I always assumed that upgrading the Mac Pro was going to by daisy chaining them with Thunderbolt connections. Guess I was wrong, but I'd love 24 cores and 6 graphics cards on my desk even if the price was crazy.
I know the reference, but I don't understand what is meant by referring to it as "the last hope" and what/why something else is an alternative to that.
That a Linux based system is an alternative for a powerful Unixy system?
> That a Linux based system is an alternative for a powerful Unixy system?
As I noted elsethread, it really is. I used to use Macs exclusively, and I'll never willing leave Linux now: it really is that much better. The problem is that Windows & macOS are too constrained by their installed base: they don't have the freedom to be really revolutionary in their UIs, nor can they afford to support deep customisation (GNOME & KDE have similar problems — but one needn't use either GNOME or KDE to use Linux). Linux, meanwhile, offers a user true freedom: I can use a tiling WM, I can write code and bind keys to do anything I want. A Linux box running StumpWM and emacs is the closest thing the modern world offers to a Lisp machine, and it's awesome.
For me -- and, I suspect, many others -- this is too little too late.
Just a few months ago, I spent somewhere around $4500 (all-in) putting together a new workstation. It runs Linux instead of OS X and this has led to me using my (4-year-old) ThinkPad more than my (18-month-old) MacBook Pro (when I'm "on the go"). I actually plan on selling the MBP; I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
I'm sure this is great news -- and long-awaited -- to many people... but some of us got tired of waiting.
Transaction costs (both the explicit "we take a percentage" kind, and the hidden ones like the risk of being ripped off) are pretty significant, so no, not really.
That's an essential insight for anybody that ever wants to run a business, and it is why sales people get paid the big bucks and purchasers are only as good as the discounts they get.
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.
I'm confused about the reduced price. Everything isn't about money when we are talking about non-large sums. Selling something like an electronic can be a huge hassle for some people.
On second thought, I guess if you can just sell it to some service. Or say, Best Buy, then there's a point there for reduced price (at a high degree :p).
When you start getting into Hackintoshes or running non-OSX operating systems on Macs (aside from Windows and Boot Camp), things can get iffy in some situations. That list is pretty nasty, though I'm fairly surprised someone got the damned Touch Bar working for Linux.
But if there's one good thing at play, it's that there's a fairly active community that tries to tackle these problems.
They tend to run worse than equivalent ThinkPads though, mostly due to prioprietary nature of power saving APIs and thus you lose battery life (and quiet).
I've had very good luck with my conversion on my old MBP so far. I have a late 2009 kicking around the house, basically a web browsing computer or backup machine if I leave my newer model in the office, etc.
Since I couldn't get the latest macOS on it I figured I'd just wipe it and install a Linux distro- all told I was maybe an hour into the process and had Ubuntu 16.10 running like a champ. The built in Ethernet was a life saver because I had to replace the WiFi drivers and there were a few power settings I tweaked.
A few weeks post install I've tweaked touchpad settings and various other things, except for the WiFi, it worked nearly straight out of the gate, and it was certainly functional immediately post-install.
Known limitations that affect me are pretty much limited to Thunderbolt hotswap (you've got to boot with the TB hardware plugged in), lid close/sleep is pretty finicky (I feel like this has always been the case with every Linux laptop I've ever run), and the iSight drivers for the built in web cam have some issues therefor preventing some smart screen dimming functionality. If I actually took the time to patch the drivers this sounds like it's resolvable but I really just don't care.
Battery life is tough to gauge because it's so old and I didn't benchmark it pre-Linux but I'm getting about 2-2.5 hours out of it while writing code. Obviously not great, but I doubt I was getting that much more w/ OS X. This machine was my daily workhorse for a couple of years, it's got plenty of cycles on the battery. With auto screen dimming or GPU optimizations, this could likely get improved.
Really, the only thing I'm finding now is that I'm not a huge fan of the default Ubuntu 16.10 desktop and I'll probably start hopping distros since it's been a while since I was running a Linux desktop as a main OS.
I would say that from a completely subjective standpoint it feels every bit as snappy in standard use as OS X did and it will likely keep this machine quite useful for as long as it holds together.
For Mac users switching to Linux, I would highly recommend using Ubuntu Studio, since it comes preconfigured for Multimedia production and has a ton of applications onboard that would make your average MacOS user double-take and re-think the position that "there is no creative software on Linux", because my friends, there is a huge plethora of creative apps for Linux, and Ubuntu Studio demonstrates that in spades...
It's never too late for me to look at potentially better alternatives. I would never work myself into a situation where switching to an alternative major OS would be extremely hard. But sure, depending on what you work with, that can of course happen -- issues like software unavailable on said target platform. Disregarding that though, I prefer not to close doors by free will.
Same I was a huge mac fan, switched during the TiBook era a good 14 years ago used them throughout my professional career (designer, 3D, animation, creative tech) but after waiting and waiting for a pro refresh with Nvidia I bit the bullet and built a PC in December.
I would have been willing to spend several thousand £ on a Mac Pro that met my needs, ended up having my needs met by a PC with a GTX 1080 that cost less than the baseline iMac and within 15 minutes of 3D rendering using CUDA and Octane render I asked myself why I didn't do this years ago and my wallet thanks me.
Now I don't really see the point in going back to Apple, feels like they've only just decided to care about pro users again and this was probably a decision that came out of a meeting where it was 50/50 if the line was killed or rebooted.
Same for me. Built my first PC in ages, 8 core Ryzen, 32 Gigs of RAM, NVME SSD, 1060 GTX, all below 2000$. Running Ubuntu on it for now, works very well.
Especially since the whole virtual escape key thing– being a default layout vim user for 20+ years– I'd love to follow suit, but I need Adobe Creative Suite. The tools available on Linux aren't even ballpark. Getting OS X on a VM has always been fussy and frustrating, and if I wanted to work with Windows I'd just use a Windows laptop. On top of that, the apple magic trackpad is just great. Fussing with extracted bootcamp drivers to get it to work on a virtualized windows so I can run some essential software? No thanks. I need quick access to a comfortable, familiar replacement environment if something goes wrong with my regular computer. I can't afford to futz around with that stuff.
I use that method too. When I found out it was available I ditched my experiments with jj, jk, etc. This and finding out how many users just use / for most of their higher-level navigation needs has helped me quite a bit.
> Especially since the whole virtual escape key thing– being a default layout vim user for 20+ years
I really don't understand how there can be vim users that haven't remapped escape.
Like, if you care about ergonomics enough to complain about making a rarely used key into a touch key, how can you not care enough to remap that key if you use it more often?
And Mac OS even has built-in support to remap caps-lock to escape, and has had for a long time I think.
Funny side-note: I've broken the keycap for my escape key (on a TypeMatrix keyboard).. yet I haven't bothered to try to fix it. It's just not worth the trouble.
I've been using the escape key for vim since I started work as a programmer 21 years ago. That's a long time and I really don't want to change it. I know it might seem silly to you, but I'd switch to Linux on an XPS before I'd upgrade to a Mac with no escape key. (Not that I have to, plenty of Macs available without the touchbar)
FWIW, I've been using the touchbar MBP for ~6 months now and I haven't had any issues hitting ESC. It definitely feels different, but it works just fine. If anything my problem is that I hit ESC too easily now. I used to rest my hand above the ESC key when web browsing but that translated to resting it above tilde on the keyboard, which meant touching the ESC area. I've had to train myself to not do this.
That is impressive. Since before xmodmap on a device that didn't either have ctrl-key positioned so that "^]" was easier, or had the esc key closer to home row?
I have large hands, so I 'like' vim escape key being mapped to the actual escape key. I also have 20+ years of muscle memory backing it up. I also do a fair amount of setting up servers or virtual environments and like to have my editor already set up on every machine I touch. I also use caps lock for writing SQL. So yes, there are people who haven't remapped it 'yet' and as long as it's still there, never will.
I use Mac OS because I like a reliable and functional workstation. I switched from Windows to OS X (at the time) specifically because of reliability. The biggest challenge then was application availability.
We have some big Linux advocates in our company, so I've also tried switching to Linux twice before going to OS X, a couple of years apart. The claim from them was always the same, Linux is ready for the Desktop. The problem is that it's been "ready for the desktop" for ten years. I can't imagine ever going to Linux over Mac OS.
