Take a look at the new Dell XPS 15” 2-in-1, with Intel Core i7-8705G (with AMD Radeon RX Vega M GH, 4GB of dedicated HMB2), e.g.
That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine, except for the “is a Mac” and “runs Mac-only software” ones.
And I imagine that an upgraded version will come out in 2019. Honestly, I find both Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu very usable nowadays. I don’t really find much reason to stick with a Mac anymore.
> That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine
Except for little things like (workstation) Xeon CPU and pro graphics (Quadro or whatever ATi is calling their FirePros these days).
If you want a actual pro system, check out Dells workstation line, e.g. Precision 7520. Sure, its not light and pretty like a XPS, but you can load it with fairly serious amount of stuff and as a cherry on top it comes with Linux support out of the box.
Workstations are just a different class of computers.
Oh, and actual desktop workstations (which Mac Pro would be competing against) are yet another class. I just had some fun at Dell website, and you can configure a desktop system with dual Xeon Platinum (lol) 8180 CPUs. Those have 28 cores each. The memory configuration taps out at 12x32 GB. With 384 GB of RAM and 112 HW threads, you might be able to even run Atom and Slack simultaneously.
The XPS 2-in-1 has also dropped all useful (in the present) ports, reduced the keyboard travel, and messed up the arrow key area on their keyboards.
I'm worried that the XPS line is trying too hard to be a MacBook; what if they want to make next year's model even thinner?
Their "classic" XPS 15 looks fantastic, but I've read too many complaints about reliability and coil whine. I hope they keep iterating on it for a few more years.
They never said that, they only said it was not going to be in 2017. The article says this was always their timeline.
If you believe that.
But they never said 2018 and I remember people being very skeptic le that 2018 would happen last year when they first announced they were working on a new Mac Pro.
> In April 2017 Apple invited journalists to its Product Realization Lab and made a series of announcements relating to the Mac line, revealing among other things that a minor update to the Mac Pro is imminent and a major revamp will arrive in 2018.
What's non-'Pro' about the current 15" MBP that was 'Pro' about the previous design? They're practically the same.
If you mean no SD card reader etc, it's my understanding that pro photographers tended to use a USB3/thunderbolt reader anyway, as the integrated reader was connected over USB2 internally and was far too slow for pro use.
I have a 2015 MacBook Air and wanted the SD card reader to belong to a Linux guest inside VMWare Fusion (for dd'ing custom RPi images). I just couldn't get it to work. Then I found this article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1035825 which says This issue occurs because the SDXC card slot included in newer Mac models is connected to the Mac using the PCIe bus and not using the USB bus that the original SD card slot uses.
I read this every time it comes up on HN yet every single one of the five photographers in our shared office laments nothing more than the missing card reader.
If it was so slow why not just upgrade it to a USB3/PCIe-connected reader? and being a 'pro' device why didn't they do that already when USB3 became available?
I currently have a 15" mid-2015 MBP, and I use the DisplayPort, HDMI, and USB-A ports on a daily basis. Losing the ports doesn't bother me too much, but similarly priced or cheaper laptops don't ask me compromise there. On the other hand the battery life, touchpad, and keyboard will be absolutely stellar or I'm not buying it, especially in this price range. Again, others ask me to compromise less. While Apple still has the best touchpads in the industry, others are catching up. Meanwhile, Apple has regressed in several ways
I've got a 15" 2017 MBP, replacing one from 2014 or so. I think on balance the 2017 is better for my needs.
I don't particularly like the touchbar (though that may change if IntelliJ ever bring out their promised support and it's any good), but it's not a huge deal for me (at least after I remapped esc to caps lock; I now do this on every keyboard I use, as I find it more ergonomic). I do love the touchId thingy, but they could have done that without the touchbar.
I prefer the keyboard to the retina MBP one, though I preferred the pre-retina MBP one to either. There was something about the feel of the rMBP (and MacBook Air) one I never liked. This is very subjective, of course.
The port situation mostly hasn't bothered me, as I just use a USB-C hub with power passthrough. It would have been nice to have at least a single USB-A port, but realistically I wouldn't use it much.
I find battery life to be similar to the previous one, generally. I think the size sacrifice is worth it, at least for my needs, because it makes the machine very portable. I barely notice the weight of it in a backpack now.
My biggest complaint is one you haven't mentioned; you can't get an integrated GPU only version. You can't even fully disable the discrete GPU. This means that you're stuck with all the quirks of the dual GPU setup. This is a step back, IMO; I've no real use for a discrete GPU on my work machine, and these dual GPU Macs have never quite worked properly.
I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did, really, but I was mostly impressed.
I hadn't realized that they didn't sell them with just the integrated GPU anymore. Combined with the reduced battery, that seems like a poor decision.
As far as I'm aware, you've never been able to fully disable the dGPU. On my previous 2011 MBP, the dGPU failed. You could twiddle some UEFI variables to prevent switching to it so the system would boot, but it didn't actually cut power to it so it just ran hot and the battery died in 3 hours. Also, all the DisplayPorts were attached to the dGPU, so you couldn't plug up external monitors anymore if you did that. Units with the dGPU have worse battery life when there's a monitor plugged up, because it forces a switch to the dGPU.
An SD reader connected over USB2 is better than no SD card reader. If they cared they would have made it PCIe, but instead they took it away in a move that benefited only Apple. No pro benefited from the removal of the sd slot. It didn't make the machine cheaper, or faster, and in fact it made it harder and more complicated to use. And then they had the audacity to charge more for it.
The feel of the keyboard is indeed subjective (I happen to like the feel of the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro), but in this case Apple genuinely built a buggy keyboard, so much so that people are writing songs about it [1].
I ordered one and then returned it (for the first time ever after ~10 or so MBPs) -- ended up just purchasing a new refurb non-touchbar MBP, which is what it was replacing too.
Largest reason for return: G key. 30% of the time = two Gs. 50% = 1 G. Remaining 20% = 0 Gs/no keydown whatsoever. Hah.
It’s amazing, but the circlejerk for hating it is so strong I have to temper myself and say “it’s not that bad” lest people foaming at the mouth to insult me bury my comment in “OMG HOW CAN YOU THINK THAT OBVIOUSLY BAD LAPTOP IS GOOD”.
Even my initial comment about the Pro MacBook being... the MacBook Pro apparently bothered people enough to downvote me.
I tried to live with mine for about 6 months before giving up, selling it and buying a second hand 2015.
