[csmuk]

Or you can buy an HP Z820. OSX is pretty much moot for workstation grade machines. The software is all cross platform.

And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.

And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.

[Fomite]

While most software is cross-platform, I've found OSX to be a vastly more pleasant scientific computing environment than Windows 7.

[csmuk]

Until you have to compile something major...

Then both OSX and Windows are awful.

[yapcguy]

Yep, the new Mac Pro is going to be a pain for IT support to move to another desk or office with all its bits hanging off it.

That is, of course, if the new Mac Pro ever makes it into the enterprise given Apple's track record in that area. I always what happened to the IT manager who convinced their boss to invest heavily in a few XServes... :-)

[coldtea]

>That is, of course, if the new Mac Pro ever makes it into the enterprise given Apple's track record in that area.

Track record? You mean the inroads they've been making for like 5 years with the iPhone and the iPad?

That said, Mac Pro is not for the enterprise. It's for big calculations: video, 3D, pro audio, scientific computing, etc.

It's not for running Lotus Domino and accessing some VB internal app.

[csmuk]

This. See my comments for another bad XServe experience.

[coldtea]

>Or you can buy an HP Z820. OSX is pretty much moot for workstation grade machines. The software is all cross platform.

Depends on the software you use. For scientific computing, maybe.

For other tasks a Mac Pro would be used, no. Logic Pro, for example, is not cross platform. Neither is Final Cut Pro. And even if I depend on something like Adobe CC, most multimedia pros prefer to use it on the Mac, because of other benefits of using OS X.

>And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.

Or just a cable and a NAS.

But that's the outside, which is a given that you'd need multiple disks. Ever seen a video pro using just the internal HDs on his Desktop machine? Each project usally takes a whole disk by itself. Nobody uses the internal disks for 4K work.

>And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.

Sure it was, as were several other units from the 1-2 million sold of the same MBP production run.

Now lets see how many unreliables you'd get from 1-2 million different self-built PCs.

That's the comparison that matters.

[csmuk]

Pro Tools. I've used Logic Pro: it's horridly unreliable. I no longer have a DAW in favour of a Triton as it's all I need personally but my experience with Logic was awful.

Adobe After Effects + Adobe Premiere Pro. The guys I know who use it do it on Windows because OSX is a moving target from hell. You get reliable iSCSI support on Windows and better SAN performance. Plus it's easier to get 10Gbit ethernet cards to your SAN when you have some real PCI express slots available.

They don't use internal disks but some of us do for storing virtual machines in my case.

See my other comments about how my Mac experience has gone. Also look at Apple forums. Nothing but bitching from people about endless stupid problems.

Microsoft get a bad rep for beta testing their products on the customers but if you've used iWork on an iPad recently you'll see what I mean.

Not pleased. People need to look at these problems pragmatically and stop defending something which has descended into the same hell as everything else.

[jshen]

What software are you talking about? The software I need requires unix. I can run VM's in windows, but I find OS X a much better experience.

[csmuk]

The OS really doesn't matter is the point. Big apps: after effects, mathematica etc - that sort of workstation stuff doesn't make a difference.

Virtualization is fine for non desktop apps. That's exactly what I do.