Does it still hold that SSDs are harder to recover data from than HDDs? Or is that out the window?
My wife's stock M.2 SSD died (I forget the vendor, it was some South Korean brand I had never heard of) in her 2 year old Dell XPS 13. There were no warning signs, just one day it wouldn't turn on. I searched everywhere but couldn't find a service that could recover the data. I'm guessing the microcontroller got bricked somehow. In that situation the only method of recovering data seems to be desoldering the flash ch…
My 2017 MacBook pro is definitely my last Apple laptop because it's just too expensive and unreliable (for reasons well discussed on HN). I have definitely considered getting a Mac Mini, but the new iMacs are definitely interesting. One thing I'd be concerned about is cooling. I know the iMac Pros are not ideal from a cooling perspective - I can't imagine an 8 core processor @ 5GHz plus a Radeon Pro GPU runs cool. I'…
I've been saying for 10 years, that I am going to switch from a Mac to a ThinkPad running Linux. Yet I keep buying Macs. My latest was a MacBook Air. It really wasn't that much more than the ThinkPad I was looking at.
Their steps backward in MacBook functionality (keyboard, ports, touchbar which is at best a wash) and the price hikes over the last ~4yrs have me thinking about going back to Linux. But I need a laptop, and don't want to feel like I have to have a mouse to use it and not be miserable. And good battery life, and power management so reliable I never have to think about it (close the lid, pick it up, walk off). They're so far ahead of everyone else it's hard to justify switching even when they keep screwing up and raising prices for years. It's more a testament to how bad every other hardware+software combo is, at this point, than how good they are.
It's just frustrating, I switched the household over to Apple devices when OSX came out, and now there really aren't any systems from Apple that look interesting to me. I've been programming since before the (Unix) dawn of time, and Apple devices have been good development machines for me since OSX was released 18 years ago. I'm comfortable on Linux, but the Apple iOS devices and computers are all over my home and in…
Since you're using a desktop, what's wrong with the 2018 Mac Mini? Upgradable RAM, storage and GPU can be added externally. Dual 4k support out of the box or a single 5k should be enough for your single monitor?
I wonder if there's a product or market for those who want a Mini core but don't want the dongles visible (ie, make a breathable ITX/DTX box but you put the Mac Mini, dongles and peripherals inside).
This would be my choice over a hackintosh for parents or other family.
It's just frustrating, I switched the household over to Apple devices when OSX came out, and now there really aren't any systems from Apple that look interesting to me. I've been programming since before the (Unix) dawn of time, and Apple devices have been good development machines for me since OSX was released 18 years ago. I'm comfortable on Linux, but the Apple iOS devices and computers are all over my home and in…
Since you're using a desktop, what's wrong with the 2018 Mac Mini? Upgradable RAM, storage and GPU can be added externally. Dual 4k support out of the box or a single 5k should be enough for your single monitor?
Getting an external enclosure effectively doubles the cost of adding discrete graphics in some instances. That's a laughable solution.
I think you meant 3x, 30x may have been true when SSDs were first brought to market. https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat... https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...
I was talking about the price of a 128GB SSD vs. what you could get in an HDD for the same price. Not "what is the maximum size SSD available". A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.
Bought my iMac 7 years ago with 8GB as the default memory option and a 1TB fusion drive. And here we are, nearly a decade later. Still 8 GB in the newest models. Still 1 TB fusion drives. GPUs haven't even seemed to take a jump over last year's models.
What seems worse to me is that the default drive for the 21.5" is a 1TB 5400 spinning rust drive, not even a fusion drive. This is just shameful. People who don't know any better will get the cheapest drive, and have horrible performance. This is exactly what happened to an older friend of my wife. And since it is an iMac, it is next to impossible to replace the drive later (on some models, you need to unseal the LCD…
Even worse, the upgrades are insultingly overpriced. $100 for 32GB of flash to get a Fusion drive, and $700 (again, extra) to get a 1TB when you can get a nice Samsung for $350 in that size. Ridiculous.
I think you meant 3x, 30x may have been true when SSDs were first brought to market. https://www.wd.com/products/internal-ssd/wd-blue-3d-nand-sat... https://www.wd.com/products/internal-storage/wd-blue-pc-desk...
I was talking about the price of a 128GB SSD vs. what you could get in an HDD for the same price. Not "what is the maximum size SSD available". A cheap 128GB SSD would be around $40-50 while you can get 3TB HDDs for that price.
Both storage types will have comparable prices at 128GB, and their cost per GB will decrese at different rates as you increase storage capacity. It's not fair to compare pricing between different storage capacities across different storage types, that is why I have shared 1TB drives from the same vendor.
Also, a cheap 128GB SSD is way less than the price you have suggested, even a 120GB Kingston SSD is only $20.
Even if the Mac Pro is the computer of all our dreams, I doubt it will meet the poster’s needs. Seems like they want a fairly bare-bones, minimalist and simple computer. I doubt a Mac Pro is going to come in at under $3.5k at the entry level.
The iMac Pro starts at $4,999 and was (probably) intended to be Apple's only "pro" desktop but the desire for an upgradable system was too much so Apple caved and a new Mac Pro is on the horizon. Apple is going to charge a premium for that upgradability that the iMac Pro doesn't have, I'll bet the base price for the Mac Pro is going to be at least $5,999.
I bought a 48-core rig (Dual socket ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS w/ 2x Xeon E7-8890V4's) w/ a 10TB RAID5 array of 10800 RPM disks, 128GB DDR4 ECC, and a 1TB SSD for $5k...
Granted it was from some dude's homelab after he got laid off at Cray but still.
When you get up to that dollar amount I feel like there's just much sweeter shit out there.
One gripe is the thing is fucking massive and kinda unwieldy stuffed into a Coolermaster Cosmos II case...
The Vega 48 GPU seems disappointing for a machine that expensive.
Yea, I agree. I'm pretty sure you could just plug in a Radeon VII as an eGPU, however. I've also heard that NVIDIA cards can work as eGPUs as well.
true. OTOH, an eGPU would be connected by Thunderbolt 3, which offers basically the same max communication speed as 4 PCIe lanes.
and so i wonder: at what point does that communication speed limit the performance of such a set up? why do people normally plug high end graphics cards into a x16 slot? how good a GPU should be used in an eGPU housing before it's a waste of money? etc
have you never seen an apple press release? Every product is 2x as fast as the old one, based on a cherry picked benchmark
In this case it's not just marketing speech: the new top end CPU is i9-9900k, it's ALMOST 2x faster than the previous top end CPU (i7-7700k) for multi-core benchmark. https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2548 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/1779
Of course it's almost 2x faster; it has 2x the cores. Meanwhile the single-core score is almost the same for both. I've never seen anyone try to put together a good breakdown on how various common workflows stack up, but I would bet that most benefit very little from the extra 4 cores.