Needed keyboard repair twice in that time, and was horrible to type on. Useless touchbar, and an over-large trackpad that was constantly activating when typing. The last was odd as I regularly touch the old size trackpad with thumbs when typing but never had an issue. Add in the occasional freeze and crash and I feel it was a complete lemon.
I'm very happy with my 2015 and get longer battery times than I did with the newer model. I have no idea what I'll do when it needs replacing.
> My monitor does video, charging, and USB 3 with full size ports with one cable.
My Lenovo X1 Yoga also does everything via one Thunderbolt cable, but it also has a full selection of normal ports on the notebook itself rather than only on the docking station. It also has a 1440p touch screen and a nice keyboard, and still costs 1000 € less than a Macbook Pro ^W Deluxe.
Ok. When I can walk into a Lenovo store and walk out with a loaner while mine gets fixed I’ll buy it. I’d also like OS X, but I can settle for Windows these days.
Lenovo has 3 years next business day on site service included with many models - you can choose to add the accidental damage option and it still costs less than AppleCare, not to mention options to upgrade to 4 or 5 years cover.
I just searched and couldn’t actually find any models listed with it available, but even so the search I did came up with more results for “they couldn’t fix it onsite” than anything.
I’d rather pay the difference in AppleCare. Most developers on this site are making large sums of money with their machines, 1000$ or even 2000$ is hardly going to make a measurable difference on the ROI of my laptop.
Let's hope Apple release an MBP that you like better then.
If the $2k isn't that significant, and minimal downtime is so important; may as well keep a slightly older refurb model on-site as a hot-spare ready to go just in case there's a problem... A policy that would work, whatever your OS / brand preference.
I love my MBP, I replied to the comment about my endorsement but for some reason the comment doesn’t show up if I’m logged out?
The endorsement was tempered by the fact that around these parts endorsing the new MBP is apparently treason. I’m getting my comments downvoted for implying the MacBook Pro is a fine machine.
IMO best all around monitor being produced today. 38” 1600p ultrawide (equivalent density to a 1440p 34” ultrawide), 75hz which is high enough for gaming without going into gamer aesthetic/retail markup territory, Freesync.
The CPU also isn't really up to par for pro use cases. I understand not putting a burly CPU and pile of RAM into the mid-high-tier laptop but developers and media people need something. Running parallel make on my brand new touch bar macbook is like 2-4x slower than doing it in a linux VM on my ~$1500 windows desktop from a year ago, to the point where I'd work more efficiently running remote desktop on a $200 chromebook.
Running parallel make on my brand new touch bar macbook is like 2-4x slower than doing it in a linux VM on my ~$1500 windows desktop from a year ago
It's also more than two times slower on my 2013 Dell Precision Xeon workstation.
But that comparison is not really fair, a MacBook Pro has to use a mobile CPU or it won't be able to dissipate the heat. Also, depending on ambient temperature, possible airflow, the MacBook's CPU probably throttles fairly early to prevent overheating.
A desktop CPU can larger power envelopes, typically throttles less and most virtualization has gotten so good that for CPU-bound workloads the difference between running on bare hardware or on a VM is barely noticeable.
to the point where I'd work more efficiently running remote desktop on a $200 chromebook.
Maybe it depends on the field I am working in, but I can't really run stuff on any laptop or desktop unless it is a > 5000 Euro workstation with plenty of RAM, storage, and a beefy GPU. The value that the Mac platform provides for me are the many applications that Chromebooks/Linux don't have good substitutes for, such as OmniGraffle, Deckset, Things, Microsoft Office, Little Snitch, Pixelmator, Acorn, Lightroom, and Affinity Designer. So, it's not just an expensive terminal ;).
I have one because of iOS development. The touch bar is stupid but ignored. The touchid is actually pretty awesome and using it for sudo is pretty convenient, especially when in a group setting where I’m nervous about people noticing keystrokes (eg, Corp hackathons and stuff).
But the memory is noticeable. For general performance, but also for running lots of vms and stuff in different configurations.
Still situations where its convenient to spin stuff up locally rather than cloud.
By comparison with high-end mobile workstations, it's a toy.
A maxed out Macbook Pro has 16GB of non-upgradeable, non-ECC RAM and a GPU with 4GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 3,553.
Lenovo will sell me a machine with 64GB of socketed ECC RAM and a Quadro P5000 with 16GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 10,281.
The Macbook Pro doesn't have built-in LTE. It has a non-removable battery. It throttles badly under sustained loads. It has chronic issues with display calibration. If you want a useful selection of ports, you'll need a bag full of fragile and easy to lose dongles. They've only just rolled out eGPU support and there's still no official support for Nvidia GPUs. There's no 17" option. It has that damnable butterfly keyboard.
Yes, the Macbook Pro is very thin and lightweight, but Apple have made a lot of performance and usability tradeoffs to get there. That doesn't sound very "pro" to me.
Apple doesn’t make a mobile workstation. They make a Pro version of the MacBook.
Take a MacBook, give it some more power, and you mostly have a MacBook Pro.
If the complaint is why doesn’t Apple make a high-end mobile workstation I'm guessing because the market isn’t there for it? At least not at the scale for Apple to touch it?
A lot of professionals end up being serviced just fine by a “Pro MacBook”. I don’t get this obsession with acting like Apple is doing something wrong by making the MacBook Pro a pro version of the MacBook instead of something like a Dell Precision, they’re two very different things with two very different markets.
OSX is a closed platform. If you're an FCPX or Logic Pro user, you're totally reliant on Apple's hardware offerings. If Apple don't sell the hardware that you need to do your job, then you have the choice between switching over completely to Windows (not a straightforward task) or tolerating the least-worst option from Apple's lineup.
If Apple honestly say "we couldn't care less about professional users, we're making money hand over fist anyway", then at least we all know where we stand. Apple haven't taken that approach - they keep making grand overtures about how much they care about professional users. They keep making grand promises about how the perfect professional machine is just around the corner, how they're not updating the current machine because the next big thing is so incredible, amazing, awesome.
There are a lot of very loyal Mac users who have kept Apple in business through thick and thin, but their patience has been tested to breaking point. Those users have been a key part of Apple's marketing; Apple make computers for dreamers, visionaries, artists, the cultural elite.
I don't know anyone who is genuinely happy about being a Mac user, but I know a lot of people who grimly tolerate giving Apple their money. They know what to expect from next year's Macs - they'll be thinner, lighter and subtly worse in a lot of important ways.