Too late maybe (at least for your personal upgrade cycle), but I don't see how a complete re-think using a modular design, pro monitors, and up-to-date components can be too little. What more were you hoping for?
Don't be so dramatic. There's a massive silent majority who will not leave OSX. The new MacBook Pros are literally some of the best machines Apple has ever produced, and a renewed focus toward pro users for the 2017 refresh (with 32gb of RAM) and a refresh of the Mac Pro will easily re-secure Apple's preeminent position in this space.
I never thought I'd be in this category, but I am. I went from a 100% Mac environment to my home computer being a windows PC I built, and the major workhorse for my lab being a linux workstation running Scientific Linux.
I've still got my Macbook Pro, so we'll see how things develop, but I've already started the process of migrating away, and if we're looking at 2018 it'll be pretty far along by that time.
If Apple makes upgrading components easier for themselves that will likely mean users and resellers can mod them more easily as well. I wonder how the 'next year' comment fits into the CPU and GPU roadmaps.
The world would be better served by Apple getting out of the hardware business and just selling OSX, allowing it to run on any x86 architecture without all of the Hackintosh bull.
I don't understand who these people are that are spending a 50% premium on components that are two to three years old. I use a MBP regularly, but only because my work buys them.
Mac OS already runs on lots of different hardware. Just look at the list of compatible hardware for building a Hackintosh. Graphics cards aside, there's a lot of compatible components.
Actually it would serve Apple very well. Most of Apple's profit these days comes from iOS devices, and more macOS in the hands of users would definitely lead to more iOS adoption.
Also, systems would be available to suit power users - Apple currently offers exactly zero in that space. Power users influence many buying decisions beyond their own systems. It would be good if macOS could be seriously used for hard-core science and engineering.
Apple's Mac business is the most profitable PC business in the world, they make more profits from Macs than the rest of the PC makers in the world. They are 7% worldwide by units, about 17% by revenues (ASP around $1200 vs. industry $500) and margins of 15% vs. industry 2-3%.
It's a $25B business that's steadily taken significant market share from Windows/Linux over the last decade.
No one said they should "give this up". If Apple's hardware is good enough to outshine whatever competition, it will continue to sell. Plus, they could easily restrict who they license the OS to - perhaps only to a few high quality OEMs and end users who'd just build a Hackintosh instead anyhow.
I'm certainly not advocating giving macOS away or selling it cheaply either. It's worth pointing out that every 2,000,000 units of $500 macOS would be $1 billion as well - which could quickly come close to the margin on that $25B.
They did the licensing thing in the mid-90s. Mac clones were a thing.
To license macOS means to support infinite hardware variations, and to rely on OEMs not to suck. It is an impossible technical problem for a company whose whole ethos revolves around integration of h/w and s/w.
To license macOS means to support infinite hardware variations, and to rely on OEMs not to suck.
Kind of.
Apple had to approve any clone designs. It wasn't as willy-nilly as the PC market. At the time Apple allowed cloning, Apple itself had a large number of varying models to support.
Apple's big problem was that the clones were faster and cheaper. For example, the Umax C500 was available up to 240 Mhz while the PowerMac 4400 was only available up to 200 Mhz and the Umax machine was $400 less expensive and that was on the low end.
Power Computing's clones were high end and either matched or outperformed their Apple equivalents for less money. The PowerTower 200e was released the same day as the PowerMac 9500/200 and it was $1300 less expensive.
In the really high end, the Daystar Genesis MP smoked everything in Apple's product lineup.
The cloners were bad for Apple but only because Apple couldn't compete with them. Developing both the hardware and the software was too expensive for them to not be able to make all of the profit on every sale.
The Daystar Genesis MP generated a lot of "holy cow" moments.
Plus, we are in a different world these days. Intel hardware, due to Intel's keeping the bus proprietary and getting rid of the chipset makers, is a lot more generic than back in the day. NeXT and a lot of open source projects today have a list of hardware you can use. The list for today is a lot shorter. I think a lot of companies would thrive on making good macOS machines.
I really think Apple should just stop making any PC other than the MacBook and iMac lines. That's where their heart is anyway. License the OS for $250 a pop and sell for the same. If they are that concerned about what happened before, limit the sold macOS to Xeon cpus only. That will get rid of all the portables that might reduce their MacBook sales.
Very. I think it speaks to the fear they have over losing this market and the incredibly bad reaction they'd have if they'd simply released the weakly updated Pro without further explanation.
Perhaps they're realising that they're potentially losing a lot of people, and are a way aways from shipping. Much better to announce some vaporware and encourage people to stick around, especially if they plan to deliver. Before now, people had little hope about either Pros or Macbooks.
They wasted an entire hardware iteration on the Touch Bar that hardly anyone cares about. That's what put them in this position. If anything is un-Apple about it, it's that they so badly understood the desires of their customers.
In my opinion, Apple started losing its way when it started caring more about "fashion", which is not necessarily the same as (and it's often the opposite of) good design.
The hardware has mostly stalled out. A great CPU from 3 years ago is still more powerful than what most people are buying today. RAM and SSD space is plentiful enough to be a non issue for most people. Battery progress is steady but very slow. So, what's left to base a new laptop on GPU?
They could go the desktop CPU route, although that's likely not an option for Apple since that would require them to either use extreme throttling or beef up the cooling (meaning louder fans and probably a thicker case)
Storage? Nearly everyone I know who has a MBP is 100% on it all the time on disk. Understand apple makes a load on the SSD upgrades, but seriously increasing base storage would be enough for a bit.
I don't think they had an issue with design so much as only having a single team as bottleneck for the entire product lineup. They really need the equivalent of Intel's tick-tock strategy where the designers can be going full speed on the cool new manufacturing techniques but a second team is just taking last year's industrial designs and shipping updates with current spec / capacity components so they stop drifting so far behind the market every time the design team isn't ready to ship a major change.
Truth. I had $1,500 earmarked for a new macbook pro before they launched. Switched to Linux for all my development work shortly after. Which, I should have done earlier tbh.
To be honest I feel like the touchbar MBP gets a bit of undeserved hate. I do think the touchbar is a total gimmick admittedly but what else did people really want? More RAM, sure, but that'd mean lower battery life.
I was admittedly disappointed at first but then realised there isn't really anything else that they could've done to interest me anyway. I'm genuinely very happy with my existing 2014 MacBook Pro. I just also think it's telling that I as someone who's spent far too much money on Apple hardware also uses a hackintosh desktop.
I was ready to pay 6k+ for a max MacBook pro with external gpu and whatever other usb-c accessories they were going to sell. The lack of a ram upgrade caught me off guard, really no ram upgrade in like 6 years? Really its usb-c-only and they have no usb-c accessories? SMH
I've been reading up on various eGPU enclosures. I'll probably do it the next time I get some side-gig money, but the hacky-ness of it makes me nervous. If Apple were to make an official one, it'd be a day-1 purchase for me. I could see this type of product possibly fitting into a new Mac Pro hardware line, but I'm probably just dreaming.
Releasing the TouchBar laptops last November, which apparently have seen a 20% yoy sales increase, screwed up their Mac Pro desktop line released 3 years ago. I don't even...
I think Gruber addresses this pretty well: they already took the silent approach, but it was becoming unsustainable with their pro market, whose needs were not being met. If they just did a small hardware bump, they'd be projecting that they'd given up on the pro and they'd lose a lot of loyalty and goodwill. People can only wait so long so this info helps to keep them interested and bring the term "Apple" back into the vocabulary of any pro considering a future purchase.
Apple said entire point of the redesign is to make the machine modular, so that it can be upgraded down the line, specifically addressing this concern. I guess it's up to each person to determine for themselves whether to believe it.
My Mac Mini's RAM says otherwise. Pretty sure that, for the vast majority of its history, the same goes for the iMac. And, obviously, the Mac Pro, even in its current iteration. What other product lines are you thinking of, aside from laptops?
The iMac only allowed RAM changing from what I know and it only had two slots. Changing the hard drive was a surgery that very few people are going to do. Apple is now in the habit of making the RAM and SSD part of the main board in the name of space saving.
