What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess.
Why haven't they kept selling the cheese grater is beyond me.
They are spending a fortune to understand what Pros need, while we have been screaming for the better part of the decade: lots of user accessible RAM, storage, PCI & GPU. How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro? Teenagers can do it for peanuts, I'm sure the largest company in the freaking world could manage. If they were truly sorry or marginally “cared”, that's what they would have done years ago.
I'm fine with them playing the “let's reinvent the Pro computer” game as a side project, they have this massive amount of money burning a whole in their pockets after all, but some of us need to work.
> What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess.
> How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro?
I hope/think that Apple is thinking that bringing back the cheese grater or in other word a PC running MacOS is not going to be enough to bring back the pro. They need to come back with something that has something unique.
The TrashCan failed but you can see where Apple was going. A small, silent, powerful machine infinitely customisable on the fly via TB.
So of course if failed and this attempt has a good chance to fail too. I'm not quite sure that Apple has in its DNA the deep understanding of the type of Pro that are not content with either the iMac Pro or MBP in the same fashion they get the consumer sphere. It is just that for a long period of time the intersection between the 2 world was large but are now diverging. Perfectly happy for me to be wrong though.
The margins are too thin on a boring desktop PC. If they spec bump the cheese grater, that will cannibalize the ground-breaking new Mac Pro. Same reason why they won't put it out this year, they don't want to cut into the imac pro sales.
Reading this it had me reminiscing about Sun back in its heyday as a workstation vendor. Sun used to do this stuff, they would bring in a partner who had some critical application and the Sun engineering team and the partner's engineering team, and some "power users" of the tool would all work through what it would take to make the tool work better on a Sun Workstation than any other workstation. Sun engineering got a collection of bugs, features, and investigations that would come out of those exercises. When my wife was at Xerox they were doing similar sorts of studies for document preparation and presentation.
You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.
That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.
> You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.
I think it work because the customer spend is of comparable magnitude. Back in the mid 90s you might have a couple of dozen game devs working on $2000 PCs with a few $45K Onyx machines used for back end rendering or part time use of a few artists = ~$200K. Or (in my case) you only had a couple of AI developers but each had a pair of $50K 3650s = ~$200K. Or your prop traders had a $25K Sparcstation on their desk and one at home, but the rank and file just had a Bloomberg terminal.
Now you have much larger teams with more uniform machines (+ some cloud resource). The total institutional spend is probably higher in constant dollars.
Speaking of which it will be interesting to see if Apple is able to push some of their APIs into the cloud so you can develop on a mac pro and dynamically push the heavy lifting into an apple rendering cloud. This article just talked about scaling ios <-> Mac Os <-> MacOS+iOS+eGPU (nice!) but left out "<-> cloud". That's where editing on iOS could really shine: chop up / assemble your downsampled rushes on your tablet and then stream them to the AppleTV at your bosses' office. Remember Peter Jackson used to bring his to LA every week on an iPod in his pocket.
I think there might be some people interested in a 25K machine, but only if it really improves their workflow; don't think adding more money / processing power does much for most people, maybe for 3d rendering but they have specialized hardware for that, which gives them more raw bang for their bucks than Apple could do.
I'm wondering if it'd be viable to have a 'compute unit' shared by multiple users. i/o would probably be a bottleneck, so maybe have it link up macs via usb-c? It might help with e.g. compile times (which last time I did iOS development, two years ago, was kinda slow (>1 minute for our app, CPU bound)).
But that's probably too specialized a thing. Apple wants to sell units by the million, not the hundreds (if that). Which is why they discontinued the mac pro and the 17 inch MBP.
The only reasons I spent that kind of money on workstations back then were that I wanted my desktop to be Unix and I wanted good 3D graphics performance. The only way to get those in one compact box was to make a deal with SGI.
These days I get astoundingly better performance than whatever that low volume hardware did back then out of a $700 desktop with a $800 graphics card and a $500 monitor.