What happens to the Mac brand if those users leave? What happens if the resentment felt towards Apple by photographers, video editors, 3D artists and recording engineers turns into a full-scale revolt? What happens if owning a Mac marks you out not as a sophisticated member of the cultural elite, but a nerd who wants a slick *nix experience or a sucker who paid $2000 for a Facebook machine?
Apple are playing a dangerous game. Apple don't need to care at the moment because the iPhone is so gratuitously profitable, but they should know better than anyone that the market is incredibly fickle. They're burning decades of goodwill for no obvious reason.
It wouldn't be particularly expensive to make the majority of pro users happy. Bring back the old cheesegrater Mac Pro and stuff it with the latest commodity components. Bring back a previous-generation MBP chassis and fill the extra space with an i9 or a Xeon E3, four SODIMM slots and a GTX 1070 Max Q or a Quadro P5000.
They don't have to promote these machines, they don't have to display them in Apple stores if they're ashamed of making a functional computer, they just need to make them and promise to keep making them to secure the continued loyalty of their most loyal customers. Apple won't do it, for reasons known only to them. In the long term, that could prove to be a very expensive oversight.
Honestly they should consider bringing back the clone program. HP/Dell can sell me a workstation that runs OSX, that they update on their schedule, and I'll be happy. I don't want it pretty, I just want it functional.
While I agree with you, I spec'd out the Lenovo that the above commenter was referencing costs $5500 with all the "discounts" tossed in. MacBook Pro tops out at $3000 (without going crazy on SSD). I understand that the market for people wanting to spend over $3k on a laptop may be thin, it seems quite easy to just give someone the option to spend $5k on a Macbook Pro if they just have to have it. Why exclude the option?
The form factor is one of the issues with the current design. Or simply add a third product line: MacBook Workstation.
Thicker for a larger battery, cooling and higher end CPU/GPU and moar RAM. Xeon class processors as an option.
There used to be a 17" MacBook Pro. Last one came out in 2009. It was a bit of a beast to carry around, but not prohibitively so. It was .98 inches thick and weighed 6.6 pounds. The current 15" MacBook Pro is .61 inches and weighs 4.02 pounds. So not a huge difference. I commuted on the bus and subway with a 17" pro with only minor discomfort.
It had gigabit ethernet, FW800, three USB ports, 1 thunderbolt port, ExpressCard/34 slot, audio in, audio out.
With the exact same form factor and updated ports, Apple could offer a hell of a Pro Macbook Pro. Just give it a 4k screen and an option for a second SSD in the space formerly used by a DVD drive.
No. The MacBook Pro as implemented is a prosumer machine at best. A Pro machine would have higher end components at the BTO level. 1) larger size for greater battery capacity, 2) Xeon-D as an option, 3) 32-64 Gig of RAM, 4) High end graphics, 5) better keyboard. User replaceable drive, and memory. Apple has the capital to build a Halo laptop, just as they do for phones. They simply chose not to.
I wonder who the target market is, though? The iMac Pro can cost £5000, so I assume more performance and hence price than that? The only users who I can imagine willing to justify paying such a premium are those who feel they must remain at the cutting edge of performance and are willing to pay for it, but surely they will have left the Apple ecosystem by then?
It's as if Apple are saying "we're making a computer for people who demand peak performance, but are willing to use cheap outdated hardware until we get round to it."
In the article it sounded as if they actually intend to achieve modularity fort the Mac Pro with eGPUs, or peripheral hardware in general. A mistake in my opinion.
Or they bill $2-300/hour so they don't really care. If their tooling is on the Apple side, they don't really have the option of going for a high end PC.
There's actually even more to it than just not caring. There is also the marketing side of it. Recording studios will sometimes make choices to buy certain gear because of the name and recognized brand. Apple computers are certainly the recognized brand for digital recording.
The software stack is very relevant, Apple shops would have to retrain to go PC, and some of the software they have is sub optimal.
My wife is a designer, she needs much more powerful computers than I do (as just a developer). She constantly runs out of memory, GPU performance is very relevant for Photoshop, Illustrator, and other tools she uses in her work. So spending $2500 or $3000 for a high end (but not pro) imac is a given, even though I would be perfectly happy with the $1900 one.
For her, the advantage in productivity is worth it. I can imagine there are many people who would see the imac pro as being worth it to them also and the price isn't going to bother them much because their time is already very valuable.
If you do any iOS work you need macs as build machines because of Apple's lock in. Spending the money on an iMac is just a waste of a monitor and if you're already spending the money on the hardware you might as well get something that can do render jobs as well. You need GPUs for that.
I have been battling Apple about my 2013 mac pro for a year. You have to be careful about the monitors you buy because Apple will say it's not their problem when your monitor knocks your wifi offline (personally) or some weird shit. Personally, I think for anyone deliberating between an iMac Pro and a Mac Pro, you should go with the iMac Pro because Apple has always been an all-in-one company--it's one of the few things they are still good at these days. I used to work on the older mac pros in high school and never had problems, but those days are over. If I knew hardware well enough to fix it I would have gone Hackintosh.
I used to have a '14 RMBP with the Apple display and it was wonderful. Now I have a '17 13" MBP and it only has two USB ports so I have a third party dock and monitors because Apple doesn't offer a solution. The entire experience is awful but still more reliable than any Windows laptop I have ever run, although the gap is closing.
Hackintosh doesn't work for me because my business isn't fixing laptops. Apple used to provide a full solution and it was really great.
Yeah I get it, I even consider that kind of thing fun in my spare time although I have other hobbies these days. In a professional (corporate) environment I don't have time to fix my laptop. I'm lucky to work in a place that has an outstanding IT department who provides what we need (including outstanding Macintosh support) but a Hackintosh is not on the list.
You can't knock everything else just because it's not a Mac. I've personally had my fair share of Mac problems and when I worked Help Desk we had our fair share of Mac Laptop problems that were comparable if not greater than our failure rate of Thinkpad's. This was in 2017 too.
That may have been the case 5 years ago, but it certainly isn't now. I work in a mostly mac office and not a single one of my mac fanboy coworkers has a single nice thing to say about the 2017 macbook pros.
Right because it's just a laptop and you have to buy a bunch of other stuff from third parties to go with it. I explained this in a sibling comment.
In 2014 Apple would sell you a monitor that doubled as a dock which worked great with the RMBP and Apple's own wireless KB and Mouse and even Time Machine.