OWC (https://www.macsales.com) made it pretty painless to upgrade an iMac's hard drive to an SSD. They sell a lot of kit for various machines. Just saying.
You are not wrong, but the article is clear that they were hamstrung by their silly trashcan design, and they are moving back to something more modular and updateable like the old Mac Pros, which should help avoid stagnation.
Adding to my comment, I find very strange that they announced almost nothing tangible (the bump in the specs of the Mac Pro is not available yet in their web site, though I imagine it will be soon)
Not sure why this was downvoted as it's completely accurate. Apple invited a well-known, Apple fanboy to an exclusive meeting with high level execs (feeling special yet?) to break this news - pretty much the best case scenario to break disappointing news.
He wasn't the only one invited, as he pointed out. However, he's one of the go-to sources for Apple punditry, so Apple knew that as soon as the announcement was made, tech people would be visiting his site to find out what he thought, and they'd be smart to give him a head start at digesting the news and asking them questions directly, instead of rhetorically.
"Religious fanatics" is a dumb phrase. Gruber has and can be very critical of apple and everyone. OP was just unhappy that Gruber doesn't share the same opinions as they do.
They likely didn't have a choice, especially as they released a speed bump today. The Mac Pro had become a bit of a joke but the iMac and MBP range was powerful enough (just enough) that the pro community would grumble more than complain.
After the critical reception of the new MacBook Pro range amongst the Apple community, especially pro users, everyone was questioning Apple's commitment to pro users, and the Mac as a whole.
I'm glad to see Apple doing this, but I can't help thinking this was totally reactive and pre-emptive damage control. If Apple had just released the Mac Pro speed bump, there would be even more of an outcry that Apple has given up on anything more than incremental changes.
The pessimist in me thinks that Apple simply had no idea that there was this sort of demand for pro Macs. Phil and Craig mentioned the iMac numerous times, as though to say "hey pros, there is a great Mac you can use", so they can still claim that they do make great, high-performance pro devices.
My guess is "next year" means "Holidays 2018", and my guess is that Apple has only recently started work on this. Apple hasn't been about modular design or expandability for a long time. With the rise in adoption of VR, there has been even more discussion about upgrading graphics cards (remember Oculus comments about the Mac?), and the age of the CPUs is another criticism. I just can't imagine Apple starting work on this some time ago.
Most likely the current gen speed bump and next gen redesign were both green-lit at the same time, so however long ago they started on the current update.
Well all the current update is is them dropping the price of configurations they already owned and killing off the previous base model. It's very much a matter of flicking a switch.
To be honest the age of the CPUs isn't too bad. I mean, they're old but the CPUs they have are still perfectly acceptable and competitive. The issue is that the GPUs just aren't worth bothering with at all compared to what's out now.
They talk in the article about being backed into a thermal corner and that's easy to believe. They simply didn't know that GPU technology was going to accelerate in advances in the way it did, and particularly not in single-GPU workloads.
Probably, but I've read Gruber's piece twice and I couldn't help but feel as if the talk was held by a bunch of young geeks coming from a Kickstarter project.
Maybe that's an Apple's new approach at PR but it sounds like they tried to downplay the impact of bad management that ultimately led to a failure that must have cost them millions.
The pessimist in me thinks that Apple simply had no idea that there was this sort of demand for pro Macs.
I've heard again and again stories about power users that are editing videos (4K these days) or doing other content creation (3D animation, etc) which can really benefit from high-end hardware.
I'm thinking it was more an issue they couldn't figure out a high-end, upgradable Mac Pro which kept their beefy profit margins, and didn't become a support nightmare at a price point that was somewhat reasonable (i.e. less than $10K USD).
Companies and industries make purchasing decisions that lock them in for several years, so Apple probably finally got their head out of their ass as they could see people heading in another direction.
Once you've spent five years transitioning to, say, a Windows setup, there's a significant additional cost to going with Apple, and it's not like Apple has felt like a deluxe experience lately.
This is the thing. A lot of companies have started switching away from Mac and now they're switching away I can't see that this is going to be enough to ever tempt them back unless they do something really amazing.
I genuinely love macOS and I'm happy with Apple's offerings on the whole, but I think there's plenty of people who just don't care and are happy with whatever works. If you're using say, Pro Tools or Avid Media Composer or whatever software you use to produce content, odds are it works just fine on Windows too. I think many are going to try Windows, realise this and then simply not bother switching back.
But its like when you're on the freeway and see billboard for your favorite restaurant 40 miles away. It gives you the motivation to not settle for something else.
Why even bother with the speed bump. These guys have been neglecting the mac pro for 4 years and work their ass on a new version, and still spend time updating the legacy ?
Gave up on the mac pro years ago. I replaced my unkillable 2008 Mac pro with a lovely Fractal Design R5 case, a stonking 5930k overclocked at 4.5Gz on a 'posh' ASUS Mobo with 64GB of DDR.
It's a 'hackintosh', sure enough, but it's fantastic. First time in 30 years I don't own a mac, that's telling. Their fault, too.
Yes I had a previous hackintosh running for a few years in parallel with the Mac Pro. It's actually quite simple but it requires a bit more patience, especially during updates. It's mostly a case these days of doing the update, rebooting in 'safe' mode to install the binary third party nvidia driver, then reboot again and voila.
Also, some of the original setup requires a bit of tinkering with drivers to start with (especially if you use 'recent' hardware) but it's really not more complicated than installing linux these days (and then fiddle a bit with the settings).
It was the updates, and the time they took, and all the details to remember that eventually led me off of running a Hackintosh after 1.5 years. That and Windows 10 is more than good enough for me, especially as a desktop.
I generally recommend that people building hackintoshes get an external USB / Firewire / Thunderbolt soundcard. That way you're pretty much guaranteed to get official macOS drivers that'll work without issues.
Fellow hackintosh builder here. It's totally doable. If you're able to run Linux and able to understand concepts like kernel modules, you'll be perfectly fine.
To get solid bluetooth support I bought a card from http://www.osxwifi.com/ , which makes peripherals like the magic trackpad work smoothly.
For me it was just too much work to keep it up to date. But then I don't have the big power requirements, but really need/want a separate monitor. These days I probably could get away with a Mini.
Been running hackintoshes since 2007 or so. Mostly smooth sailing. Off the top of my head:
- It's all about making it easy for yourself. In short, motherboard and GPU choice change the experience from 'almost effortless' to 'never gonna work'. Get a $20 USB external soundcard to get rid of any audio configuration quagmires. Get the most compatible, widely used motherboard and Nvidia GPU, so you can get support on Tonymac should you need it. Stick to wired Ethernet to avoid meddling with bluetooth and wi-fi if you can. Everything else (PSU, CPU, RAM, hard drives and case) isn't an issue.
- The tradeoff is time invested into initially understanding how it all fits vs. money saved and increased knowledge of how MacOS ticks (a good thing regardless, if you're a power user). How much time depends on how much of a PC tinkerer you are already. If you already built PCs and tried getting Linux distros going it's gonna be second nature.
- You'll still need to check out Tonymac when a point update comes out for tips and warnings. The easiest solution is to install the fully up to date next-to-last MacOS version (install El Capitan 10.11.6 now that we are in the Sierra cycle, for example) and keep it going until you're forced to upgrade. Staying a generation behind, both in hardware and software, is the safest strategy. Hackintosh and being on the bleeding edge don't really mix.
In fairness I've been running Sierra just fine on my Hackintosh, though I did wait until 10.12.1. If I recall correctly the first version had issues with the Nvidia Web Drivers (some strange bugs) but they've long since been resolved.
I would agree with the overall sentiment though and add that even on a legitimate Mac it's usually a good idea to hold back a bit on updating. I work with audio a lot and it's common for audio units (and Pro Tools if you use that) to break initially.
Audio user here too. I just updated to 10.12.4 yesterday on a test install and it went without a hitch, but only because I checked Tonymac and updated Clover beforehand, which I wouldn't have done otherwise. And I'm on a old GTX 650 Ti that doesn't need the Web Drivers. Meanwhile my main 10.9.5 work install keeps gloriously chugging along.