$5000 is probably still too high, unless you see the Apple product line as your only option.
Mac Pro cheese graters going away was a bad move and a missed opportunity by Apple, today they already lost the power pro users and they had them for a while.
Most Mac Pro users have moved back to PC, or iMac's/minis just for iOS/macOS related dev, with most work being done on PCs.
Apple had a window where developers needed a heavy Pro Mac for iOS, nix development like python/ruby/etc, even Unity dev back when it was only on Mac (2007-2010 ish), it was also great to have a Mac after the 2006 Intel processor move as it was the sexiest nix and great for developers from 2006 on, but those days are over.
Somewhere in 2013, they just moved on from the cheese grater and Pro market that included developers and content creators. Now they want to regain it? There was so much momentum squandered here and hearing Tim Cook repeat "Post-PC" and Apple messaging that desktops were like trucks, only developers need them, caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers. Apple even watered down their developer laptops and Macbook Pros, 17" screens were relegated to being 'lapzillas' and Apple went only mainstream. Content creators and programming were not something they focused on anymore after the iPhone took over, eventhough those influencers were always the focus. I thought they would use the iPhone and iOS/macOS platforms to get more people on their desktops as well, instead they went the other direction.
We used to be Mac Pro heavy now we just have iMacs/minis for the last mile or iOS/macOS export and testing with performance heavy beefy PCs for most of the day to day work. Additionally, taking your jet engine/trashcan new Mac Pro or iMac to the mall for repairs instead of just popping in a new video card or drive also sucks.
Developers can get two performance PCs for the price of one Mac Pro. Usually you can get more power out of both as well since Mac Pros from 2011 on were 1-2 years behind. There is no getting back pro users such as devs/game devs that had switched over and have now gone back to Windows/PC.
>caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers
Wasn't there a statistic from github recently, that 75% of the PRs created in 2017, were done from Macs?
They are bigger in the market for devs then ever before, the thing is, that the majority of this peer group is totally fine with a MBP.
I see this whole new MacPro story more as a marketing campaign, the driving factor behind this is not the demand from the market, it's only for their long-term reputation.
But how in the world are you going to manage without ecc memory? You might have a bit get flipped by a cosmic ray once every 5 years of 24x7 computing.
I switched to Apple product in 2002, because at the time they were absolutely better than Windows 2000 for my needs (mostly Protools, and eventually Logic 7). Windows at the time was a mess and poorly supported most pro hardware and vendors (specifically Avid) were slow to support releases.
It really felt like the best platform. I had a nice G4 tower, and eventually used a G5 and then Mac Pro tower. Things generally just worked, and you could expand things as needed.
Roll around to today, and it's a mess. Apple canceled a lot of their pro products. Aperture? Dead. Final Cut got nerfed pretty hard. Logic is still reasonably well maintained, but Ableton Live took over a lot for me.
The hardware options aren't that great right now for my needs. Last week, I sold my 2011 Macbook Pro to a friend and switched all my audio stuff to my old Windows gaming system. Picked up a Firewire PCI-E card for $20 and I was in business. It's fast, has a ton of ram and is easily expandable. Windows 10 drives me nuts, but eh...
I've still got three Macbook Pros for software development, and they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). I don't think I'll be switching laptops anytime soon. But ugh, audio work on them just feels like an overpriced joke at this point.
I really never thought I'd be saying it, but for photography and audio stuff, Windows seems to be the place right now!
As someone who uses a MBP as a daily driver laptop: Windows has been a better platform for a lot of the photography software for over a decade. Photoshop and Lightroom just work a ton better on Windows and have since right before the CS days.
But the native terminal, etc, has won me over as a *Nix person for a long time. I don't like Linux desktop interfaces at all, and the new Windows linux/bash stuff hasn't been compelling or integrated enough for me to want to switch (ConEmu and all of the terminal stuff being garbage is a big issue). I'll be sticking with a MBP and OSX for my laptop and work related stuff, but I don't understand why anyone would still be using OSX for a photography workflow. It's just so much more polished on Windows.
