This is what they used to do with the venerable Mac Pro tower, built as recently as Mid 2012. The heavy gauge aluminum construction was a work of art. People pick up Mac Pro G5 shells and use them to build tables, benches, etc.
I am hoping that Apple returns to this sort of design philosophy. It's quite frustrating that many of their iMacs are not (easily) user upgradable. Upgrading an HDD to an SSD requires cutting adhesive, suction cups to remove the display, disconnecting not-meant-to-be-disconnected cables from comically delicate sockets, and similar feats of delicacy.
The Mac Pro redesign applied the same sort of anti-consumer bullshit.
The current philosophy is pretty solidly in line with the historical Apple design philosophy, so I wouldn't necessarily expect it to change. The iMac is basically today's evolution of the original Mac [1], a single-piece computer/monitor combination with no user-serviceable parts. Jobs said in 1984 that hardware customization is unnecessary to support, because "customization really is mostly software now".
The Mac Pro towers were pretty different, but if anything they were the aberration, going in a more Unix workstation direction.
You're cherry-picking. That is definitely one of Apple's design philosophies, and it has definitely worked very well for the iPhone and iPad. But not all their computers have followed that style. The Mac II launched in 1987(!) and was very influential. And as the earlier commenter mentioned, before the "trash can" redesign, the Mac Pro was easy to open and had plenty of ports.
Trying to apply that sealed appliance approach to every single product is sometimes a mistake, as demonstrated by the Mac Pro misstep.
They wanted to make a tiny, silent Pro machine to make a statement, but nobody seems to have cared much about that. I haven't seen a single person saying "I hope the new Pro is still really really small, even if that means it's more expensive and less expandable!"
Sure, neither does anyone... on anything. If the bet had succeeded though we'd all be calling them geniuses and suchlike. If no-one made bets like that we'd still have boring beige boxes. Hell the original Mac was a bet like that (the design was radical at the time).
The MacPro is an awesome machine. Everyone I know that has used one loves it. That's great for a pro-machine. That's exactly what Apple likes to do - create hardware that people love
They lost the bet, but it was a good bet to make. I'll take a company that makes bets like that over one that doesn't, long term.
Sorry, I was unclear about the "bet". I don't mean they shouldn't take risks, more that in this case it would have been easy to hedge the bet -- launch a bigger expandable box at the same time.
In their recent discussions around the upcoming redesign, it sounds like they didn't realize they were making a bet at all. If they had, they should have monitored it more closely and been a lot quicker out of the gate with the redesign.
A possible defence is that Apple had other priorities at the time, and wasn't paying full attention to the Pro. But it's mystifying why the world's biggest company by market cap can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
The MacPro is an awesome machine. Everyone I know that has used one loves it.
It's funny it hasn't been more successful, then! Although I certainly believe you. It's definitely possible for it to be popular with a niche while failing in the wider market.
Of course it is! Not all bets have to be all-in. Having a backup plan would have reduced the downside if the Pro wasn't a hit. It would also add a little risk, sure, of being perceived as cowardly or unfocused by going for such an "un-Apple" approach.
When a product like the Mac Pro is widely perceived as a failure, and you have to resort to the extremely un-Apple thing of discussing your future roadmap, it seems to me very reasonable to ask what might have been done differently, and why.
I still say that if Apple had kept their eye on the ball, they would have known within a couple of years that the Mac Pro wasn't working as intended. They could and should have started work on a more modular replacement a year or two ago. It would have been shipping now and they wouldn't be in the embarrassing situation they're in.
Wikipedia's summary seems fair: "By 2016, reviewers started to agree that the Mac Pro was lacking in functionality and power, and should be updated by Apple. Apple later revealed in 2017 that the thermal core design had limited the ability to upgrade the Mac Pro's GPUs and that a new design was under development, to be released in 2018 or 2019."
Either it took them a year to figure out the problems with the current design and realize they needed to go back to the drawing board, or (I'm guessing) it was just allowed to languish and no serious investigation was done until fairly recently.
(Take all this with a pinch of salt, of course! I'm a random internet pundit and not actually running one of the most successful businesses of all time.)
True, although perhaps worth noting that the Mac II was developed in secret because its developers knew Jobs would hate it, and indeed Jobs hated its "unnecessary" and supposedly user-unfriendly expansion ports. It ended up being released only after Jobs was fired from Apple.
Apple did. It came with a G5 processor. Most people didn't want to pay the exorbitant prices that Apple wanted them to pay for things like Apple-compatible AGP graphics cards and such when PCs got the same thing at literally 1/3 the price, and they pretty quickly fell into irrelevance.
Apple would probably go the exact same route as they did the last time and fail just as miserably.
They certainly did not keep up. Their equipment has been behind as far as I can tell when I worked for them starting back in the G3 days, and that's including after the intel switch.
The situation today in completely different than 1995-1996, when Apple briefly allowed Macintosh clones, before Jobs killed the project because they were cannibalizing Apple's high-end desktop sales. Now high-end desktop sales are such a small part of Apple's line that they let the products stagnate for years. Are Mac Pro motherboards really going to compete with notebook sales?
Apple likes the control over the hardware and software, and packages all of the drivers needed to run macOS on any blessed instance of Apple hardware currently supported (and maybe even ever created, since Intel). If you wanted, and I have done this before, you can clone a Mac made HDD and boot it from any other Mac you can get your hands on, and other than the hardware swap it's basically a reboot. If Apple let me build a tower and drop anything I wanted in to it, they can't guarantee that anymore, and even if it's just amongst developers, it hurts their brand experience.
If it's for developers they don't have to guarantee it. I'm happily running a hackintosh right now. If they made it a little easier we wouldn't have to do weird hacks to spoof hardware ids just so messages work.
I think the iOS "developer previews" have shown that even if you label something as being "unstable and just for developers" you'll still end up with thousands upon thousands of people with no idea what they're doing running it anyways and subsequently being vocally horrified that not everything works perfectly.
The difference is those people would now have to build hardware instead of just opening itunes and hitting install. You really think those users could get past the bios setup stage?
Those weird hacks exist because of the spambot problem they're trying to prevent. It's enough of a hassle for us that iMessage spambots are practically nonexistent as a result.
>If it's for developers they don't have to guarantee it.
This would only be true in a world where Ars Technica, The Verge, and other publications did not exist.
Apple would suffer from poor performance reviews for any sort of driver issue. Plus, "not guaranteed to work" is the opposite of Apple's ethos, which is "it just works."
Apple has made it easy enough for hackitoshes to work by being lax with people running MacOS.
I believe that is due to the fact of the strength of their xnu kernel than any drivers. I've installed my hackintosh HDD into a regular Mac and it booted just fine. It ignored the chameleon partition and booted the HDD as if it came from any other Mac.
BTW, this isn't quite assured when copying a Hackintosh to another Hackintosh. Chameleon kernel injections are device specific. Different motherboards require different injectors.
The core business model of Apple is to sell hardware.
That simple.
That's why macOS, etc are free now. That's why they're ramping up their enterprise partnerships behind the scenes to ensure big apps run best or even first on iOS and macOS.
IBM, SAP and especially Cisco (the latter has special hooks in the networking stack in iOS, giving Cisco routers an edge).
You can argue if that is the correct approach or not, but it is Apple's DNA now - and all the issues in the pro segment stem from it. Not enough hardware to be sold, why bother, etc.
As much as that's true, Apple has been trying to dig deeper into "services" over the last decade. App sales, music sales, movie sales, cloud services, anything they can do to expand their software ecosystem to make it more versatile and useful on hardware they never produced.
If in some conceivable future Apple could make enough money on the "pro" market looking for OEM-style rigs to fund development of macOS through the macOS App Store, or through OS sales, they would probably at least consider it.
The problem Apple has is success. If you're managing a team of top talent and you have two products, one of which rakes in hundreds of billions, the other which is mere tens, which team do you think gets the best people?
It must take a lot of determination to keep really great people on the macOS team instead of poaching them for iOS. Apple's strategy of using the same OS core for both platforms probably helps in that regard: They can put their best people in the middle without concern about their full potential being wasted.
It's a really tricky spot to be in. If Apple had no phone business at all they'd be a tiny company, but they wouldn't have the same stress about where to place people.
As I inderstand it, Apple isn't organised that way. They have OS teams, app teams, design teams, which work on whichever product at a given time. They don't have product-specific teams.
As for Apple being tiny without the iPhone; it's huge but Apple Watch (commonly described as a failure) is estimated to be a bigger business than Microsoft's Surface business.
What I mean is that the OS people get prioritized for phone features first, computer features second. The filesystem team, which is a great example, did work for both products, but note that it hit the phone first.
Apple minus iPhone means no watch, no tablet, and marginal market share since these products help spur sales in the computer area. Using a MacBook as a hub for all your Apple devices is a compelling reason to get one.
Look at how hard it has been for Microsoft to grow market share being what is basically an OS company with no significant hardware sales to speak of.
And the idea that selling an alternative proprietary OS for PCs is viable business model doesn't really seem to be supported. Neither NextStep nor BeOS could make any inroads into the PC world after giving up their own hardware.
> IBM, SAP and especially Cisco (the latter has special hooks in the networking stack in iOS, giving Cisco routers an edge).
I assume you're talking about Apple's iOS, not Cisco's IOS? What special APIs does Cisco have in Apple iOS, I couldn't find anything from a quick googling?
Why doesnt McDonald's let you build a big mac at home - it's not like people don't have access to lettuce, tomatoes, hamburger buns, meat, cheese, mayonnaise, pickles, etc. The only thing we really need is the sauce that makes it a big mac.
hey before I answer you wanna take a stab at that question?
EDIT: I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a fairly close analogy.
your sister comment made an interesting point that McDonald's does sell the sauce in grocery stores. That is a close analogy to this (since if someone really wants a big mac, they can make a hamburger at home and, by including some of that sauce, gets something that meets some of that need.) I think that's a pretty bad business decision for McDonald's to have done.
