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Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

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Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#311

Post by greedo »

seanica wrote: post #17
marquis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OSX is still solidly used in many industries, such as media and publishing. Recording studios need the Pro to install expansion cards, video production houses the same. I've seen close to riots because a production house wanted to move all their staff to Windows, and as much as you think it might save costs, you don't have to worry about Anti-Virus and Firewall software management, admin permissions etc on top of…

"you don't have to worry about Anti-Virus and Firewall software management, admin permissions" Are you sure about that? "Flashback" is just one example. Apple has also approached an av vendor to help harden OSX.

No, Apple hasn't approached an AV vendor to help harden OSX. That was marketing FUD by Kaspersky that was later retracted. Kaspersky is conducting its own internal audit of OSX, and Apple has said that it would naturally be open to listening to any reports of vulnerabilities that Kaspersky might discover. This is far different than what was reported by computing.co.uk.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#312

Post by w1ntermute »

betterth wrote: post #297
w1ntermute wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really like gedit more than Notepad++ gedit is available on Windows too. If you really want to harness the power of Linux, run Vim. You'll see at least an order of magnitude in productiviy improvement.

I've heard this a lot -- in fact in a recent Stack Overflow "best rails IDE's" thread, Vim was near the top of recommended answers. I've been using gedit with a few add-ons installed to make working with rails a little easier. I also grabbed RubyMine but I haven't spent any significant time there yet as I already have the terminal->gedit workflow down and fighting through RubyMine modal menus to setup BitBucket git p…

> What does Vim offer that gedit doesn't? I guess I don't understand the main difference.

It's about the modal editing. It's a completely different paradigm for text editing. It changes the way you interact with your code.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#313

Post by w1ntermute »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #284
w1ntermute wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really like gedit more than Notepad++ gedit is available on Windows too. If you really want to harness the power of Linux, run Vim. You'll see at least an order of magnitude in productiviy improvement.

I keep hearing this. I can do basic Vim (i.e use it as a standard text editor) but for "serious" programming tasks I mostly use Eclipse. What advantages other than freeing up screen room and RAM would I get from using Vim over eclipse that would give me an "order of magnitude" productivity increase? I know vim has a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but there are also quite a few in eclipse.

See my other reply: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4101878

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#314

Post by gallerytungsten »

jcromartie wrote: post #306
gallerytungsten wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the above. Audio, video, 3D. Any pro level design. Even print design. Having a Mac Pro with lots of storage and big monitors when you're working on a 300 page book with 300GB of photos is much less annoying than poking along with a laptop. It's not just the speed, it's also the usability. Eg, a comfortable trackball and a nicer keyboard. Sure, you can add those to a laptop, but then you have a kludge.

How is that a kludge? You have to add them to a Mac Pro exactly the same. And you can just stick all of your "desktop" stuff on a USB hub and call it a docking station...

With a Mac Pro, you can stick the original keyboard in a closet. With a laptop, you'd have two keyboards, plus a trackball and a trackpad.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#315

Post by cbsmith »

cageface wrote: post #141
cbsmith wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees. With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there. Video is mostly offloade…

With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there. Not true. Try running a really complicated Logic set with a lot of virtual instruments on a low-end machine and watch it grind to a halt. In the last year we've seen new virtual instruments that bring analog emulation to a new level but they can eat as much a…

Macbook Air CPU By a long shot.

But I'll stand corrected. I'm obviously just playing with inferior tools.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#316

Post by cbsmith »

glesica wrote: post #133
cbsmith wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees. With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there. Video is mostly offloade…

Moore's Law doesn't apply to this situation because you aren't comparing CPUs designed for the same market and purpose. A low-power laptop CPU might very well be a year or more behind its desktop brethren.

Yes, it might be. It tends not to be behind several years behind though, particularly given the CPU's in a MBP.

The memory bandwidth, # of cores, fixed point and floating-point computational characteristics of MBP's are not that different from their desktop brethren (smaller, but they tend to be proportional). Bottom line is chewing half the power still puts you ahead after a couple of iterations of Moore's Law.

If your problem is bigger than that, or requires specialized hardware, it tends to make sense to support external hardware and/or distributed computation, in which case the MBP's limitations tend to matter far less.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#317

Post by justindocanto »

MBlume wrote: post #136
justindocanto wrote: post #94

If I used your logic last year when they did soft bumps to the MacBook Pro after not having a major upgrade since 2010, I would've been shitting my pants thinking they would be dropping the MacBook Pro and only going consumer... which, as we learned today, is not the case. The Mac Pro is a necessary part of their line for professionals and aren't going anywhere. My guess is next upgrade will be a big overhaul. It wil…

You and OP have made clear, concrete, differing predictions about the future, predictions which can be checked within the next 6-12 months. This is epistemically virtuous -- congratulations! If you want to be even more epistemically virtuous, you could arrange a bet. How much would you be willing to bet that there will be a new Mac Pro within the next year?

Like I said: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/06/12/tim_cook_confi...

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#318

Post by rurounijones »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #300
rurounijones wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, then for me breaking "The law" covers Civil Law and Criminal law. I never made any mention of Federal or not and don't see how that matters. I thought it was well known on HN that Apple used the DMCA ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act, aka, part of "the law" in the US) against the Hackintosh company Psystar, I guess I was wrong. A quick google will bring up the specifics if you want it. (e.g. http://www.theregist…

I think the reason we ended up down this road was that your original comment accused somebody of "illegal" use of OSX. Firstly this makes the assumption that the person fell under US jurisdiction at the time of their use of the system. It would also assume that the DMCA would apply to this specific person in this case. I don't know of any instance of a successful crimimal conviction against somebody for using their o…

Fair point on the first one, I did assume US & DMCA.

For the second. A law is a law is a law, even if there is no successful conviction using it yet. It is a "Damocles Sword" hanging over every person in the country it was enacted until courts actually rule on it at which point we will know what the judiciary thinks of it.

As for "illegal" vs "unlawful". As far as I am concerned they are synonyms.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#319

Post by mahyarm »

burrokeet wrote: post #86
mahyarm wrote: post #81

I guess it's going to a thin client approach. iMac workstations with thunderbolt expansion and processing farms for rendering or what have you. I bet someone would make a killing with the pro market if they sold an easy to integrate and expandable render farm, or something that uses amazon services.

Except that you would have to pipe giga/terabytes of data to/from the cloud - that is why lots of in house rendering and catalogue systems use Fibre Channel and similar technologies - one of the bottlenecks is I/O from the workstation

It wouldn't be the cloud, it would be local gigabit ethernet and thunderbolt interconnects.

Re: Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”

#320

Post by flyinRyan »

FireBeyond wrote: post #310
flyinRyan wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the Apple hardware ecosystem were open like that of Windows you'd have major companies all over the world evolving the platform in wonderful ways. And OSX would also be crashing all the time, getting a reputation for being unstable. This is exactly why they have such tightly controlled hardware configurations: so some cheap company with bad drivers can't make Grandmothers think Mac OSX crashes all the time. It's…

"Crashing all the time"? This isn't the days of 95, 98, and early XP... Crashing and BSODs are a thing of the past now, unless you buy a non-name peripheral, or have faulty hardware (which will crash an Apple just as quickly).

That's pretty much exactly what I was saying. And this is why Apple would be hesitant to open up the hardware configuration.
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