Their utilities (Multibeast, Unibeast, Kextbeast...) are well-though and easy to use, but it worth noting that Tonymacx86 doesn't have any plans to open source them -- you have to trust him (no one seems to know his real name, mostly for legal reasons related to Apple I think) to execute binaries with root rights on your fresh OS, or go the Vanilla (and harder) way.
I have a fully working hackintosh. Just take someones confirmed build and buy the exact same parts. I lucked out in that every piece of hardware (besides the wifi card) worked out of the box. It runs just like a mac, better actually, and I use it all the time.
I've been building hacks (as the community calls them) since 2010.
If you get a golden build and get it working it's almost like a real mac. It's possible to get everything working 100% but it's time consuming and even in the best case scenario macOS updates will probably be a pain.
Another aspect to consider is noise. If you come from the Mac world you are probably spoiled by low noise or silent computers. PCs are very noisy and you will probably have spend time in research and money in expensive silent parts to solve this.
Finally, a common problem with hackintoshes is wifi. I've tried everything, believe me. If you intend on using Wifi your best bet is buying the same chip Apple uses with an adapter. Many manufacturers offer their Wifi drivers for macOS but those are usually finicky or outdated.
I briefly ran a hackintosh when my Biostar motherboard died and I was frustrated with how slow my old Macbook Air was running. Pretty simple process: replaced it with a Gigabyte, downloaded an installer image from my Mac, and used to TonyMac tools to set it up. Unfortunately wasn't able to get Xcode to work reliably. Everything else seemed to work but Xcode was a crashfest.
I'm not sure it's the hackintosh... now and then I hear a lot of complaints about a particular version of xcode even on native macs. I don't use it, but I have work colleagues who do.
I was running the same version of Xcode on the same version of Mac OS on a 4-5 year old Macbook Air and it worked fine there, just slow.
I've certainly had Xcode crash once in a while, but this was something else. Tried reinstalling it and no change. I don't think I even got it to finish a build.
The FC R5 is a HUGE case, and it's as good as my mac pro 2008 really. Lighter too! Very, VERY well designed, excellent filters, and I run 3 140mm fans in it so it doesn't make a noise; the fans are permanently just over the stalling speed. Really very good cases.
Macs (maybe with the exception of a Mac Pro) are only silent at idle, not in full load. By my definition of 'silent' at least. If you can't hear the system while gaming because you use headphones, sorry, it's not silent.
If you just randomly build a beige box hackintosh, it will be noisy. If you spend some quality time on silentpcreview, you can get one that is silent even under load. I know, I have one.
Still, I'd very much like to get a decent Mac Pro instead. Devil's in the details, let's wait and see. My hackintosh isn't becoming obsolete any time soon.
The truth is that the best hackintosh is Niresh but since it's even more illegal than Unibeast and such it's banned from the tonymacx86 forum and /r/hackintosh/ both.
Have a Fractal Define Mini C myself, definitely desk worthy even as someone who is very fussy about product design. Has a utilitarian Richard Sapper vibe.
Really wish more PC component companies focus on high quality good looking components without the gamer branding.
I'm on #3 hackintosh, and I agree, they're great. I'm using it for audio production primarily. 0 problems, and I have a lot of peripherals. The one place these fall short is graphics card support. Newer 1070's and 1080's simply do not work (unless there's some very recent developments).
I built my Hackintosh on the 970 platform, right when it came out. It was frustrating early on, waiting for the supported drivers, but eventually they came. What didn't go away though was having to install custom drivers with each upgrade/patch of OS X.
I ran a Hackintosh for about 1.5 years. I just recently went back to Windows 10 after the integrated Linux sub-system came out with the update. Most of the software/tools I use run in both OS X and Windows, so it wasn't a huge deal breaker for me.
One thing I didn't like about the Hackintosh was maintaining it during updates, having to wait for the right NVidia web drivers, and then remembering how to update all the stuff specifically.
What I did like was that I had a computer that I built for $1100 that scored about 16,000 on the Geekbench, without overclocking.
Note: I still use a Mac Book Air 11" because it's the best laptop I've owned. I think the trackpad and sleep/wake functionality that just works is the best ever, and makes it really convenient. Obviously, these two killer features for me matter a lot less on a desktop.
Second Note: I built mine with an aluminum Rosewill Legacy U3-S – Silver/Aluminum Case that was both compact, and really good-looking.
[Edit, updated type of computer cost from $110 -> $1100]
Is this just because the newer cards are so new, or will there never be drivers released anymore? That's a bummer. And makes me feel slightly more confident on going back to Windows from Hackintosh. It likely wouldn't affect me for a few more years, since this 970-based, Intel gen 5, desktop that I built up a couple years ago, still has plenty of longevity left in it.
Not sure why it would need to be smaller, the Cheesegrater was exactly what I'd expect a Pro level machine to look like and I've never been an apple user, I just love that case.
It's a pro level desktop, size (within reason) constraints aren't really an issue.
I agree. Bringing back the old design would immediately solve a lot of problems, but Apple won't do that. Even with a new redesign, I assume the system will still be designed to accommodate standard-sized GPUs and other add-in cards, unless Apple is going to use custom packaging, which is doubtful. That's why I guessed that they could potentially make the new Mac Pro smaller and have it sit on a desk instead of the floor, etc. Instead of the current cylindrical Mac Pro, it would go back to something box-shaped.
I wouldn't mind a slightly smaller cheese grater truth be had. It's a heavy beast of a machine and takes up a fair bit of space. Although it doesn't really move much and I don't notice it too much sitting next to me. Top specs and upgradability are my top feature requests.
My impossible dream is that Apple would simply release a microATX motherboard containing all of the "Mac goodness" and bundled with a license for macOS.
i would settle for a barebones machine with the basic CPU, onboard graphics, and like 4-8gb of ram but the ability to add in whatever cpu(s) and GPU i wanted, under $2000. Preferably around the price of the base imac.
Really hanging out for the nvidia Pascal drivers for my almost perfect pci passthrough VM system. I can run GPU accelerated Windows and Linux apps at (near) native speeds without rebooting, if Pascal drivers drop I'm off to the races with MacOS as well.
Can you go into a bit more detail? You're running Windows and Linux on Mac in a VM with graphics acc. at almost native speeds? Or on Linux running Windows, and possibly MacOS when (big IF) Nvidia releases Pascal drivers? If it's on Linux running Windows - I'm all ears.
Recent Linux kernels and have added the ability to pass through PCI devices to QEMU guests.
I run NixOS with Windows 10, Windows 7, and Ubuntu guests. Only one guest can be run at a time. I have a second GPU with a second screen that gets passed directly to the VM. I use numactl and nice to half surrender half my CPU cores to the VM and static huge pages to hand over a chunk of memory. The VM also gets passed an entire dedicate SSD for application storage. I believe libvirt can do most of this automatically now. I pass in a seperate bluetooth controller for keyboard and mouse.
Performance wise you're missing some CPU power and RAM, but otherwise running at full speed. Applications run flawlessly, its my dream development machine. I dont game much but I get the same FPS from the vm as bare metal windows on the same machine, as CPU and RAM are not my bottle neck.
Id I had a supported GPU or the Pascal drivers dropped I could get MacOS running and it'd be a one stop shop.
Thanks! This sounds almost exactly like something I need. Why separate keyboard and mouse though? Only difference that I would prefer is to retain the same keyboard/mouse/tablet and monitors (three of them) and to be able to easily switch between the two, preferably to have copy and paste working between the two. Alternative, I'm pursuing right now, is a KVM with synergy, but I have limited deskside space (for machines) - I'd rather have one machine with 20 cores and four graphics cards than two machines.
To get the performance benefits the VM can't be run with a spice / vnc interface, so there is no virtual screen or virtual input. You have to pass the VM its GPU and some USB ports and can only see/interact through those and the network bridge.
My keyboard and mouse can pair to multiple different machines at the same time and switch with a button press so I just do that.
Synergy also works fine, you just need to temporarily pass a real keyboard in to set it up.
There is also a newish feature in QEMU that allows they physical devices to be swapped back and forward by pressing both CTRL keys [1]. It works reasonably well with a few quirks (Extra mouse buttons dont work in guest, for example)
Same thing apples to the screen, I surrender an entire monitor to whatever VM is running, but you could use a KVM switch.
