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

A world without the Mac Pro

marco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 191 posts

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#101

Post by [deleted] »

hosh wrote: post #36
wfleming wrote: post #7

> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change. Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore. I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did. I…

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

[deleted]

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#102

Post by criddell »

vbezhenar wrote: post #52
thenewwazoo wrote: post #6

I feel like I'm living in a crazytown where nobody sees what's so plainly obvious. Doesn't anyone remember when IBM wasn't able to deliver chips to Apple on the schedule they demanded, and customers were complaining, and they were taking a drubbing in the press for it? And Apple let their existing product line stagnate for a little while, and then we got the Intel Macs? Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except…

What's wrong with Intel? They release new processors every year. Apple could easily update every mac every year with new processor, they just don't care.

Intel's problem is power consumption.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#103

Post by mhenr18 »

haldean wrote: post #87
m_mueller wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* The windows registry vs the OSX defaults system * Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa * HiDPI that always works or has good fallbacks * Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use * Battery life * Multidesktop * POSIX scripting (that one is slowly coming to windows now) * Can be restored from another computer in a matter of minutes (se…

Some of these are valid, but: * My Razer Blade 2015 has no problem driving its hidpi screen and my lodpi monitor, even at the same time * My battery lasts 8 hours with a VM running, which is about as good as any MacBook I've ever had * Multi desktop exists in Win10, Win+Tab lets you switch desktops Windows isn't perfect, and I spent a long time on a combination of Linux and Mac machines, but my daily driver is Window…

And you don't notice any issues when you drag windows between the two monitors?

One of the developers at my work can't do fine tuning of our styles because his Windows multi-display setup won't re-render apps at 1x when he drags them to the lodpi monitor. Instead it renders the app at 2x and downscales it to 1x, blurring everything.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#104

Post by mamon »

sheer_horror wrote: post #27
djhworld wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think for some people customisation is a pain, especially when you have to workarounds bugs or find some hardware configuration incompatibility. Not saying there's anything wrong with people enjoying tinkering with their setup, but I guess the advantage OSX offers you is most of that is taken care of you on the desktop, you just install your apps on top

It is a misconception that mainstay Linux distributions have any sort of hardware or software incompatibility (aside from Mac- or Windows-only targeted software). That said, you are correct that people use OSX because it's literally 0 set up and configuration.

There's a lot of incompabilities on new hardware. Usually Linux kernel needs about 6 months to catch up with latest Intel or NVidia products. Also, try to use an iPhone with Linux computer - it is a nightmare. I have Windows installed in VirtualBox vm solely for iTunes's sake.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#105

Post by captainmuon »

A strange fact is that many modern PCIe graphics cards work with MacOS, despite the last extendable Mac Pro being sold years ago. Also, Apple knows exactly what hardware they have sold over the years. They could put a whitelist in their OS to prevent Hackintosh or make it at least a lot harder (almost everything can be patched out of course, but it is funny that you can open "About my Mac" and it happily shows configurations that have nothing to do with a real Mac).

I take this as a hint that they secretly tolerate hackintosh at a small scale. They can't allow it altogether, and anyway it is nothing for most Mac customers (who want the "it just works" experience), but some people in the "pro" segment who need the extra power and don't fear some hacking can be satisfied that way. I'm thinking especially about small iOS or macOS developers, or people who work with audio/video, who need a beefy macOS machine.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#106

Post by Adaptive »

tptacek wrote: post #45
Adaptive wrote: post #16

"Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change." When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platfo…

My first Mac was a TiBook, which I bought to install Yellow Dog Linux on. I switched to OSX at 10.1. I worked from 2001-2005 at a decent-sized network software firm in Ann Arbor. Within a year or so of arriving, much of the office had converted to Macs. I don't think having a Mac in '05 made you too much of an outlier --- at least, not if you worked in technology. By 2005, Apple had already started the switch to Inte…

In 05 I was based in Asia. Macs were edge cases. From 99-03 I ran online ops for a large ad agency network in Asia. PCs were by far the norm outside of the video departments. By 07 I worked in the states for a mac software firm, so I was definitely no outlier by then.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#107

Post by wodenokoto »

I think this is the first article on HN that touches on the real problem with the Mac lineup. It's not that the notebook aren't powerful enough (they're notebooks, not desktop replacements) it's that there isn't a viable Mac backend to do the heavy lifting.

They discontinued the rackable servers, yet require developers to do software testing and compiling on MacOS. On what? Racks of macbooks and imac mini apparently.

What backend are we supposed to render on? A single, 3 year old Mac pro?

I get wanting to only sell in highly profitable segments, but maybe they should give developers a little sugar

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#108

Post by gaius »

bitwize wrote: post #74
Adaptive wrote: post #16

"Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change." When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platfo…

Virtually all of the rendering heavy lifting and many of the desktops in the world of cinematic VFX are Linux. Have been for years. Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet.

That is subtly incorrect - what they are is "cheap generic x86" (or x64 now), that's why all those SGIs and Suns were dumped, the price/performance of the hardware. Linux just happened to be the x86 Unix around at the time. It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) Solaris x86.

Would anyone have ditched IRIX to run Linux on their MIPS kit? Of course not because it was never about the OS in this space, it was about FLOPS/$.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#109

Post by hyperpape »

dbg31415 wrote: post #20
pavlov wrote: post #4

Arment is way too positive on the Mac Pro's thermal design. Recently I worked on an application where we had about a dozen Mac Pros doing heavy video encoding workloads. Four of these computers started having GPU overheating issues, and turns out that this is a common occurrence on the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple has been quietly replacing units over the years (searching for the specific console error message reveals that it…

Can confirm, had a similar set up with six Mac Pros for video processing and compression. We had to replace every single one of them at least once, and some 3 times and still we feel there are heat-based performance issues that Apple hasn't addressed. Also, I think Apple will have to come out with a new display to go with the Mac Pro.

There's no press release, but they've told at least one journalist there's no more displays: https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/28/apple-standalone-displays/.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#110

Post by gaius »

hosh wrote: post #36
wfleming wrote: post #7

> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change. Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore. I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did. I…

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

Even today the only way to make this work in Linux is to run Windows or OSX on the hardware, then VirtualBox or VMware, then Linux full-screen. Let the host OS do the tricky stuff like power management and networking.
Post reply on HN