Twitter goes nuts over the new Mac Pro’s price tag, A self-driving truck delivered butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days, and the Chinese government wants to get rid of all of its foreign computers and software.
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The cheese grater is back in the news this week. Apple’s most expensive Mac Pro costs about the same as a new Corvette. The workstation is available starting at nearly CA$8,000, but what’s got Twitter up in arms is the cost of upgrades: It costs an additional $9,200 to get the vaunted 28-core 2.5GHz Xeon, and a whopping $33,000 to equip the machine with 1.5TB of RAM. Throw in some additional processing power and accelerator cards, and you’re looking at a price tag of roughly $70,000. The screen costs extra – $7,000 extra. Naturally people took to Twitter to complain, but some users pointed out how this machine is for heavy-duty developers and people rendering hours worth of video on a near-daily basis. While this may be true, the infamous $1,000 stand is pretty outrageous.
A Reddit post about a self-driving truck delivering butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days – without any issues – is getting a lot of attention. The story linked to the post says the trip is the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck. The autonomous capabilities were supplied by a Silicon Valley startup. There was a single safety driver and engineer on board to make sure nothing went horribly wrong. And luckily, nothing did during the 2,800-mile long trip.
And lastly, the Chinese government has given government offices three years to remove all foreign computers and software as part of a larger effort to increase the country’s reliance on home-made technology. Fortune says more than 20 million computers, including hardware from HP, Dell, and Microsoft. The story points out how American tech companies make an estimated $150 billion in annual revenues from China.
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