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A world without the Mac Pro

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Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#131

Post by rogerbinns »

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).

It does come down to the hardware. I have had no problems with wifi, video, suspend/resume, hibernation etc since a laptop ago bought in 2007. I have been buying the Thinkpad T series with all Intel components. Especially the wifi and gpu are Intel. Everything worked with Ubuntu.

If you have Nvidia or AMD GPUs, some other wifi vendors (cough broadcom cough) then there can be issues due to drivers, firmware, binary blobs etc. They manifest as suspend/resume issues, wifi flakiness etc.

So yes you can do it by selecting component vendors, but in general 100% of systems will not be robust.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#132

Post by devsquid »

krosaen wrote: post #42

This was interesting until he got to the unsubstantiated (maybe he elaborates elsewhere?) partisan jabs at windows, linux and Google.

Yup thats typically this guys MO. Him and Grubber make it pretty lame to be a modern Apple fan. They whine about Apple not doing what they want, they whine about people critiquing Apple, and then they make up or spread nonsense about Apples competitors. They are the "Macs can't game" Windows fan boys of the 90s.

I would be surprised if he's ever really given Ubuntu or Fedora a serious chance. I think he thinks Google's Android and Kindle Fire have the same UI. I listened to him once bitch about Windows and it was so obvious he hadn't installed it properly.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#133

Post by justinclift »

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…

Sounds like an opportunity for someone to create after-market coolers.

MacPro "SubZero Edition". :)

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#134

Post by rogerbinns »

eknkc wrote: post #85
_ph_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has indeed some great chip designs available. But one should not forget that the switch to Intel not only gave Apple nicer CPUs but also made Apple compatible to the rest of the PC world. You can run any x86 application on a Mac via VMware or Parallels. Moving away from Intel would kill this.

I've been wondering, is it practically possible to have a dual arch hardware + OS? The kernel would run on an ARM processor, along with all the supported software. Any x86 binary would be offloaded to the intel cpu. Sharing RAM and even the remaining hardware would be nearly impossible I guess. Not sure though. This way it can be like the integrated / discrete gpu design and switch can be done a lot less painfully.

Note that many operating systems today are already multiple architecture. It may not seem like it, but for example x86 and AMD64 are different architectures, just as 32 bit ARM and 64 bit ARM are different. The operating system has to define system call interfaces for them, have copies of libraries for each architecture, ensure the processor(s) are in appropriate modes when running the applications, provide inter-process interoperability even when different architectures etc.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#135

Post by ScottBurson »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #58
hosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them. I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over t…

My company-issued HP laptop running Windows 7 does not reliably wake from sleep. I have to use hibernation instead.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#136

Post by dozzie »

gaius wrote: post #108
bitwize wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It could just have easily been FreeBSD or (if Sun weren't so short-sighted) Solaris x86.

What exactly did Sun do wrong with their x86 and x86_64 versions of Solaris that you call "so short-sighted"?

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#137

Post by pjmlp »

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…

My Pro needs are iOS and OS X development, in no way Linux can solve that.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#138

Post by pjmlp »

m_mueller wrote: post #10
cwyers wrote: post #2

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up — and they won’t do everything right. So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is i…

* 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…

> Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa

Really? Mac OS also has a very long history of deprecated and thrown out of the window APIs and SDKs.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#139

Post by DowsingSpoon »

hyperpape wrote: post #111
addicted wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Do people still face Registry issues anymore? My ME system was hosed due to a minor registry corruption, but I haven't heard about Registry complaints in a decade (to be fair, I was completely in the mac camp, until a few months ago, so I may simply be unaware). 2) Applications written in the 90s still work on Windows 10. There was a short period (around Windows 8) where MS started dropping all their old APIs, but…

8. I believe the tool of choice among Mac users is Super-Duper. It creates bootable clones. Time Machine isn't that well regarded.

The asr and ditto command line tools work very well and cost nothing.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#140

Post by mhenr18 »

addicted wrote: post #122
mhenr18 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Free OS updates. * Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS. * Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI setup). I cannot stress how poorly Windows 10 performs in this regard. This has been a solved problem on the Mac for years. * Better colour management through the whole UI stack. * Better tablet support (OSX has had integrated support for tablet events since 10.4…

* Windows has free OS updates * Precision Touchpads are equally well supported in Windows. * HiDPI is better on the Mac * I don't know much about this. * Are you referring to Wacom style tablets? Not sure about that, but if tablets in general, OSX tablets don't even exist, so it's irrelevant. * Windows Audio APIs are as good as Core Audio now. * This really isn't that big a deal. In Windows it leads to different bene…

* You're right, but it took how long to get here?

* The APIs are there now, but the hardware isn't on many machines.

*

*

* Yes, I'm referring to graphics tablets. I've had to deal with the APIs for that stuff myself and what was about 10 lines of extra event handlers on OSX ended up being well over 200 lines on Windows.

* There's still driver issues that aren't present on OSX.

* You've got to realise that anywhere where you think "this really isn't that big a deal" it's actually a huge deal to the people who use OSX daily and want a better Mac Pro because Windows doesn't care about the small things.

* Cortana isn't better than Siri though, which is what it's actually meant to compete with.

* To be fair, the feature was so undiscoverable that it took someone on Hacker News telling me about it before I knew it existed.

A lot of my post was pointing out things that have been better on OSX for literally more than a decade before Windows finally caught up in a few areas.

HiDPI is probably the biggest thing that Windows just won't catch up to for a while. The API compatibility requires Windows to support APIs that will stop HiDPI from working well, because old Windows had the ability to set DPI that affected certain UI components but not everything.

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