Today you're stuck with USB-C docks which are pretty awful. Pretty much on par with a Dell or HP laptop dock. The new Macbook Pros are the worst device I have used from Apple.
The thread you are replying to is about hackintoshes. The point of a Mac for me is that it Just Works (tm). If I want to fight with something I'll buy a Thinkpad and install Ubuntu. I have no interest in fighting with macOS, it's only useful to me if it is easy.
> Right because it's just a laptop and you have to buy a bunch of other stuff from third parties to go with it.
No. Their complaints are about the laptop itself. The keys are constantly breaking. The software constantly crashes. We're all a bunch of consulting devs and the 2017 macbook pros have cost every single one of them at least a week's worth of billable hours in the past 6 months. Most of them have gone back to their 2015 models.
Statistically there are almost no hackintoshes, it would be a very dumb reason to switch from Intel chips. The much more likely reason is that Intel chips have hit something of a performance wall and Apple also runs a much more popular ARM based platform.
I simply cannot imagine running something like that in a professional context. For me, "maybe this next update will install correctly" is a non-starter.
For consumers who just really want to run macOS, I can see the appeal.
I agree, in an educational institution or large corporation, no way. But in a small shop that lives and dies on productivity, where one can't (won't?) migrate away from MacOS, a Hackintosh may be the only option available.
It's the market filling in the gaps of Apple's engineering & marketing plan.
That depends how much your creators' time is worth, i.e. the return on increased performance.
If Hackintoshes have motivated Apple to release a new Mac Pro after a multi-year gap, then Apple-only shops will benefit from the Hackintosh investments of other shops.
Yes, that's my point. How much money are you saving? Maybe a couple thousand dollars? Balance this with the time you'd need to spend on setting this up and getting it to work right–a couple days, a week? It's not obvious that this would always work out, especially so if you don't have in-house IT and would either have to get a creator to learn how to do something like this or hire someone that does.
A Core i7 is not the same as a Xeon. ECC memory matters. The Apple premium simply isn't that much higher.
I also wanted to add that the cost of a person's time eclipses the cost of hardware (especially with computers). As a business, I simply wouldn't risk having days of downtime from a bad update, just to save $2,000 for something that's used for years, when the lost time in paying a creative person's salary will eclipse that.
And everytime, someone mentions how ecc memory is important. But it's just not. There is a performance penalty, and the real use case for ecc memory is vanishingly small for a workstation.
What could you possibly be doing on a workstation that requires ecc?
For every 8 gb of memory, you are potentially looking at a single bit flip every 9 years. With ecc, only once every 45 years. And in exchange, you are looking at a 10% performance penalty.
What could you possibly be doing on a Mac pro that would need that kind of accuracy?
Even if it is higher, what are you doing on a workstation that would benefit from lower rates? This study found 2 (yes, 2) "suspected" soft errors in 300 machines running for multiple months.
And not that Row Hammer should really be a concern for a workstation, but ECC does not necessarily protect against it. Some types of ram are vulnerable and some aren't. But ECC is not necessarily a factor.
But that's not my argument (Even though I said ECC matters. maybe you're right).
My argument is that every time someone says "I can build the same thing for 1/3 the price", they are literally using completely different parts. They AREN'T building the same thing.
The idea of an Apple Tax is that apple arbitrarily marks up everything. But if you bought the same parts independently, you'd find the markup is very little. More like 10%.
Look at those $10k HP workstations. They are more comparable to Mac Pros.
But then the problem is just that Apple makes component choices with very poor value. A Threadripper CPU is not the same thing as the Xeon in the Mac Pro, but who cares? You can still build a way faster machine (with ECC) for half the price.
No I’d say a better analogy for what you’re trying to say:
I just want to buy a car for $20k that goes 70 miles an hour. But you’re only selling me cars for $50k cuz you insist on putting things like carbon fiber brakes and titanium alloys. I don’t need any of that. I can build something that perfectly meets my needs for way less. Because those enhancements are meaningless for what I’m trying to do (go 70 MPH)
You want to sell me a car for $50k that can go only 60 mph. But it has carbon fiber brakes and titanium alloys, requires premium gas, and has a fancy logo. Oh, and it has a flux capacitor which does nothing.
Or I could just buy a car that can go 100 mph for $20k.
A lot of the Mac faithfuls point to ECC and Xeon to defend the price of the entry level iMac Pro.
Yet every single one of them I follow has used only MacBook Pros for the last 5 years or so which obviously don't have ECC so yeah I feel the importance of it is overstated.
This solution is fine for individual developers, or even small shops / startups, but it would never fly in a more corporate environment. Coincidentally, those environments are also the most likely to drop $5K+ on a development machine without batting an eye.
This list is a joke, that's not even close to a 1:1 comparison. It looks like they intentionally picked the most expensive options for everything. You don't need a $160 AIO water cooler, a $250 1000W power supply, or a $650(!?!?!) motherboard. The Vega in the iMac doesn't compare to a 1080 at all.
To anyone with an understanding of PC hardware it's clear this list was composed specifically to justify the iMac pro's price.
That had more in common with the trash can Mac Pro.
The NeXT Cube had three NuBus expansion slots that accepted boards something like 11"x11". (There were actually four connectors on the backplane; one was used for the NeXT motherboard.)
Granted, there weren't many boards produced for use in the Cube. There was NeXT's own i860-based color video card, the NeXTDimension. I think there was a third-party card with multiple i860s, and there was a 3rd party card with multiple Motorola 56001 DSPs.
Though the big aluminum desktops they made years ago were probably a high point for balance of beautiful and functional.
This. I think existing and potential future Mac Pro users would be perfectly happy with a cheese gater that has 2018 innards (ok, they could make it Space Gray).
When it comes to Pro hardware, I think that Apple has lost the balance between aesthetics and functionality. The trash can Mac Pro is a good example of this - it's beautiful, overheating all the time and not extensible. So is the new MacBook lineup, they are beautiful. But really? 1 USB-C port on the MacBook 12" and 2 USB-C ports on the MacBook Pro Escape? I don't know of any MacBook 12"/Pro user who doesn't dislike the port selection.
They could have taken the old cheese grater Mac Pro case, put in some non-embarassing hardware, made it "space gray", called it the "Mac Pro Monolith", and released it this year with ads tied into the 50th anniversary of Kubrick's 2001.
Instead in 2020 we'll probably get something like the desktop computer version of the RED camera system, and priced to match. Something that Apple's very very VIP consultants can use and afford but which doesn't meet anyone else's needs or budgets.
