I would like to remind international users that making use of American technology makes you a pawn in the current trade war.
The US is a counterparty risk.
Apple Is Listening
201–210 of 379 posts
Re: Apple Is Listening
#202I’m glad that Apple is finally updating their Macs again, but at the same time Apple has doubled-down on its refusal to sell user-serviceable, upgradeable, and expandable hardware at prices that are within reach for most customers. The laptops have soldered RAM and soldered storage. The Mac Mini and iMac Pro thankfully have DIMMs, but in order to keep the warranty, you have to visit an Apple-approved repair center to…
> which means giving up macOS, which I find a more productive environment Get Ubuntu, install Docky and Macbuntu theme if you want to keep familiar desktop around before you fully convert to Linux.
Does Ubuntu run Final Cut?
Re: Apple Is Listening
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that, statistically, nobody cares about the issues you raise. You can maybe get your problems addressed by a niche retailer, but Apple has bigger fish to fry.
How long will it have to take for people to realize that this tendency to only ever care for a virtual customer that's an average of all customers across all characteristics is in fact a market failure?
Looking at Apple's sales and customer satisfaction ratings, I'm not quite sure you understand what the term Market Failure means.
Re: Apple Is Listening
#204I'll believe it when they produce a MacBook Pro that developers love again or a Mac Pro that (not yet independently wealthy) developers can afford again.
As I sit here looking at the stupid TouchBar, the hunk of aftermarket plastic that contains an HDMI port, Thunderbolt port and USB ports hanging off the side of my MacBook Pro so that I can connect my peripherals, the TouchPad I never use and the keyboard I hate, I can't help but wonder if I'm just an idiot for buying Mac after Mac after Mac. I've run Apple products since 2007 and this is the feeling I'm left with. When my iPhone 7 decided to stop working, I ended up getting a Pixel 3a because it was cheap and good enough for what I want to do with a phone. I'm looking at my laptop the same way. I can't shake the feeling that for my use, I'd be happier on a Thinkpad T480. If I can self-upgrade that second NVME to whatever I want, it'd be a ripping machine to run in i7-8550U 32GB RAM 1440p trim, and comes with a second 72Wh battery, for less than £1800.
Re: Apple Is Listening
#205On the new MacPro, we have to consider the target audience.
It's doubtful the machine is a good choice for anything other than an artist doing crazy sound/video stuff. It's simply too much compute power. Of course I'd love to have a 56-thread monster (I always wanted Intel to invest more seriously on Xeon Phi as a homogeneous CPU/GPU replacement because I got tired of the VAX+supercomputer arrangement from the 80's that survives today as the normal clever x86 driving stupid-but-can-lift-heavy-things GPU) but I simply can't justify one for me. When I actually need to do some heavy lifting, there is always Google or AWS to help me with it (and Azure can rent me some really big Cray iron if I really, really need that kind of power). I have a cousin who was into computational chemistry that has mastered programming the classic Cray boxes and even he would probably be very happy with ad-hoc swarms of cloud-based boxes these days.
The main advantage of the Mac Mini is the size, but if you match specs with an iMac Pro or even an iMac, you'll kind of end up with the same price for a machine without a monitor. It's cute, but I wouldn't get one. And the actual desk footprint of an iMac is more or less the same as a Mini with a monitor.
It'd be nice if Apple decided to sell the iMac LCD panels as standalone monitors (because I'd love to have a monitor with the same color responses as my iMac, just so that the background looks the same on all screens - or even the black background of the terminals were all the same shade of black, FFS). Maybe they will, but, again, considering all machines that can run macOS, all practical options in the low-to-mid-to-high-end (MacPros are waaay above that) have pretty nice free screens attached to the machine.
One minor complaint: the stand... Asking $999 for a monitor stand is beyond ridiculous. If it costs that much to make, then just sell the ultra-HDR 8K wundermonitor for $999 more and put the stand in the box. It's not like it's not much cheaper than the reference monitors it goes against. I'd totally get one without a Mac if I had to edit 8K video for money (lots of it). The stand is 2019's version of the "I'm rich" iPhone app.
All in all, we should think of the Pro as the SGI Tezro of our time - exotic, expensive, ugly (it really looks like a cheese grater) and probably more than we need.
Re: Apple Is Listening
#206Back in 2012, I bought the original rMBP. It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s…
I'm giving up my spec'd out Macbook Pro 2015 over my cold, dead body.
My wife needed a MBP so I've bought a 2019 to replace my 2013 13" model.