> they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support).
If you're training a model on your laptop, instead of a server, does it really matter? It doesn't seem likely that you'd want to deploy a model trained locally.
After "can't innovate anymore my ass" Apple released their architectural dead-end trashcan Mac Pro in _2013_ we have to wait until _2019_ for an update? What am I supposed to buy? I'm certainly not going to buy anything with a Touch Bar. It's 2018 and I had my job order me the 2015 Macbook Pro for my work computer so I could skip the Touch Bar and still have USB ports.
Yup. And "we painted ourselves into a thermal corner with this non-upgradable yeah can", so while you wait we give you a non-upgradable iMac Pro with the same thermal problem.
If only the 2013 Can Pro used normal PCIe connectors for the GPUs. Then you could bungie cord a couple of new GPU cards on the outside of the can, connect them using PCIe risers and cables, and power them off an external PC power supply instead of using the Can's power supply.
I wonder who the target market is, though? The iMac Pro can cost £5000, so I assume more performance and hence price than that? The only users who I can imagine willing to justify paying such a premium are those who feel they must remain at the cutting edge of performance and are willing to pay for it, but surely they will have left the Apple ecosystem by then?
It's as if Apple are saying "we're making a computer for people who demand peak performance, but are willing to use cheap outdated hardware until we get round to it."
If you do any iOS work you need macs as build machines because of Apple's lock in. Spending the money on an iMac is just a waste of a monitor and if you're already spending the money on the hardware you might as well get something that can do render jobs as well. You need GPUs for that.
From 2007 to 2016 I was all-in on OS X / MacBook Pros / iMacs for work (software dev.) Since then I've gone back to a Dell XPS 15 and a custom-built AMD Threadripper machine. As much as I like the Mac hardware, I could no longer justify the cost. The XPS is a nice machine and (no touchbar - it's a feature) and my custom-PC is a monster. Windows 10 with all its warts is plenty serviceable especially now with it's Linux Subsystem (primarily because I prefer to use bash as my shell.)
I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.
Dell XPS laptops are very high quality and a definite suitable replacement for a Macbook Pro if you can justify getting rid of OSX. XPS laptops are also fully Linux supported out of the box.
I could justify the cost that whole time until the 2017 Macbook Pro. Or was it the 2016 that moved to the tiny-action keyboard switches?
My 2017 MBP is less than 6 months old and two keys don't attach to the switch anymore. They literally come off with my finger as I type. They aren't broken, the C-clamps are still intact. They have just widened enough with wear such that they don't clamp anymore.
It's so bad that I use my 2014 Macbook Air when I need to do a lot of typing.
Most of the people I know IRL are having the same issues with their newer model Macbooks, especially my developer friends since we of course tend to be harder on our keyboards.
Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
Reading this article was really annoying. First, there were grammatical issues like these, which may have been intentional, but made understanding the article difficult:
> I saw a bunch of them walking by in Apple park toting kit for an outdoor shoot on premises while walking
> Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.
Then, I clicked over my Hacker News tab and when I went back, the content was replaced by another page (!). Apparently it was changed via JavaScript when I reached the bottom of the page. This is stupid and user-hostile.
I think Apple is needlessly re-inventing the wheel here. While their intent to analyze real world usage and optimize every detail by bringing in actual pro users is admirable, I‘d prefer them to use a simpler, more streamlined approach and have them release standard, state of the art hardware in a tasteful, quiet case and continuesly work on optimizations on the software side - a process that is required anyway and not exclusive to the Mac Pro, which makes me wonder why it should dictate the Mac Pro roadmap and schedule in such a significant way.
Furthermore it‘s concerning that the article mentions modularity mostly in ways that involve external hardware and peripherals. If that turns out to be the approach Apple is considering, it sounds worryingly similar to an iMac Pro without the fanatastic display.