It's a non-competing market. Nobody is going to fire up a grill in the office, make a burger, and then slap on the sauce just to save a trip to a McDonald's.
They are going to use it when the otherwise wouldn't buy a McDonald's burger, like when hosting a backyard BBQ.
my analysis is different, but whatever. I think some people would make a hamburger at home rather than go to a mcdonald's when they yearn for this product.
obviously mcdonald's canada agrees with you and not me.
The Big Mac product is not actually burger, it's convenience and being packaged at a consistent, predictable level of quality. If you're hungry and have five minutes, they've got a burger for you.
The Big Mac sauce is the McDonald's signature brand. It's not a competitor to their main product. It's not inherently convenient, it's just familiar, and could serve to reinforce the brand and promote sales of their core product.
McDonald's has a dozen different burgers and you can get them made however you want. You can even get a double Big Mac if you need one and you can supersize the fries and drink. You can even take the burger home and add more ketchup, mustard etc.
So, your assertion that Apple be more like MacDonald's is spot on.
In my business analysis the link you included is a really bad move for McDonald's to perform: they should not have done that. Don't expect it to remain on grocery shelves.
I think you're being downvoted because your "close analogy" compares the lowest common denominator of burgers, where the main value is speed, to a company that purports to offer the highest tier of professional developer computers, where the main value is quality of experience.
A lot of people go to McDonald's because they yearn for their signature hamburger, a Big Mac. In fact some people might leave a fully stocked kitchen to go eat one. that's all I meant. it considerably cheapens the experience if you can get the big mac in a bottle -- and mcdonad's is making a bad business decision by allowing that product on grocery shelves.
Because Apple is about as done as it can be with general purpose computing. I think it's safe to say they will make no more significant investments in it. Closed ecosystem computing is their golden goose now, they have zero interest in anything else. The margins for what they're doing now are too high for them to give that up.
Apple started with a closed ecosystem. Any perceived notion that they were going to be open: using commodity hardware, using open source software, was a means to an end. And they have come back full circle.
Anyone could get a schematic of their Apple ][ and crack the case. It wasn't until the Mac that they stopped treating customers like humans with tools.
Because Apple is about as done as it can be with general purpose computing. I think it's safe to say they will make no more significant investments in it. Closed ecosystem computing is their golden goose now, they have zero interest in anything else. The margins for what they're doing now are too high for them to give that up.
HP has stepped up to compete with the sealed Mac Mini. Their "Z2 Mini Workstation" is small, has user upgradeable RAM/disk, optional Xeon and Nvidia GPU, and can drive six monitors, http://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/z2mini.html
Have you used this and can comment on what the driver support experience is like? I was eyeing the new HP Zbook Studio G4 laptop since it checks most of the boxes where the current 15" MBP is lacking (matte display, 32 gigs RAM, upgradeable components) but after doing a quick "Zbook driver issues" search I'm not so sure anymore.
Do we really need a full tower? Isn't most of the space in a traditional PC "trash can" form factor wasted? The graphics card size would need to change, but it would be great if we could shrink the case and still have all the power of a desktop.
...integrated graphics are plenty good enough for a lot of use cases, but you're right in assuming the graphics card would need to change. Current GPUs require a lot of extra power and cooling that requires a (mini-)tower form factor...
Full towers have a couple benefits against smaller cases, thermals and space for expansion (internal hdd's, additional graphics cards, etc.). Smaller cases really suffer from lack of expansion space and often severely restrict the components you can use just based on the volume you can work with.
Heat is a big problem but given that they barely seem to want to be in the pro business at all these days given their laptop choices lately I doubt they'd want to have 2 different desktops.
Depends on if you use all your feature or not. Sure, can be mostly empty is you mostly don't use what you pay for. But if you use everything you pay for, it can get pretty tight in there.
That being said, if you want a smaller case, you can get that as well. It really depends. You have flexibility, and you get what you need. This is something Apple has been missing for some time now.
If they skip a second cpu socket, a second graphcis card, and any 3.5" internal storage then they could make it pretty small. I hope they don't however, they should at least have two full length graphics cards. CPU's are good enough that you can cram enough cores in one socket these days for most desktop workloads. Spinning metal storage isn't necessary either, an m2 slot + space for 2xSSD's is plenty for internal storage. The problem is the full size graphics cards, in the age of 4K, 5K and 8K and what have you, there is just no way around that content creators for games, video, VR etc will need two of the latest of whatever is on the market. And those are huge and hot. And they need a large box of moving air with an 750W+ power supply.
How about Apple create a "Custom Hardware" program ala their Developer program and basically charge $99+ a year for a legal install usb image. Then they can skip building a Pro and concentrate on the portables and iMac they like.
There is a middle ground between "random hardware" and one Apple device, clearly evidenced by the Hackintosh community. The difference is that Apple can more effectively support a whitelist of components than the Hackintosh community that is already doing it on a volunteer basis.
Even if once each year Apple picked a "blessed" list of commodity hardware (one motherboard, one graphics card, etc.) that was supported, it would still be a major improvement over the status quo. Apple could pick partly based on the MSRP of the hardware or charge a licensing fee to the winner.
It's just such a shame that getting a high performance desktop that runs OSX is such a hassle.
> Because the cost for supporting random hardware will probably run to more than they make from running such a program.
What support? NeXT once had a fax that they sent you with the listed hardware that it worked on. Its even easier now that Intel has shut out all third-party motherboard chipsets. Your paying for legality, not support.
That's a great idea, unfortunately, the shape the company is in is that it would be too greedy (and it's too healthy financially, at least) - to be bothered with doing really cool hacker stuff.
There is a lot of opportunity for Apple to still make a design statement with a tower. One that people willingly display. The key is that is not only does it need to look good but cooling fans need to be deathly quiet. Then offer it up in aluminum or black enclosure.
Dimensions are pretty much locked down by what types of video card technology they wish to support, really would love a new solution that doesn't use the typical slots we still have today.
With regards to the mini, my only beef was when I wanted to integrate with my home theater white boxes just don't fit. It had to hide.
For people wed to commercial design apps, I can totally understand the draw of running macOS on commodity hardware. But as someone who skews more to the hacker end of the spectrum and doesn't depend on commercial software, the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days. Ditto OpenBSD, etc. I'll never go back.
At least it does if you've already come around to using a desktop formfactor. For me I get lots of physical RAM (R / Pandas) a mechanical keyboard, and one of those straight-out-of-the-90s Logitech marble mouses that you'll pry from my cold dead fingers. Hardware support in Linux/*BSD for any Intel graphics based system is a total non-issue.
It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs. I will say though, I've always loved running Linux on desktops where this isn't the use case.
>It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs.
It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in developer circles).
Which goes to say how silly the notion that "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" is.
Macs are for users who want a working GUI and/or a UNIX subsystem, and don't want to do any self-building and/or tinkering.
> "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers"
I honestly haven't heard that argument in years from anyone I'd consider in touch with the current state of tech.
And for a decade I was right there with you on the OSX == *nix plus creature comforts.
But the landscape has changed since that argument held sway for me. Linux has gotten way less fiddly, and the size of my scripts to keep macOS on the straight and narrow has gotten larger.
And Mac OS X has an absolutely shitty software package management "ecosystem". App Store is shitty; compared to apt and dpkg. Brew is the only thing that helps me stay reasonably sane on OS X. But still; to "remove" any large commercial software is basically: reinstall the OS.
You see the same in virtually any physics department (I'm not aware of a similar trend in other STEM subjects, but presumably). Everyone uses a mixture of Linux and OS X. At the start of my PhD, the question wasn't "What laptop do you want?" it was "Do you want a Macbook or an iMac?"
Yes but the MacOS operating system is becoming more and more dumbed down in the UI experience, which nullifies most of the "its got a good UI" argument.
Uhhhh. I put my time in with a Linux desktop for nearly a decade until a job bought me a Mac and there's no way I'd go back. And I think my "hacker end of the spectrum" bona fides are pretty good--but those bona fides aren't incompatible with a preference for a pleasing UX that has been considered with users in mind, which for my money no open-source desktop environment has even approached (and I have my beefs with OS X but they're small fry compared to even just "why is there no terminal emulator on par with iTerm2 in 2017?"). Wanting to enjoy using the thing you spend much of your waking life in front of is a pretty reasonable ask, and the indicative give-a-damn of well-thought-out polished experiences is worth it to me to the point where I don't even bother to boot the way faster desktop with way more RAM that sits under my desk when I can just plug in my MacBook Pro and everything just works. (Also that the window system doesn't randomly lose heads, which still happens on my dual-boot desktop, in 2017, to the point where I don't even bother with it. I'll probably Hackintosh that next time I'm bored.)
Casting your own preferences as implicitly "hacker" and pulling out some "qualitative experience" (which among nerds is best read as "subjective preferences") stuff is pretty silly.
Woah, woah, my comment never said that people who prefer macOS to Linux/*BSD are inferior hackers. I think I was clear that I was differentiating between the software that I run and the software that a creative professional is required to run. That is, I have a choice where to run my dev stacks, while a graphic designer is probably a captive Adobe CS user.
And yes, that's exactly what I meant by "qualitative experience." I was actively calling out that the opinion voiced in my comment was, like, my opinion man.
People are entitled to their preferences, and you clearly have yours neither is "silly" but we can still politely disagree.
It's funny that you say that an Adobe CS user is "captive", but you don't consider yourself "captive" to the superior Linux hacker tools. Ie: why is the creative user captive, but you are free.
If you wanted to move to macOS/Windows you couldn't, because you wouldn't bear their inferiority when it comes to hacker things, so aren't you also captive?
Easy, because I could and occasionally do run my tools on Windows and macOS. And from some of the responses here, it's clear that some people do prefer that.
But, if I wanted to buy the latest Adobe Creative Suite and run it in Linux, I have no real recourse.
So I guess in that sense, my statement could be made more precisely as: Obligate users of such commercial software suites as Adobe Creative Suite are captive users of either Windows or macOS.
Said obligate users _could_ migrate to Gimp or Audacity.