It's a little work to get set up and tuned but it is 100% a dual boot killer. The next time I reconfigure this machine, I won't be installing a native Windows partition, I simply don't need it anymore.
Assuming you can run another OS than OS X (meaning that you have some Linux, Windows or BSD mileage and are confident about administrating such a machine), then look around you on the refurb market, get your hands dirty and you can build a _great_ workstation at prices that are much less than Apple's. I have done so and I do not regret it at all.
For those who can run another OS besides macOS, then Apple hardware has rarely been the best option, and never the cheapest. The point for many, like me, is the combination of both the hardware and software.
What an incredible unprofessional move, this would never have happened under Steve Jobs.
Apple has been known for having the patience to wait with introducing things until they got them right. I guess this really is the Scullyfication of Apple. Desparate moves rather than just putting your heads down and come out with something new when you have it.
But maybe it's just a matter of them realizing that they have to announce something because they know releasing when it's ready means next year... and last year was already late.
The company has changed in a lot of ways since 2011, some in a bad way, some in good. Times are changing too. Get on with it.
They dont have to do anything. They can just come out with things when they are ready. The Pro line is such a specific usecase that they wont be missing that many people and even if they loose some they will come back if what they come with really are as great as they claim.
If they really wanted to put out the words that they are working on something they should hint at it instead.
If they were really serious they would make an open letter or they would write out to their Mac Pro users personally. That way their "openness" would actually make sense and they would show they really cared.
Pushing this to a little elite group of bloggers is just an amateurish move on Apples part.
Well now we're talking about subjective opinion. To me, press releases and corporate double-speak are petulant. Actual engineers speaking frankly to journalists, to me, is the height of professionalism.
All this is subjective. When Jobs wrote an open letter about not supporting flash that wasnt a press release that was him taking responsibility and adressing something heads on.
Making it engineers job to adress a leadership issue is exactly the wrong kind of frank.
If Apple seems intent on making things right with its high-end desktop consumers, I wonder what that means for those of us pining for the return of the esc key on the MacBook Pro.
Fans of the Mac Pro have been waiting four years for this announcement, and are likely to be waiting another one or two for any real movement on the problem.
The Touch Bar seems like a pretty apparent failure in that even most of the "until death" apologists can't or won't defend it, but Apple's not going to give up this quickly. I think you'll get your wish, but not soon.
>> Fans of the Mac Pro have been waiting four years for this announcement, and are likely to be waiting another one or two for any real movement on the problem.
The troublesome thing with this article is that even if Apple put out a Mac Pro with the latest and greatest guts in the old cheese grater chassis today, pros would be extremely happy. FWIW, I still think the cheese grater chassis is a great design.
Sure, design matters, but the livelihood of pros depends on their ability to get sh!t done. Just giving them access to "less pretty" hardware that does what they need today is better than making them wait another year or so.
Of all the Macs, the Mac Pro is probably the easiest to design. What people basically need are modular-PCs that can run OSX on the latest hardware and gives the user choice with respect to GPU manufacturer. There's less of a need to make it the smallest possible computer, because smaller makes it harder to do upgrades.
I'm sure it's been pointed out to you before, but there's a system-level option to map the Caps Lock key to Escape. It took me about a day to adjust, never looked back.
It is really interesting to read the articles from the other people who were there (links in the daring fireball article) and see the little differences in what each of them put in or left out.
>Mac sales were up in 2016, once again outpacing the PC industry as a whole, and the new MacBook Pros are a hit, with sales up “about 20 percent” year over year.
Not really, what are people supposed to do? Move their entire ecosystem to Windows?
Just because it sells doesn't mean it's a great product. Balmer's reign is testament to that so I'm getting pretty tired of (non-shareholder) people pointing at spreadsheet numbers to justify Tim Cook doing a good job.
>Just because it sells doesn't mean it's a great product.
How about if the people it makes those record sales to love it?
"According to Brand Keys’ 2017 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, Apple delivers a best in class user experience across every single category in which it competes, from smartphones to music streaming."
That's true for people who want 32 GB of RAM, a Nvidia GPU, a touchscreen etc. - I'm sure they haven't bought the MBP 2016.
But what about people who are fine with the specs and just don't like the details? You really need to have bought an MBP to know whether you like the Touch Bar and the flat/loud keyboard, or how well the battery works for you (given that the benchmarks are all over the place).
I'd love to see the percentage of returned machines instead.
But the whole point of a lot of the reaction pieces was that it was bad enough to finally shove developers off it and onto... whatever non-Apple laptop. (I don't really know much about PCs these days)
When the iMac was introduced, I worked at an Apple dealer. I can still remember one client who used to do video production work on an iMac. There may have been others but I distinctly remember one.
I am really curious what Apple feel constitutes "pro" apps. "Software development" is mentioned, but the general sentiment from Hacker News and developers I have talked to seems to be that Apple do not understand their "Pro" audience, at least when it comes to the Macbook Pro (granted, it's a different beast than Mac Pro).
> Apple’s research shows that 15 percent of all Mac users use at least one “pro” app frequently. These are apps for things like music creation, video editing, graphic design, and software development.
> Schiller, on Apple’s own pro apps: “I just want to reiterate our strong commitment there, as well. Both with Final Cut Pro 10 and Logic 10, there are teams on those software products that are completely dedicated to delivering great pro software to our customers.
Maybe they'll update aperture (one can only hope for good, not so expensive photo editing software that allows one to put pictures into folders and projects...)
> seems to be that Apple do not understand their "Pro" audience
As a few people have noticed (Recall Arment and possibly even Gruber pointing this out) for a while now almost all their Pro user footage used in advertising and announcements has either been photographers, directors or people sketching down ideas on iPad Pros.
Kinda seems to be ignoring the intersections of creativity and computing that the original Mac pioneered.
a pro machine that demanded placement on your desk, not under your desk
... and that's how Apple lost the professionals. The desk is a clean space for a huge monitor / keyboard / mouse, and MY work. It's good to make a workstation that looks nice, but it's ten times as good to make one that's flexible and powerful. The only people who want that workstation on the desktop are the designers at Apple, and stroking your own ego isn't on the path to making a great product.
Every great designer knows that form follows function.
I wouldn't take that too literally, firstly those are Gruber's words and secondly, there isn't anything stopping you putting the Mac Pro on the floor so long as the cables reach.
You're refusing to accept the simple reality that professionals couldn't figure out how to put a computer on the floor. And that's how Apple lost an entire market!
Couldn't agree more, I mean hell I put my G5 (cheese grater) behind my monitor (on my desk) back in the day _just_ so I could more easily dust my machine. Pretty? No way. Ergonomic? Yes.
Apple themselves admitted as much. They focused too much on making something beautiful and small. Neither of those things matter to a pro, especially for a desktop.
And not only that, even Apple with its vast resources cannot keep the machine up to date because the components are so tied to the case design.
A nicely designed item is unrelated to where it should be placed. The OP was specifically saying that Apple lost the Pro market because the unit "demanded" to be put on the desk which is absurd since the Mac Pro can be placed anywhere that the cables allow it to.
I think the OP's point is that the Mac Pro is not a nicely designed item. Design is all about tradeoffs. In this case, Apple had to decide whether to prioritize form factor and appearance or upgradability and performance. They chose the former, which turned out to be the wrong design for the target market.
The feature that allows a current Mac Pro to be placed on a desk comes at the price of more important features like being able to easily upgrade and expand a Mac Pro. Could be wrong but I feel that's one thing that OP wanted to express.
The trade offs made give it a small footprint, I've seen many cheese graters on desks and they were fine. Initially I assumed OP meant the same thing as you highlight but after talking about keeping a pros desk clear I assumed they were being more literal. If the issue is that Apple made a small computer that compromised on its core requirements then that's fine but to say that the issues stems from making a computer to sit on a desk alone is absurd.
my issue with the current Mac Pro is that, yeah cute packaging, but I need a second tower/accessory/etc when I only needed one before so I immediate get new clutter and cables all because someone had a "cute" design for the main computer
It's not important where I can put it - the act of designing something that should be placed on a desk prevents them from designing what I want. A Ferrari is a desirable sports car and a terrible cargo van.
