Re: Pretty amazing Thunderbolt demo.

[Craig Seeman] "The reduction in materials used in the case and internals. Increase in orders, possible lower per unit shipping costs, other "inexpensive" reductions add up."

Craig, assuming you were kidding about Apple selling a computer with no hard drive, you are talking about what, a hundreds dollars at best? For the system you describe to meet your price point, you'd have to lose a thousand or two. And what have you done to save that $100? You've eliminated a lot of the features (massive memory capacity, internal storage, internal expansion) that a modern workstation offers in the first place.

I get that sometimes smaller or cheaper is better than bigger or more powerful. Your dream system exists today with PCs, but they use Core i7 in order to remain affordable. You just cannot get the same performance at half the price in a case half the size by eliminating the HDD and two PCIe slots.

It's not an issue of purchasing power or bad industrial design. Xeons themselves simply start at 3x the price of an i7. You pay for multiprocessing support, ECC RAM support, access to more RAM, improved memory bandwidth, and improved reliability.


[Craig Seeman] "The original 2008 MacBook Air started at $1800 with Core2Duo without SSD in the base model and certainly without Thunderbolt. It had an 80GB HD 4200rpm PATA drive. Now the base 13" model at $1300 is Dual Core i5, 128GB SSD and Thunderbolt. For $1700 add Dual Core i7 and 256GB SSD, still less than the original model. You'd think even holding the price would be a challenge given SSD and Thunderbolt implementation."

No, I would expect the price to be lower, because all the component prices are lower today than they were in 2008.

Workstation component prices are actually higher today than they were in 2008. Correspondingly, workstations are also more expensive.

Walter Soyka
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