But they don't, for the same reason you stay on Linux. The fact that you can run bash on Windows is not such a huge difference if for other reasons you don't.
They don't want an inferior experience, even if they could tolerate it if strictly necessary.
> Said obligate users _could_ migrate to Gimp or Audacity.
Perhaps—and I've certainly met professionals that claim to use those tools. However, I've met others who claim (rightly or wrongly) that Gimp and Audacity are not perfect substitutes for other commercial packages.
I've found Gnome-terminal to be better than iTerm2 in the areas that matter to me - speed, color/font rendering, and configurability. I switched from OS X to Ubuntu and i3 because I was tired of how slow iTerm2 was compared to Gnome Terminal, and haven't regretted it even slightly.
My main workstation is a Lenovo Thinkpad with dual 1440p external monitors, and haven't run into issues losing heads, however, I wrote my own auto-detect and screen layout wrapper for xrandr so that it would consistently do what I wanted. Basically, my window manager makes calls like: `xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-2 --left-of DP-2-1 --auto --output eDP-1 --auto` when I connect to my docking station and `xrandr --output eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-1 --off --output DP-2-2 --off --output HDMI-2 --off --output HDMI-1 --off` when I disconnect. MacOS's screen arrangement consistency was pretty great, though - on par with the consistency of my own script.
I think the improvement of moving from MacOS to Linux for me has been that I don't have to try to figure out how the OS "magic" works to make it do what I want, because there is no magic, it's just scripts I've written myself and I understand them because I wrote them.
Yes, magic is a great way to describe it. Sometimes it's delightful and benevolent magic, while other times it's more like a trickster's curse.
For me, there came a point when making Free nixen do what I want became easier than making macOS not do what I didn't want. Returning to Linux/*BSD from my decade long sabbatical to macOS, I've been delighted by the things that have changed, but even more delighted by some of the things that haven't.
I also spent my high school years working on a roadster in the garage with my father, and once I had money I thought I'd like to do that again, but it turns out that knee room, heated seats, airbags, side impact safety, a DSG and not having to fuck around with my car all goddamned weekend trumped my need to tinker, and so it sat in the garage.
Instead I tinker with other things, like frameworks, databases, video games, and plants. And my computer Just Works.
> the day-to-day qualitative experience of Linux is head and shoulders above macOS these days.
For you, perhaps. But given your preamble it strongly suggests your conditions make this boil down to "for someone who wants to use Linux, Linux is better."
For a start: Linux is not a monolithic ecosystem. The sheer number of qualifiers that are needed (what flavor? What window manager? What hardware? because driver hell is still a thing) make this statement meaningless.
At best you can say "I've found a combination of hardware and many pieces of software that work better for me."
Good! Happy for you. Seriously.
For a developer like myself I can do anything I want to in MacOS and I don't have to fight it to get it working right - it "just works".
In a way this mirrors the iOS and Android debate: for those who like hyper-customization of their OS then of course Android/Linux is better. It's better due to a fundamental precondition of the requirements.
For the rest of us - those who don't find that as important - the other system is superior because you don't have to do that.
I love Linux and use it every day, but this kind of statement is the same thing the Linux crowd has been saying since the early 2000s (is it the year of Linux on the desktop yet?) and while it is more true now than ever it still masks it's very real issues to mass adoption as a primary OS
Linux is far less fiddly than it used to be, though.
I just recently installed the currently frozen Debian testing (with the intent on staying on it once it replaces the previous stable) and there was nothing to configure, it just works, even starting with a minimal install (no DE) there was nothing to configure, just pull the right packages (like bluez, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth etc) and I could pair with my wireless headphones etc. If you install a complete DE like Gnome or KDE from the metapackages you don't even have to install anything yourself, it just works out of the box. Even for people like me who do minimal installs and run tiling wm there is little to nothing to configure. apt install xorg will get all you need for Xorg to work and autodetect your hardware, echo "exec dwm" >> .xinitrc will get your startx session up.
The early 2k had the massive amount of suffering between very poor WiFI support (lots of kernel drivers out of tree, need to compile them yourself and pray the API was synced with the current kernel or do it yourself), terrible state of audio stack (pulseaudio has gotten a lot more stable now, and is better than what we had in early PA days, or ALSA days), terrible state of GPU support (with mostly nvidia being okay, but still you would have to be more careful with kernel upgrades. Now you can even run a rolling release distro like arch, and pick a LTS kernel).
But now it's great. You don't need the proprietary driver for AMD cards, intel iGPUs work fine, NVIDIA requires the proprietary driver for performance but the open source drv will still help you get a decent X session up in the first time install, audio just works, bluetooth just works, wifi just works. Even wifi with proprietary drivers, like the broadcom ship on my mac, it's just a matter of apt install broadcom-sta-dkms and it just works. Even Debian doesn't shy away from distributing the proprietary packages in the non-free repository and it's smooth sailing.
Linux missed many window of opportunities during times when it really could have become closer to a mainstream OS. What is funny, is that in my opinion, Linux is now as ready for mainstream purposes as it could ever be, but the opportunities for it will not come again.
And then we have the locked down versions that are getting popular, like Chrome OS, which is really linux underneath. We'll probably see more of that, not less, in the future, but it's not too bad as long as we have the freedom to unlock the bootloader and install what we want.
Google is in a good position to bring an alternative to MacOS/Windows, although it won't be GNU/Linux as we know it in full, but it's close enough.
Linux is indeed much less fiddly than it used to be. It's improved massively since my first use, which was Yellow Dog (red hat for macs) back around 2002 or so.
One area that still needs work, though, is consistency. I can understand why this wouldn't be an issue for some, but it when running Linux it feels like I almost spend as much time getting the UI, little behaviors, etc to match up and be consistent between applications/DE/etc. Quite often you can't get 100% of your desired behavior.
Absolutely. I have a 2008 Mac Pro and it is still going strong, an absolute workhorse of a machine with 4 hard drives; incredibly reliable. At least, it was incredibly reliable with Snow Leopard, but MacOS X has been a bit downhill from there as far as reliability of the audio subsystem. The only real downsides to this machine have been that it is loud, which is problematic when using it for recording. But I would happily buy a modernized version of the same machine, and I'd be _especially_ happy to do so if it was much quieter.
If Apple offered me a dead-silent Mac Mini, even one with not much CPU capability, I would use it for tracking -- that is, right in the room where I'm recording. Also for Skype stuff for podcast recording, and streaming; probably two of them. These machines don't need to have a lot of CPU to record; they only have to do a modest amount of live audio processing. They don't have to run dozens to hundreds of instances of plug-ins like when I'm mixing.
Then the Mac Pro can go in the room where I'm mixing and mastering. So quiet is important but dead silence in the Pro is not really a requirement for me.
I helped my friend run conduit last week to solve this exact problem... a 100'($500) thunderbolt cable lets him keep the machine and storage in a separate room outside of the studio. Probably cost close to $600 when you factor in the conduit materials and the Korean BBQ wings he fed me!
You dont need a hackintosh to run a great mac for cheap(er).
I picked up a 2012 mac mini off CL with 2.5 i5 and dropped in a SSD and maxed RAM to 16GB. Runs silent in a small package. Also added a 28" 4K off craigslist (although it'll only drive up to 2k). All for under $900
The Late 2012 was a great model. Easily accessible memory as in previous all-aluminum generations and replacing the hard disk is just a few screws. I also have a Late 2012 with 16GB RAM and SSD (500GB) like you. I bought it new for IIRC 600 Euro. So, it's been a great investment --- had it almost five years now and it still flies.
I really hope that they'll make a new Mac Mini extensible like the 2012 again.
Honestly, Apple should make a Mac tower, and then incentivize graphic card manufacturers to write drivers. Imagine a Mac with not last years cards, but current generation cards. No custom bios BS like they had before, just buy a card, put it in, install the driver.
They have this in the form of a legal note, don't they? Last I heard it was technically "illegal" to run macOS on anything other than Apple hardware per the TOS. Or is that just an urban legend?
Not illegal, just against the EULA. Basically they could revoke your usage of the software and probably legally fine you.
It is a software license issue. Technically it would be something like unlicensed distribution/copying.
Practically speaking they don't care though. The machine building market is vanishingly small and the licensing gives Apple plausible "we never said it would work" deniability.
I think the illegal bit is using an illegal copy of their OS to install as you don't hold the copyright and so aren't allowed to make a (modified) copy of the installer that works on the non-Apple hardware.
I think downloading an illegal copy of something is still illegal though right? If I download a copy of a DVD for instance I've committed a crime in the UK at least.
I agree it's not due to anything specific about Apple - it's just that it's an illegal copy as you are not the copyright holder and so have no right to make a modified copy or download a copy or modified copy.
> I think downloading an illegal copy of something is still illegal though right?
Mostly not! Seeding a torrent however counts as distribution. Using the software is against the EULA on ToS usually though.
It's kind of like how, back in the day, if you bought pirate software from a guy in a market they were the criminal, not you. Copyright law is mostly about infringement which requires distribution.
It's how torrent sites stay (mostly) legal: they don't actually distribute the files (usually).
They'll pursue you, if you will build hackintoshes and sell them with pirate macOS. I've never heard that they were after individuals. I even think that in many countries Apple's EULA is not counted as law, so they don't even have legal reasons to fine anyone.
I'm not sure it follows that Apple should build it just because some people want it. Some people build Hackintoshes because they like building things or they want to save money. Neither would be addressed by an official tower.
Well to me it is important to remember who the people are that want it - These are professionals and developers that create applications for the OS (mobile and desktop) as well as creatives who have kept Apple afloat in rough times. I would think there is strategic value in keeping these people somewhat happy.
As a counterpoint, they also build them because they want the software/OS but Apple doesn't sell a machine with the hardware to run it. Your only options are notebooks, all-in-ones (essentially notebooks built into monitors), basic lightweight desktop computers, or outdated workstations with limited hardware and expandability.
