New Mac Pro • Hacker News Board

Re: New Mac Pro

#321

Post by bdowling » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #247

llampx wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those workstations were substantially different (and faster) than commodity x86 hardware at the time. Today you can buy a latest-gen 8-core CPU for $300 or so.

The sad truth is they really weren't that much faster. Sun workstations were using the same 68k processors that Macs were using. There is a reason the Unix Workstation market didn't survive. That said, this Mac is not as overpriced as it appears on the surface. A server class motherboard with ECC RAM support and an 8 core Xeon aren't cheap components. I'm guessing they aren't using the bottom of the barrel SSDs eithe…

Sun's mid-1990's SPARCstation models used a SPARC CPU (hence the name). The single-core workstations were a bit faster than the top of the line 386 or 486 available at the time. As I understand it, the draw was the CPU and OS compatibility with Sun's million dollar servers.

Re: New Mac Pro

#322

Post by timc3 » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

altmind wrote: post #303

walterbell wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a prevalent vendor/stack, e.g. Netapp, QNAP, FreeNAS, Unraid?

No prevalent stack AFAIK, but add Synology and WD Nas to the list.

The kinda places I see these going in would not touch either of those products. They are both seen as the most entry level of storage devices

Re: New Mac Pro

#323

Post by throwaway2048 » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

alexis_fr wrote: post #300

saagarjha wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those alternatives don’t run macOS.

Yep. Ubuntu lost by several orders of magnitude. They lost me with Unity, which seemed like something overly fancy which wasn’t required. Had they gone for stability instead of UI, they mighy have kept the users and developed a more suitable alternative to macOS. It really feels like a list battle. I’d pay $200 a year for an OS, especially an open-source one that doesn’t send my data to Amazon.

ubuntu does not send your data to amazon, and has not for years now, the search plugin was pulled almost immediately.

Re: New Mac Pro

#324

Post by walterstucco » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

PascLeRasc wrote: post #50

vbezhenar wrote: post #2

That price is just absurd. I waited for Mac Pro announcement to decide whether I'll stay with Windows or jump to macOS. Macbooks are not for me, but I hoped for a remotely reasonable priced computer, something like $2000 with another $1000 to expand with more memory, etc. But $6000 for 8-core CPU, 256 GB SSD, GPU that is less powerful than my old $200 NVidia 1060? It's just laughable. Otherwise seems like a good mach…

The new Mac Pro, like Mac Pros always have been, is for music/TV studios and design agencies that bill their time starting at $500/hour. It's really not for individuals, and that's ok. Apple made a computer "just for the pros", like HN begs for in every butterfly keyboard thread. I'm thrilled about it even though I know I'll never touch one. It's for people who don't know what a CPU core is but know how to produce a…

Those people can do it now with a laptop or a tablet.

They don't need a Mac PRO, even though they can afford it, it's not something they need.

Re: New Mac Pro

#325

Post by droithomme » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

All I want is to be able to replace the hard drive when it fails after 18 months, and upgrade the RAM. Also need an optical bay for a tower.

It would be nice to have more than 2 USB ports, when I'm paying over $6000, without having to look for a PCIe board that has a compatible driver. Also, audio input would be a cool feature in that price range.

Main thing really though is replacing that hard drive when it fails, which they always do before long.

Re: New Mac Pro

#326

Post by cm2187 » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

kbirkeland wrote: post #286

cm2187 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that link aggregation is pretty much useless and/or unstable. Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. But seeing 10gbe becoming part of the standard spec is a really welcomed improvement. Not the least because it will drive prices down.

I'm curious what your experiences are here. With enterprise-level networking equipment and LACP (802.3ad), I've never run into any weird issues.

I tried between two enterprise dlink switches, and also between a synology NAS and a dlink switch.

Link aggregation in general only provides performance with multiple connections to multiple machines, so using link aggregation between one client (Mac) and one NAS will like result in zero performance improvement (the packets will only use one of the cables). It only makes sense if you have two or more NAS that you want to access simulatenously (or two or more clients accessing the same NAS, but that wouldn't be a use case for 2x 10gbe port on a client).

Synology also supports balance slb bonding, which in theory goes around this single connection restriction. However I ran into some connection problems with some Windows clients. Never went to the bottom of them but they went away when I disabled the bonding.

In any case, it is hard to saturate a 10gbe connection with a single NAS, unless it is packed with SSDs, which I wouldn't assume for mass storage. So I am not sure there is much value in aggregating the links in the first place.

Re: New Mac Pro

#327

Post by core-questions » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

lallysingh wrote: post #251

altmind wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5000 for imac pro(+applecare)? that is bonkers. $6000 is even more crazy. You can get more storage, better gpu, more options for network for much less. And you wont need to deal with apple geniuses to fix the issues.

Apple is only thinking of video editing for this box.

Well of course, they've done the marketing work and know who has the money to buy it. People complaining about GPUs in this thread are missing the point.

Re: New Mac Pro

#328

Post by ultrarunner » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #37

ultrarunner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this can be controversial but I do all my work at home on a computer I built myself for ~900 running macOS. I had a Coffee Lake processor before you could get one straight from Apple. It's fast and with three monitors, plenty of ram, and NVME storage I noticed increased productivity over a laptop with an external display. With the T2 chip this may not be an option forever, and the initial setup means it may no…

I know this can be controversial but I do all my work at home on a computer I built myself for ~900 running macOS Awesome. It's great that you choose to do that. You're also not the target market for this product. This is a product for people and companies for whom increased performance equals increased revenue.

I know several people who were waiting to see what Apple offered for a pro desktop machine. I replied to a comment that said "I waited for Mac Pro announcement to decide whether I'll stay with Windows or jump to macOS". The whole issue is that there is a segment of the population demanding a product that Apple is, again here, not offering.

Had I been able to justify it, I could have also chosen n-core Xeon processors (some people do go this route) and I still wouldn't have been anywhere near $6000, and that's the base model here. That's obscene, and in that light I think that my original comment is relevant.

Re: New Mac Pro

#329

Post by snuxoll » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

kbirkeland wrote: post #286

cm2187 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that link aggregation is pretty much useless and/or unstable. Not sure what good two 10gbe ports do. But seeing 10gbe becoming part of the standard spec is a really welcomed improvement. Not the least because it will drive prices down.

I'm curious what your experiences are here. With enterprise-level networking equipment and LACP (802.3ad), I've never run into any weird issues.

LACP does generally “just work”, the problem is when you want one machine or session to be able to max multiple links. The solution here remains the same as it always has - multipath. I hope Apple has added support for SMB multi-channel support for these users since I last checked.

Re: New Mac Pro

#330

Post by _ph_ » Mon, Jun 03, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #219

_ph_ wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And look how great Sun and SGI are doing with their workstations today :). The list of companies, who are willing to spend 10k or more on the workstation of a single employee is growing short. And some of those still need NVidia graphic cards.

Sure, this is not a mass-market product. But I'm actually glad that the concept of a high-end workstation is making a comeback. Not everything needs to be dirt-cheap, we should not necessarily feel entitled to every product on the market being in our price range, and I'd love to see some competition on the high-end.

Yes, it is great that they have a real high-end product. But in the past, at least the starting price of the Mac Pro was in enthusiast-range. There should be a product between the Mini and the Pro which supports a desktop graphics card.