According to Apple’s Trade-In program, a perfectly working specced-out Mac Pro bought for more than $52,000 is now worth less than $1,000. That’s weird since you can still buy this machine from Apple for the same prices it was launched in 2019. Furthermore, according to rumors, the Intel-based Mac Pro is far from an obsolete product. This ultra-low value disrespects the customers.
The Next Mac Pro Will be Less ‘Pro’ Than Planned. Picture: YMCinema via Midjourney (AI-generated Mac Pro).Intel Mac Pro: From $52,000 to $1,000
Apple’s flagship which is the Intel-based Mac Pro was introduced in 2019. Professionals had (and still have) the privilege of upgrading and improving that beast, for a solid price. A specced out machine which is armed with a 2.5GHz 28‑core Intel Xeon W processor, turbo boosts up to 4.4GHz, 1.5TB (12x128GB) of DDR4 ECC memory, two Radeon Pro W6800X Duo with 64GB of GDDR6 memory each, 8TB SSD storage, and the Apple Afterburner card, would cost a bit more than $52,000. The price remained unchanged! And you can still buy the same machine at Apple Stores. However, how much would you get for a trade-in? As discovered by YouTuber Marques Brownlee which stated: “Fun fact: If you plug in a 4-year-old $50,000+ Mac Pro into Apple’s trade-in site, you don’t even get enough credit to buy an iPhone 14 Pro”. Indeed, his team tried to trade its beefed-up Mac Pro and got for it just $970 USD. “Just tried pricing out our $52,199 Mac Pro’s at the office for trade-in, which you can still buy from Apple, $52,199. What else has dropped 50x in value in 3 years.. besides crypto?” Brownlee asked.
Fun fact: If you plug in a 4 year old $50,000+ Mac Pro into Apple's trade-in site, you don't even get enough credit to buy an iPhone 14 Pro 🫠 https://t.co/CzPzoymWAa
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 17, 2023
Refurbished Mac Pro: X20 price of the trade-in
According to Twitter used Adam Nash, Apple usually tracks eBay-sold prices for machines, but not in this case. A quick search of recently sold Mac Pros on eBay shows much higher prices. Meanwhile, Apple’s probably refurbishing them and selling them for like 20x the price, and you can find those machines got refurbished and ready to be sold for $20,000. So this is it: The user buys a $52,000 Mac Pro from Apple, trades it in for $1,000, and then Apple sells it for $20,000. Sounds logical 😤
Mac Pro on eBayWe’ll give you a quote for what your current device is worth online or in a store.
Apple
Refurbished Mac Pro computersNot obsolete
According to Bloomberg, the upcoming revision of Apple’s powerful computer will lack user-upgradeable graphics options. There are rumors indicating that the next Mac Pro would come without an M2 Extreme chip, upgradeable memory, or a new design. The new Apple Silicon Mac Pro has not launched yet, and professional users are not happy. Thus, the Intel-based Mac Pro is still very relevant, and far from being an obsolete product, which makes it even more bizarre its smashed value on the Trade-In program. “We’ll give you a quote for what your current device is worth online or in a store” Apple states by explaining its Trade-In program. However, this sentence is not so accurate in the case of Apple’s flagship and most expensive (and powerful) product to date.
Product List
Here’re the products mentioned in the article, and the links to purchase them from authorized dealers.
- Mac Pro Apple Desktops
- BUY on B&H
- BUY on ADORAMA
Last year I purchased a completely maxed out M1 Max 16″ laptop with 8 TB of storage on it for just under $7,000. I was thinking about replacing it with the brand new M2 Max laptop and the trade-in value of my 1 year old laptop from Apple was only $1200.00. However they are selling refurbished laptops with the exact same specs for $4,689. A difference of $3489.00
I am used to the “Apple Tax” however this is far too much greed….even for Apple.
What a lot of these similar articles are failing to grasp:
-Apple often comes out with awesome hardware (old Mac Pro trashcan with at the time amazing GPUs).
-Apple hardware doesn’t work with traditional industry leading software in the same sense, Apple devs need to write code properly to make their hardware supported by the software.
-Apple devs get lazy and don’t actually bother making their hardware compatible with the most commonly used programs in the industry (3D software, editorial, etc).
But of course they work fine with stuff like Final Cut Pro, which is Apple owned and backed.
-Software companies don’t do anything extra to have their software supported by Apple since it isn’t their problem.
-Industry professionals abandon the Mac platform because it’s really only geared to the Professional Consumer (Film and VFX work on PCs, Corporate videos, some commercials and documentary use Mac)
-Apple comes out with some better newer tech in a few years time and abandons their older but still very powerful tech in favor of getting new customers and sales.
So yeah that 50,000 dollar computer isn’t selling back to Apple for a whole lot, but I can tell you professionally on a film set and in an editorial suite that the “outdated” Intel systems are the only ones that are being used because they actually work. Software works on the Intel based hardware faster despite the M chips noted benchmark tests.
I can tell you this as a vetted industry professional who works both on set and in editorial.
Until Apple actually supports their new hardware with proper software dev, they aren’t getting any new sales from myself or people in the know.
Apple has to be shaken they kill all their devices with their planned obsolescence. You can’t upgrade their devices. Aweful stick to phones your tablets and macs are going down.