There's clearly a market for high powered desktop workstations but you can't currently buy the best hardware if you want it to (officially) run MacOS.
Can anyone tell me their experiences running a virtual hackintosh?
In my current job I don't need a mac anymore, so I'm switching to a NUC which I'm thinking it'll be best to run Qubes on. But I do have existing mac/ios projects that I'd like to support, thus the need for a virtual hackintosh.
I've tried running OS/X in VMWare on Windows. Technically it works fine but there's no video acceleration and that's annoying enough to not make it a viable option for me.
It's better to dual boot. As mentioned graphics acceleration doesn't work which breaks a surprising amount of things. There's a good chance it will work on a NUC.
I've had great success running kvm as a host and macOS as a client and passing through hardware to get good performance. That said, this is on a dual socket xeon board and not a NUC, so ymmv.
I wonder what the OS and software guys at Apple think about the lack of options in their own hardware department. It must be a little frustrating to be invested into the software as a developer but know that a lot of pro users (people like themselves) are moving away from the platform.
May be it's just me, but I don't really care about design at all. I'm perfectly fine with huge tower or some reasonable fan noise. What I care is price, durability, extendability, repairability, and, of course, performance. I'm not really into macOS, I can use Linux or Windows just fine, but macOS is not that bad.
I'm actually opposed to thin things or design aberrations like trash can mac. I'm paying for that after all, with money or engineering trade-offs.
The best of both worlds would be officially supported hackintosh (that is, curated list of hardware parts, which are guaranteed to work for some reasonable period (15 years or something like that). But I don't think that would happen, Apple is greedy corporation and wants piece of pie from everything.
It is. I don't care a lot about design either (although I care a lot about user experience), but many people /do/ care for design, and are willing to pay a premium to get that design.
Honest question: what percent of Pro Mac users care more about design than performance? I get that lots of creatives (who might care about design) use Macs, but in the Pro community the sense I get is that performance (and expandability) are relatively more important. That's why the trash can Mac Pro was not particularly popular, to say the least.
The trash can Mac Pro is definitely too much form for too little function - but letting the pendulum swing back the other way is IMO also bad.
The previous tower Mac Pros are massive machines - massive beyond the point of practicality for many purposes. They're also insanely heavy to the point of impracticality. Not all pros want/can live with something 3 feet tall that consumes several square feet of floor space.
The "right" path forward for the pro-desktop Mac is IMO something in between - something that maximizes extensibility and versatility without completely embracing the gigantor-ATX-case-on-the-floor direction.
I'm wondering about the practicality of something more like mini-ITX - small enough to be practical, but allowing access to all the core bits (RAM, CPU, GPU, HDDs).
Having max settle on desktop-class ITX motherboards would be huge... having the MB themselves be user purchasable would be beyond awesome. Buy a known quantity board with wireless/btle and an apple boot system, throw in your own cpu, ram, ssd, either onboard or offboard video, and you've still got a decent DIY system.
Apple could sell the full systems with a great looking case, and DIY enthusiasts could have a fast path to a hackintosh with a MB that's far less likely to blow up when updates happen.
I guess there is a space where it matters more and one where it matters less (at least for me).
Something like a notebook or a smartphone? Thin, light, and pretty have a bit more bearing on these things because you carry them around and other people see them. The value you place on this sort of "form v. function" balance will vary but I can certainly see how "form" can have some legit worth.
But with a high-end workstation I feel that there's much less of an argument to be made for the importance of "form" past a more basic level of build quality and form factor. It might matter a little bit more on a workstation than something like a server that lives in a rack 24/7 but when considering a high-powered workstation purchase, I care very little about it being thin, light, pretty, or unique in shape. Power, flexibility, and "upgradeability" matter vastly more.
And don't forget that "design" doesn't just mean estethics. Design is also usability, maintainability etc. Good product design makes a product easy to use too, not just nice to look at.
Most of my pc cases are easily 15 years old. They have been upgraded when needed and have none of the same parts, but at no point did I have to trash the entire thing and start over. Just the simple standard of having mobos and pss fit has been incredibly useful in decreasing waste, both physical and monitary. Obviously this whole poiny is moot with apples current hardware strategy becoming even more untouchable black box like.
And i'm on HN so I obviously use a model M from the late 80s early 90s. No scarcasm here.
My old computers are working fine. I've gifted them to other people, but I care about devices working for a long time. But really nowadays computers are not progressing that much. Unless something very revolutionary happens, the difference between 2017 and 2032 computer will be much less than difference between 2002 and 2017. So it's perfectly reasonable to assume that people will use computers from 2017 (especially high-end computers) after 15 years.
I feel skeptical about that. 2002 was seeing Pentium IIIs being released that could support usually a maximum of 256MB of RAM (512MB on the very latest high end models). I don't see much in the way of web browsing these days working with that.
You don't care about design, size, or noise, you want something cheap, you want repairability, you don't like the designs Apple favours like thinness and the Pro design, you aren't into macOS…
Why do you want a Hackintosh? It sounds like you want the exact opposite of a Mac.
macOS is popular among developers, so it's a good option, because almost every software piece will work there. iOS development is hardly possible outside of macOS and I have iOS work sometimes, so it's useful for this too.
Boy did they drop the football in this area. I always thought the advantage to making the switch to more common PC architectures was the ability to keep pace and support a wider array of components and technologies.
Instead, they over-designed the enclosure and froze the high-end range of the platform. Creating a simple, but reliable tower design (optimized for speed rather than size) would have been extremely well received, would be nearly free money, and would have done wonders for the brand and their connection to creative pros.
Most of the pros I work with in the industry have gone from loving the mac to tolerating the mac. They are certainly looking around. I don't love Windows, but I have to admit that the Adobe Creative Suite now sings on a modern Windows machine.
Deleted this comment because it's apparently rubbing people the wrong way that I experienced poor performance using Adobe programs on a Windows machine and decided to share that experience.
What's weird is that any game I throw at the machine (which is what I built it for) works flawlessly. It's only Lightroom/Photoshop that give me grief.
I've never heard that PS is supposed to run better on one platform. From my personal experience there's no difference. PS performs bad pretty much platform-independently. However I'd love to see some tests about this.
If there are tests you can point me to I'd love to run them. I admittedly haven't used either program much on the Windows PC, as I was turned off almost instantly when spot usage of clone/heal tools took on the order of seconds to complete.
Edit: I'd love an explanation as to why this was downvoted as well.
I use Creative Suite regularly on both PC and Mac and haven't really seen a difference in speed at all. All 3 computers I run it on have SSDs, though. Are you running SSD on the Windows side?
Could be a bad chip batch on the SSD. 3rd party SSD vendors are notorious for switching around NAND suppliers. Often they are forced to do so(since they do not control the supply like Samsung/Micron/Intel does)
Besides SP600 is not considered a particularly good SSD
Pretty much all SATA3 SSDs claim the top speed of 500MB+ read/ 300MB+ write which is a best case scenario.
Many lesser SSDs have problems in random read writes.
Adobe CS works great on my similarly spec'd (slightly worse) PC. Maybe try reinstalling? I do have an SSD- if yours is a platter that could affect performance too.
It is definitely possible. I switched to using Passmark almost exclusively after having some of the other sites give me some really horrible data a few times (CPU Boss, in my case).
Go with about 4-8 times as much RAM, and Ramdisk your commonly used programs like PS/LR, and make sure you have a large swap space on a dedicated NVMe SSD. Also consider getting higher performing RAM. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/x3yxFT/corsair-memory-cmk32... is a relatively cheap high-performance RAM module. More ram per stick will get more expensive and have higher CAS latency.
Consider getting a high-end quadro instead of a consumer-level card- the P4000 is a good entry-level, while a P6000 is an absolute monster, though probably overpriced. NVidia claims better performance in Photoshop and Lightroom using those instead. http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe.html
Consider a high-end Z270 ASRock motherboard. They are almost always the best choice for making everything else work together optimally.
You can always get better performance with more hardware and better configuration if you need to - is it worth it to you over buying a Mac though, and will the performance of that Mac actually be better?
Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe someone else here will find them helpful if they're considering a new build. I'm not in the market to build a new Windows computer after just building the one I have now a year ago, though. I'm fine with just using the Macbook for photo editing.
It's very possible that there's something else going wrong with my Windows desktop as it's setup now, and it should be running better than it does. Whatever that may be, I'm unsure. I would expect the programs to at least be usable, but they aren't.
And this isn't directed at you in particular, but I should probably make it clear (since for some reason my comments have been getting downvotes) that I'm not saying that Windows computers in general are incapable of running these programs, and I'm not a Mac fanboy in any sense of the word. I'm relaying what I've experienced. If I click and hold an adjustment brush, drag it an inch, let go of the mouse button, then move the mouse to another area of the screen, the program shouldn't lag to the point where it doesn't even register that I let off the adjustment brush and give me a stroke that goes across the entire photo. And yet it does. It doesn't benefit me at all to lie about it.
Seems like there is symmetry in everything: Apple enjoys doing badass engineering, that ends up totally not meeting the usability expectations of the customer. The gloating is only just baredly overshadowed by the sheer hubris.
Agreed... as much as I'd prefer mATX, I think ITX would be the smartest bet... for that matter, if they'd sell "replacement" motherboards with a "core" fee (refunded on turning in the old MB), they could just turn even more of a blind eye to those that really want to go the DIY route with supported hardware. They don't make much money of the desktop users, but those users create most of their money making content for them.
Having a beautiful case that takes a standard ITX board would be great. Yeah, you might not get dual-gpu that way, but even a good ITX would be a huge step up from what they have now...
I liked the last of the G4s better since you could actually carry them comfortably and the door opened wider. I think my ideal case is a smaller G4 with doors on both sides.
It wasn't always this way though. The early mac pro had case accessibility and ventilation improvements that predated Lian Li and their copycats. Today we have tower cases where the screwdriver and bandaids no longer required equipment to replace something in your computer, but it wasn't always that way.
It seems like the same group that made the new Mac Pro made the top-loading Mac Mini that kids put coins in, destroying the CDROM drive in the process. All form, no function.
