> ... it might hit the sweet spot for studios that need a powerful desktop they can easily carry to the set.
That's an interesting idea. I loved my imac for portability while travelling to a "fixed location". I still have my iMac from 2011 with the box and foam it came in and with the carrying handle it makes it super easy to securely pack up and move.
I was about to comment that this really is too litte, too late, for too much money IMO but the idea of a large screen portable might actually have an audience.
What I've seen from my friends working in media is that they would never buy something like this. They know enough about the hardware they need that they wouldn't buy an all-in-one desktop when they can snag a laptop and if they need the render horsepower mac / radeon might not be their first choice.
I'm curious to see how this pans out... can't see it having much of a market appeal at the current hardware / price point unless I'm just under a rock and out of touch with what people are doing these days with $5k to burn on compute resources.
Actually it just dawned on me- why didn't they try to make a "pro mini" instead with pci-ex slots and upgradable ram (and I know why- because the planned obsolescence) but that would be a better "middle ground" between a laptop and a pro machine. And better than an all-in-one if they make mini-itx form factor. I can use whatever monitor I want but i get to keep Apple blessed hardware (for whatever that's worth these days) along with macos (also losing it's luster with me).
The canonical use case here (and it's already a thing) is an iMac running Capture One and/or Phocus (for Hasselblad) and/or Lightroom (if the desired output is raw + xmp) for tethered commercial photography on set. There are rugged cases available for it. All you need is the iMac, a keyboard and (Wacom) tablet and cable for a rather complete DT (digital technician) setup.
You don't need a lot of processing power in the grand scheme of things, you just need something that the photographer, AD and client can use to make decisions without incurring the cost of a potential reshoot. The grunt work of post-processing is done elsewhere and elsewhen - that's much to costly to do on location - but you do need a "close enough" representation of final colour and contrast, along with focus checking, page overlays and that sort of thing.
Yeah, this is a joke for $5,000. You should be able to pay $3,000 and get a proper modern day variant of a Mac Pro, which is where their current Mac Pro price point sits. Why would anyone pay more than $3,000 for this?
A top of the line 27-inch Mac with VESA mount adapter currently costs $2,339.00. That's just shy of a $3,000 price point I would expect a proper Mac Pro, not an iMac Pro, to sit at.
Think about it for a moment: you get a decent computer with solid performance, with an incredible screen, a great software ecosystem (from both Unix and Mac) and a very nice OS to run everything.
You can't build a Dell to match that, even if you rip Windows out and install Linux or a BSD.
Think about it for a moment: 5 years ago you could have gotten more for the same price, relative to the GPU and compute power at the time.
Of course you can't build a Dell to match that. The point is this is less of a computer for the longevity that the Mid 2012 Mac Pro originally priced at $2,499 provided. (Guess what, the Apple Thunderbolt Display then was also priced at only $999.) Why in the hell would I pay twice that, for a computer I can't use for twice the lifespan? There are _still_ people selling their Mid 2012 Mac Pros for a large fraction of the original price.
But, no you're right, it's totally acceptable that Apple's only VR-capable machine is $5,000 to produce VR content that no one on the Mac platform can use.
It all depends on how much you need compute power on your desk. This is a reasonable computer. It's not the absolute fastest thing you could build or buy. It's not an 224-core octa-socket Xeon Platinum box with 16 Titan V cards and 24 TB of RAM.
Provided you don't go for the lowest spec one, it's probably more than enough to cover most needs of most power users for the next 5 years or so. Even if you go for the low-spec one, it'll be fairly decent 5 years from now just like my aging MacBook Pro is.
I don't portability is the main point. If you work on a desktop all the time and want a Mac, you get an iMac. Price is high but its a small cost for a developer who will work on it for multiple years.
Re: Price - when I saw the Iphone priced at $1k, I thought it was very expensive but they still sold like hot cakes.
> ... it might hit the sweet spot for studios that need a powerful desktop they can easily carry to the set.
I've met a couple of Data Grips before (the guys who manage all the digital files on set). First, these guys are hired on contract and they usually need to have some of their own equipment. And second, they all use macbook pros... and stacks upon stacks of hard drives. The macbook is their personal computer that they use for all their jobs and carry around in backpack. The hard drive arrays are owned by the production company and are kept in sturdy boxes on wheels so they can be moved around the set easily and locked up at night.