“And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”
This approach is reminiscent of Apple's approach to low-latency touch scrolling on the original iPhone; to Quicktime and MIDI a decade and a half before that; and, more recently, to the Apple Pencil.
I knew executives at Palm who were frustrated by the challenges that both the tech stack and the organizational structure (Conway's Law) posed in the (failed) effort to reduce touch latency to where it felt physical. I know that it took Android many years to reach the point where objective observers described it as equally “buttery”. IMO this full-stack integration and optimization is one of Apple's core competences. It will be interesting to see what it leads to this time. The effort may be too late, but if the past predicts the future, it will not be too little too late.
I waited and waited and waited. I liked the design of the Trashcan but by the time I could afford one it was woefully out of date and I needed Nvidia GPUs for the rendering engine I wanted to use.
In the end I moved my creative work over to PC and currently run a nice compact mATX PC built for GPU computing with two 1080Tis. Still cost me less than half the eventual iMac Pro and presumably this Mac Pro.
If this had been released a few years back maybe I'd never have moved to PC but at this stage they'll have to be still supporting the new Mac Pro in 3 years before I even consider moving back at this point.
Been a Mac only user for 15 years now, I didn't move away lightly, but now I've switched it'll be hard to convince me back.
I do not need a Mac Pro, nor could I afford one if I wanted to (I do own one, though, albeit it is 11 years old, I got it preowned from a friend).
But I wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking when they put put the "trashcan"-design. It looks awesome, I cannot deny it, and I imagine it is very convenient to handle.
But something deep inside of me cringes when a computer in this price class has everything soldered on and has no real option to extend it. You cannot upgrade the CPU, the RAM, the GPU, nor can you install any additional PCIe cards.
I just hope they don’t break any new ground with it. Zero. Just make a big tower that does excactly what a HP workstation tower would do, and match the price. No need for any Apple magic of any kind here. Don’t make a trash can, don’t make a touch bar.
Apple already lost the Mac Pro market when they made Final Cut Pro X, and stopped regularly releasing Mac Pros. They completely disregarded the professional market by killing functionality that was critical to the users. That combined with the lack of powerful hardware made a lot of the professionals go to PC and Avid. They addressed some of the issues in future releases but it was too late.
Creators were pretty much the only people keeping Apple alive in the tough years and they abandoned them.
The first is time. If they were ready to release a simple, expandable, better-everything box a few months from now, every single person who’s been chomping at the bit for a new pro Mac would buy it immediately. That would fix their market, gain them goodwill and give them plenty of time to explore what all these amazing professionals actually want to do, later.
Second, this just doesn’t seem like the hardest list of requirements to guess. Heck, there are practically no constraints, not even price! It doesn’t have to be thin, it can guzzle power, they don’t have to compromise on any ports (put 4 of everything you can think of in, old and new). Theoretically they could build a slightly better box with some analysis but literally no one is asking for that gargantuan task to be done yet, at least not before 2022.
If they just make an expandable ATX/cheese grater style case with generous cooling and allow top Nvidia GPUs, I will pay a large premium for this. Ideally there would be the option for high end consumer gear (i7/i9, vanilla RAM) in addition to the Xeons/ECC/FBDIMMs that get so expensive so quickly, but two tiers with different architectures is probably too much to hope for.
I wish Apple would just make their own ATX case (or any other standard *TX form factor), their own ATX motherboard with their TPM on it, and then use commodity components for everything else. I'd pay a huge premium for that product, but Apple is so far up their own ass trying to imitate themselves they can't see what their customers really need.
[+] [-] tambourine_man|8 years ago|reply
They are spending a fortune to understand what Pros need, while we have been screaming for the better part of the decade: lots of user accessible RAM, storage, PCI & GPU. How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro? Teenagers can do it for peanuts, I'm sure the largest company in the freaking world could manage. If they were truly sorry or marginally “cared”, that's what they would have done years ago.
I'm fine with them playing the “let's reinvent the Pro computer” game as a side project, they have this massive amount of money burning a whole in their pockets after all, but some of us need to work.