What about the existing trashcan design, but instead of plugging in a monitor and mouse and keyboard, the trashcan's surface is just one single touch screen? That's much more user-friendly, you don't have to mess with cables at all anymore.
Good point on user friendly. But I don’t think that’s really what they’re going for.
Sphere on a stick would be cool to mount on a walk so it looks cool and then have wireless video (or video through the stem) so you just remote into it from your local network from tablets or light notebooks as terminals.
Take the existing trashcan design, make it three times as tall, and have the top be somewhat thicker. And have two more rounded cylinders at the bottom adjacent to the main cylinder.
Reading this it had me reminiscing about Sun back in its heyday as a workstation vendor. Sun used to do this stuff, they would bring in a partner who had some critical application and the Sun engineering team and the partner's engineering team, and some "power users" of the tool would all work through what it would take to make the tool work better on a Sun Workstation than any other workstation. Sun engineering got a collection of bugs, features, and investigations that would come out of those exercises. When my wife was at Xerox they were doing similar sorts of studies for document preparation and presentation.
You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.
That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.
On my PC I use Corel Draw, on the iPad Autodesk Sketchbook, Touch Draw, or the Notes application, on the Surface its usually Sketchbook but I've also got Sketchable, and on Linux Inkscape.
The worst thing is the linkage between knowing what you want to do and assembling the right tools to do it in the app you're looking at. Most of my drawing is technical in nature (systems, small components, software architectures, Etc.)
Not to mention Apple is overflowing with profit. Their failures around the pro market in the last decade have not been about resource constraints but poor vision and execution.
They could have put out a cheese-grater with fresh Intel chips every year like clockwork, but they were too cool for that. And the failure is all the more striking when they continue to "crush it" in other categories.
> You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.
I think it work because the customer spend is of comparable magnitude. Back in the mid 90s you might have a couple of dozen game devs working on $2000 PCs with a few $45K Onyx machines used for back end rendering or part time use of a few artists = ~$200K. Or (in my case) you only had a couple of AI developers but each had a pair of $50K 3650s = ~$200K. Or your prop traders had a $25K Sparcstation on their desk and one at home, but the rank and file just had a Bloomberg terminal.
Now you have much larger teams with more uniform machines (+ some cloud resource). The total institutional spend is probably higher in constant dollars.
Speaking of which it will be interesting to see if Apple is able to push some of their APIs into the cloud so you can develop on a mac pro and dynamically push the heavy lifting into an apple rendering cloud. This article just talked about scaling ios <-> Mac Os <-> MacOS+iOS+eGPU (nice!) but left out "<-> cloud". That's where editing on iOS could really shine: chop up / assemble your downsampled rushes on your tablet and then stream them to the AppleTV at your bosses' office. Remember Peter Jackson used to bring his to LA every week on an iPod in his pocket.
I think there might be some people interested in a 25K machine, but only if it really improves their workflow; don't think adding more money / processing power does much for most people, maybe for 3d rendering but they have specialized hardware for that, which gives them more raw bang for their bucks than Apple could do.
I'm wondering if it'd be viable to have a 'compute unit' shared by multiple users. i/o would probably be a bottleneck, so maybe have it link up macs via usb-c? It might help with e.g. compile times (which last time I did iOS development, two years ago, was kinda slow (>1 minute for our app, CPU bound)).
But that's probably too specialized a thing. Apple wants to sell units by the million, not the hundreds (if that). Which is why they discontinued the mac pro and the 17 inch MBP.
The only reasons I spent that kind of money on workstations back then were that I wanted my desktop to be Unix and I wanted good 3D graphics performance. The only way to get those in one compact box was to make a deal with SGI.
These days I get astoundingly better performance than whatever that low volume hardware did back then out of a $700 desktop with a $800 graphics card and a $500 monitor.
$5000 is probably still too high, unless you see the Apple product line as your only option.
From 2007 to 2016 I was all-in on OS X / MacBook Pros / iMacs for work (software dev.) Since then I've gone back to a Dell XPS 15 and a custom-built AMD Threadripper machine. As much as I like the Mac hardware, I could no longer justify the cost. The XPS is a nice machine and (no touchbar - it's a feature) and my custom-PC is a monster. Windows 10 with all its warts is plenty serviceable especially now with it's Linux Subsystem (primarily because I prefer to use bash as my shell.)
I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.
Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
>Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal?
It's hardly limited to GNU apps. Most of your Linux applications should work fine on it. I've had no problem with all sorts of non-GNU releases when I use it on my desktop.
>Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
No, it is a Linux userland on top of the NT kernel with an emulation layer written to handle all of the syscalls.
It works well. The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal.
> The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal.
...and that bites you in a surprising number of ways.
I recently tried porting some software that runs just fine under Ubuntu-on-x86 to Ubuntu-on-WSL, and I found three different failure modes in the console/pty mechanism before I gave up. I then tried running it under Cygwin and it ran correctly out of the box.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to try to run a program like GNU screen under WSL, but the core problem isn’t any specific application. Any program that does anything even moderately tricky with ptys is likely to fail under WSL.
There are many tools like valgrind that are necessary for development that are broken in the subsystem. I would call it a step in the right direction, but it is somewhat half baked.
"It works well. The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal."
Does that mean Ctrl-C is still "copy" on Windows even in a bash shell?
I could justify the cost that whole time until the 2017 Macbook Pro. Or was it the 2016 that moved to the tiny-action keyboard switches?
My 2017 MBP is less than 6 months old and two keys don't attach to the switch anymore. They literally come off with my finger as I type. They aren't broken, the C-clamps are still intact. They have just widened enough with wear such that they don't clamp anymore.
It's so bad that I use my 2014 Macbook Air when I need to do a lot of typing.
Most of the people I know IRL are having the same issues with their newer model Macbooks, especially my developer friends since we of course tend to be harder on our keyboards.
My daughter's 2016 12" Macbook's space bar only works on a hard key press. I have AppleCare on it, but taking it to either Apple Store in our area is a ridiculous hassle. Drive 30+ minutes, service will take a minimum of 2-3 hours (at least that's been my experience with our phones.) I feel that Apple used to have a competitive advantage in that I could bring my devices in, have them serviced in a reasonable amount of time while I wait (an hour?)
