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New Mac Pro

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Re: New Mac Pro

#371

Post by leoc »

TomVDB wrote: post #345
wayoutthere wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would if you had a storage appliance on a SAN, as the SAN is almost certainly faster than a single SSD. This is an extremely common setup for video production, so it’s not out of the target market at all.

I know nothing about SAN, but I'm still surprised that it would be faster than a PCIe connected local SSD?

I'm just speculating here, but I assume that online storage isn't faster, but it may be bigger, online, easier for IT to manage, and fast enough. It also seems likely that some employers are worried about engineers or creatives just walking out with commercially sensitive data.

Re: New Mac Pro

#372

Post by hinkley »

asaph wrote: post #320
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about the base specs are just good enough. I’m not defending it per se, but if you spec’ed the machine for any given purpose, whether software dev, or rendering, it’d probably raise the cost by at least $1-2k, and then you’d have the “real” machine. So, the reason the price looks egregious is because most of it is just base cost. This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are m…

> This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette. What about an EV such as a Tesla?

I was tempted to make a joke about the Porsche or Corvette being luxury vehicles but I've noticed we spend way too much time nitpicking after fine details. It deflects from the thesis to do so and I'm not a fan. I can understand GP's point just fine without getting into quibbles over that.

Instead I took umbrage with the idea that a $3000 laptop which is our primary tool is a luxury item. I think it's one of many signs that we're a bunch of cheapskates. Other industries have different perspectives on this.

Re: New Mac Pro

#373

Post by jrockway »

ken wrote: post #318
knicholes wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download and install the app "Blind" to be shamefully informed of how many there are. Seemingly there is either a very large amount, or there are lots of SWEs who like to lie. Lots of it seem like stock options from FAANG and Uber.

I've been on the internet. I know people lie. The OKCupid blog found that "There are consistently 4x the number of people making $100K a year than there should be" [1]. They also lie about their height, and what they look like. What reason should I have for trusting anonymous self-reported data in a category where people are known to exaggerate? [1]: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...

Yeah, so... plenty of software engineers are making $500k a year. That is total compensation; you should expect half of that to come from non-salary things like stock options and bonuses.

Maybe some people are lying, but that seems about right to me for actual senior people (leading projects, maybe managing people).

My last year at Google, my W2 income was in the area of $300,000. I was a "level 5" with good performance reviews, and the scale goes up to 9. I sold all my stock the second it was issued ("autosale"), so the W2 income is pretty close to the amount of cash I got.

Programmers focused on the right task are worth their weight in gold. There are very few fields where an hour of time put in can save society as a whole thousands of hours. Software engineering is one of those, and we get to skim off a little bit of that value we created in the form of cash.

Re: New Mac Pro

#374

Post by reificator »

llampx wrote: post #186
duskwuff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first step up from 256GB is 2x512GB, and there's configurations up to 2x2TB. My guess is that the 256GB configuration is meant for users that work primarily with data that's kept on network storage.

There's no professional that would buy a machine with 256GB of storage. Let's call it what it is - a throwaway configuration meant to hit a price point.

My OS drive is for the OS and applications I don't care about. 128GB is plenty tbh.

I really can't imagine this world where "professionals" keep everything on a single drive and are primarily concerned with capacity of that single drive.

My gaming computer has three SSDs, including a 120GB for the OS, and a pair of magnetic drives.

Re: New Mac Pro

#375

Post by ken »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #210
aczerepinski wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it’s always been this way. I bought a G4 tower when I was in college and it sure as heck wasn’t $6,000 back then. This is the only traditional desktop computer that Apple sells, so it’s disappointing that everybody outside of movie studio employees has to fall back to an iMac or a Windows/Linux machine.

Just as I'm curious what prices really were. don't know exactly what Gr tower line you are talking about, but according to https://www.macstories.net/mac/the-power-mac-g4-line/ , the first reasonable powermac G4 was summer 2000, and > Prices ranged from $1,599 to $3,499, According to one online inflation calculator, $1599 in 2000 dollars is $2,372.95 in 2019 dollars. and $3499 is $5,192.58. So, I guess, yeah.I do rec…

They got even cheaper than that. In 2003, the Power Mac base price was $1499. In 2019 dollars, that's only $2082.

By 2012, the entry level Mac tower was up to $2499. Since 2013, the cheapest Mac Pro (no PCI/E slots) has been $2999.

The 2019 model is literally more than twice as expensive as the 2013, which in turn was already the previous most-expensive entry-level Mac workstation ever.

PowerMac/MacPro prices have always seemed steep, but this is a new ballgame even for Apple.

Re: New Mac Pro

#376

Post by HugoDaniel »

threeseed wrote: post #139
old-gregg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, 580X is old (it's the same hardware as RX 480 from 2016) In fact, everything in that machine is old: the Xeons they use are rocking the Skylake core form 2015, with all of the recently discovered side-channel vulnerabilities. The upcoming AMD Threadripper 3 CPUs with PCIe4 would be a much better Pro offering. Clock-for-clock they are beating Skylake now, rumored to have up to 64 cores. Also, PCIe4-based RAID 0 a…

Don't forget that Apple can see AMD and Intel's future roadmaps. AMD definitely has a superior offering with Threadripper 3 but we haven't seen what Intel is going to offer in comparison. And switching CPU manufacturers is never trial.

Do these roadmaps include running at half a speed after a couple of months due to (arguably purposeful) design flaws ?

Re: New Mac Pro

#378

Post by DuskStar »

matwood wrote: post #230
kickopotomus wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware was many orders of magnitude more expensive to manufacture in 1987[1]. The base model that you get for $6000 is not impressive at all by today's standards. The max specs would make it a powerhouse but it probably will also cost ~$12000. [1]: http://www.singularity.com/charts/page59.html

12k for max specs feels low. I'm thinking the over/under is 20k.

I'm thinking $10/GB for ram - that's $15k just to max out that one segment

Re: New Mac Pro

#379

Post by seltzered_ »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #210
aczerepinski wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it’s always been this way. I bought a G4 tower when I was in college and it sure as heck wasn’t $6,000 back then. This is the only traditional desktop computer that Apple sells, so it’s disappointing that everybody outside of movie studio employees has to fall back to an iMac or a Windows/Linux machine.

Just as I'm curious what prices really were. don't know exactly what Gr tower line you are talking about, but according to https://www.macstories.net/mac/the-power-mac-g4-line/ , the first reasonable powermac G4 was summer 2000, and > Prices ranged from $1,599 to $3,499, According to one online inflation calculator, $1599 in 2000 dollars is $2,372.95 in 2019 dollars. and $3499 is $5,192.58. So, I guess, yeah.I do rec…

They were even higher in the early 90's. In 1993 the Power Macintosh 8100 (one of the first ppc computers) started at $4200 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_8100
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