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The Mac Pro Review

anandtech.com

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Re: The Mac Pro Review

#131

Post by coldtea »

yapcguy wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products. Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS. Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target…

Rob Pike wrote a blog post "Thank you Apple" (sarcasm) because of the problems he was having with his iMac and Apple's software. http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.ht... Linus Torvalds is said to be using the ChromeBook Pixel as his primary machine. http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chrom... As for Miguel De Icaza, he's eating his own dog food, as he now makes his money sel…

>Rob Pike wrote a blog post "Thank you Apple" (sarcasm) because of the problems he was having with his iMac and Apple's software.

Half of it it's about how it's Apple's fault that he didn't have a USB to boot off, so he tried to boot of a (camera) CF card (unsupported) and then an old Mac that wasn't up to running the latest OS version. Because Apple should consider what olders machines an OS supports not on hardware specs needed by the new OS, but on the needs of people upgrading their OS without a USB that want to use their older machine as a firewire devices (huh?). It's like the kind of complaints you read on Tripadvisor ("the bell boy didn't smile enough to me", "the bedsheets where not the exact Pantone blue they had on the hotel website" etc).

>http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chrom...

Yes, but he said a MBA just until then, of which he writes on his Google+ page. Also, if you read the article, what he solely likes about the Pixel is the screen resolution. And he dislikes its weight. He looks like a perfect candidate for the inevitable retina MBA.

>As for Miguel De Icaza, he's eating his own dog food, as he now makes his money selling an IDE for iOS development, so of course he's going to choose the Mac because that's where the toolchain is.*

Well, it's not just that. He also wrote a post about why he moved to OS X, and how he got dissillusioned with the Linux desktop prospects.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#132

Post by coldtea »

leephillips wrote: post #112
yapcguy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rob Pike wrote a blog post "Thank you Apple" (sarcasm) because of the problems he was having with his iMac and Apple's software. http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.ht... Linus Torvalds is said to be using the ChromeBook Pixel as his primary machine. http://www.geek.com/chips/linus-torvalds-is-making-the-chrom... As for Miguel De Icaza, he's eating his own dog food, as he now makes his money sel…

From now on when people ask me why I use Linux instead of OSX and why I refuse to install closed-source, copy-protected software, I'm going to send them to Rob Pike's eloquent description of his self-inflicted torture.

Self-inflicted sums it about nice. He didn't have a USB drive (needed for installation), so he tried a few offbeat methods which didn't work, and he didn't have a bootable backup image (so he had to mess with a lengthy copying process). The only legit thing in his complaints is that Time Machine wouldn't let him restore off his Time Machine backup. The other stuff is self-inflicted.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#133

Post by konstruktor »

gfodor wrote: post #32
guelo wrote: post #15

Wow. For me, the big takeaway from this review are the benchmarks showing the iMac and MBPs beating out the Mac Pro. That shows that this machine is really for niche markets like professional video editing. Makes you wonder why Apple even bothers.

It's a "forward looking" architecture (to steal the line from the iPhone 5S pitch.) They're betting big on GPU compute. I wouldn't say it is for "niche markets", though perhaps today it is only useful to smaller markets, it's that this computer is going to over time get faster and faster relative to the 2013 iMac and MBPs as more apps take advantage of the GPUs. It's kind of a unique phenomenon and makes the benchmar…

I would argue that at least the current model actually is for a niche market, i.e. applications that use GPUs right now. By the time more non-gaming applications outside of media editing are using GPUs more extensively, the top end mobile graphics chips will have the power of this dual GPU setup.

It's a bold bet on a possible trend, which I like a lot, since it would mean that non-gamers would profit from the GPUs that would otherwise bore themselves to death on their machines. Also, it would give AMD a better position, maybe averting x86 being a complete Intel monopoly.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#134

Post by adamors »

marincounty wrote: post #22

Apple needs to fix Mavericks before I ever buy anything from them. They have so much cash, and so many bugs in Mavericks?