It's a joke to think that data grips are going to buy a desktop computer and lug it around everywhere. You don't do any editing on set, just store the video and edit it in the shop. The on set computers are just throughputs to the hard drive arrays. Even in the shop, the rendering isn't done on the computers you do the editing on. The production company probably doesn't even do the final rendering, they'll just ship off the uncompressed files to a post-production company to handle all that.
The 3D shops I used to work at (Pixar, Weta) both used Linux, actually. Houdini does work on macOS, but the super outdated OpenGL drivers were a major problem.
> I think 3D artists prefer windows (I know c4d and maya work on apple, I wonder if Houdini works on apple)
Apple's problem is that for 3D art you need a current, beefy graphics card with good drivers. Apple only supports up to OpenGL 4.1 (an old version) and recommends using Metal for fast 3D graphics (which is used nowhere else). Under Windows Direct3D 11.x (for legacy purposes), Direct3D 12, current OpenGL versions and Vulkan is supported by the drivers of current GPUs (why do I mention DirectX, even though it is proprietary to Microsoft? Because in the past the driver quality was much better for DirectX than for OpenGL).
With Vulkan support available under GNU/Linux I can imagine that in the future the situation will also improve under GNU/Linux (where in the past the quality of the OpenGL implementations was even worse than under Windows). But I see no plans of Apple on how they plan to improve the situation under OS X.
My brother has been obsessed with Apple products for the past 20 years, he was the one who convinced my parents to get one in 1998. He's been a professional photographer since 2001 and has worked on different iterations of Mac Pro machines ever since. This Thanksgiving he finally gave in and asked me how to build a PC for his work studio. He just can't justify working on desktop Mac Pros anymore. He'll keep the mac laptop for onsite work, but he wants a real beast for working on the RAW photos.
I keep hearing this story from every creative professional I know. (2 digital artists, 1 painter, 2 video editors)
I've got a beast of a rig that has been flawless. Easy upgrades (though you do have to wait a few days), handoff, continuity, thunderbolt all working 100%.
The only downtime I've had is restarts due to security updates.
I saw a dude with a ryzen hackintosh rig, it performed incredibly but... even among enthusiasts he mentioned 'This was not for the faint hearted. I don't recommend you actually do this- even though I got it to work with minimal quirks it took probably more than a month of my life".
Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.
I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.
> Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.
> I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.
The lock-in to Apple products should also be considered as a large blocker.
If you stick to "standard" parts there is little to no risk. There is so much information out there on which parts are compatible and which aren't.
The hardest obstacle for me was sourcing some parts because they weren't available here in Vietnam. I had to fly to Singapore for most of it. Ironically, it was cheaper to do that for the parts I could get here, so everything worked out in the end.
I'm aware of DSMOS, but as yet it doesn't do any verification of anything before decryption. Also, the actual key used is simply "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc". To virtualize OSX/macOS on hypervisors that don't natively support Mac, you have to pass this in yourself.
> That's why you wait a few days. The hackintosh community is very active.
That may be fine for a home user, but if my livelyhood was dependent on this machine I'd rather buy something less hacked together and with actual support options.
This is not about wether or not it will actually work, it's about liability.
People who depend on Macs for a living also have to stay behind on OS updates for reasons of staying compatible with production software. For instance, my friend works at a publishing house and they are all running Mavericks.
Is that really a big deal? You barely notice any benefits between 2-4 versions on Mac. What's Mavericks? 10.10? And High Sierra is 10.14? I have a computer that is 10.9 or 10.10 and a 10.13 computer. I can barely tell the difference between them.
My 10.13 computer is my main one and was on 10.11 before when I upgraded only because I did a clean install right before the newest release. Don't remember noticing any changes.
I'm a huge Apple user but don't keep up with OS changes since they are so minor. This really isn't an issue. And if it's for business then the apps that are trendy and only for newer versions won't matter either.
I've not had any of my friends full on switch yet. Only one friend doing 3D uses a mac- he works in broadcast and the whole department has the trashcan pros.
Other friends in video / photo are still using mac laptops. I never saw any of them pull the trigger on the mac pros personally...