> Most of the pros I work with in the industry have gone from loving the mac to tolerating the mac.
This is true of myself (UX Designer with 10+ years in the biz pushing code and design) and ALL of the creative types I associate with. I know Apple is something like 90% an iPhone company now, but I'd love to see some long term analysis on the damage they've done to themselves, and even the iPhone, by alienating ALL of the creative content creators of the world. I know I'm painting in broad strokes, but it's hard to overstate the positive mindshare and goodwill Apple used to enjoy in this community. Now they're just the new Microsoft-a necessary annoyance.
Agree 100%, I just refurbished my 6-year old Macbook Air instead of buying a new computer because Apple doesn't sell anything today I actually want. I know for sure my next tablet and my next phone won't be Apple, so they have until this 2011 Macbook Air dies (for the last time) to come up with something worth spending money on, or else I'm back to the PC market! Same goes for all of the Mac users I know, we lament the golden days of Apple but are glad to have experienced them.
When did CS not sing on Windows machines? To my knowledge Apple has never had a performance advantage over Windows.
I thought the Apple advantage has been workflow. For example, OS X is color-managed at the OS level. You can easily create a custom profile for your display without expensive 3rd party equipment.
And OS X uses the same language as PDF to composite the display, so it's easy to produce (color managed) PDFs from any application.
I've used Adobe since early 1990s versions on PCs, never had any issues. PS 4.0 was fantastic. Plus CS versions went 64 bit on Windows long before MacOS.
Plus Windows could actually multitask much better. My Dual P3-933 is still the fastest machine I've ever used compared to the hardware of the time. Amazing how much better a dual core (NT/2000) machine was.
People overestimate how a modern Mac Pro tower would work. A Mac Pro tower is not going to permit hackintosh-style hardware builds. They will force the use of whitelisted "supported" hardware, and sell it all themselves with their standard high markups.
Without proprietary hardware, there is not enough money in the market for them to bother with a tower in the first place. It would also put the "it just works" aspect of the Apple brand at risk, should customers use 3rd-party hardware components that wind up not functioning properly due to unofficial drivers. Apple has a public image to maintain, and they will not expose themselves to having customers claim that their Mac Pro "isn't working", blaming Apple instead of looking to the 3rd-party hardware manufacturer.
I've been with my hackintosh for 3 years, first it was mavericks, yosemite and now i use el capitan. My pc is 2.99 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4gb ram and nvidia gt520 use only to develop. And works quite well.
If that's the problem, then why not create a subsidiary firm and call it, I don't know, Pear, Gala, McIntire, Darwin or something. Let this firm build hackintoshes from off-the-shelf components. The trick is then to remove any reference to Apple and every logo from the OS. People "in the know" would be able to buy a Pear and use it just like a Mac.
This would be really cheap to pull off, just give some people a factory and a few million dollars, and would put next to no strain on Apple proper. It's really just buying a few blessed components, putting them together, and creating a boot disk with the needed kexts. Any mom and pop computer shop can do that if it weren't for legal issues. In the next year's iteration you can talk about custom hardware / buying at scale.
It went really well for clone manufacturers and Apple with quick infusion of cash they needed. It didn't end well because Jobs came in and put an end to it, fearing cannibalisation - at a point in time when their product was Mac, more or less. Now it's different. A lot different.
I don't know what you mean, the model worked extremely well and IBM PC clones took over the market completely.
Oh, you mean Mac clones ;-).
What I'm trying to say is it depends entirely on execution if it works or not. I wouldn't go the way of outsourcing it to others. I would make the clone company a 100% daughter company of Apple, and at the same time I would crack down hard on other Hackintoshs (legally and technically). Apple can milk their cash cow and eat it, too (aehm, I mean their cake).
No, it's more like Windows Server vs Windows XP/7/10, or DRDOS vs MSDOS - but with much more compatibility (just the name change, exact same code).
Since they have the blessing from Apple, they could literally say on the package "This PearPC is also a genuine Macintosh" or even better "The operating system, PearOS, is A macOS". So you would say "yes, I run a macOS".
Profit margin, plain and simple. I'm willing to pay a premium for the best laptop, been using macbooks exclusively for years and they are actually a great value for the quality of the components. But I will not pay 3x for comparable desktop that I can't upgrade just to run MacOS.
Yeah, and upgrade parts are far too much of an an (ahem) apples to apples comparison. Seeing a 20-30% markup on a graphics card might make people reconsider the value they're getting on their macbook or iPhone.
Apple could literally just release the new Mac Pro in the old case, with updated hardware and ports, and if it was priced closer to reality, it would make a lot of their pro users happy. I doubt it would cost them much to do so too. I'd start it off at around $1500 for an entry level 4 core Xeon with an mid-level graphics card (GTX 1060 or Radeon 480).
I think that it'll be a cut-down version of the old tower, not the entire huge thing. My prediction:
2 16x PCIe card slots: YES
2 4x PCIe card slots: NO, use Thunderbolt 3 instead. Every time Apple can push a device maker to switch from slow PCIe to Thunderbolt, that's another device that's usable with a MacBook Pro.
4 3.5" hard disk bays: NO
1 3.5" hard disk bay: MAYBE
2–4 PCIe Flash storage bays: YES
2 optical/Zip/floppy drive bays: HELL NO. Most users rarely use optical discs, and almost no one uses both bays. An external drive is actually more convenient, because you can put it somewhere on your desk when you need it, and put it away when you're done. Then you can place the tower wherever you like, because you won't be stuffing discs into it. In addition, ever since the Blue and White G3, Apple has had to rig up some doors to hide the off-white plastic of the optical drives. Never again!
The starting price will go back to $2499, like it was in 2012. The B&W G3 started at $1599, $2340 in today's dollars.
I bought an m.2 solid state and a wifi adapter that is known to work well with hackintosh's (the stock wifi card wasn't compatible), and another 8gb of ram for another ~$150.
So for ~$850, after 'hackintoshing' this computer, I get:
A laptop that gives me the choice to boot into an SSD imaged with latest OSX Sierra, or the regular 5,400 rpm Windows 10 drive. The last thing I want to do with this laptop is exchange the 1tb 5,400 windows drive for a 1tb SSD.
When booted into Sierra:
The software runs exactly the same as using a real mac. I've done some video editing in Final Cut, some audio work in Ableton, streamed 1080p youtube / netflix videos no problem. There's decent battery life, as the guide above shows you how to disable the nvidia graphics card entirely when running OSX (doesn't work anyways) to save battery. The specs are comparable to a modern macbook pro, and in one case even better.
Pros
- Actually get 4k resolution/screen
Cons
- SD card reader does not work
- Mobile graphics Nvidia 960m does not work, but intel 530 HD graphics card does just fine
- Backlight adjustment doesn't not work (could probably spend time to get it to work, but I'm fine without it for now)
- Trackpad is a little too sensitive
Sames
- Hardware: Core i7, 16gb ram
- Full airdrop support
Where am I going with this? In my opinion the general public is becoming more tech savvy. If Apple does not embrace the culture of people wanting to experiment with code (theirs or not) on different devices, then they are putting themselves at a disadvantage. The guides to make hackintoshes are more than likely getting easier and easier as time goes on and support grows. (this was my second attempt and first success)
What a disappointment this macbook pro reveal was. So instead of spending $2,399.00 on a new 15" macbook pro, I decided to hack together a very comparable one for ~$850.
I'll take the $1,550 savings for a little software and screwdriver work, even with a couple of minor issues, any day.
As long as those dedicated apple fans eat it up, I don't expect anything to change anytime soon. But for everyone else who can't afford those business practices, there are ways like what I did above to get what you want without breaking the bank.
If I had unlimited funds, I would probably just build a desktop, since they have a really good monthly recap of what hardware works with the current software.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017
I guess that's sort of where the line is drawn is you can't really "build" a laptop. Seems like there are a few good Dell models that chose hardware that works with mac, though. I'm sure in the near future we'll start seeing more 4k capable hackintosh laptops.
So for ~$850, after 'hackintoshing' this computer, I get:
The difference is that Apple could do anything to accidentally or intentionally break future updates. It would be in their right to do so, since it is illegal to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [1].
I bought a 2016 MBP for 1480 Euro (after the educational discount) and it will always work without a hassle. I don't have to worry if the latest minor release that also has security fixes breaks anything. That, plus Apple's great support (had to use it twice in 10 years and in both cases I had new or fixed hardware within 2 hours) is worth the extra cost to me.
An additional factor is that Apple hardware is often less expensive mid/long-term. I now buy a new MacBook every 1.5 years or so, my wife gets my current MacBook, and we sell her old one for 800-1000 Euro. So, we both have state-of-the-art MacBooks for ~400 per 1.5 year, or 133 Euro per year per person. There is a store across the street from my office where they sell second hand Dells and Lenovos. Three year old models go for around 300 Euro. So the resale value on other laptops is pretty bad.
Of course, I can understand that when you are on a tight budget, a Hackintosh can be attractive :^). When I was a student, I started with a Hackintosh. But after a month I realised it was easier to get a reasonably-priced Mac Mini ;).
[1] I also find it quite risky, unless you verify the Clover + custom kext source code and compile them yourself.
Apple isn't making a Mac tower because there is no demand for overpriced machines with mediocre performance. All those people building hackintoshes want a cheap Mac desktop. They won't buy a new Mac tower should Apple produce one. They'll continue building hackintoshes.
not true for me. I built the hackintosh I'm typing this on last summer so I could run a large 4k display and have an Nvidia graphics card to monkey around with. If Apple builds a nice Mac tower that I can upgrade and extend (a new, larger SSD ... a new video card ... etc), I'll buy it. It's not really cost.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadI am hoping that Apple returns to this sort of design philosophy. It's quite frustrating that many of their iMacs are not (easily) user upgradable. Upgrading an HDD to an SSD requires cutting adhesive, suction cups to remove the display, disconnecting not-meant-to-be-disconnected cables from comically delicate sockets, and similar feats of delicacy.
