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Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

arstechnica.com

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Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#211

Post by quicksilverFTW »

snowwrestler wrote: post #184
toddmorey wrote: post #46

Boy did they drop the football in this area. I always thought the advantage to making the switch to more common PC architectures was the ability to keep pace and support a wider array of components and technologies. Instead, they over-designed the enclosure and froze the high-end range of the platform. Creating a simple, but reliable tower design (optimized for speed rather than size) would have been extremely well r…

When did CS not sing on Windows machines? To my knowledge Apple has never had a performance advantage over Windows. I thought the Apple advantage has been workflow. For example, OS X is color-managed at the OS level. You can easily create a custom profile for your display without expensive 3rd party equipment. And OS X uses the same language as PDF to composite the display, so it's easy to produce (color managed) PDF…

I've used Adobe since early 1990s versions on PCs, never had any issues. PS 4.0 was fantastic. Plus CS versions went 64 bit on Windows long before MacOS.

Plus Windows could actually multitask much better. My Dual P3-933 is still the fastest machine I've ever used compared to the hardware of the time. Amazing how much better a dual core (NT/2000) machine was.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#212

Post by pinaceae »

thoraway25455 wrote: post #104
pinaceae wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core business model of Apple is to sell hardware. That simple. That's why macOS, etc are free now. That's why they're ramping up their enterprise partnerships behind the scenes to ensure big apps run best or even first on iOS and macOS. IBM, SAP and especially Cisco (the latter has special hooks in the networking stack in iOS, giving Cisco routers an edge). You can argue if that is the correct approach or not, bu…

> Cisco (has) special hooks in the networking stack in iOS, giving Cisco routers an edge I despise Cisco as much as anyone else, but this statement merits a citation.

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wireles...

it is real.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#213

Post by Pokepokalypse »

peatmoss wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in dev…

> "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" I honestly haven't heard that argument in years from anyone I'd consider in touch with the current state of tech. And for a decade I was right there with you on the OSX == *nix plus creature comforts. But the landscape has changed since that argument held sway for me. Linux has gotten way less fiddly, and the size of my scripts to keep macOS on the straight and n…

And Mac OS X has an absolutely shitty software package management "ecosystem". App Store is shitty; compared to apt and dpkg. Brew is the only thing that helps me stay reasonably sane on OS X. But still; to "remove" any large commercial software is basically: reinstall the OS.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#214

Post by iainmerrick »

abritinthebay wrote: post #209
iainmerrick wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was unclear about the "bet". I don't mean they shouldn't take risks, more that in this case it would have been easy to hedge the bet -- launch a bigger expandable box at the same time. In their recent discussions around the upcoming redesign, it sounds like they didn't realize they were making a bet at all. If they had, they should have monitored it more closely and been a lot quicker out of the gate with th…

High end desktops are a niche, a small but important one, and the MacPro was wildly successful... at first. There's a reason people complained about the lack of upgrades and it wasn't because no-one bought one. Your suggestion would be the most un-Apple thing I've heard. They never do stuff like that because they believe in their solution as being the best . They could have been right - that was the bet. What you des…

What you describe is not a bet at all!

Of course it is! Not all bets have to be all-in. Having a backup plan would have reduced the downside if the Pro wasn't a hit. It would also add a little risk, sure, of being perceived as cowardly or unfocused by going for such an "un-Apple" approach.

When a product like the Mac Pro is widely perceived as a failure, and you have to resort to the extremely un-Apple thing of discussing your future roadmap, it seems to me very reasonable to ask what might have been done differently, and why.

I still say that if Apple had kept their eye on the ball, they would have known within a couple of years that the Mac Pro wasn't working as intended. They could and should have started work on a more modular replacement a year or two ago. It would have been shipping now and they wouldn't be in the embarrassing situation they're in.

Wikipedia's summary seems fair: "By 2016, reviewers started to agree that the Mac Pro was lacking in functionality and power, and should be updated by Apple. Apple later revealed in 2017 that the thermal core design had limited the ability to upgrade the Mac Pro's GPUs and that a new design was under development, to be released in 2018 or 2019."