Look how far the other display manufactures have came, too. I don't know if we have Apple to thank but there are some _really_ nice monitors around now that aren't coming from Apple. Maybe it was just the bubble I was in but in ~2005~2007 I don't remember anyone having anything that could compete with Apple's displays for the price.
I think your brother is probably going to get a LOT more for his money going to PC...
I don't get it.. PC for studio and mac for field work.. that seems like a very counter intuitive setup. Whatever benefits he get from a mac laptop is no doubt eroded by using these two platforms together.
sure it is.. it's all under the sentiment of Macs not producing products with performance parity with PCs.. What's wrong with just using a high-end windows laptop for field? Is that gap in the laptop space that big that warrants dealing with two distinct platforms that do not work well together?
Because the laptop is what he keeps his life on, and the work station is just that, for doing heavy lifting work in Photoshop and Lightroom and video and whatever. I don't think he wants to move his life to Windows which is a bigger deal, just his work.
He's most likely using the laptop for capturing photos (possibly tethered capture), and doing post-processing on the PC. Post-processing is what requires high performance hardware. It's also likely that he already had the Macbook and didn't feel the need to replace it at the same time.
I'm in the same boat, as it turns out. I switched from macOS to Windows for post-processing this summer, but I still have my Macbook for image capture and driving a telescope in the field.
I agree and have taken time to build a PC recently, after living in Mac world for 10 years.
The hardware you can get is quite amazing (this is what I built https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/b/6FXPxr). Everything works and it's rock solid, it's also very quiet (something a lot PC users aren't so concerned about).
Windows however I'm finding a lot harder to get on with. Windows 4K support is awful. So many broken and blurry dialogs and applications (including Microsoft ones). Retina, on the Mac, just works.
I missed the Windows 8 disaster, however it appears some of it has spilt over Windows 10.
Seems you can't have the hardware you want and the OS you want, you have to pick one or the other.
Maybe I'm snowblind to it because I've been using Windows for so long now, but what are some examples of "awful" 4k support on Windows? I have a 15 inch 4k laptop and have been fairly pleased with the high DPI support
There's quite a bit. The services dialog is blurry. The dialog that details the network devices is blurry. I have an ongoing battle with IntelliJ and PyCharm, fonts are all broken.
Steam is totally broken, not to mention the games. I got QuakeLive (best bit about being back on Windows). Quake was all broken (rendered at twice the DPI), I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).
Not doubting you, but I just opened it and it's not blurry on my 4k monitor. To be clear, I hit Start, typed Services and pressed ENTER when I saw the Services desktop app. (Another way to open it would be to hit Win+R and type: services.msc)
> I have an ongoing battle with IntelliJ and PyCharm, fonts are all broken.
Sounds like a JetBrains problem. What's broken with them anyway?
> I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).
That's called learning how to use a new OS. Also, I can't imagine that you have more complaints about games on Windows than you would on a Mac where there hardly are any games to begin with, are only half-supported or in perma-beta.
As a Mac and Windows user of over 20 years, I feel that Windows is generally more flexible; you can make it do exactly what you want way more often than with the Macintosh OS. Things are simpler on the Mac, but that comes at the price of inflexibility.
As a former Mac user, I can say Windows 10's 4K support is getting better. The Fall Creators Update improved some issues I was having when running multiple monitors with different scaling. At Microsoft's current pace, I expect the remaining HiDPI issues will be fixed sooner rather than later.
It's similar for me. I've been a Mac user for decades and use an old iMac as my main computer - msotly for audio work and web development. This machine needs to be replaced rather sooner than later, but I'm having hard time justifying the price/performance ratio of Macs. The configuration I'm looking for will cost me at least €3000.
I'm also using a PC as media center and gaming system and I envy what €3000 will buy me in PC world. More importantly, it'll be a machine I can selectively upgrade at any point, unlike the iMac. I'm just not sure if the price justifies using Windows, which I kind of tolerate, but really am not fond of.
Indeed. I’m just a bit fed up with all the low signal-to-noise ratio comments on stories about Apple and Google (not to mention Bitcoin, ugh), sorry about that.