The i7 2.8GHz dual core is now an i5 2.4GHz quad core. The RAM is still 16GB. To keep the price roughly the same the 2019 is a fixed 512GB instead of an upgradeable 1TB.
And of course, no escape or function keys but touch bar. And no SD card slot. And a keyboard replacement programme - I've replaced a few keys myself on the 2013 that wore out, I can't see me doing that one the 2019.
The 2019 hasn't arrived yet. I'm genuinely not sure whether to give her the new one and keep the six year old one for myself. That it's even in question seems ridiculous.
Re: Apple Is Listening
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which means giving up macOS, which I find a more productive environment Get Ubuntu, install Docky and Macbuntu theme if you want to keep familiar desktop around before you fully convert to Linux.
Does Ubuntu run Final Cut?
What's the point of this question? Stating the obvious that voluntary platform lock-in has consequences? That software from Apple doesn't run on anything else than Apple hardware (iTunes being an exception)?
It runs DaVinci Resolve and Pixar's RenderMan natively. CS6 runs reliably under Wine as well.
Can you run 3DS Max on macOS? So, isn't macOS a pro environment then?
Re: Apple Is Listening
#208Back in 2012, I bought the original rMBP. It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s…
As a vi user, I hate the touchbar and its escape "key". I sometimes find myself turning down the brightness instead of getting into command mode which is irritating.
I'm with all the people who remap Caps Lock to be the Escape key. Works fine.
(Although when I have to use other people's Macs or my Win PC at home it's often hard to remember to use the Escape key instead - at least toggling Caps Lock isn't destructive.)
Re: Apple Is Listening
#209Half of the keyboard started acting up on my 6 year old Early 2013 15" MBP yesterday. Was waiting for the rumoured 16" rework but had my hand forced to the 2019 15". The touch bar is already winding me up as I'm used to resting my fingers on the edge of the top of the keyboard. It's constantly like: Siri, mute, brightness! siri! siri! It looked cool on iMessage that I could scroll through smileys but that's about it.…
You can remove Siri from the touchbar. I did because I kept activating it when authenticating with Touch ID.
Re: Apple Is Listening
#210I'm wondering why you need so much power in 1 machine for DCC work. Wouldn't it be better to have a relatively cheap model, and when you need to Render, to farm it out to a cluster of computers? For example, they claim the beefiest model will be 4x the old Mac Pro. But at what cost? $10,000-15,000 for maxed out system? How many cheap PC renderfarm computers can I get for that? How many cloud rendering instances could…
Why outsource critical work to a 3rd party cloud when you can buy this one time purchase from Apple? Why build your own cloud and hire a ton of specialized personnel to manage a bunch of infrastructure you're not in the business of managing when you can buy this one time purchase from Apple? Why wait around for your project to render when you can render it in real time and make changes as necessary? Remember when you…
> Why outsource to cloud when make a one time purchase from Apple?
Because I can scale the cloud as much as I want. I can purchase 100x the compute power of this Mac, and I stop renting it as needed. The Mac Pro will need to be upgraded over time, the cloud will automatically upgrade what HW I can rent.
Also, there's a difference between rendering previews and rendering in real time. This machine is not going to render a production frame workload in real time. You do that kind of stuff with offline rendering. A machine that's 4x faster represents a marginal increase in workload that can be rendered in real time, because 3d rendering isn't O(n). And if you want real time rendering previews, there are PC workstations that will still smoke this Mac.
I feel like once again, people are trying to justify Apple pricing by appeal to edge case, when the reality is, people can put together a professional PC workstation for 3dsmax that performs about the same and costs half the price or more.
Look at the Z8 for example, not even the top of the line custom built PC workstation: https://petapixel.com/2017/09/13/hp-z8-pc-can-upgraded-insan...
Up to 3TB of RAM, 48 TB storage, 56 CORES, and this was shipped in 2017! Starting price $2400 (vs $6k for new Mac Pro). And you can't even get NVidia cards for the Mac Pro. An NVidia RTX 2080 or Titan RTX can be up to 2x faster than a Vega II Pro in DCC apps. If you want really fast rendering, Nvidia has actual racks of GPUs that are far more cost effective than sticking 4 expensive Vega II Pro's into this Mac.
A fully decked out Mac Pro is likely to cost $36k. An NVidia RTX Rendering server, which can give you real time desktop previews and contains 8 Titan RTX cores with 24GB VRAM, and 16 Xeon Cores, also costs $36k, and it can be scaled as needed.
If you really need to scale up massively parallel workloads, then commodity compute HW is far more cost effective and less limited.