I don't think that's necessarily Apple's fault. Desktops/towers (much to my chagrin) are largely a thing of a bygone era. No matter where I go, everyone is on a laptop, and that's what allows the employee to be mobile.
I'd be okay with putting the desktop on my desktop if the form factor was tight enough. Clearly that's what they were trying to do with their current Pro model, but at the expense of it being competitive. Just sayin', there's plenty of space in the corner behind my primary display.
The first thing I did when I ditched mac was to get a pc motherboard/ram/cpu/psu and bolt it out of the way under my desk. More room on my desk is an upgrade. Nobody really makes enclosures designed to be out of the way.
A machine the size of the trashcan Mac Pro would be awesome as an upgradable Mac Mini type device. i7, internal drive bays, RAM slots. I'd love a desktop sculpture like the Trashcan, but not with the useless dual GPUs and thermal design and everything.
Great point, and the entire Mac lineup needs to be more flexible and configurable to meet customers's needs:
- I want to configure a laptop with a 1TB spinning hard disc, so that I get a lot of space without paying $3000. I can get such a Dell for $1500 with a UHD screen. I'd prioritise disk space over weight and battery life.
- I want to configure the Mac Mini with a 6TB spinning desktop hard disc, rather than a portable one, which is costlier and has limited capacity. To reduce footprint, make the machine vertical. I also want to be able to configure the Mac Mini to drive a 5k monitor via Thunderbolt 3, and 32GB memory. All of this should be upgradeable. It's a shame that the Mac Mini isn't. It doesn't even have the "thin and light" excuse laptops have.
None of this is sexy. It won't make tech reviewers go ooh and aah. It won't earn a place in the MoMA. But it will be more useful to customers.
I have read quite a few confusing things about new MBPs. I'll probably stay put for another year before bailing out of the Apple ecosystem (aka distortion field).
My brother has one - it's quite a nice machine and the touch bar is way cooler than I thought it would be (whether it will be really useful is probably yet to be seen over the long term).
He's mostly using it for video editing (4K/5K) and it screams along in Final Cut Pro X.
Apple should not lose focus of their roots. They need to remain committed to desktops and laptops. With Ryzen there are now tons more options.
While the iPhone and iPad businesses are solid, they can be cyclical and nowhere near as robust as their core faithful mac users who have stuck with them for decades.
Few professionals are going to muck about with a hackintosh and I mean no disrespect to those who muck about. I have done it myself, and its great as a curiosity and to learn but at a point you just need to get things done and have proper seamless hardware support for all the peripherals for pro level work.
Granting it took Adobe about 10 years to switch from old classics API on mac to cocoa, don't expect CS on Ubuntu before 2050 if they start working on it today...
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 422 ms ] threadObi-Wan: "That boy is our last hope."
Yoda: "No...there is another..."
That a Linux based system is an alternative for a powerful Unixy system?
As I noted elsethread, it really is. I used to use Macs exclusively, and I'll never willing leave Linux now: it really is that much better. The problem is that Windows & macOS are too constrained by their installed base: they don't have the freedom to be really revolutionary in their UIs, nor can they afford to support deep customisation (GNOME & KDE have similar problems — but one needn't use either GNOME or KDE to use Linux). Linux, meanwhile, offers a user true freedom: I can use a tiling WM, I can write code and bind keys to do anything I want. A Linux box running StumpWM and emacs is the closest thing the modern world offers to a Lisp machine, and it's awesome.
Just a few months ago, I spent somewhere around $4500 (all-in) putting together a new workstation. It runs Linux instead of OS X and this has led to me using my (4-year-old) ThinkPad more than my (18-month-old) MacBook Pro (when I'm "on the go"). I actually plan on selling the MBP; I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
I'm sure this is great news -- and long-awaited -- to many people... but some of us got tired of waiting.
That's an essential insight for anybody that ever wants to run a business, and it is why sales people get paid the big bucks and purchasers are only as good as the discounts they get.
Unrelated, but nice to have interacted with you on HN! I've seen your handle and comments hundreds of times by now.
On second thought, I guess if you can just sell it to some service. Or say, Best Buy, then there's a point there for reduced price (at a high degree :p).
https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
State of Linux on the MacBook Pro 2016
Not Working:
• Audio input & output
• Bluetooth
• Keyboard backlight
• Suspend & Hibernation
• Touch ID
• Wi-Fi
I've had a similar experience with the Air but it works well with the newer kernels (including the SSD, which was the main problem for me).
But if there's one good thing at play, it's that there's a fairly active community that tries to tackle these problems.
I've had very good luck with my conversion on my old MBP so far. I have a late 2009 kicking around the house, basically a web browsing computer or backup machine if I leave my newer model in the office, etc.
Since I couldn't get the latest macOS on it I figured I'd just wipe it and install a Linux distro- all told I was maybe an hour into the process and had Ubuntu 16.10 running like a champ. The built in Ethernet was a life saver because I had to replace the WiFi drivers and there were a few power settings I tweaked.
A few weeks post install I've tweaked touchpad settings and various other things, except for the WiFi, it worked nearly straight out of the gate, and it was certainly functional immediately post-install.
Known limitations that affect me are pretty much limited to Thunderbolt hotswap (you've got to boot with the TB hardware plugged in), lid close/sleep is pretty finicky (I feel like this has always been the case with every Linux laptop I've ever run), and the iSight drivers for the built in web cam have some issues therefor preventing some smart screen dimming functionality. If I actually took the time to patch the drivers this sounds like it's resolvable but I really just don't care.
Battery life is tough to gauge because it's so old and I didn't benchmark it pre-Linux but I'm getting about 2-2.5 hours out of it while writing code. Obviously not great, but I doubt I was getting that much more w/ OS X. This machine was my daily workhorse for a couple of years, it's got plenty of cycles on the battery. With auto screen dimming or GPU optimizations, this could likely get improved.
Really, the only thing I'm finding now is that I'm not a huge fan of the default Ubuntu 16.10 desktop and I'll probably start hopping distros since it's been a while since I was running a Linux desktop as a main OS.
I would say that from a completely subjective standpoint it feels every bit as snappy in standard use as OS X did and it will likely keep this machine quite useful for as long as it holds together.
I would have been willing to spend several thousand £ on a Mac Pro that met my needs, ended up having my needs met by a PC with a GTX 1080 that cost less than the baseline iMac and within 15 minutes of 3D rendering using CUDA and Octane render I asked myself why I didn't do this years ago and my wallet thanks me.
Now I don't really see the point in going back to Apple, feels like they've only just decided to care about pro users again and this was probably a decision that came out of a meeting where it was 50/50 if the line was killed or rebooted.
Neat, I hope AMD sells a lot of these chips to get back on its feet.
Takes 10s to write into a .vimrc on any new computer.
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53633/does-using-ctr...
I really don't understand how there can be vim users that haven't remapped escape.
Like, if you care about ergonomics enough to complain about making a rarely used key into a touch key, how can you not care enough to remap that key if you use it more often?
And Mac OS even has built-in support to remap caps-lock to escape, and has had for a long time I think.
Funny side-note: I've broken the keycap for my escape key (on a TypeMatrix keyboard).. yet I haven't bothered to try to fix it. It's just not worth the trouble.
I had never gotten in the habit of using "^]". And I, like some others, do like my caps-lock right where it is these days, because I use it a lot.
We have some big Linux advocates in our company, so I've also tried switching to Linux twice before going to OS X, a couple of years apart. The claim from them was always the same, Linux is ready for the Desktop. The problem is that it's been "ready for the desktop" for ten years. I can't imagine ever going to Linux over Mac OS.
I've still got my Macbook Pro, so we'll see how things develop, but I've already started the process of migrating away, and if we're looking at 2018 it'll be pretty far along by that time.
At the time of release, their asking price for the dual D700 system was less than the price of buying just the two equivalent FirePro W9000.
I don't understand who these people are that are spending a 50% premium on components that are two to three years old. I use a MBP regularly, but only because my work buys them.
Windows is not inherently bad. But the premise of it working everywhere means some trade-offs are made. Same for Android.
