Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

marco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 321 posts

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#41

Post by rpedroso »

blueprint wrote: post #31
forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Our sound guy is PISSED at the lack of update. Seriously, incredibly pissed. I've honestly never seen him this angry before. He'd been counting down the days till WWDC and a long overdue update. There are three major pieces of software he uses on his Mac that he swears by. It sounds like they have all just released or are about to release Windows versions. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trend? Apple is clearly…

To confirm, what kind of professionals are you talking about for whom a new Macbook Pro isn't going to be fast enough?

People in the business of video editing are one example. They need/use more RAM and processing power than you can get on any new model of Macbook Pro.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#42

Post by millzlane »

Bud wrote: post #15
millzlane wrote: post #10

This isn't surprising. Look at the product wikis and see the comparison of all the hardware. From the mac pro all the way down to the phone. They have been selling overpriced hardware for a very long time. To be fair.. before the intel switch the hardware was theirs. Now, after the intel switch they're still selling over priced hardware except now it's cheaper for them because they're not using powerpc's anymore, and…

Uh, except they aren't overpriced, as evidenced by the fact that nobody can undercut the Air or the iPhone or the iPad on price yet. And they aren't reaping the benefits of using PC hardware, either; other than Intel CPUs, Apple is custom-building all its motherboards and parts. So basically, you have no valid points at all and are just posting an anti-Apple rant.

You only named 3 devices. All of which have only been on the market less than 5 years. It won't take the industry long to surpass those. Intel chips are the brain of the computer. Therefore the rest of the device benefits from it. And you can't argue that Apple didn't benefit greatly from the switch. Or else they wouldn't have rewritten their entire OS for them.

So maybe 1/3 of my points are invalid.and I'm not anti apple I happen to own the latest macbook. And used to work there.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#43

Post by dasil003 »

zobzu wrote: post #21
ary wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because there are audio/video professionals who want a Mac that has hardware expandability similar to a PC. The market becomes more niche by the day, but it's there.

That being said the vast majority just have a laptop Its fast enough and support high rez external monitors. That's probably the reason. When the niche for desktops is too small, it will eventually die. Because Apple only produce stuff that makes a pretty good amount of money. If it doesn't, it's removed. It make sense, even if it's annoying.

It make sense on pure dollar value, but I think it would really hurt the brand perception of Macs as a premium computer, and it would drive the pro market elsewhere which could have a nasty trickle down effect over time. I don't think Mac Pro is going anywhere, maybe they have something bigger in the works and just need more time.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#44

Post by protomyth »

mortenjorck wrote: post #25

Let's say I'm running a post shop and I want to render from After Effects as fast as possible. In normal use, just how much faster will one of these dated Xeons render my comps than the quad-core i7 in a top-of-the-line iMac?

After Effects has NVidia acceleration (CUDA), so a Mac Pro with multiple NVidia cards might be a better choice.

This is an "upgrade" in the sense that the processors they were using became too expensive and they used the currently sold ones.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#45

Post by twog »

blueprint wrote: post #31
forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Our sound guy is PISSED at the lack of update. Seriously, incredibly pissed. I've honestly never seen him this angry before. He'd been counting down the days till WWDC and a long overdue update. There are three major pieces of software he uses on his Mac that he swears by. It sounds like they have all just released or are about to release Windows versions. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trend? Apple is clearly…

To confirm, what kind of professionals are you talking about for whom a new Macbook Pro isn't going to be fast enough?

I imagine he is talking about sound engineers. Also, he is talking about the Mac Pro (the desktop) not the Macbook Pro, the laptop.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#46

Post by reitzensteinm »

mortenjorck wrote: post #25

Let's say I'm running a post shop and I want to render from After Effects as fast as possible. In normal use, just how much faster will one of these dated Xeons render my comps than the quad-core i7 in a top-of-the-line iMac?

Here is a relevent benchmark. The top of the line iMac has a Sandy Bridge 2600, and the 980X is the desktop version of the equivilant server part.

980X vs 2600 video transcoding: 24s vs 29.1s (lower is better)

But there are still 2 CPUs in the Mac Pro, so you can double performance; it should be 2.5x faster still.

Ivy Bridge, which features in the new MacBook Pros, and likely iMacs soon, nets another 10% or so for the same clock speed over Sandy Bridge.

Haswell will likely be the point at which a quad core Haswell chip roughly equals a 6 core Westmere chip (not bad for a 3 generation gap).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-i...

Edit: Another commenter pointed out that AE has CUDA acceleration. In that case, even a mid range graphics card would be faster than two high end CPUs.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#47

Post by adventureful »

planetguy wrote: post #11

"No Xeon E5 CPUs" I must admit I've lost track of what the latest and greatest CPU is at any given time, so I googled for "Xeon E5" and found this article: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/11/apple_quietly_... So what is it? Have they stuck in an Intel Xeon E5 or not?

Consumer wise it's the i7-3930k and 3960x. For the XEONs as the other person noted, it's the E5-26xx and the E5-1650 is pretty badass.

You can still go higher than these, but the prices skyrocket on the E7 line, eg the E7-8870, and the core to core value isn't higher:

http://ark.intel.com/products/53580/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-...

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#49

Post by dasil003 »

blueprint wrote: post #31
forrestthewoods wrote: post #29

Our sound guy is PISSED at the lack of update. Seriously, incredibly pissed. I've honestly never seen him this angry before. He'd been counting down the days till WWDC and a long overdue update. There are three major pieces of software he uses on his Mac that he swears by. It sounds like they have all just released or are about to release Windows versions. I'm beginning to wonder if this is a trend? Apple is clearly…

To confirm, what kind of professionals are you talking about for whom a new Macbook Pro isn't going to be fast enough?

What everyone else said, plus the fans. Man, there are times I actually think about a Mac Pro as a humble Rails developer. If I fully parellelized my test suites it might even be worth the money.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#50

Post by aphyr »

AndrewNoNumbers wrote: post #33
chrissnell wrote: post #23

The Mac Pro isn't just for those in the A/V industry. It's for anyone who wants a Mac with more than four cores. No other Mac can do 6+ cores. The Mac Pro hasn't seen a case update in at least six years. What other Apple product has been neglected like this?

I'd politely like to ask.. What, besides A/V work, is a 6+ core OS X machine necessary for?

Scientific computing, system modeling, numerics, CAD/CAM, visualization, developing highly concurrent software, event processors, rendering, machine learning (esp vision/video/spatial stuff), genetic algorithms, databases, GIS, crypto, traffic processing, theorem proving, compiling stuff, exploratory data mining. Gaming, maybe. I routinely saturate my MBP's 4 HT cores. It's also nice to develop on the same architecture you'll deploy to; helps with concurrency tuning.

Not that you can't run these on smaller devices; these are just easy ways to use up a lot of CPU.

Post reply on HN