The Pro looks like something I wouldn’t mind using, but there’s no way I could pretend that it’s enough value for the price given what I would do with it - VR or AI use cases not relevant for me.
It’ll be interesting to see if they sell, and what the ”real” Mac Pro will look like when the get arond to releasing it.
I also hear that it’s possible to spend over 100,000 on a car, 2,000 on bathroom fixtures and 5,000/sq ft on counter tops and the price in a lot of cases doesn’t justify the higher priced alternatives.
However I am quite relieved in this case to see consumers rise up and recommend their alternatives to a particular high priced product so that consumers that my want to purchase said product are swayed.
People in industry keep commenting in threads like this how they’ve jumped ship to Windows because they have work to get done and need the power now. Other loyal Mac fans can’t belive this and downvote these comments or try to ask for specifics. I’m telling you it’s happening, even in indie shops (source: close friend runs a shop that does big name TV spots and commercials). Adobe Premier isn’t that different on Windows. Most people aren’t Apple fans such as myself. These people need CPU/GPU perf like now because deadlines. So they send someone to Fry’s and get going. Yah a Mac would be nice but they have work to do.
Coworker who does 3d and video content here has an old Mac Pro tower with an aftermarket GPU (remember when you could upgrade those?), his next computer will be Windows.
Apple might have had an edge back in the day thanks to QuickTime, but Premier, After Effects, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, all these things are basically equivalent across platforms.
Except for the fact that on Windows they can run faster on cheaper hardware.
When I did 3D (3D Studio DOS, long time ago) I had a couple beefy rendering slaves. My desktop was not even the fastest machine on the group - it just happened to have a better graphics card (a Matrox one IIRC).
If I had to do it now, I'd have an iMac on my desk (because the screen is so incredibly awesome) and a bunch of Dells (or custom built) boxes on a rack at the other end of a fat pipe).
I'm sure render farms are great, but if a single modern computer would be fast enough, why bother? He also does just as much photography and 2D advertising work, which as far as I know wouldn't benefit from one.
I would say even the 8-core one is pretty much fast enough for mostly anything 2D you can throw at it and a buy-and-forget option for the next couple years. Also, keep in mind even Apple thinks this is a stopgap computer - they still mentioned the future modular MacPro on the last event.
I'm sure the 8-core iMac Pro is a great computer but it's also a $5000 computer. I'm glad they're getting back to a modular Mac Pro, but people have been bailing for years and are continuing to bail while said computer doesn't exist yet. $5000 for a stopgap computer without an upgradable GPU just strikes me as insane.
There are external GPU docks, but if I'm paying $3000-$5000 for a computer I'd rather it just have 3-4 PCIe slots.
The GPU that comes with this machine costs about US$ 1000. The CPU seems to be an 8-core E7 for the lower end model, which is slightly north of USD 1200. With 32 GB of RAM and a 5K 27 inch best-in-class monitor and a reasonable amount of PCIe flash storage, the USD 5K is not bad at all. A cutting edge GPU costs about that and, if you are serious about having the top-performer you should count on spending that much in gear every year.
Things could be different if you didn't need the screen (I need the pixel count, but not so much the density and color precision, for instance) and would prefer the cash to be invested in memory (32 is enough for me now, but I'd get 64 or 128 for a machine that has to be usable 5 years from now).
I don't disagree about any of the specs, but when next year rolls around I'd rather be able to upgrade my GPU and add more RAM, not replace the whole thing including an best-in-class 5K display just because it's all glued together.
I'll also point out that the iMac used to be able to be plugged in as a display (target display mode), but the iMac Pro isn't listed on the compatible models page. For whatever reason, they dropped that feature after the 2014 models and decided not to reintroduce it.
Once you're no longer using it as your primary workstation, that gorgeous 5K panel is going up on Ebay or wherever along with the rest of the computer. If you want to spend your money efficiently, I have a hard time believing that's a better deal than a workstation and monitor from Dell or similar.
> not replace the whole thing including an best-in-class 5K display just because it's all glued together.
That's a fair point. With this machine you are committed to a certain performance over a long period before you commit yourself to the next machine. With a modular design, you can change the asset in smaller increments, at the cost of having an upgrade process to manage.
Admittedly I'm not the target market, since I use some Windows-only software and my work computer's years-old GPU and is fast enough for the CAD work I do.