My dad had is IPhone 6+ battery replaced under the $29 plan. 6+ week wait for the battery. They call, the battery is in, dad shows up at 11:30am on a weekday, it'll be ready by 3pm. He shows up at 3, and it takes until nearly 4 o'clock to get someone to get the device back out to him. I'm reaching the point where I may as well go with Dell/Samsung because shipping a device in is guaranteed to be less of a hassle than the "Apple Store Genius Bar" experience.
It's almost what you might expect from an executive team whose vision/talent is focused on manufacturing efficiencies and the aesthetic side of industrial design...
Dell XPS laptops are very high quality and a definite suitable replacement for a Macbook Pro if you can justify getting rid of OSX. XPS laptops are also fully Linux supported out of the box.
Mac Pro cheese graters going away was a bad move and a missed opportunity by Apple, today they already lost the power pro users and they had them for a while.
Most Mac Pro users have moved back to PC, or iMac's/minis just for iOS/macOS related dev, with most work being done on PCs.
Apple had a window where developers needed a heavy Pro Mac for iOS, nix development like python/ruby/etc, even Unity dev back when it was only on Mac (2007-2010 ish), it was also great to have a Mac after the 2006 Intel processor move as it was the sexiest nix and great for developers from 2006 on, but those days are over.
Somewhere in 2013, they just moved on from the cheese grater and Pro market that included developers and content creators. Now they want to regain it? There was so much momentum squandered here and hearing Tim Cook repeat "Post-PC" and Apple messaging that desktops were like trucks, only developers need them, caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers. Apple even watered down their developer laptops and Macbook Pros, 17" screens were relegated to being 'lapzillas' and Apple went only mainstream. Content creators and programming were not something they focused on anymore after the iPhone took over, eventhough those influencers were always the focus. I thought they would use the iPhone and iOS/macOS platforms to get more people on their desktops as well, instead they went the other direction.
We used to be Mac Pro heavy now we just have iMacs/minis for the last mile or iOS/macOS export and testing with performance heavy beefy PCs for most of the day to day work. Additionally, taking your jet engine/trashcan new Mac Pro or iMac to the mall for repairs instead of just popping in a new video card or drive also sucks.
Developers can get two performance PCs for the price of one Mac Pro. Usually you can get more power out of both as well since Mac Pros from 2011 on were 1-2 years behind. There is no getting back pro users such as devs/game devs that had switched over and have now gone back to Windows/PC.
But how in the world are you going to manage without ecc memory? You might have a bit get flipped by a cosmic ray once every 5 years of 24x7 computing.
Switched to a threadripper 1950 and used ecc memory and an nvme drive. Fastest computer I could build at the moment, cost less than half of a worse Mac,even with a 34 inch curved widescreen. Plus I got to go back to awesomewm. Finally I don't hate my dev environment. Feels good to get back to my pre-2013 roots.
There are plenty of papers that put the error frequency orders of magnitude lower than.
But even if true, so what? What are you doing on a workstation where a bit flipped every 3 days is going to cause a problem? Anything critical is going to have a software check. I just have never seen any legitimate argument for needing it in a workstation.
How do you know they were bit flips? And if they were, how do you know they were soft errors that could have been corrected with ecc and not hard errors that would have happened either way?
Because we had insanely good crash reporting and we root caused every crash report we got in that had more than half a dozen hits in the wild.
Hardware was at fault. Turns out suppliers push the truth a bit here and there about their chips, what is supposed to be an identical part # isn't always identical, parts from different manufacturers that are supposed to be interchangeable aren't, and technical manuals aren't always the best.
We had (what we thought was) rigorous memory testing in place at the factory, but under certain extreme conditions there was a 100% reproducible flip of a few bits in RAM. It was almost always the same bits, thankfully, that made it possible to track down!
> What are you doing on a workstation where a bit flipped every 3 days is going to cause a problem?
Depends what bit flips. Given some of the file formats out there, the bit flip just before it is written to the disc might be fatal.
> Anything critical is going to have a software check.
I would love to see someone go through github and analyze if that is true.
I just cannot imagine why it would be acceptable to have bit errors when a preventative measure is available. If the industry would stop looking at it as a value add, the cost would come down and we all would benefit from a more stable platform.
>we all would benefit from a more stable platform.
What instability are you talking about? Has anyone experience any instability ever on a workstation that could have been attributed to a cosmic ray bit flip?
I wouldn't trade a 10% memory performance drag for ECC if the memory was cheaper than standard.
By definition, if the bits can flip in a way that wasn't intended then it is not stable. I'll take the 10% because I pretty sure getting to wrong 10% faster is not worth it to me.
Not a ton, but for iOS games you have to export at least on an Apple machine. At our studio most people had PCs but people working on iOS/Unity games had Mac Pros and iMacs solely or in addition to PCs.
There was also a window where Unity was only available on Mac from 2007-2010 where lots of Macs were purchased by game devs.
Also making Linux/Apple/web games there was a little blip for a while where Macs were making inroads especially after going Intel processors. OSX is arguably the sexiest nix compatible machine and is quite fun/efficient for development.
Overall game devs have always used PC as the main for desktop, but with mobile and iOS taking over handheld gaming in 2007, game studios all had to buy them.
Now, most end up just getting a few iMacs or Mac Minis to export on and debug otherwise much of the game dev work is done on PCs.
Apple truly lost game devs, but also other content creators like video editing/production, graphic designers, photographers, audio production and more. These professionals were always the focus of Apple, amazing they just let those people wander off as they are also influencers. I even see lots of devs going from Macbook Pro to Surface Pros now because their main machines are back to PC, that could eventually start causing people to switch from iPhone to Android/Samsung/Google as well.
>caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers
Wasn't there a statistic from github recently, that 75% of the PRs created in 2017, were done from Macs?
They are bigger in the market for devs then ever before, the thing is, that the majority of this peer group is totally fine with a MBP.
I see this whole new MacPro story more as a marketing campaign, the driving factor behind this is not the demand from the market, it's only for their long-term reputation.
Yeah Apple still owns the laptop market but even their latest Macbook Pro wasn't really, more mainstream. Mac is still a better development environment because it is nix based for most things webdev related and iOS appdev mobile related.
At far as desktops though, even creative/advertising agencies are moving to PC for 3d, photography, graphic design, audio production, video production and more. These were always the target market of Apple but they lost many.
Apple iPhone lost ground to Android and laptops may also do so starting with development. I see many devs that went from Mac to PC desktop go from Macbook Pros to Surface Pros but that is just starting. Eventually it could also start switching people from iPhone to Android/Samsung/Google hardware as well as the hardware has caught up.