The Mac Pro redesign applied the same sort of anti-consumer bullshit.
The Mac Pro towers were pretty different, but if anything they were the aberration, going in a more Unix workstation direction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
Trying to apply that sealed appliance approach to every single product is sometimes a mistake, as demonstrated by the Mac Pro misstep.
It was a technically beautiful machine (still is, really) but their choices meant it became impossible to update.
If the market had gone the other way we'd likely be talking about the 2016 MacPro instead.
They wanted to make a tiny, silent Pro machine to make a statement, but nobody seems to have cared much about that. I haven't seen a single person saying "I hope the new Pro is still really really small, even if that means it's more expensive and less expandable!"
Sure, neither does anyone... on anything. If the bet had succeeded though we'd all be calling them geniuses and suchlike. If no-one made bets like that we'd still have boring beige boxes. Hell the original Mac was a bet like that (the design was radical at the time).
The MacPro is an awesome machine. Everyone I know that has used one loves it. That's great for a pro-machine. That's exactly what Apple likes to do - create hardware that people love
They lost the bet, but it was a good bet to make. I'll take a company that makes bets like that over one that doesn't, long term.
In their recent discussions around the upcoming redesign, it sounds like they didn't realize they were making a bet at all. If they had, they should have monitored it more closely and been a lot quicker out of the gate with the redesign.
A possible defence is that Apple had other priorities at the time, and wasn't paying full attention to the Pro. But it's mystifying why the world's biggest company by market cap can't walk and chew gum at the same time.
The MacPro is an awesome machine. Everyone I know that has used one loves it.
It's funny it hasn't been more successful, then! Although I certainly believe you. It's definitely possible for it to be popular with a niche while failing in the wider market.
There's a reason people complained about the lack of upgrades and it wasn't because no-one bought one.
Your suggestion would be the most un-Apple thing I've heard. They never do stuff like that because they believe in their solution as being the best.
They could have been right - that was the bet. What you describe is not a bet at all!
Of course it is! Not all bets have to be all-in. Having a backup plan would have reduced the downside if the Pro wasn't a hit. It would also add a little risk, sure, of being perceived as cowardly or unfocused by going for such an "un-Apple" approach.
When a product like the Mac Pro is widely perceived as a failure, and you have to resort to the extremely un-Apple thing of discussing your future roadmap, it seems to me very reasonable to ask what might have been done differently, and why.
I still say that if Apple had kept their eye on the ball, they would have known within a couple of years that the Mac Pro wasn't working as intended. They could and should have started work on a more modular replacement a year or two ago. It would have been shipping now and they wouldn't be in the embarrassing situation they're in.
Wikipedia's summary seems fair: "By 2016, reviewers started to agree that the Mac Pro was lacking in functionality and power, and should be updated by Apple. Apple later revealed in 2017 that the thermal core design had limited the ability to upgrade the Mac Pro's GPUs and that a new design was under development, to be released in 2018 or 2019."
Either it took them a year to figure out the problems with the current design and realize they needed to go back to the drawing board, or (I'm guessing) it was just allowed to languish and no serious investigation was done until fairly recently.
(Take all this with a pinch of salt, of course! I'm a random internet pundit and not actually running one of the most successful businesses of all time.)
Apple would probably go the exact same route as they did the last time and fail just as miserably.
The situation today in completely different than 1995-1996, when Apple briefly allowed Macintosh clones, before Jobs killed the project because they were cannibalizing Apple's high-end desktop sales. Now high-end desktop sales are such a small part of Apple's line that they let the products stagnate for years. Are Mac Pro motherboards really going to compete with notebook sales?
Apple likes the control over the hardware and software, and packages all of the drivers needed to run macOS on any blessed instance of Apple hardware currently supported (and maybe even ever created, since Intel). If you wanted, and I have done this before, you can clone a Mac made HDD and boot it from any other Mac you can get your hands on, and other than the hardware swap it's basically a reboot. If Apple let me build a tower and drop anything I wanted in to it, they can't guarantee that anymore, and even if it's just amongst developers, it hurts their brand experience.
No, all kinds of companies will start offering machines as 'ready for macOS', and we'll see the same problems.
This would only be true in a world where Ars Technica, The Verge, and other publications did not exist.
Apple would suffer from poor performance reviews for any sort of driver issue. Plus, "not guaranteed to work" is the opposite of Apple's ethos, which is "it just works."
Apple has made it easy enough for hackitoshes to work by being lax with people running MacOS.
BTW, this isn't quite assured when copying a Hackintosh to another Hackintosh. Chameleon kernel injections are device specific. Different motherboards require different injectors.
That simple.
That's why macOS, etc are free now. That's why they're ramping up their enterprise partnerships behind the scenes to ensure big apps run best or even first on iOS and macOS.
IBM, SAP and especially Cisco (the latter has special hooks in the networking stack in iOS, giving Cisco routers an edge).
You can argue if that is the correct approach or not, but it is Apple's DNA now - and all the issues in the pro segment stem from it. Not enough hardware to be sold, why bother, etc.
If in some conceivable future Apple could make enough money on the "pro" market looking for OEM-style rigs to fund development of macOS through the macOS App Store, or through OS sales, they would probably at least consider it.
The problem Apple has is success. If you're managing a team of top talent and you have two products, one of which rakes in hundreds of billions, the other which is mere tens, which team do you think gets the best people?
It must take a lot of determination to keep really great people on the macOS team instead of poaching them for iOS. Apple's strategy of using the same OS core for both platforms probably helps in that regard: They can put their best people in the middle without concern about their full potential being wasted.
It's a really tricky spot to be in. If Apple had no phone business at all they'd be a tiny company, but they wouldn't have the same stress about where to place people.
As for Apple being tiny without the iPhone; it's huge but Apple Watch (commonly described as a failure) is estimated to be a bigger business than Microsoft's Surface business.
Apple minus iPhone means no watch, no tablet, and marginal market share since these products help spur sales in the computer area. Using a MacBook as a hub for all your Apple devices is a compelling reason to get one.
Look at how hard it has been for Microsoft to grow market share being what is basically an OS company with no significant hardware sales to speak of.
I despise Cisco as much as anyone else, but this statement merits a citation.
it is real.
I assume you're talking about Apple's iOS, not Cisco's IOS? What special APIs does Cisco have in Apple iOS, I couldn't find anything from a quick googling?
hey before I answer you wanna take a stab at that question?
EDIT: I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a fairly close analogy.
People also go to fast food restaurants to get food quickly. Preparing it yourself saves you zero time, it destroys the value of the Big Mac.
If you're going to make your own burger, you can sure as shit do better than a Big Mac.
They are going to use it when the otherwise wouldn't buy a McDonald's burger, like when hosting a backyard BBQ.
obviously mcdonald's canada agrees with you and not me.
The Big Mac sauce is the McDonald's signature brand. It's not a competitor to their main product. It's not inherently convenient, it's just familiar, and could serve to reinforce the brand and promote sales of their core product.
http://fortune.com/2017/03/28/mcdonalds-sauce-bottles-canada...
McDonald's has a dozen different burgers and you can get them made however you want. You can even get a double Big Mac if you need one and you can supersize the fries and drink. You can even take the burger home and add more ketchup, mustard etc.
So, your assertion that Apple be more like MacDonald's is spot on.
apple can prevent you from making a mac at home, even if you know the recipe (via licensing).
That's extremely disappointing for a "workstation". :(
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/12/17/1840
...integrated graphics are plenty good enough for a lot of use cases, but you're right in assuming the graphics card would need to change. Current GPUs require a lot of extra power and cooling that requires a (mini-)tower form factor...
Applying an 80/20 rule, one or two graphics cards, and a couple of drives should pretty much cover it.
Apple could offer a large and small form case. The real problem is heat, right?
That being said, if you want a smaller case, you can get that as well. It really depends. You have flexibility, and you get what you need. This is something Apple has been missing for some time now.
Not to mention Apple doesn't seem to care about the developer and/or professional consumer anymore.
It's just such a shame that getting a high performance desktop that runs OSX is such a hassle.
What support? NeXT once had a fax that they sent you with the listed hardware that it worked on. Its even easier now that Intel has shut out all third-party motherboard chipsets. Your paying for legality, not support.
Dimensions are pretty much locked down by what types of video card technology they wish to support, really would love a new solution that doesn't use the typical slots we still have today.
With regards to the mini, my only beef was when I wanted to integrate with my home theater white boxes just don't fit. It had to hide.
At least it does if you've already come around to using a desktop formfactor. For me I get lots of physical RAM (R / Pandas) a mechanical keyboard, and one of those straight-out-of-the-90s Logitech marble mouses that you'll pry from my cold dead fingers. Hardware support in Linux/*BSD for any Intel graphics based system is a total non-issue.
It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in developer circles).
Which goes to say how silly the notion that "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" is.
Macs are for users who want a working GUI and/or a UNIX subsystem, and don't want to do any self-building and/or tinkering.
I honestly haven't heard that argument in years from anyone I'd consider in touch with the current state of tech.
And for a decade I was right there with you on the OSX == *nix plus creature comforts.
But the landscape has changed since that argument held sway for me. Linux has gotten way less fiddly, and the size of my scripts to keep macOS on the straight and narrow has gotten larger.
Casting your own preferences as implicitly "hacker" and pulling out some "qualitative experience" (which among nerds is best read as "subjective preferences") stuff is pretty silly.
And yes, that's exactly what I meant by "qualitative experience." I was actively calling out that the opinion voiced in my comment was, like, my opinion man.
People are entitled to their preferences, and you clearly have yours neither is "silly" but we can still politely disagree.
If you wanted to move to macOS/Windows you couldn't, because you wouldn't bear their inferiority when it comes to hacker things, so aren't you also captive?
But, if I wanted to buy the latest Adobe Creative Suite and run it in Linux, I have no real recourse.
So I guess in that sense, my statement could be made more precisely as: Obligate users of such commercial software suites as Adobe Creative Suite are captive users of either Windows or macOS.