Either it took them a year to figure out the problems with the current design and realize they needed to go back to the drawing board, or (I'm guessing) it was just allowed to languish and no serious investigation was done until fairly recently.

(Take all this with a pinch of salt, of course! I'm a random internet pundit and not actually running one of the most successful businesses of all time.)

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#215

Post by basseq »

iainmerrick wrote: post #200
basseq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, note[1] that Apple isn't being stupid here. Their strategy was just wrong (namely expansion via Thunderbolt peripherals and multi-GPU performance). John Gruber suggests this is a bit of an "Oh Shit" moment for Apple, too. [1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

Maybe not stupid, but very slow on the uptake. If they'd been taking the temperature of the community properly, they wouldn't have been surprised when the reaction to their new MacBook Pros was "okay, whatever, but what about the desktops?"

Gruber asserts it's the opposite:

  Even among pro users, notebooks are by far the most 
  popular Macs. In second place are iMacs. The Mac Pro is 
  third. Apple declined to describe the Mac Pro’s share 
  of all Mac sales any more specifically than “a single-
  digit percent”, but my gut feeling is that the single 
  digit is a lot closer to 1 than it is to 9.

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#216

Post by basseq »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #170
basseq wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they got wrapped around the axle on too much industrial design and painted themselves into a corner where they couldn't upgrade it easily. The ROI of going back to the drawing board so soon was a non-starter. They're not yet at the point where their developers' grumblings are having a material negative impact on the bottom line. Yet. I hope they don't make the same mistake twice. But I don't think a hackint…

I think the grumblings are impacting the bottom line, and have penetrated the Cupertino distortion field. The slightly panicked assertion that "Hey we're working on new Macs for pro users" earlier this year is evidence of that. Previously the strategy seems to have been to put minimal effort into the Mac line and push it towards a closed kind-of-good-enough commodity platform designed to maximise margins not performa…

It's not the "pro" market: Apple considers ~30% of their user base to be "pro". You wouldn't ignore that.

Now, within the pro market, notebooks are far-and-away #1, iMacs are #2, and the Mac Pro is #3 (and is described as "single digit" sales percentage). Would you care about 1-3% vs. the other 97%?

The problem is that that 1-3% are probably very vocal and the "trend-setters".

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#217

Post by _ea1k »

iamatworknow wrote: post #99
_ea1k wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very suspicious of the benchmarks that you pointed to. Maybe some users are reporting erroneous data? Take a look at the Passmark list here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php The i5 scores in at 7995, and the i7 4960HQ is 9770. If you are really CPU bound, there are going to be some big advantages for the i7 here. Of course, if performance is so bad on the Windows machine that it is nearly unusable, then…

Maybe that's the case, then? I just googled the comparison and that site I linked came up.

It is definitely possible. I switched to using Passmark almost exclusively after having some of the other sites give me some really horrible data a few times (CPU Boss, in my case).

Re: Modern “Hackintoshes” show that Apple should probably just build a Mac tower

#218

Post by iainmerrick »

basseq wrote: post #215
iainmerrick wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not stupid, but very slow on the uptake. If they'd been taking the temperature of the community properly, they wouldn't have been surprised when the reaction to their new MacBook Pros was "okay, whatever, but what about the desktops?"

Gruber asserts it's the opposite: Even among pro users, notebooks are by far the most popular Macs. In second place are iMacs. The Mac Pro is third. Apple declined to describe the Mac Pro’s share of all Mac sales any more specifically than “a single- digit percent”, but my gut feeling is that the single digit is a lot closer to 1 than it is to 9.

I meant critical reaction, not sales. It's true that critics don't always represent the silent happy majority. But if there weren't a real problem, they wouldn't be scrambling to show their Mac Pro roadmap in advance.

In terms of sales, sure, the models that are selling the best are also the ones that have been refreshed recently: https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac

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