Apple being a hardware company, it is strange they did not take more advantage of the desktop inroads they were making in 2006+ with Intel and iOS development.
> At far as desktops though, even creative/advertising agencies are moving to PC for photography, graphic design, audio production, video production and more. These were always the target market of Apple but they lost many.
I don't think this is really true, all the creative agencies I'm aware of are still firmly mac shops. Do you have a citation or anecdotes to back up your assertion?
Most of them are still pretty Mac heavy, I said 'moving to PC'. The agencies I work with and worked at have begun to purchase more and more PCs over Macs.
Adobe Creative Cloud apps tend to work better on PC now so this is a big reason.
The areas I mentioned (video, photography, audio, gamedev, 3d etc) are moving to hefty PC machines that need 64GB/128GB/256GB+ of ram, latest GPUs, many drives and many cores (16-40+)[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], no iMac can do that and Mac Pros have left the building. Many of the PCs are cheaper and more powerful as well, custom built ones especially. Many web developers or graphic designers still on iMacs, but the other areas on PC.
Basically, anyone that needed a Mac Pro, where an iMac or Macbook Pro was not enough, has probably switched/back to PC. You'll see most people do this around 2013-2014 when the Mac Pro was un-cheese grated and put in a jet engine/trashcan, looks cool but too expensive and not for hands-on pros or expanded easily.
One video/photography/3d guy I know is running 40+ core/thread machines 256GB RAM, hard for Mac Pros to compete with that[9][10].
I see a lot of developers embarking on the Linux on Windows approach. It makes sense if one's goal is to learn to manage Windows boxes, but it misses a lot on the Linux side of things a good developer needs to know (unless, of course, they're developing for Windows, in which case the whole Linux side is unnecessary).
Apple can't regain the 3D, design and production market unless they can get a solution that's competitive in price with PCs. I'd suggest keeping Macs as the most delightful to use desktop and transparently offloading the heavy lifting to racks of commodity PCs running headless Apple software (which may even run on top of Darwin if that makes the porting easier).
OTOH, if Apple can develop a significant edge in performance like it had with early PowerPCs. Then Apple becomes the best bang for the buck again. Since they are designing CPUs, they can be pretty creative here.
"fine", yes, but it could be a lot better still. I'd sacrifice the small size and touch bar and such for a faster cpu, or a docking station (like the plan they had for a new display, which included its own discrete graphics card to help power the 5K display - actually there was an article recently saying Apple now supports external gpu's, so that might still be a thing), or a better keyboard, bigger screen, etc.
(and personally, yes I'm stuck with a laptop due to work atm. Wouldn't mind having an office or fixed work place with an imac pro though)
Yeah but most of the people using OSX aren't really thrilled about it. I'm typing this on a 2012 MBP- there's not much that's pushing me to upgrade to their latest machines.
Are any visual effects or animation shops still on macOS? I was under the impression that this world was mainly Linux (Pixar, Disney, Weta, ILM, etc, are all on Linux).
The major studios are still using Maya, Photoshop, and other commercial software that doesn't work on Linux. They are using Linux for render farms and some custom software.
Oh, upon closer reading, that page just says it doesn't work on 32 bit linux. Why they are even including that is beyond me. Who is working on Maya with a 32 bit system?
Maya does too, all major vfx software runs primarily on Linux these days. Photoshop is another animal where the vast majority of users are in other fields on mainstream platforms.
I'm really glad to see that Apple is paying attention again to what have been their long time core users. First with the new iPad for the education market and now revealing strategies for creatives in design and audio.
What I read from the article is that Apple is working on finding a few workflows and optimising the hell out of those instead of like creating an awesome general purpose computer for which only users imagination is the limitation.
I do not need a Mac Pro, nor could I afford one if I wanted to (I do own one, though, albeit it is 11 years old, I got it preowned from a friend).
But I wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking when they put put the "trashcan"-design. It looks awesome, I cannot deny it, and I imagine it is very convenient to handle.
But something deep inside of me cringes when a computer in this price class has everything soldered on and has no real option to extend it. You cannot upgrade the CPU, the RAM, the GPU, nor can you install any additional PCIe cards.
When I said "convenient to handle", I was thinking, small enough to sit on top of my desk, lightweight enough so I can carry it without breaking a sweat (the cheesegrater is really heavy!), that sort of thing.
I waited and waited and waited. I liked the design of the Trashcan but by the time I could afford one it was woefully out of date and I needed Nvidia GPUs for the rendering engine I wanted to use.
In the end I moved my creative work over to PC and currently run a nice compact mATX PC built for GPU computing with two 1080Tis. Still cost me less than half the eventual iMac Pro and presumably this Mac Pro.
If this had been released a few years back maybe I'd never have moved to PC but at this stage they'll have to be still supporting the new Mac Pro in 3 years before I even consider moving back at this point.
Been a Mac only user for 15 years now, I didn't move away lightly, but now I've switched it'll be hard to convince me back.
Many people in the pro audio world have moved to Windows over the last 5 years. Apogee, who I think Apple paid to only support OsX at one time, now makes Windows drivers and officially supports both platforms. MOTU has been cross platform since like 2006. Logic is really the only audio product that does not support Windows but only because Apple killed the pc version in like 2004. Logic pc was amazing and might even still run on Windows 10.
The main reason I'm not using Logic right now on my MBP is that it doesn't run on other platforms, and Apple's behavior over the last half-decade has convinced me that after almost two decades of knowing their platforms were the right choice for me, I can't trust their judgment when it comes to disruptive or dealbreaking changes to both hardware and software.
What are you basing that on? There is plenty of Windows now being used in audio. I use a MacBook Pro 2017 QuadCore, and still off loading audio work to a PC. The laptop uses the fan really heavily. Granted the i7 iMac is pretty damn good, but still you need up with lots of things hanging off it.
It also depends on the music you do and the plugins you run.
> He stresses that it’s not just Apple’s applications that they’re testing and working to help make better. Third-party relationships on this are very important to them and the workflow team is helping to fix their problems faster too.
This is great. Sounds a lot like Microsoft's recent change in culture away from using Windows as their worldview lens for everything to seeing their work as being platform agnostic (with non-Windows OS, mobile, IoT, watches, cars, etc).
It sounds like the next Mac Pro still won't handle ML workloads in a meaningful way, but it will have a keyboard with a touchbar that works with Garage Band. Pass.