But they don't, for the same reason you stay on Linux. The fact that you can run bash on Windows is not such a huge difference if for other reasons you don't.
They don't want an inferior experience, even if they could tolerate it if strictly necessary.
Perhaps—and I've certainly met professionals that claim to use those tools. However, I've met others who claim (rightly or wrongly) that Gimp and Audacity are not perfect substitutes for other commercial packages.
My main workstation is a Lenovo Thinkpad with dual 1440p external monitors, and haven't run into issues losing heads, however, I wrote my own auto-detect and screen layout wrapper for xrandr so that it would consistently do what I wanted. Basically, my window manager makes calls like: `xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-2 --left-of DP-2-1 --auto --output eDP-1 --auto` when I connect to my docking station and `xrandr --output eDP-1 --auto --primary --output DP-2-1 --off --output DP-2-2 --off --output HDMI-2 --off --output HDMI-1 --off` when I disconnect. MacOS's screen arrangement consistency was pretty great, though - on par with the consistency of my own script.
I think the improvement of moving from MacOS to Linux for me has been that I don't have to try to figure out how the OS "magic" works to make it do what I want, because there is no magic, it's just scripts I've written myself and I understand them because I wrote them.
For me, there came a point when making Free nixen do what I want became easier than making macOS not do what I didn't want. Returning to Linux/*BSD from my decade long sabbatical to macOS, I've been delighted by the things that have changed, but even more delighted by some of the things that haven't.
Did you ever try using the built-in Terminal.app? I've never had any speed issues with it.
Have you tried elementary OS? If you are looking for a comparable polished experience I think you will be surprised (in a good way).
I also spent my high school years working on a roadster in the garage with my father, and once I had money I thought I'd like to do that again, but it turns out that knee room, heated seats, airbags, side impact safety, a DSG and not having to fuck around with my car all goddamned weekend trumped my need to tinker, and so it sat in the garage.
Instead I tinker with other things, like frameworks, databases, video games, and plants. And my computer Just Works.
For you, perhaps. But given your preamble it strongly suggests your conditions make this boil down to "for someone who wants to use Linux, Linux is better."
For a start: Linux is not a monolithic ecosystem. The sheer number of qualifiers that are needed (what flavor? What window manager? What hardware? because driver hell is still a thing) make this statement meaningless.
At best you can say "I've found a combination of hardware and many pieces of software that work better for me."
Good! Happy for you. Seriously.
For a developer like myself I can do anything I want to in MacOS and I don't have to fight it to get it working right - it "just works".
In a way this mirrors the iOS and Android debate: for those who like hyper-customization of their OS then of course Android/Linux is better. It's better due to a fundamental precondition of the requirements.
For the rest of us - those who don't find that as important - the other system is superior because you don't have to do that.
I love Linux and use it every day, but this kind of statement is the same thing the Linux crowd has been saying since the early 2000s (is it the year of Linux on the desktop yet?) and while it is more true now than ever it still masks it's very real issues to mass adoption as a primary OS
I just recently installed the currently frozen Debian testing (with the intent on staying on it once it replaces the previous stable) and there was nothing to configure, it just works, even starting with a minimal install (no DE) there was nothing to configure, just pull the right packages (like bluez, pulseaudio-module-bluetooth etc) and I could pair with my wireless headphones etc. If you install a complete DE like Gnome or KDE from the metapackages you don't even have to install anything yourself, it just works out of the box. Even for people like me who do minimal installs and run tiling wm there is little to nothing to configure. apt install xorg will get all you need for Xorg to work and autodetect your hardware, echo "exec dwm" >> .xinitrc will get your startx session up.
The early 2k had the massive amount of suffering between very poor WiFI support (lots of kernel drivers out of tree, need to compile them yourself and pray the API was synced with the current kernel or do it yourself), terrible state of audio stack (pulseaudio has gotten a lot more stable now, and is better than what we had in early PA days, or ALSA days), terrible state of GPU support (with mostly nvidia being okay, but still you would have to be more careful with kernel upgrades. Now you can even run a rolling release distro like arch, and pick a LTS kernel). But now it's great. You don't need the proprietary driver for AMD cards, intel iGPUs work fine, NVIDIA requires the proprietary driver for performance but the open source drv will still help you get a decent X session up in the first time install, audio just works, bluetooth just works, wifi just works. Even wifi with proprietary drivers, like the broadcom ship on my mac, it's just a matter of apt install broadcom-sta-dkms and it just works. Even Debian doesn't shy away from distributing the proprietary packages in the non-free repository and it's smooth sailing.
Linux missed many window of opportunities during times when it really could have become closer to a mainstream OS. What is funny, is that in my opinion, Linux is now as ready for mainstream purposes as it could ever be, but the opportunities for it will not come again.
And then we have the locked down versions that are getting popular, like Chrome OS, which is really linux underneath. We'll probably see more of that, not less, in the future, but it's not too bad as long as we have the freedom to unlock the bootloader and install what we want. Google is in a good position to bring an alternative to MacOS/Windows, although it won't be GNU/Linux as we know it in full, but it's close enough.
One area that still needs work, though, is consistency. I can understand why this wouldn't be an issue for some, but it when running Linux it feels like I almost spend as much time getting the UI, little behaviors, etc to match up and be consistent between applications/DE/etc. Quite often you can't get 100% of your desired behavior.
I'm a developer and I don't want to waste another second of my life configuring boot or managing drivers on linux.
If Apple offered me a dead-silent Mac Mini, even one with not much CPU capability, I would use it for tracking -- that is, right in the room where I'm recording. Also for Skype stuff for podcast recording, and streaming; probably two of them. These machines don't need to have a lot of CPU to record; they only have to do a modest amount of live audio processing. They don't have to run dozens to hundreds of instances of plug-ins like when I'm mixing.
Then the Mac Pro can go in the room where I'm mixing and mastering. So quiet is important but dead silence in the Pro is not really a requirement for me.
I really hope that they'll make a new Mac Mini extensible like the 2012 again.
It is a software license issue. Technically it would be something like unlicensed distribution/copying.
Practically speaking they don't care though. The machine building market is vanishingly small and the licensing gives Apple plausible "we never said it would work" deniability.
It's a bit of a strange area. Either way - it's not illegal due to any specific thing Apple does. Other copyright/IP law may apply though.
I agree it's not due to anything specific about Apple - it's just that it's an illegal copy as you are not the copyright holder and so have no right to make a modified copy or download a copy or modified copy.
Mostly not! Seeding a torrent however counts as distribution. Using the software is against the EULA on ToS usually though.
It's kind of like how, back in the day, if you bought pirate software from a guy in a market they were the criminal, not you. Copyright law is mostly about infringement which requires distribution.
It's how torrent sites stay (mostly) legal: they don't actually distribute the files (usually).
http://i.imgur.com/K5rtC9z.png
There's clearly a market for high powered desktop workstations but you can't currently buy the best hardware if you want it to (officially) run MacOS.
In my current job I don't need a mac anymore, so I'm switching to a NUC which I'm thinking it'll be best to run Qubes on. But I do have existing mac/ios projects that I'd like to support, thus the need for a virtual hackintosh.
I'm actually opposed to thin things or design aberrations like trash can mac. I'm paying for that after all, with money or engineering trade-offs.
The best of both worlds would be officially supported hackintosh (that is, curated list of hardware parts, which are guaranteed to work for some reasonable period (15 years or something like that). But I don't think that would happen, Apple is greedy corporation and wants piece of pie from everything.
It is. I don't care a lot about design either (although I care a lot about user experience), but many people /do/ care for design, and are willing to pay a premium to get that design.
The previous tower Mac Pros are massive machines - massive beyond the point of practicality for many purposes. They're also insanely heavy to the point of impracticality. Not all pros want/can live with something 3 feet tall that consumes several square feet of floor space.
The "right" path forward for the pro-desktop Mac is IMO something in between - something that maximizes extensibility and versatility without completely embracing the gigantor-ATX-case-on-the-floor direction.
I'm wondering about the practicality of something more like mini-ITX - small enough to be practical, but allowing access to all the core bits (RAM, CPU, GPU, HDDs).
Apple could sell the full systems with a great looking case, and DIY enthusiasts could have a fast path to a hackintosh with a MB that's far less likely to blow up when updates happen.
Something like a notebook or a smartphone? Thin, light, and pretty have a bit more bearing on these things because you carry them around and other people see them. The value you place on this sort of "form v. function" balance will vary but I can certainly see how "form" can have some legit worth.
But with a high-end workstation I feel that there's much less of an argument to be made for the importance of "form" past a more basic level of build quality and form factor. It might matter a little bit more on a workstation than something like a server that lives in a rack 24/7 but when considering a high-powered workstation purchase, I care very little about it being thin, light, pretty, or unique in shape. Power, flexibility, and "upgradeability" matter vastly more.
I'm curious how you came up with that number? Are you currently still using anything PC related from 2002?
Most of my pc cases are easily 15 years old. They have been upgraded when needed and have none of the same parts, but at no point did I have to trash the entire thing and start over. Just the simple standard of having mobos and pss fit has been incredibly useful in decreasing waste, both physical and monitary. Obviously this whole poiny is moot with apples current hardware strategy becoming even more untouchable black box like.
And i'm on HN so I obviously use a model M from the late 80s early 90s. No scarcasm here.
> I'm not really into macOS, I can use Linux or Windows just fine, but macOS is not that bad.
I think it's safe to say that you fall outside of Apple's target demographic.
Why do you want a Hackintosh? It sounds like you want the exact opposite of a Mac.
Instead, they over-designed the enclosure and froze the high-end range of the platform. Creating a simple, but reliable tower design (optimized for speed rather than size) would have been extremely well received, would be nearly free money, and would have done wonders for the brand and their connection to creative pros.
Most of the pros I work with in the industry have gone from loving the mac to tolerating the mac. They are certainly looking around. I don't love Windows, but I have to admit that the Adobe Creative Suite now sings on a modern Windows machine.