I do make incremental upgrades on my personal desktop though (mostly gaming). The last rebuild was triggered by some failed parts, so I ended up doing a new motherboard and processor and switching to DDR4, but I still have the GPU, screen, SSDs, and some other miscellaneous components. If I'd had an out of warranty failure on an iMac Pro motherboard I wouldn't have been able to salvage those. Or perhaps knowing that giving up the computer means losing the screen along with everything else, I'd have just shelled out a couple of thousand dollars on repairs.
I was a pretty early adopter of 4K screens and I'm still using the same one more than three years later.
With all the cloud offerings available, this is very fucked up. I can pretty summon a Top 500 cluster in minutes and can't use it to render my 30-second spot in 8K HDR for downscaling into broadcast...
> the $4,999 'starter' model ships with an 8-core Xeon processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of solid-state storage and a Radeon Vega Pro graphics chipset with 8GB of RAM
I am very curious to see how cooling holds after couple of months of use. I did use iMac and fan didn't work silently as soon as I actually used processor. Maybe it works better now, that's a lot of cores and a lot of heat.
The frustration level of Macs has increased to the extent that some users are jumping to Windows.
If you live in Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator, with the new subscription service that Adobe has for their apps, the switching cost is almost nothing (your time costs you of course).
Capture One is very good on Windows, 4k works fine, etc.
If the hardware fails you can replace it, but what if Apple improves the security of the OS and prevents the next OS update from working on a hackintosh ? What if a bug in one of the hacked parts wipes your entire drive ?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadThat's an interesting idea. I loved my imac for portability while travelling to a "fixed location". I still have my iMac from 2011 with the box and foam it came in and with the carrying handle it makes it super easy to securely pack up and move.
I was about to comment that this really is too litte, too late, for too much money IMO but the idea of a large screen portable might actually have an audience.
What I've seen from my friends working in media is that they would never buy something like this. They know enough about the hardware they need that they wouldn't buy an all-in-one desktop when they can snag a laptop and if they need the render horsepower mac / radeon might not be their first choice.
I'm curious to see how this pans out... can't see it having much of a market appeal at the current hardware / price point unless I'm just under a rock and out of touch with what people are doing these days with $5k to burn on compute resources.
You don't need a lot of processing power in the grand scheme of things, you just need something that the photographer, AD and client can use to make decisions without incurring the cost of a potential reshoot. The grunt work of post-processing is done elsewhere and elsewhen - that's much to costly to do on location - but you do need a "close enough" representation of final colour and contrast, along with focus checking, page overlays and that sort of thing.
Isn't this why a lot of professionals turned to brands like Dell years ago?
A top of the line 27-inch Mac with VESA mount adapter currently costs $2,339.00. That's just shy of a $3,000 price point I would expect a proper Mac Pro, not an iMac Pro, to sit at.
You can't build a Dell to match that, even if you rip Windows out and install Linux or a BSD.
Of course you can't build a Dell to match that. The point is this is less of a computer for the longevity that the Mid 2012 Mac Pro originally priced at $2,499 provided. (Guess what, the Apple Thunderbolt Display then was also priced at only $999.) Why in the hell would I pay twice that, for a computer I can't use for twice the lifespan? There are _still_ people selling their Mid 2012 Mac Pros for a large fraction of the original price.
But, no you're right, it's totally acceptable that Apple's only VR-capable machine is $5,000 to produce VR content that no one on the Mac platform can use.
Genius.
Provided you don't go for the lowest spec one, it's probably more than enough to cover most needs of most power users for the next 5 years or so. Even if you go for the low-spec one, it'll be fairly decent 5 years from now just like my aging MacBook Pro is.
Re: Price - when I saw the Iphone priced at $1k, I thought it was very expensive but they still sold like hot cakes.
I've met a couple of Data Grips before (the guys who manage all the digital files on set). First, these guys are hired on contract and they usually need to have some of their own equipment. And second, they all use macbook pros... and stacks upon stacks of hard drives. The macbook is their personal computer that they use for all their jobs and carry around in backpack. The hard drive arrays are owned by the production company and are kept in sturdy boxes on wheels so they can be moved around the set easily and locked up at night.
