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The Mac Pro Lives

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Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#191
post #173

Gave up on the mac pro years ago. I replaced my unkillable 2008 Mac pro with a lovely Fractal Design R5 case, a stonking 5930k overclocked at 4.5Gz on a 'posh' ASUS Mobo with 64GB of DDR. It's a 'hackintosh', sure enough, but it's fantastic. First time in 30 years I don't own a mac, that's telling. Their fault, too.

I ran a Hackintosh for about 1.5 years. I just recently went back to Windows 10 after the integrated Linux sub-system came out with the update. Most of the software/tools I use run in both OS X and Windows, so it wasn't a huge deal breaker for me. One thing I didn't like about the Hackintosh was maintaining it during updates, having to wait for the right NVidia web drivers, and then remembering how to update all the…

I'd gladly give Apple $200/$300 have have a supported OS X running on my own hardware, BTW.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#192
post #65

a pro machine that demanded placement on your desk, not under your desk ... and that's how Apple lost the professionals. The desk is a clean space for a huge monitor / keyboard / mouse, and MY work. It's good to make a workstation that looks nice, but it's ten times as good to make one that's flexible and powerful. The only people who want that workstation on the desktop are the designers at Apple, and stroking your…

I wouldn't take that too literally, firstly those are Gruber's words and secondly, there isn't anything stopping you putting the Mac Pro on the floor so long as the cables reach.

my issue with the current Mac Pro is that, yeah cute packaging, but I need a second tower/accessory/etc when I only needed one before so I immediate get new clutter and cables all because someone had a "cute" design for the main computer

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#193
post #178

Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a har…

>32/64GB RAM

I'm genuinely curious - why do you need 64 GB of RAM on a laptop? Are there industries where this is a necessity? At that point, wouldn't you be better off having remote machines?

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#194

Every time the topic comes up of Apple ceding the high performance market, I wonder: What are developers at Apple using? Some in-house hackintosh?

Probably just a maxed out Mac Pro, which is good enough if you don't look at the price.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they're realising that they're potentially losing a lot of people, and are a way aways from shipping. Much better to announce some vaporware and encourage people to stick around, especially if they plan to deliver. Before now, people had little hope about either Pros or Macbooks.

They wasted an entire hardware iteration on the Touch Bar that hardly anyone cares about. That's what put them in this position. If anything is un-Apple about it, it's that they so badly understood the desires of their customers.

Releasing the TouchBar laptops last November, which apparently have seen a 20% yoy sales increase, screwed up their Mac Pro desktop line released 3 years ago. I don't even...

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#197
I bought a macbook pro back in the summer of 2015. It is still running strong despite the coffee I split on it.

I am hoping for a serious memory upgrade when every they get around to it.

I am curious what others are using for external storage? I did not splurge on a big internal drive, but I am finding any video work really consumes a ton of space.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#198
This is a combination of vaguely encouraging, and vaguely maddening.

Perhaps I'm just a Luddite, but what I really want from my desktop Macs is, basically, what I already have in my 2008 Mac Pro and my very ancient Mac Mini, just updated, because those machines won't last forever.

The 2008 Mac Pro has the giant aluminum case. It has four drive bays. That machine has been an absolute warhorse for me. It's pretty much been running every day since 2008. I've produced a lot of video clips and multi-track songs using Logic. The only things I haven't liked about it have been (1) Snow Leopard was more reliable for audio, on this box, than later releases, (2) Apple has gradually walked away from things I wanted to do with the server subsystem, like maintain a usable current version of Apache in the OS distribution, and (3) the box is quite loud for use in a recording studio.

With the Mac Mini I am actually planning to buy some newer refurbished Mac Minis with SSDs. These machines are almost perfect for use in recording situations.

Apple is so obsessed with design -- the tin can design of the modern Pro, whatever "modular" design they are cooking up with the future Pro design -- that it doesn't sound like they will consider that the old Pro had an industrial design that was almost ideal, with the exception in my view of the noise level. A honking big case with a lot of thermal mass and big fans and a lot of room for hot memory and drives is in fact perfect. It is beautiful to me because it is so simple and reliable. It doesn't need to be tiny. Another option would be a rackable version. And that's it. That's all I need from a high-end computer.

For the low-end utility machine like the Mini I want it to be small and _silent_.

The iMac probably has enough CPU but I don't think it is quiet or expandable enough and I need 4-16 terabytes of storage right in the box and an easy way to back it up _to physical drives in my own house_, not the cloud.

I'm still resentful of the thousands of hours of work I put in to Aperture projects. Tens of thousands of photos, many with a lot of delicate editing, which don't even render on the screen correctly anymore. I'm still resentful of all the projects I had built in iMovie which don't work in later versions because of the features that Apple jettisoned. If Apple has a solution for the two big needs I've got -- the small ultra-quiet media "capture" capability (for audio), and a big honking _simple_ Pro for editing and production, _and_ it appears they are serious about maintaining Logic, then I'll stay with them and probably buy more Macs. If Logic goes, I'm gone. (Mac user and on-and-off developer since 1985... Apple user since 1977...)

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#199

Gave up on the mac pro years ago. I replaced my unkillable 2008 Mac pro with a lovely Fractal Design R5 case, a stonking 5930k overclocked at 4.5Gz on a 'posh' ASUS Mobo with 64GB of DDR. It's a 'hackintosh', sure enough, but it's fantastic. First time in 30 years I don't own a mac, that's telling. Their fault, too.

I'm on #3 hackintosh, and I agree, they're great. I'm using it for audio production primarily. 0 problems, and I have a lot of peripherals. The one place these fall short is graphics card support. Newer 1070's and 1080's simply do not work (unless there's some very recent developments).

I built my Hackintosh on the 970 platform, right when it came out. It was frustrating early on, waiting for the supported drivers, but eventually they came. What didn't go away though was having to install custom drivers with each upgrade/patch of OS X.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm not doing enough development.... As a development machine - what is a top spec iMac/MBP missing that you would need a hackintosh?

The biggest thing is greater than 16GB of RAM.

The 27" iMacs are all configurable up to 32GB RAM.
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