I have CS running on and old i3 machine with 8 GB of RAM with an SSD and an integrated video card, and Photoshop runs as fast as in my MBPr i7.
Edit: I'd love an explanation as to why this was downvoted as well.
Besides SP600 is not considered a particularly good SSD
Pretty much all SATA3 SSDs claim the top speed of 500MB+ read/ 300MB+ write which is a best case scenario.
Many lesser SSDs have problems in random read writes.
Take a look at the Passmark list here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
The i5 scores in at 7995, and the i7 4960HQ is 9770. If you are really CPU bound, there are going to be some big advantages for the i7 here.
Of course, if performance is so bad on the Windows machine that it is nearly unusable, then there is probably something else causing the issue.
Go with about 4-8 times as much RAM, and Ramdisk your commonly used programs like PS/LR, and make sure you have a large swap space on a dedicated NVMe SSD. Also consider getting higher performing RAM. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/x3yxFT/corsair-memory-cmk32... is a relatively cheap high-performance RAM module. More ram per stick will get more expensive and have higher CAS latency.
Get at least a 7700k and OC to at least 4.8Ghz, though most will go higher. Consider buying from a known-bin site, such as https://siliconlottery.com/collections/all/products/7700k52g which has a chip known to perform stably at 5.2GHz.
Consider getting a high-end quadro instead of a consumer-level card- the P4000 is a good entry-level, while a P6000 is an absolute monster, though probably overpriced. NVidia claims better performance in Photoshop and Lightroom using those instead. http://www.nvidia.com/object/adobe.html
Consider a high-end Z270 ASRock motherboard. They are almost always the best choice for making everything else work together optimally.
You can always get better performance with more hardware and better configuration if you need to - is it worth it to you over buying a Mac though, and will the performance of that Mac actually be better?
It's very possible that there's something else going wrong with my Windows desktop as it's setup now, and it should be running better than it does. Whatever that may be, I'm unsure. I would expect the programs to at least be usable, but they aren't.
And this isn't directed at you in particular, but I should probably make it clear (since for some reason my comments have been getting downvotes) that I'm not saying that Windows computers in general are incapable of running these programs, and I'm not a Mac fanboy in any sense of the word. I'm relaying what I've experienced. If I click and hold an adjustment brush, drag it an inch, let go of the mouse button, then move the mouse to another area of the screen, the program shouldn't lag to the point where it doesn't even register that I let off the adjustment brush and give me a stroke that goes across the entire photo. And yet it does. It doesn't benefit me at all to lie about it.
Having a beautiful case that takes a standard ITX board would be great. Yeah, you might not get dual-gpu that way, but even a good ITX would be a huge step up from what they have now...
It seems like the same group that made the new Mac Pro made the top-loading Mac Mini that kids put coins in, destroying the CDROM drive in the process. All form, no function.
This is true of myself (UX Designer with 10+ years in the biz pushing code and design) and ALL of the creative types I associate with. I know Apple is something like 90% an iPhone company now, but I'd love to see some long term analysis on the damage they've done to themselves, and even the iPhone, by alienating ALL of the creative content creators of the world. I know I'm painting in broad strokes, but it's hard to overstate the positive mindshare and goodwill Apple used to enjoy in this community. Now they're just the new Microsoft-a necessary annoyance.
This Apple is starting to go rotten.
I thought the Apple advantage has been workflow. For example, OS X is color-managed at the OS level. You can easily create a custom profile for your display without expensive 3rd party equipment.
And OS X uses the same language as PDF to composite the display, so it's easy to produce (color managed) PDFs from any application.
Plus Windows could actually multitask much better. My Dual P3-933 is still the fastest machine I've ever used compared to the hardware of the time. Amazing how much better a dual core (NT/2000) machine was.
Without proprietary hardware, there is not enough money in the market for them to bother with a tower in the first place. It would also put the "it just works" aspect of the Apple brand at risk, should customers use 3rd-party hardware components that wind up not functioning properly due to unofficial drivers. Apple has a public image to maintain, and they will not expose themselves to having customers claim that their Mac Pro "isn't working", blaming Apple instead of looking to the 3rd-party hardware manufacturer.
If that's the problem, then why not create a subsidiary firm and call it, I don't know, Pear, Gala, McIntire, Darwin or something. Let this firm build hackintoshes from off-the-shelf components. The trick is then to remove any reference to Apple and every logo from the OS. People "in the know" would be able to buy a Pear and use it just like a Mac.
This would be really cheap to pull off, just give some people a factory and a few million dollars, and would put next to no strain on Apple proper. It's really just buying a few blessed components, putting them together, and creating a boot disk with the needed kexts. Any mom and pop computer shop can do that if it weren't for legal issues. In the next year's iteration you can talk about custom hardware / buying at scale.
Oh, you mean Mac clones ;-).
What I'm trying to say is it depends entirely on execution if it works or not. I wouldn't go the way of outsourcing it to others. I would make the clone company a 100% daughter company of Apple, and at the same time I would crack down hard on other Hackintoshs (legally and technically). Apple can milk their cash cow and eat it, too (aehm, I mean their cake).
Since they have the blessing from Apple, they could literally say on the package "This PearPC is also a genuine Macintosh" or even better "The operating system, PearOS, is A macOS". So you would say "yes, I run a macOS".
They adopt industry standards when convenient, but would be perfectly content to make a Pro machine locked to Moore's Law and 3-year turnovers.
Dongles. Dongles are your Pro future.
Apple don't want to be associated with the "Gamer".
There's some brand reputation to protect here.
2 16x PCIe card slots: YES
2 4x PCIe card slots: NO, use Thunderbolt 3 instead. Every time Apple can push a device maker to switch from slow PCIe to Thunderbolt, that's another device that's usable with a MacBook Pro.
4 3.5" hard disk bays: NO
1 3.5" hard disk bay: MAYBE
2–4 PCIe Flash storage bays: YES
2 optical/Zip/floppy drive bays: HELL NO. Most users rarely use optical discs, and almost no one uses both bays. An external drive is actually more convenient, because you can put it somewhere on your desk when you need it, and put it away when you're done. Then you can place the tower wherever you like, because you won't be stuffing discs into it. In addition, ever since the Blue and White G3, Apple has had to rig up some doors to hide the off-white plastic of the optical drives. Never again!
The starting price will go back to $2499, like it was in 2012. The B&W G3 started at $1599, $2340 in today's dollars.
I bought an m.2 solid state and a wifi adapter that is known to work well with hackintosh's (the stock wifi card wasn't compatible), and another 8gb of ram for another ~$150.
I followed this (https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-dell-inspiron-15-75...) guide to get a nice hackintosh out of this laptop. Obviously this is a decent bit more difficult for the regular computer user to do.
So for ~$850, after 'hackintoshing' this computer, I get: A laptop that gives me the choice to boot into an SSD imaged with latest OSX Sierra, or the regular 5,400 rpm Windows 10 drive. The last thing I want to do with this laptop is exchange the 1tb 5,400 windows drive for a 1tb SSD.
When booted into Sierra: The software runs exactly the same as using a real mac. I've done some video editing in Final Cut, some audio work in Ableton, streamed 1080p youtube / netflix videos no problem. There's decent battery life, as the guide above shows you how to disable the nvidia graphics card entirely when running OSX (doesn't work anyways) to save battery. The specs are comparable to a modern macbook pro, and in one case even better.
Pros - Actually get 4k resolution/screen
Cons - SD card reader does not work - Mobile graphics Nvidia 960m does not work, but intel 530 HD graphics card does just fine - Backlight adjustment doesn't not work (could probably spend time to get it to work, but I'm fine without it for now) - Trackpad is a little too sensitive
Sames - Hardware: Core i7, 16gb ram - Full airdrop support
Where am I going with this? In my opinion the general public is becoming more tech savvy. If Apple does not embrace the culture of people wanting to experiment with code (theirs or not) on different devices, then they are putting themselves at a disadvantage. The guides to make hackintoshes are more than likely getting easier and easier as time goes on and support grows. (this was my second attempt and first success)
What a disappointment this macbook pro reveal was. So instead of spending $2,399.00 on a new 15" macbook pro, I decided to hack together a very comparable one for ~$850.
I'll take the $1,550 savings for a little software and screwdriver work, even with a couple of minor issues, any day.
As long as those dedicated apple fans eat it up, I don't expect anything to change anytime soon. But for everyone else who can't afford those business practices, there are ways like what I did above to get what you want without breaking the bank.
If I had unlimited funds, I would probably just build a desktop, since they have a really good monthly recap of what hardware works with the current software. https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017
I guess that's sort of where the line is drawn is you can't really "build" a laptop. Seems like there are a few good Dell models that chose hardware that works with mac, though. I'm sure in the near future we'll start seeing more 4k capable hackintosh laptops.
The difference is that Apple could do anything to accidentally or intentionally break future updates. It would be in their right to do so, since it is illegal to run macOS on non-Apple hardware [1].
I bought a 2016 MBP for 1480 Euro (after the educational discount) and it will always work without a hassle. I don't have to worry if the latest minor release that also has security fixes breaks anything. That, plus Apple's great support (had to use it twice in 10 years and in both cases I had new or fixed hardware within 2 hours) is worth the extra cost to me.
An additional factor is that Apple hardware is often less expensive mid/long-term. I now buy a new MacBook every 1.5 years or so, my wife gets my current MacBook, and we sell her old one for 800-1000 Euro. So, we both have state-of-the-art MacBooks for ~400 per 1.5 year, or 133 Euro per year per person. There is a store across the street from my office where they sell second hand Dells and Lenovos. Three year old models go for around 300 Euro. So the resale value on other laptops is pretty bad.
Of course, I can understand that when you are on a tight budget, a Hackintosh can be attractive :^). When I was a student, I started with a Hackintosh. But after a month I realised it was easier to get a reasonably-priced Mac Mini ;).
[1] I also find it quite risky, unless you verify the Clover + custom kext source code and compile them yourself.