I see this a lot, yet Mavericks works great on my Hackintosh. Never crashed since I updated, and that was very early on.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#135

Post by gaius »

thearn4 wrote: post #5

Do a lot of folks here generally like Mac desktops? I've grown to like Macbooks because I do like working on a portable UNIX-y platform, and have had generally bad luck with Linux laptops in the past. On desktops though, I'm willing to put more effort into settling software update issues/device conflicts, since I probably have to do that anyway to write performance-optimized code (depends on the exact purpose of the…

I have been running Linux on laptops for about 12 years now. The only way to do it and retain your sanity/get any useful work done is to run it inside a VM on OSX or Windows. Full screen, you won't even notice the underlying OS if you don't want to.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#136

Post by justincormack »

veidr wrote: post #102

For me the disappointing takeaway is that good high-res monitor support isn't implemented. Like the reviewer, I had assumed the same types of scaling options that the high-res MacBook Pros have. However, according to this review, the new Mac Pro doesn't work with the new Dell 4K monitors (I don't consider 30Hz refresh as 'working'), and even with the 4K display that Apple sells, it only works at its native 3840 x 216…

It sounds like its not sane to get a 4k monitor now as a long term investment, as the monitor side is not standardised yet.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#137

Post by justincormack »

corresation wrote: post #114
rsynnott wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don't want two high-end compute cards In which case, do you want a Xeon workstation of any sort? As mentioned later on in the review, you make significant sacrifices for Xeon (startlingly expensive, last-gen cores), and, besides the option for more cores than you can get on an iX, the main thing you get is extra PCIe lanes, which are not actually that useful for most things; one of the few things they _are_ u…

do you want a Xeon workstation of any sort? ECC memory is a big one. Usually getting a Xeon workstation comes with SMP, though not on the new Mac Pro. Big memory support. Lots of PCI lanes. Usually lots of space to drop in extra storage, a couple of 10GbE ports (the Mac Pro has just 1Gbps ports which is another oddity). There are a lot of traditional reasons a so-called workstation features a Xeon. Worth noting that…

Yeah 10GbE missing is odd, although its probably a cost thing, and you appear to be able to buy thunderbolt 10GbE.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#138

Post by LinaLauneBaer »

gmac wrote: post #125
josephagoss wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Australians get 2 years free as per the legal requirements. However I suspect they increase the overall price to compensate so we are not really better off.

EU citizens do too: http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/

I just want to make something clear: In the EU, during the first 6 months, the seller/manufacturer has to prove that you did something wrong when there is a problem with the device. After the first 6 months the roles are reversed and YOU have the burden of prove. In most cases you cannot prove that it is the fault of the manufacturer. There are some cases however where it is clear that it is the manufacturer's fault: In the case of a serial fault.

So your protection is really only 6 months long.

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#139

Post by gurkendoktor »

thearn4 wrote: post #5

Do a lot of folks here generally like Mac desktops? I've grown to like Macbooks because I do like working on a portable UNIX-y platform, and have had generally bad luck with Linux laptops in the past. On desktops though, I'm willing to put more effort into settling software update issues/device conflicts, since I probably have to do that anyway to write performance-optimized code (depends on the exact purpose of the…

I used to hate Mac desktops, but the Magic TrackPad is a killer IMHO (both hardware and software).

Re: The Mac Pro Review

#140

Post by protomyth »

Watabou wrote: post #111
protomyth wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not op) I have 4 reported to Apple about Mavericks and one (Quicktime) was fixed with 10.9.1. The other 3 are on the Finder, first appeared in 10.9, and were not fixed in 10.9.1. Mavericks has the buggiest Finder I have seen on a 10.x release. It is a pain to have to restart Finder multiple times a day.

I would agree with you if Apple hadn't released 10.9.1, but honestly, Apple has fixed the Finder issues for me. Quicklook is still slower compared to Mountain Lion for me, so I hope they make it faster still.

Move some picture files from one folder to another with preview item on and watch the finder hang after about twenty files. It is damn near unusable at this point. I gave up for big sorting and just have a button on the finder toolbar that opens a terminal in the folder the window is showing and do copies that way.
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