It's a joke to think that data grips are going to buy a desktop computer and lug it around everywhere. You don't do any editing on set, just store the video and edit it in the shop. The on set computers are just throughputs to the hard drive arrays. Even in the shop, the rendering isn't done on the computers you do the editing on. The production company probably doesn't even do the final rendering, they'll just ship off the uncompressed files to a post-production company to handle all that.
I think 3D artists prefer windows (I know c4d and maya work on apple, I wonder if Houdini works on apple)
The 3D shops I used to work at (Pixar, Weta) both used Linux, actually. Houdini does work on macOS, but the super outdated OpenGL drivers were a major problem.
Apple's problem is that for 3D art you need a current, beefy graphics card with good drivers. Apple only supports up to OpenGL 4.1 (an old version) and recommends using Metal for fast 3D graphics (which is used nowhere else). Under Windows Direct3D 11.x (for legacy purposes), Direct3D 12, current OpenGL versions and Vulkan is supported by the drivers of current GPUs (why do I mention DirectX, even though it is proprietary to Microsoft? Because in the past the driver quality was much better for DirectX than for OpenGL).
With Vulkan support available under GNU/Linux I can imagine that in the future the situation will also improve under GNU/Linux (where in the past the quality of the OpenGL implementations was even worse than under Windows). But I see no plans of Apple on how they plan to improve the situation under OS X.
I keep hearing this story from every creative professional I know. (2 digital artists, 1 painter, 2 video editors)
I've got a beast of a rig that has been flawless. Easy upgrades (though you do have to wait a few days), handoff, continuity, thunderbolt all working 100%.
The only downtime I've had is restarts due to security updates.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/JnJCf8
Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.
I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.
> I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.
The lock-in to Apple products should also be considered as a large blocker.
The hardest obstacle for me was sourcing some parts because they weren't available here in Vietnam. I had to fly to Singapore for most of it. Ironically, it was cheaper to do that for the parts I could get here, so everything worked out in the end.
Can you guarantee that ? Who is responsible if an upgrade doesn't work or bricks your machine ?
Information on changes for updates come quickly, and it's pretty standard practice to clone your boot drive before major updates.
In a worst-case scenario, you just stay on a version of macOS until it makes more sense to use that same hardware for a Windows/whatever OS change.
Also, at this point, the things that would brick you in the past are no longer applicable with a modern hackintosh.
That may be fine for a home user, but if my livelyhood was dependent on this machine I'd rather buy something less hacked together and with actual support options.
This is not about wether or not it will actually work, it's about liability.
My 10.13 computer is my main one and was on 10.11 before when I upgraded only because I did a clean install right before the newest release. Don't remember noticing any changes.
I'm a huge Apple user but don't keep up with OS changes since they are so minor. This really isn't an issue. And if it's for business then the apps that are trendy and only for newer versions won't matter either.
Other friends in video / photo are still using mac laptops. I never saw any of them pull the trigger on the mac pros personally...
Look how far the other display manufactures have came, too. I don't know if we have Apple to thank but there are some _really_ nice monitors around now that aren't coming from Apple. Maybe it was just the bubble I was in but in ~2005~2007 I don't remember anyone having anything that could compete with Apple's displays for the price.
I think your brother is probably going to get a LOT more for his money going to PC...
I'm in the same boat, as it turns out. I switched from macOS to Windows for post-processing this summer, but I still have my Macbook for image capture and driving a telescope in the field.
The hardware you can get is quite amazing (this is what I built https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/b/6FXPxr). Everything works and it's rock solid, it's also very quiet (something a lot PC users aren't so concerned about).
Windows however I'm finding a lot harder to get on with. Windows 4K support is awful. So many broken and blurry dialogs and applications (including Microsoft ones). Retina, on the Mac, just works.
I missed the Windows 8 disaster, however it appears some of it has spilt over Windows 10.
Seems you can't have the hardware you want and the OS you want, you have to pick one or the other.
Edit: Also, that's a rad build!
Steam is totally broken, not to mention the games. I got QuakeLive (best bit about being back on Windows). Quake was all broken (rendered at twice the DPI), I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).
I could go on.
