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The Mac Pro Lives

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Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#491

Post by mozumder »

atemerev wrote: post #224
adtac wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Yes -- anything related to data science. Or, like in my case, algorithmic trading. I used to keep AWS GPU nodes for that, but those are expensive, and it is infinitely more convenient to keep your data close to your workspace, instead of constantly uploading/downloading work batches.

A better option is to just have your own server at your house on a static IP address that you connect to via your laptop. That way you can have as much space as you want and it's always available to you.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#492

Post by bitshiffed »

blktiger wrote: post #378
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing is greater than 16GB of RAM.

If they are all developing with Xcode I bet they also have a server farm for distributed builds. That said, why would OSX devs need more that 16GB of RAM? It's not like they are going to be running virtual machines/docker images. Xcode isn't _that_ much of a memory hog.

Why wouldn't they be running VMs? I frequently use them for development, within OSX.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#493

Post by Karrot_Kream »

HelloNurse wrote: post #472
shadowmint wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a thoughtfully crafted product regarding what "command-line interface" should look like. How so? I've never appreciated what's actually good about powershell... you pass objects around? So...? Is that a thing that's useful? If you want to just automate a task, having intermediate objects that are serializable (eg. strings) so you can `foo ... > blah` and inspect the value of blah before continuing (`cat blah |…

I'm using a large corpus of Powershell scripts, mostly written by enthusiastic Microsoft consultants, and even if I know exactly what they do I cannot stand the mysterious imports, the sequences of script invocations and bare statements that leave the session with the desired invisible state (and, conversely, closing and reopening the session after every major command just in case), the automagical option handling, a…

To play devil's advocate, UNIX sh shell scripts are pretty mysterious too, and often leave the local environment polluted and other such no-nos.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#494

Post by clapinton »

"The second would be to bite the bullet and tell the world what your plans are, even though it’s your decades-long tradition — a fundamental part of the company’s culture — to let actual shipping products, not promises of future products, tell your story."

Interestingly enough, they also broke secrecy in 2013 when they gave a sneak peek of the new MacPro at WWDC, which would only ship later that year. They probably only announce products when they're ready to ship to not hurt sales of the existing models, but I'm guessing that won't make much of a difference with the current MacPro.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#495

Post by dade_ »

timdavila wrote: post #397
dade_ wrote: post #168

Brand loyalty is silly. It does mean I need to avoid platform lock-in, but it is completely worth it. I buy the best machine available for me at the time. When it was time to replace my MacBook Pro 2011, it wasn't a machine from Apple. I bought a Surface Pro 3 and thought that I'd switch back to Mac when Apple sorted out whatever their problem is. Vapour Race 2017: Next Gen MacBook Pro or Surface Pro 5. It would be n…

How do you like the Surface Pro 3 for software development? Do you have an external monitor/keyboard setup?

I think it is great, all the usual Windows items apply.

Specific to the SP3 Pro: use the SP4 keyboard, it is much better and is completely compatible; the dock is expensive and worth it: 2 display port connectors so I have the surface display, 4K monitor + 1K monitor attached working at the same time - Also wired Gigabit Ethernet; Magnet connector for the dock/power is super convenient; Power adapter has USB charging; I use the new Surface Ergonomic keyboard and a Logitech MX Master Mouse at home and the Surface foldable mouse on the road (best portable mouse I have used). I keep the surface on my desk so I can use it with my pen, I just flip the keyboard underneath it. On the road: the MicroSD provides all the extra storage I need (movies on the plane), and it has a real USB 3 port, battery life is around 5 hours, but better if you are only using it to watch movies or reading. Runs VMs effortlessly with i7 processor.

Biggest problem is power, sometimes it sleeps and won't wake up. Happens far more often than it should, but I haven't heard the same complain from people with Surface Pro 4s.

Hope that helps.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#496

Post by icebraining »

skinnymuch wrote: post #407
icebraining wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in my experience, but in any case, it's still equivalent to buying at that reduced price.

It's not equivalent. Buying is far easier than selling.

That's included in the spread I mentioned as "reduced price". Unless you're saying that the expected value of selling it is literally lower than throwing it in the trash, my point stands.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#497

Post by setr »

coryfklein wrote: post #421
notduncansmith wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Spectacle for this, simplest thing I've found so far: https://www.spectacleapp.com

I second the Spectacle recommendation, but it is frustrating that you have to download an APP to do something that should be built into the window manager.

for top-level activities that won't really be composed with anything else, it seems fine to leave it to app developers;

as long as someone does the job correctly

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#498

Post by coldtea »

specialp wrote: post #362
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Window management in OSX is horrible. What is so horrible about it ? I have the exact same reaction every time I have to use Microsoft Windows. Window management is one of the strongpoints of MacOS. > A network drive hangs? Good luck with Finder..., the whole system halts. I've never encountered this problem on both AFP and SMB shares.

Fullscreen mode loses focus constantly with 2 monitors, SMB shares are very slow especially with large amounts of files to be listed. Finder crashes a lot dealing with network filesystems. The search on Finder is extremely bad and doesn't hold a candle to Windows 10 search. I am typing this on a Macbook Pro so I am not some Windows fan. OS X has fallen way behind in its desktop incarnation. The only reason I use OS X…

>Fullscreen mode loses focus constantly with 2 monitors

I've never lost focus with fullscreen/2 monitors. So?

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#499

Post by scholia »

m_mueller wrote: post #367
scholia wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now) Use the Alt key. For example, open Word and press Alt to show the keyboard commands. If you want the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press H as shown. Alternatively, to open the Ribbon and show the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press Alt-H. So, if you want to center some selected text in Word,…

As I wrote I still do consider keyboard UI on windows the best, because it's AFAIK the only widely supported destop OS with full keyboard control of the GUI. But the Ribbons are not for me - it's a menu system that's also trying to be a context aware palette, which makes it worse than either a classic menu (easy to skim though and find what you want, especially on MacOS) or a palette (can be placed wherever it's the…

The Ribbon is a much better UI because it takes up less room, makes more features more accessible, and provides much better discoverability. To appreciate the pros and cons, I'd suggest going though the full account of the development [1], though there is a simpler intro/index [2] that links to a good video [3].

Of course, there's also personal taste, and you are perfectly entitled to prefer whichever menu system you like. However, the Ribbon won a decade ago, so at this stage, it would probably be more useful to learn how to make better use of it. My Alt tip is just one example.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-stor...

[3] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#500

Post by jrs95 »

It'd be pretty awesome if this came w/ Ryzen. Official ECC support ought to be a thing by then. Given that they already have a relationship with AMD for graphics cards it doesn't seem impossible.
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