone else. As counterintuitive as it seems, agencies will want the most expensive new Mac Pro setup precisely because the quality of inexpensive production has become so great. Creative people always want what they can’t have.
Digital imaging technology has advanced to the point where high-end advertising and even feature films can be shot on a cellphone. Apple promotes the quality of their iPhone camera by releasing and promoting images and films produced on the latest device. The results can be stunning.
Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has shot numerous features on an iPhone. (Photo by Alexander Koerner)
Some filmmakers can’t seem to get enough of the gimmick of shooting on the phone. Steven Soderberg famously shoots movies with the product. And why not? The iPhone has offered 4K imagery since the advent of the iPhone 6S in 2015. The latest version, the iPhone 11 Pro, supports 4K video up to 60 fps and 1080p slow motion at up to 240 fps.
In this era of higher and higher quality found in smaller and smaller devices, you’d think the barrier of entry for creating a great creative agency would be the cost of a phone and a WeWork space, right?
Apple's new Pro Display XDR starts at $4599
Well, as of this week, I predict that the entry-level cost of having a hot creative agency is at least $13,000, which is the price of Apple’s new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR monitor. If you really want to amp things up to 11, you could pay more than $50,000 just to host a single workstation. Monitor, and, of course, the famous $400 set of casters, extra.
What do you get for this lofty price tag? There’s no question the new Mac Pro is a beast. To quote Apple: “The Mac Pro features workstation-class Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with a massive 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture featuring the world’s most powerful graphics card. It also introduces Apple Afterburner, a game-changing accelerator card that enables playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously.”
The monitor is crazy, too. Apple, again: “Pro Display XDR features a massive 32-inch Retina 6K display with gorgeous P3 wide and 10-bit color, an extreme 1,600 nits of peak brightness, an incredible 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a superwide viewing angle.”
Impressive computing power, to be sure. But why pay the big bucks when even Apple itself is doing amazing creative work on devices you can slip into your pocket? Who in their right mind would pay ten to fifty times the cost of that phone to get a device with capabilities they would never likely need?
The price is a feature, not a bug. The scarcity is the attraction.
The people in the business of cool, that’s who. The price is a feature, not a bug. The scarcity is the attraction. To be cool, you have to have something that pretty much only the cool people have because unless you really valued being cool, you simply couldn’t justify the crazy expense for utility you would never need.
Even Tesla's new Cybertruck costs less than a tricked out Mac Pro. (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN)
Celebrities may tout the environmental friendliness of a Tesla, but let’s not kid ourselves. The Model X starts at $81,000. You’re paying a chunk of that money to be cool. But with lower-end Teslas now on the market for $35,000, you can feel the cool factor ebbing away. Time to hurry up and launch that Cybertruck.
Sociologist Thorstein B. Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption."
Paying for pointless scarcity isn’t a new idea. Sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in the 1890s in his influential book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The theory detailed that while the Robber Barons of the gilded age spent every waking moment making money, their families lived in lavish splendor—splendor that they themselves would never enjoy. They wanted to be recognized for having so much money that they could toss it away ostentatiously. Keeping up with the Rockefellers.
Creative agencies will argue that the power of the new Mac Pro is justified as they develop higher-end creative offerings, including VR, CGI and other new digital bells and whistles. For some truly high-end film effects houses, this is undoubtedly true. But the bottom line is that most typical creative agency product will be seen on small screens, cropped and edited for Instagram and Twitter. They could produce 90% of it on smartphones.
We became creatives because we wanted to hang out with the cool kids.
But when the leading creative agency in town tricks out its workstations with $50,000 Mac Pros and displays, you can be sure that every serious competing agency will follow suit. We didn’t get in the creative business to skimp. We didn’t even really get into it to make money. We became creatives because we wanted to hang out with the cool kids. Pretty soon, all the cool kids will have Mac Pros.