Also, systems would be available to suit power users - Apple currently offers exactly zero in that space. Power users influence many buying decisions beyond their own systems. It would be good if macOS could be seriously used for hard-core science and engineering.
It's a $25B business that's steadily taken significant market share from Windows/Linux over the last decade.
They should give this up, why?
I'm certainly not advocating giving macOS away or selling it cheaply either. It's worth pointing out that every 2,000,000 units of $500 macOS would be $1 billion as well - which could quickly come close to the margin on that $25B.
They did the licensing thing in the mid-90s. Mac clones were a thing.
To license macOS means to support infinite hardware variations, and to rely on OEMs not to suck. It is an impossible technical problem for a company whose whole ethos revolves around integration of h/w and s/w.
Kind of.
Apple had to approve any clone designs. It wasn't as willy-nilly as the PC market. At the time Apple allowed cloning, Apple itself had a large number of varying models to support.
Apple's big problem was that the clones were faster and cheaper. For example, the Umax C500 was available up to 240 Mhz while the PowerMac 4400 was only available up to 200 Mhz and the Umax machine was $400 less expensive and that was on the low end.
Power Computing's clones were high end and either matched or outperformed their Apple equivalents for less money. The PowerTower 200e was released the same day as the PowerMac 9500/200 and it was $1300 less expensive.
In the really high end, the Daystar Genesis MP smoked everything in Apple's product lineup.
The cloners were bad for Apple but only because Apple couldn't compete with them. Developing both the hardware and the software was too expensive for them to not be able to make all of the profit on every sale.
Plus, we are in a different world these days. Intel hardware, due to Intel's keeping the bus proprietary and getting rid of the chipset makers, is a lot more generic than back in the day. NeXT and a lot of open source projects today have a list of hardware you can use. The list for today is a lot shorter. I think a lot of companies would thrive on making good macOS machines.
I really think Apple should just stop making any PC other than the MacBook and iMac lines. That's where their heart is anyway. License the OS for $250 a pop and sell for the same. If they are that concerned about what happened before, limit the sold macOS to Xeon cpus only. That will get rid of all the portables that might reduce their MacBook sales.
It feels incredibly un-Apple.
For Apple, that normally is "you're holding the phone wrong."
Sure, they IMO should increase the minimum past 128, but many people don't use close to that and the 1,300$ price point is attractive w/ 2.7GHz i5.
I was admittedly disappointed at first but then realised there isn't really anything else that they could've done to interest me anyway. I'm genuinely very happy with my existing 2014 MacBook Pro. I just also think it's telling that I as someone who's spent far too much money on Apple hardware also uses a hackintosh desktop.
A lot of pros will be thinking "So why should I buy New MacPro if they're only going to let the line stagnate again?"
After the critical reception of the new MacBook Pro range amongst the Apple community, especially pro users, everyone was questioning Apple's commitment to pro users, and the Mac as a whole.
I'm glad to see Apple doing this, but I can't help thinking this was totally reactive and pre-emptive damage control. If Apple had just released the Mac Pro speed bump, there would be even more of an outcry that Apple has given up on anything more than incremental changes.
The pessimist in me thinks that Apple simply had no idea that there was this sort of demand for pro Macs. Phil and Craig mentioned the iMac numerous times, as though to say "hey pros, there is a great Mac you can use", so they can still claim that they do make great, high-performance pro devices.
My guess is "next year" means "Holidays 2018", and my guess is that Apple has only recently started work on this. Apple hasn't been about modular design or expandability for a long time. With the rise in adoption of VR, there has been even more discussion about upgrading graphics cards (remember Oculus comments about the Mac?), and the age of the CPUs is another criticism. I just can't imagine Apple starting work on this some time ago.
They talk in the article about being backed into a thermal corner and that's easy to believe. They simply didn't know that GPU technology was going to accelerate in advances in the way it did, and particularly not in single-GPU workloads.
Probably, but I've read Gruber's piece twice and I couldn't help but feel as if the talk was held by a bunch of young geeks coming from a Kickstarter project.
Maybe that's an Apple's new approach at PR but it sounds like they tried to downplay the impact of bad management that ultimately led to a failure that must have cost them millions.
I've heard again and again stories about power users that are editing videos (4K these days) or doing other content creation (3D animation, etc) which can really benefit from high-end hardware.
I'm thinking it was more an issue they couldn't figure out a high-end, upgradable Mac Pro which kept their beefy profit margins, and didn't become a support nightmare at a price point that was somewhat reasonable (i.e. less than $10K USD).
Once you've spent five years transitioning to, say, a Windows setup, there's a significant additional cost to going with Apple, and it's not like Apple has felt like a deluxe experience lately.
I genuinely love macOS and I'm happy with Apple's offerings on the whole, but I think there's plenty of people who just don't care and are happy with whatever works. If you're using say, Pro Tools or Avid Media Composer or whatever software you use to produce content, odds are it works just fine on Windows too. I think many are going to try Windows, realise this and then simply not bother switching back.
But its like when you're on the freeway and see billboard for your favorite restaurant 40 miles away. It gives you the motivation to not settle for something else.
It might work.
It's a 'hackintosh', sure enough, but it's fantastic. First time in 30 years I don't own a mac, that's telling. Their fault, too.
Also, some of the original setup requires a bit of tinkering with drivers to start with (especially if you use 'recent' hardware) but it's really not more complicated than installing linux these days (and then fiddle a bit with the settings).
Odd kernel panics used to happen once every 3 months. Black text would scroll down the screen and you have to hard reset the system.
I would keep a legit backup around but the power/price ratio cannot be beat. I'm looking at building another soon.
To get solid bluetooth support I bought a card from http://www.osxwifi.com/ , which makes peripherals like the magic trackpad work smoothly.
- It's all about making it easy for yourself. In short, motherboard and GPU choice change the experience from 'almost effortless' to 'never gonna work'. Get a $20 USB external soundcard to get rid of any audio configuration quagmires. Get the most compatible, widely used motherboard and Nvidia GPU, so you can get support on Tonymac should you need it. Stick to wired Ethernet to avoid meddling with bluetooth and wi-fi if you can. Everything else (PSU, CPU, RAM, hard drives and case) isn't an issue.
- The tradeoff is time invested into initially understanding how it all fits vs. money saved and increased knowledge of how MacOS ticks (a good thing regardless, if you're a power user). How much time depends on how much of a PC tinkerer you are already. If you already built PCs and tried getting Linux distros going it's gonna be second nature.
- You'll still need to check out Tonymac when a point update comes out for tips and warnings. The easiest solution is to install the fully up to date next-to-last MacOS version (install El Capitan 10.11.6 now that we are in the Sierra cycle, for example) and keep it going until you're forced to upgrade. Staying a generation behind, both in hardware and software, is the safest strategy. Hackintosh and being on the bleeding edge don't really mix.
I would agree with the overall sentiment though and add that even on a legitimate Mac it's usually a good idea to hold back a bit on updating. I work with audio a lot and it's common for audio units (and Pro Tools if you use that) to break initially.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/march/2017
There was also a great hackintosh discussion on HN a couple days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13901752
If you get a golden build and get it working it's almost like a real mac. It's possible to get everything working 100% but it's time consuming and even in the best case scenario macOS updates will probably be a pain.
Another aspect to consider is noise. If you come from the Mac world you are probably spoiled by low noise or silent computers. PCs are very noisy and you will probably have spend time in research and money in expensive silent parts to solve this.
Finally, a common problem with hackintoshes is wifi. I've tried everything, believe me. If you intend on using Wifi your best bet is buying the same chip Apple uses with an adapter. Many manufacturers offer their Wifi drivers for macOS but those are usually finicky or outdated.
This is expensive, but it's IMO the best choice: http://www.osxwifi.com/apple-broadcom-bcm94360cd-802-11-a-b-...
I briefly ran a hackintosh when my Biostar motherboard died and I was frustrated with how slow my old Macbook Air was running. Pretty simple process: replaced it with a Gigabyte, downloaded an installer image from my Mac, and used to TonyMac tools to set it up. Unfortunately wasn't able to get Xcode to work reliably. Everything else seemed to work but Xcode was a crashfest.