[+] [-] gutnor|8 years ago|reply
I hope/think that Apple is thinking that bringing back the cheese grater or in other word a PC running MacOS is not going to be enough to bring back the pro. They need to come back with something that has something unique.
The TrashCan failed but you can see where Apple was going. A small, silent, powerful machine infinitely customisable on the fly via TB.
So of course if failed and this attempt has a good chance to fail too. I'm not quite sure that Apple has in its DNA the deep understanding of the type of Pro that are not content with either the iMac Pro or MBP in the same fashion they get the consumer sphere. It is just that for a long period of time the intersection between the 2 world was large but are now diverging. Perfectly happy for me to be wrong though.
[+] [-] robbyt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.
That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.
[+] [-] gumby|8 years ago|reply
I think it work because the customer spend is of comparable magnitude. Back in the mid 90s you might have a couple of dozen game devs working on $2000 PCs with a few $45K Onyx machines used for back end rendering or part time use of a few artists = ~$200K. Or (in my case) you only had a couple of AI developers but each had a pair of $50K 3650s = ~$200K. Or your prop traders had a $25K Sparcstation on their desk and one at home, but the rank and file just had a Bloomberg terminal.
Now you have much larger teams with more uniform machines (+ some cloud resource). The total institutional spend is probably higher in constant dollars.
Speaking of which it will be interesting to see if Apple is able to push some of their APIs into the cloud so you can develop on a mac pro and dynamically push the heavy lifting into an apple rendering cloud. This article just talked about scaling ios <-> Mac Os <-> MacOS+iOS+eGPU (nice!) but left out "<-> cloud". That's where editing on iOS could really shine: chop up / assemble your downsampled rushes on your tablet and then stream them to the AppleTV at your bosses' office. Remember Peter Jackson used to bring his to LA every week on an iPod in his pocket.
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|8 years ago|reply
I'm wondering if it'd be viable to have a 'compute unit' shared by multiple users. i/o would probably be a bottleneck, so maybe have it link up macs via usb-c? It might help with e.g. compile times (which last time I did iOS development, two years ago, was kinda slow (>1 minute for our app, CPU bound)).
But that's probably too specialized a thing. Apple wants to sell units by the million, not the hundreds (if that). Which is why they discontinued the mac pro and the 17 inch MBP.
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
These days I get astoundingly better performance than whatever that low volume hardware did back then out of a $700 desktop with a $800 graphics card and a $500 monitor.
$5000 is probably still too high, unless you see the Apple product line as your only option.
[+] [-] wintercharm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggg9990|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|8 years ago|reply
Most Mac Pro users have moved back to PC, or iMac's/minis just for iOS/macOS related dev, with most work being done on PCs.
Apple had a window where developers needed a heavy Pro Mac for iOS, nix development like python/ruby/etc, even Unity dev back when it was only on Mac (2007-2010 ish), it was also great to have a Mac after the 2006 Intel processor move as it was the sexiest nix and great for developers from 2006 on, but those days are over.
Somewhere in 2013, they just moved on from the cheese grater and Pro market that included developers and content creators. Now they want to regain it? There was so much momentum squandered here and hearing Tim Cook repeat "Post-PC" and Apple messaging that desktops were like trucks, only developers need them, caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers. Apple even watered down their developer laptops and Macbook Pros, 17" screens were relegated to being 'lapzillas' and Apple went only mainstream. Content creators and programming were not something they focused on anymore after the iPhone took over, eventhough those influencers were always the focus. I thought they would use the iPhone and iOS/macOS platforms to get more people on their desktops as well, instead they went the other direction.
We used to be Mac Pro heavy now we just have iMacs/minis for the last mile or iOS/macOS export and testing with performance heavy beefy PCs for most of the day to day work. Additionally, taking your jet engine/trashcan new Mac Pro or iMac to the mall for repairs instead of just popping in a new video card or drive also sucks.
