191–200 of 497 posts
Slightly off-topic, but who here uses a HEDT (high-end desktop) or workstation computer for software development? Does it make a significant difference in comparison with a standard business laptop?
Not a great example. Web Dev. Going from a 2015 MBP to the new touchbar model, my cold build times were cut in half. Other than, saving 15 seconds once per day, I noticed nothing.
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I've always argued that for the prices that Apple charges Apple Care should be included in all its products. The first Apple computers I bought lasted for years and I never thought Apple Care was necessary, but since the fiasco with the 2011 MBP and the butterfly keyboards I'm not buying another of its products without Apple Care. Yes, Apple ended up doing the right thing in both cases but it took years after the pro…
It presumably is in some areas. In New Zealand we have The Consumer Guarantees Act. Things are expected to have a reasonable life span. What this means is not specified but is generally accepted to be relative to the price paid (eg if it’s expensive, it should last). It’s a fantastic piece of legislation. I’ve had a 2.5 year old iPhone covered for example.
TV set you get on Black Friday works until X-mas. It was a bargain, what did you expect?
That discount you got on your car? You think it was because of your outstanding negotiation skills? Think again, the seller swapped a cheaper bifurcator, meaning your mileage will suffer. But is it wrong? You got a discount.
If you sell it, if needs to be good. If it is not good, you cannot sell it. There's no price in question.
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We do have very high retail mark ups. Perhaps this is due to that law. But it is very nice protection to live under.
Aside from the additional taxation and regulations in NZ, it does have some pretty unavoidable issues which drive up the prices of consumer goods. It’s a very small market, and very far away. Getting things there is just going to cost more anyway, and the market isn’t big enough to invite significant competition, so there’s usually a large (or at least larger than a lot of other places) markup on imported goods.
Kind crazy you can’t configure this thing with an NVMe drive even if you’re ready to drop $30,000 on it.
Kind crazy you can’t configure this thing with an NVMe drive even if you’re ready to drop $30,000 on it.
Plus you can put some pci NVMe card the can support up to 4 NVMe slots
What are people doing that require such high-powered desktops?
I am working on a project right now where I am rendering atmospheric effects (lots of clouds). Even on a 12-core workstation, it takes a very long time to render a single frame to even be able to get a good idea as to what things will look like, so I'm doing a lot of changing something, waiting… changing something, waiting. Most of the final rendering can be offloaded to a farm, but being able to quickly and interact…
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Aside from the additional taxation and regulations in NZ, it does have some pretty unavoidable issues which drive up the prices of consumer goods. It’s a very small market, and very far away. Getting things there is just going to cost more anyway, and the market isn’t big enough to invite significant competition, so there’s usually a large (or at least larger than a lot of other places) markup on imported goods.
Is it really far from China compared to US/Europe?
At the base configuration (single 8-core Xeon W) with 256GB SSD and 32GB RAM for $6000, it's about twice what it should be. I could build a faster dual Xeon Silver series with more cores, Nvidia graphics, much larger SSD and 32GB RAM in a nicer case for around $3000. So, that Apple logo and macOS are the other $3000.
I love how any post I make that is critical of something Apple always gets me some negative points here on Hacker News - I actually made a point of showing my tech class this social phenomenon a few weeks back and we had a good discussion that explored possible reasons why it happens.
A great machine to be sure for high end content creation but Apple is not chasing the deep learning dev market because of the lack of CUDA. That market is better served by Linux boxes with appropriate GPUs for TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. support.
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Yes. I work on a Linux distro, and the amount of time my 1st gen 32 core Threadripper has saved me is truly mind blowing. It made it possible to do changes I wouldn't have dreamed of. As an example, I worked a bunch on our PostgreSQL infrastructure, but we support 5 years of versions. So you have to CI/integrate your changes and test them across all 5 versions, every time you test. My machine could do this on the ord…
How's kernel support and VM support such as QEMU lately? I'm thinking to buy i7 for embedded OS dev but that sounds very tempting. I heard AMD CPUs had some breaking issues last year.
When it was bad, it was so bad. I never wanted to know as much as I do now about IOMMU groups and PCIe lanes.