I've certainly had Xcode crash once in a while, but this was something else. Tried reinstalling it and no change. I don't think I even got it to finish a build.
If you just randomly build a beige box hackintosh, it will be noisy. If you spend some quality time on silentpcreview, you can get one that is silent even under load. I know, I have one.
Still, I'd very much like to get a decent Mac Pro instead. Devil's in the details, let's wait and see. My hackintosh isn't becoming obsolete any time soon.
My point is simply that one has to put special effort when building a PC to even get silence at idle.
Really wish more PC component companies focus on high quality good looking components without the gamer branding.
One thing I didn't like about the Hackintosh was maintaining it during updates, having to wait for the right NVidia web drivers, and then remembering how to update all the stuff specifically.
What I did like was that I had a computer that I built for $1100 that scored about 16,000 on the Geekbench, without overclocking.
Note: I still use a Mac Book Air 11" because it's the best laptop I've owned. I think the trackpad and sleep/wake functionality that just works is the best ever, and makes it really convenient. Obviously, these two killer features for me matter a lot less on a desktop.
Second Note: I built mine with an aluminum Rosewill Legacy U3-S – Silver/Aluminum Case that was both compact, and really good-looking.
[Edit, updated type of computer cost from $110 -> $1100]
For anything earlier, Nvidia periodically releases drivers about a month later than the OS version bumps. There are drivers for 10.12.4.
Also glad to hear the Mac Mini's not being killed off.
It's a pro level desktop, size (within reason) constraints aren't really an issue.
Recent Linux kernels and have added the ability to pass through PCI devices to QEMU guests.
I run NixOS with Windows 10, Windows 7, and Ubuntu guests. Only one guest can be run at a time. I have a second GPU with a second screen that gets passed directly to the VM. I use numactl and nice to half surrender half my CPU cores to the VM and static huge pages to hand over a chunk of memory. The VM also gets passed an entire dedicate SSD for application storage. I believe libvirt can do most of this automatically now. I pass in a seperate bluetooth controller for keyboard and mouse.
Performance wise you're missing some CPU power and RAM, but otherwise running at full speed. Applications run flawlessly, its my dream development machine. I dont game much but I get the same FPS from the vm as bare metal windows on the same machine, as CPU and RAM are not my bottle neck.
Id I had a supported GPU or the Pascal drivers dropped I could get MacOS running and it'd be a one stop shop.
The best source to get started I've found is the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM...
My keyboard and mouse can pair to multiple different machines at the same time and switch with a button press so I just do that.
Synergy also works fine, you just need to temporarily pass a real keyboard in to set it up.
There is also a newish feature in QEMU that allows they physical devices to be swapped back and forward by pressing both CTRL keys [1]. It works reasonably well with a few quirks (Extra mouse buttons dont work in guest, for example)
Same thing apples to the screen, I surrender an entire monitor to whatever VM is running, but you could use a KVM switch.
It's a little work to get set up and tuned but it is 100% a dual boot killer. The next time I reconfigure this machine, I won't be installing a native Windows partition, I simply don't need it anymore.
Heres a video demoing and explaining it a bit: https://youtu.be/16dbAUrtMX4
[1] https://www.kraxel.org/blog/2016/04/linux-evdev-input-suppor...
Apple has been known for having the patience to wait with introducing things until they got them right. I guess this really is the Scullyfication of Apple. Desparate moves rather than just putting your heads down and come out with something new when you have it.
But maybe it's just a matter of them realizing that they have to announce something because they know releasing when it's ready means next year... and last year was already late.
The company has changed in a lot of ways since 2011, some in a bad way, some in good. Times are changing too. Get on with it.
If they really wanted to put out the words that they are working on something they should hint at it instead.
None of those things speak to a hemorrhaging segment of users whose needs are performance and expandability.
It's a show of strength for the modern era of Apple that they are willing to switch strategies when necessary.
Pushing this to a little elite group of bloggers is just an amateurish move on Apples part.
Making it engineers job to adress a leadership issue is exactly the wrong kind of frank.
The Touch Bar seems like a pretty apparent failure in that even most of the "until death" apologists can't or won't defend it, but Apple's not going to give up this quickly. I think you'll get your wish, but not soon.
The troublesome thing with this article is that even if Apple put out a Mac Pro with the latest and greatest guts in the old cheese grater chassis today, pros would be extremely happy. FWIW, I still think the cheese grater chassis is a great design.
Sure, design matters, but the livelihood of pros depends on their ability to get sh!t done. Just giving them access to "less pretty" hardware that does what they need today is better than making them wait another year or so.
Of all the Macs, the Mac Pro is probably the easiest to design. What people basically need are modular-PCs that can run OSX on the latest hardware and gives the user choice with respect to GPU manufacturer. There's less of a need to make it the smallest possible computer, because smaller makes it harder to do upgrades.
Brutal to all the MBP hot takes from this fall.
Here's a good running list of them.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/10/27/new-macbook-pros-and-the-...
Not really, what are people supposed to do? Move their entire ecosystem to Windows?
Just because it sells doesn't mean it's a great product. Balmer's reign is testament to that so I'm getting pretty tired of (non-shareholder) people pointing at spreadsheet numbers to justify Tim Cook doing a good job.
How about if the people it makes those record sales to love it?
"According to Brand Keys’ 2017 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, Apple delivers a best in class user experience across every single category in which it competes, from smartphones to music streaming."
http://bgr.com/2017/01/20/apple-user-experience-customer-sat...
But what about people who are fine with the specs and just don't like the details? You really need to have bought an MBP to know whether you like the Touch Bar and the flat/loud keyboard, or how well the battery works for you (given that the benchmarks are all over the place).
I'd love to see the percentage of returned machines instead.
Not true at all, it was G3 almost as fast as Apple's then PowerMac. The only "problem" was that USB was slow compared to SCSI.
But I used it for PRO work for years. Great value for the money
> Apple’s research shows that 15 percent of all Mac users use at least one “pro” app frequently. These are apps for things like music creation, video editing, graphic design, and software development.
> Schiller, on Apple’s own pro apps: “I just want to reiterate our strong commitment there, as well. Both with Final Cut Pro 10 and Logic 10, there are teams on those software products that are completely dedicated to delivering great pro software to our customers.
As a few people have noticed (Recall Arment and possibly even Gruber pointing this out) for a while now almost all their Pro user footage used in advertising and announcements has either been photographers, directors or people sketching down ideas on iPad Pros.
Kinda seems to be ignoring the intersections of creativity and computing that the original Mac pioneered.
It's going to be an iPod, a Phone, AND an internet communications device
... and that's how Apple lost the professionals. The desk is a clean space for a huge monitor / keyboard / mouse, and MY work. It's good to make a workstation that looks nice, but it's ten times as good to make one that's flexible and powerful. The only people who want that workstation on the desktop are the designers at Apple, and stroking your own ego isn't on the path to making a great product.
Every great designer knows that form follows function.
And not only that, even Apple with its vast resources cannot keep the machine up to date because the components are so tied to the case design.
- I want to configure a laptop with a 1TB spinning hard disc, so that I get a lot of space without paying $3000. I can get such a Dell for $1500 with a UHD screen. I'd prioritise disk space over weight and battery life.
- I want to configure the Mac Mini with a 6TB spinning desktop hard disc, rather than a portable one, which is costlier and has limited capacity. To reduce footprint, make the machine vertical. I also want to be able to configure the Mac Mini to drive a 5k monitor via Thunderbolt 3, and 32GB memory. All of this should be upgradeable. It's a shame that the Mac Mini isn't. It doesn't even have the "thin and light" excuse laptops have.
None of this is sexy. It won't make tech reviewers go ooh and aah. It won't earn a place in the MoMA. But it will be more useful to customers.
He's mostly using it for video editing (4K/5K) and it screams along in Final Cut Pro X.
While the iPhone and iPad businesses are solid, they can be cyclical and nowhere near as robust as their core faithful mac users who have stuck with them for decades.
Few professionals are going to muck about with a hackintosh and I mean no disrespect to those who muck about. I have done it myself, and its great as a curiosity and to learn but at a point you just need to get things done and have proper seamless hardware support for all the peripherals for pro level work.