Developers can get two performance PCs for the price of one Mac Pro. Usually you can get more power out of both as well since Mac Pros from 2011 on were 1-2 years behind. There is no getting back pro users such as devs/game devs that had switched over and have now gone back to Windows/PC.
[+] [-] stiGGG|8 years ago|reply
Wasn't there a statistic from github recently, that 75% of the PRs created in 2017, were done from Macs? They are bigger in the market for devs then ever before, the thing is, that the majority of this peer group is totally fine with a MBP. I see this whole new MacPro story more as a marketing campaign, the driving factor behind this is not the demand from the market, it's only for their long-term reputation.
[+] [-] wilsonnb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjeaff|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbon|8 years ago|reply
It really felt like the best platform. I had a nice G4 tower, and eventually used a G5 and then Mac Pro tower. Things generally just worked, and you could expand things as needed.
Roll around to today, and it's a mess. Apple canceled a lot of their pro products. Aperture? Dead. Final Cut got nerfed pretty hard. Logic is still reasonably well maintained, but Ableton Live took over a lot for me.
The hardware options aren't that great right now for my needs. Last week, I sold my 2011 Macbook Pro to a friend and switched all my audio stuff to my old Windows gaming system. Picked up a Firewire PCI-E card for $20 and I was in business. It's fast, has a ton of ram and is easily expandable. Windows 10 drives me nuts, but eh...
I've still got three Macbook Pros for software development, and they are pretty great for that (minus the new keyboard, and that Tensorflow GPU has dropped OS X support). I don't think I'll be switching laptops anytime soon. But ugh, audio work on them just feels like an overpriced joke at this point.
I really never thought I'd be saying it, but for photography and audio stuff, Windows seems to be the place right now!
[+] [-] cthalupa|8 years ago|reply
But the native terminal, etc, has won me over as a *Nix person for a long time. I don't like Linux desktop interfaces at all, and the new Windows linux/bash stuff hasn't been compelling or integrated enough for me to want to switch (ConEmu and all of the terminal stuff being garbage is a big issue). I'll be sticking with a MBP and OSX for my laptop and work related stuff, but I don't understand why anyone would still be using OSX for a photography workflow. It's just so much more polished on Windows.
[+] [-] ellisv|8 years ago|reply
If you're training a model on your laptop, instead of a server, does it really matter? It doesn't seem likely that you'd want to deploy a model trained locally.
[+] [-] chrisper|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbd|8 years ago|reply
After "can't innovate anymore my ass" Apple released their architectural dead-end trashcan Mac Pro in _2013_ we have to wait until _2019_ for an update? What am I supposed to buy? I'm certainly not going to buy anything with a Touch Bar. It's 2018 and I had my job order me the 2015 Macbook Pro for my work computer so I could skip the Touch Bar and still have USB ports.
What's going on at Apple?
[+] [-] CydeWeys|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wintercharm|8 years ago|reply
They are nice machines with plenty of performance. With 4 Thudnerbolt ports, you have some expandability.
[+] [-] dmitriid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonhendry18|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jnwatson|8 years ago|reply
For the first time in 33 years, I no longer have access to a Mac. Apple doesn’t sell one that my employers nor myself want to buy.
That it has taken so long to course correct would have sunk most companies. It is probably a couple percent hit on Apple revenue at most.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|8 years ago|reply
Doubt there is a Lenovo waiting in the wings, nor would they allow it, a shame.
[+] [-] jphoward|8 years ago|reply
It's as if Apple are saying "we're making a computer for people who demand peak performance, but are willing to use cheap outdated hardware until we get round to it."
[+] [-] jayd16|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjamesaustin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] limeblack|8 years ago|reply
Schools for sure. The staff believes that Macs are better and have bough trash cans to replace the cheese graters.
[+] [-] andrei_says_|8 years ago|reply
It takes effort to set up, but not that much.
[+] [-] VonGuard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GiorgioG|8 years ago|reply
I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.
