The difference between the low and high end is much bigger than it used to be.īut don’t feel too bad about those high-end CPUs being so far out of reach. Prices have stayed mostly in proportion to parallel performance. Scores for the 4- and 12-core 2013 models are estimated from the 6-core’s. Here are those same Mac Pros with their Geekbench 3 scores graphed (32-bit multicore): Once Intel started ramping up core counts and Turbo Boost in the last few generations, the midrange was no longer 10–20% slower than the high-end - it became more like 50–75% slower at fully parallel tasks. In the 20 generations, the range of performance within the lineup was smaller, especially between the midrange and high-end. It’s not even as much of a ripoff as you might assume.

Mac Pro prices have always crept upward, but the biggest jumps aren’t recent. The trend is even more clear when graphed: And this is based on CPU upgrades only, since it’s easiest to find data for those and they’re usually the most expensive upgrades in the lineup. It’s also debatable whether the 2013 “high-end” should be the 8- or 12-core model since Turbo Boost makes it weird now, but I chose the 12-core to be more comparable with the previous generations. It’s hard to define “midrange” in some generations, so I made my best estimates.

Macbook pro 2012 price new