Not doubting you, but I just opened it and it's not blurry on my 4k monitor. To be clear, I hit Start, typed Services and pressed ENTER when I saw the Services desktop app. (Another way to open it would be to hit Win+R and type: services.msc)
> I have an ongoing battle with IntelliJ and PyCharm, fonts are all broken.
Sounds like a JetBrains problem. What's broken with them anyway?
> I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).
That's called learning how to use a new OS. Also, I can't imagine that you have more complaints about games on Windows than you would on a Mac where there hardly are any games to begin with, are only half-supported or in perma-beta.
As a Mac and Windows user of over 20 years, I feel that Windows is generally more flexible; you can make it do exactly what you want way more often than with the Macintosh OS. Things are simpler on the Mac, but that comes at the price of inflexibility.
I take your point about flexibility and you're 100% correct on the gaming aspect.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/transcript-phil-schiller-c...
I'm also using a PC as media center and gaming system and I envy what €3000 will buy me in PC world. More importantly, it'll be a machine I can selectively upgrade at any point, unlike the iMac. I'm just not sure if the price justifies using Windows, which I kind of tolerate, but really am not fond of.
/s
The Pro looks like something I wouldn’t mind using, but there’s no way I could pretend that it’s enough value for the price given what I would do with it - VR or AI use cases not relevant for me.
It’ll be interesting to see if they sell, and what the ”real” Mac Pro will look like when the get arond to releasing it.
However I am quite relieved in this case to see consumers rise up and recommend their alternatives to a particular high priced product so that consumers that my want to purchase said product are swayed.
Apple might have had an edge back in the day thanks to QuickTime, but Premier, After Effects, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, all these things are basically equivalent across platforms.
Except for the fact that on Windows they can run faster on cheaper hardware.
When I did 3D (3D Studio DOS, long time ago) I had a couple beefy rendering slaves. My desktop was not even the fastest machine on the group - it just happened to have a better graphics card (a Matrox one IIRC).
If I had to do it now, I'd have an iMac on my desk (because the screen is so incredibly awesome) and a bunch of Dells (or custom built) boxes on a rack at the other end of a fat pipe).
There are external GPU docks, but if I'm paying $3000-$5000 for a computer I'd rather it just have 3-4 PCIe slots.
Things could be different if you didn't need the screen (I need the pixel count, but not so much the density and color precision, for instance) and would prefer the cash to be invested in memory (32 is enough for me now, but I'd get 64 or 128 for a machine that has to be usable 5 years from now).
I'll also point out that the iMac used to be able to be plugged in as a display (target display mode), but the iMac Pro isn't listed on the compatible models page. For whatever reason, they dropped that feature after the 2014 models and decided not to reintroduce it.
Once you're no longer using it as your primary workstation, that gorgeous 5K panel is going up on Ebay or wherever along with the rest of the computer. If you want to spend your money efficiently, I have a hard time believing that's a better deal than a workstation and monitor from Dell or similar.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/06/15/2017-4k-5k-imacs-w...
That's a fair point. With this machine you are committed to a certain performance over a long period before you commit yourself to the next machine. With a modular design, you can change the asset in smaller increments, at the cost of having an upgrade process to manage.
I do make incremental upgrades on my personal desktop though (mostly gaming). The last rebuild was triggered by some failed parts, so I ended up doing a new motherboard and processor and switching to DDR4, but I still have the GPU, screen, SSDs, and some other miscellaneous components. If I'd had an out of warranty failure on an iMac Pro motherboard I wouldn't have been able to salvage those. Or perhaps knowing that giving up the computer means losing the screen along with everything else, I'd have just shelled out a couple of thousand dollars on repairs.
I was a pretty early adopter of 4K screens and I'm still using the same one more than three years later.
Yes, seriously
With all the cloud offerings available, this is very fucked up. I can pretty summon a Top 500 cluster in minutes and can't use it to render my 30-second spot in 8K HDR for downscaling into broadcast...
It's going to end as well as last time they did that.
Cheaper and more powerful, also you can replace parts as they break and mine Ethereum 24/7 when PC is not in use.
If you live in Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator, with the new subscription service that Adobe has for their apps, the switching cost is almost nothing (your time costs you of course).
Capture One is very good on Windows, 4k works fine, etc.