[+] [-] prolikewhoa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] always_good|8 years ago|reply
My 2017 MBP is less than 6 months old and two keys don't attach to the switch anymore. They literally come off with my finger as I type. They aren't broken, the C-clamps are still intact. They have just widened enough with wear such that they don't clamp anymore.
It's so bad that I use my 2014 Macbook Air when I need to do a lot of typing.
Most of the people I know IRL are having the same issues with their newer model Macbooks, especially my developer friends since we of course tend to be harder on our keyboards.
So you aren't missing anything.
[+] [-] wwweston|8 years ago|reply
I've seen the phrase "not part of their target market" deployed at developers and particular users with increasing frequency for years.
Seems inevitable that eventually people will go somewhere else.
[+] [-] asciimo|8 years ago|reply
Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
[+] [-] saagarjha|8 years ago|reply
> I saw a bunch of them walking by in Apple park toting kit for an outdoor shoot on premises while walking
> Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.
Then, I clicked over my Hacker News tab and when I went back, the content was replaced by another page (!). Apparently it was changed via JavaScript when I reached the bottom of the page. This is stupid and user-hostile.
[+] [-] thirdsun|8 years ago|reply
Furthermore it‘s concerning that the article mentions modularity mostly in ways that involve external hardware and peripherals. If that turns out to be the approach Apple is considering, it sounds worryingly similar to an iMac Pro without the fanatastic display.
[+] [-] osteele|8 years ago|reply
This approach is reminiscent of Apple's approach to low-latency touch scrolling on the original iPhone; to Quicktime and MIDI a decade and a half before that; and, more recently, to the Apple Pencil.
I knew executives at Palm who were frustrated by the challenges that both the tech stack and the organizational structure (Conway's Law) posed in the (failed) effort to reduce touch latency to where it felt physical. I know that it took Android many years to reach the point where objective observers described it as equally “buttery”. IMO this full-stack integration and optimization is one of Apple's core competences. It will be interesting to see what it leads to this time. The effort may be too late, but if the past predicts the future, it will not be too little too late.
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|8 years ago|reply
In the end I moved my creative work over to PC and currently run a nice compact mATX PC built for GPU computing with two 1080Tis. Still cost me less than half the eventual iMac Pro and presumably this Mac Pro.
If this had been released a few years back maybe I'd never have moved to PC but at this stage they'll have to be still supporting the new Mac Pro in 3 years before I even consider moving back at this point.
Been a Mac only user for 15 years now, I didn't move away lightly, but now I've switched it'll be hard to convince me back.
[+] [-] krylon|8 years ago|reply
But I wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking when they put put the "trashcan"-design. It looks awesome, I cannot deny it, and I imagine it is very convenient to handle.
But something deep inside of me cringes when a computer in this price class has everything soldered on and has no real option to extend it. You cannot upgrade the CPU, the RAM, the GPU, nor can you install any additional PCIe cards.
[+] [-] alkonaut|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialp|8 years ago|reply
Creators were pretty much the only people keeping Apple alive in the tough years and they abandoned them.
[+] [-] torstenvl|8 years ago|reply
- Will the Mac Pro actually be Pro?
- Will they ever bring back a Pro computer in a notebook form factor?
[+] [-] makecheck|8 years ago|reply
The first is time. If they were ready to release a simple, expandable, better-everything box a few months from now, every single person who’s been chomping at the bit for a new pro Mac would buy it immediately. That would fix their market, gain them goodwill and give them plenty of time to explore what all these amazing professionals actually want to do, later.
Second, this just doesn’t seem like the hardest list of requirements to guess. Heck, there are practically no constraints, not even price! It doesn’t have to be thin, it can guzzle power, they don’t have to compromise on any ports (put 4 of everything you can think of in, old and new). Theoretically they could build a slightly better box with some analysis but literally no one is asking for that gargantuan task to be done yet, at least not before 2022.
[+] [-] ericd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endymi0n|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namelost|8 years ago|reply