Live data from Hacker News

Mac Pro

apple.com

461–470 of 571 posts

Re: Mac Pro

#461

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that a "pro" computer with no wired ethernet? Who on earth would discard stable gigabit internet for some flaky wifi with substantially lower performance? Edit: Corrected as requested. Thanks.

[deleted]

Re: Mac Pro

#462

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that a "pro" computer with no wired ethernet? Who on earth would discard stable gigabit internet for some flaky wifi with substantially lower performance? Edit: Corrected as requested. Thanks.

It has two Gb ethernet ports (and you can easily add more through the 6 20Gb Thunderbolt 2 ports.

Re: Mac Pro

#463

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that a "pro" computer with no wired ethernet? Who on earth would discard stable gigabit internet for some flaky wifi with substantially lower performance? Edit: Corrected as requested. Thanks.

[deleted]

Re: Mac Pro

#464
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When's the last time you needed an optical drive for example? About a dozen times each month.

And is an external unit adequate for your needs? I understand that an internal unit might have been more convenient for you, but Apple tends to optimize for the more common needs.

I do in fact use an external unit, but only because the internal units on every Mac I have owned have failed due to Apple using very low quality, poorly designed Chinese sourced hardware components. This same low quality internal "SuperDrive" unit is in the add on Apple external optical disc.

The external third unit is pretty noisy, has a large wall wart, and takes up desk space which contributes two cables, power and USB, as well as taking up one of the small number of USB ports on the Mac. This is an exceptionally poor design compared to the experience of using a PC which reasonable comes with an optical drive, something that I use very frequently, as do most computer users.

Re: Mac Pro

#465

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is that a "pro" computer with no wired ethernet? Who on earth would discard stable gigabit internet for some flaky wifi with substantially lower performance? Edit: Corrected as requested. Thanks.

1. Gigabit ethernet is listed.

2. Thunderbolt to ethernet adapter, just like on mbp retina.

Re: Mac Pro

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I've been using the same Mac Pro since 2008. I bought an ATI Radeon 6970 around a year or so ago and extended its life that much more. For most of my computer's life, its had a PCIe eSATA card. I can't say I'm too excited about a computer that's relegated to an much more expensive Mac Mini.

The idea here is any video card you might want you can just plug in to a Thunderbolt 2 port. Six of those, which can be chained, is way better than having four internal slots.

Not quite. Note that Thunderbolt 2 can do 2x20G/bits/ per second, vs PCI-E v3 at 32G/bytes/ per second (on a 16x slot).

Refs:

- http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/19/pci-express-makes-the-3-0...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pci_express

- http://www.zdnet.com/intel-unveils-thunderbolt-2-7000016595/

- http://www.tomshardware.com/news/lucid-gpu-graphics-thunderb...

- http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-graphics-thu...

TL;DR external video cards via Thunderbolt help but can't hang in terms of performance with real internal cards. (edited for formatting)

Re: Mac Pro

#467
post #417

OK, so it's not a Mac Pro. It's a Mac Mini Pro. As long as it's not too expensive, it's exactly what a lot of prosumers might want (especially those who want to ditch their laptops for iPads and iPhones, and maybe a MBA for the road- a lot of people's MacBook Pros live on their desks). I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations (and at some point, s…

"I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations" Is this actually the case? I don't know anything about that segment of the computing industry, but I just assumed that FCP was the industry standard.

FCP was never the only solution in the pro video editing market. Avid has been the traditional choice since the mid-'90s, but FCP was encroaching.

Unfortunately the botched introduction of FCP X sent Apple back a decade in this market. FCP X was too different from 7, and it didn't even support many of the workflows that pros needed. Since users had to learn new software anyway, a lot of editors went to Avid or Adobe (Premiere is quite good nowadays).

Re: Mac Pro

#469
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get VMWare Workstation to run Mountain Lion if you have Intel hardware. It's a bit harder for other hardware. It ran pretty well last time I ran it, good enough for iOS testing.

Hmmm... does that mean that you can then run the other OSX vms (SL Server, Lion) inside of the Mountain Lion vm ? Like: (((SL Server vm) vmware fusion on ML) Linux on Intel)

[deleted]
Post reply on HN