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A world without the Mac Pro

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Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#91

Post by saosebastiao »

derefr wrote: post #54

> We can’t just buy hideous Xeon workstations from Dell and install macOS on them. Sure you can. Or rather, you can install the [free] VMWare ESXi hypervisor on said hideous box, and then install macOS on that . The ESXi hypervisor is an officially-supported macOS hardware configuration. Apple want you to only run macOS guests through ESXi if you're on macOS hardware, but there's literally nothing stopping you from d…

I'd love to run macOS on my NUC with 32 gigs of ram for iOS development instead of buying a shitty Mac mini. This sounds pretty awesome but I only understand a fraction of what you're talking about. Is there some kind of tutorial for setting this up?

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#92

Post by whyoh »

pavlov wrote: post #4

Arment is way too positive on the Mac Pro's thermal design. Recently I worked on an application where we had about a dozen Mac Pros doing heavy video encoding workloads. Four of these computers started having GPU overheating issues, and turns out that this is a common occurrence on the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple has been quietly replacing units over the years (searching for the specific console error message reveals that it…

It was already evident from the Anandtech review, where the 12 core model was reaching around 100 C (CPU and GPU) under stress load. Anand tried to downplay the issue somewhat, but the numbers speak for themselves, it's not a computer you can rely on for prolonged high loads.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#93

Post by lucb1e »

This article is ridiculous.

> Nobody else can make macOS hardware. If Apple doesn’t address someone’s hardware needs, there’s no alternative.

So that's a bad thing right, the closed ecosystem?

Oh no wait.

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but [even] if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up

Talking about which, that decade an entirely unfounded claim. It doesn't even attempt to make arguments, instead waiting for the mac vs windows users flamewar to start. Then to add some fuel, it says linux sucks as well, not backing up that claim either, inviting anyone using a linux-based desktop (and by extent, the rest of the open source desktop community) to add to the flamewar.

And it's all for nothing. The article is telling about how bad it would be not to get another mac pro, using a hundred arguments that come down to "I like OS X software and software that runs on OS X, and the pro hardware is better than the consumer version [duh]". Apple cannot possibly not have thought of this yet.

PS. My memory must be wrong but I thought I remembered a different company boldly (bravely?) experimenting with hardware.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#94

Post by witty_username »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #58
hosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them. I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over t…

Just curious, is that because of VPN?

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#95

Post by redial »

et2o wrote: post #77
woofdogwoof wrote: post #66

Not sure what the author point was. He told us that chips aren't getting faster, so the only way to add speed was to add cores, then he told us that we can get 22 cores from a Mac Pro. As far as I know no other desktop can deliver 22 cores, so what is he griping about? Is he upset that Apple hasn't released a Pro with 48 cores?

You can only get maximum 6 cores from a Mac Pro currently. He is saying that the modern processors they should be using have 22 cores.

You can custom order a 12 core Mac Pro from the Apple Store.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#96

Post by mrcarrot »

jeremymcanally wrote: post #76
Yabood wrote: post #57

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up — and they won’t do everything right. A whole decade to catch up? I use Windows and macOS on daily basis for web development and various other tasks. I find macOS inferio…

> Can't cut and paste with keyboard, can't lock your screen with keyboard... Uh, are you using some weird KVM or something? There are keyboard shortcuts for both of those.

I assume he's talking about files in Finder, where you can't just CMD+x, CMD+v like you'd expect (though I think there is some kind of CMD+SOMETHING+V shortcut that will move a file after copying it).

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#98

Post by QuantumRoar »

wfleming wrote: post #29
kenOfYugen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can relate. Since I setup a Linux desktop PC running Arch & bspwm, I feel less productive in macOS. The only other desktop UX tool I use is dmenu. It feels like when I first moved from Windows to OS X. Makes sense, since back then OS X felt minimal compared to Windows, and a bare tiling manager over Linux is the ultimate minimalism.

Proper window tiling was one of the annoyances that prompted me to switch! I used dwm at first when I switched back to Linux, but found it still doesn't handle multi-head very well, so now I use XMonad (with dmenu), and have been very content with it.

Arch Linux + XMonad is the way I run my stuff.

I still have a MacBook Air lying around that I use when I'm on the road. The amount of visual clutter, annoying UI animations, the nagging from notifications and alerts surprises me every time. I didn't notice it before I started using my current XMonad setup. So either Apple is making it worse or you just don't see it when you don't have a clean and minimal system as a comparison.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#99

Post by witty_username »

hosh wrote: post #36
wfleming wrote: post #7

> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change. Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore. I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did. I…

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

I have never encountered any wireless issue.

Suspend works fine.

(IIRC suspend issues are mostly due to proprietary drivers, which is basically nVidia and AMD to a smaller extent (AMD's open source drivers work well))

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#100

Post by rcarmo »

hartator wrote: post #80
ditados wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, it's not. Even when the userland gets updated to 16.04, it's still heavily dependent on the Windows kernel, and the networking stack (for example) will not be the same. The WSL will never replace a native Linux OS. Period. But it will be pretty useful for some lighter use cases. As a dev, I'm still not convinced it's good enough, given the recent issues with Ruby and Node.

What issues are you talking about? I was about able to run a full Rails installation with MongoDB, Redis and Sidekiq without issues. But, I kind of agree actually, the only true issue was advanced socket issue with PhantomJS. Like for some reasons, Capybara/Poltergeist can't connect to it. It's the only reasons I am back to MacOS. But, I think I will switch as soon as it fixes. It should be soon.

Probably this, which has since been fixed:

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/26054

I'm running current stable (full disclosure: MS FTE here), and there are still a few hang-ups that I know are being addressed (and some already fixed) in the Insider Previews.

I had to leave the Previews because I needed to pin down a few things, and mostly use Docker for Windows instead of WSL for work. WSL will not run Docker containers directly (for instance), but I managed to get the CLI to run in WSL to control them inside the Docker VM. Well, until the last Docker upgrade reset the configs... :)

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