I disagree. Do you really want to be training large models locally? The effort for Apple to optimize the Mac for ML is not worth it (for anyone). The cloud is cheap and ubiquitous.
Which cloud provider? When I last ran the numbers, 1080 Ti cards paid for themselves pretty quickly vs Amazon's ML instances if you're using them regularly. Also, you never have to remember to shut off your instances.
I've never done ML professionally, though, so it may be a totally different use case that you're thinking about.
Apple is going to EOL Mac Pros to 2011 via the next OS and have done for many of the older Mac Pros [1]. It is a shame because many can still run it just fine. I have a 2012 I got in 2013 which is our last Mac Pro and I am not going to be happy the day they do it.
At work we still run El Captain so I am fine using High Sierra for a few years at home :) hopefully by that time Ubuntu will be usable with multiple HiDPI displays.
My 2008 is running the very latest version of High Sierra without any issues. It's a very simple hack to make it work. So you can get more life out of it easily.
If Apple say they want to look at workflows, and winkle out bugs, then I've got a good one - but incredibly specific to LibreOffice.
If they get the LibreOffice git repository, then run:
make sw.all
eventually it will get to the unit tests and one of our exports kills the display server. Only happens if you run it on a iMac Pro 4K screen running max resolution.
We know it's something we are doing around graphics, but for the life of us we can't work out what that is. But also: I would have thought killing the display server like this should be something that shouldn't be possible...
I'm making a guess that the explanation is going to be as hilarious as the infamous "LibreOffice cannot print on Tuesdays" bug, which ended up being a problem with file(1).
352 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 335 ms ] threadTake a look at the new Dell XPS 15” 2-in-1, with Intel Core i7-8705G (with AMD Radeon RX Vega M GH, 4GB of dedicated HMB2), e.g.
That thing ticks most checkboxes of a pro machine, except for the “is a Mac” and “runs Mac-only software” ones.
And I imagine that an upgraded version will come out in 2019. Honestly, I find both Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu very usable nowadays. I don’t really find much reason to stick with a Mac anymore.
And I use BitTorrent and Usenet frequently.
Where/how are you getting all this malware?
Except for little things like (workstation) Xeon CPU and pro graphics (Quadro or whatever ATi is calling their FirePros these days).
If you want a actual pro system, check out Dells workstation line, e.g. Precision 7520. Sure, its not light and pretty like a XPS, but you can load it with fairly serious amount of stuff and as a cherry on top it comes with Linux support out of the box.
Workstations are just a different class of computers.
I'm worried that the XPS line is trying too hard to be a MacBook; what if they want to make next year's model even thinner?
Their "classic" XPS 15 looks fantastic, but I've read too many complaints about reliability and coil whine. I hope they keep iterating on it for a few more years.
If you believe that.
But they never said 2018 and I remember people being very skeptic le that 2018 would happen last year when they first announced they were working on a new Mac Pro.
> We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product
By "transparent and open" I guess they meant wait a year to tell people it's going to be another year?
https://web.archive.org/web/20170404192349/http://www.macwor...
> In April 2017 Apple invited journalists to its Product Realization Lab and made a series of announcements relating to the Mac line, revealing among other things that a minor update to the Mac Pro is imminent and a major revamp will arrive in 2018.
- Will the Mac Pro actually be Pro?
- Will they ever bring back a Pro computer in a notebook form factor?
If you mean no SD card reader etc, it's my understanding that pro photographers tended to use a USB3/thunderbolt reader anyway, as the integrated reader was connected over USB2 internally and was far too slow for pro use.
EDIT: According to Apple, all the laptops are USB2: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204384
Desktops are PCIe.
Some of the top end cameras use both CF and SD, so sure, it doesn't cater for everyone, but SD has become so ubiquitous it seems odd it's missing.
(I'm actually not sure what the reason for this was; iMac SD card readers were PCIe).
I read this every time it comes up on HN yet every single one of the five photographers in our shared office laments nothing more than the missing card reader.
If it was so slow why not just upgrade it to a USB3/PCIe-connected reader? and being a 'pro' device why didn't they do that already when USB3 became available?
- Touchbar at all
- Battery reduced from 99 whr to 76 whr
- Lost magnetic charging port
- Lost every other useful port
- Keyboard generally considered worse
I currently have a 15" mid-2015 MBP, and I use the DisplayPort, HDMI, and USB-A ports on a daily basis. Losing the ports doesn't bother me too much, but similarly priced or cheaper laptops don't ask me compromise there. On the other hand the battery life, touchpad, and keyboard will be absolutely stellar or I'm not buying it, especially in this price range. Again, others ask me to compromise less. While Apple still has the best touchpads in the industry, others are catching up. Meanwhile, Apple has regressed in several ways
I don't particularly like the touchbar (though that may change if IntelliJ ever bring out their promised support and it's any good), but it's not a huge deal for me (at least after I remapped esc to caps lock; I now do this on every keyboard I use, as I find it more ergonomic). I do love the touchId thingy, but they could have done that without the touchbar.
I prefer the keyboard to the retina MBP one, though I preferred the pre-retina MBP one to either. There was something about the feel of the rMBP (and MacBook Air) one I never liked. This is very subjective, of course.
The port situation mostly hasn't bothered me, as I just use a USB-C hub with power passthrough. It would have been nice to have at least a single USB-A port, but realistically I wouldn't use it much.
I find battery life to be similar to the previous one, generally. I think the size sacrifice is worth it, at least for my needs, because it makes the machine very portable. I barely notice the weight of it in a backpack now.
My biggest complaint is one you haven't mentioned; you can't get an integrated GPU only version. You can't even fully disable the discrete GPU. This means that you're stuck with all the quirks of the dual GPU setup. This is a step back, IMO; I've no real use for a discrete GPU on my work machine, and these dual GPU Macs have never quite worked properly.
I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did, really, but I was mostly impressed.
I have tried 3 and all 3 have not worked well with 2 screens (one screen being 2k)
As far as I'm aware, you've never been able to fully disable the dGPU. On my previous 2011 MBP, the dGPU failed. You could twiddle some UEFI variables to prevent switching to it so the system would boot, but it didn't actually cut power to it so it just ran hot and the battery died in 3 hours. Also, all the DisplayPorts were attached to the dGPU, so you couldn't plug up external monitors anymore if you did that. Units with the dGPU have worse battery life when there's a monitor plugged up, because it forces a switch to the dGPU.
The keyboard is subjective.
Yeah, I think if the keyboard didn't break from a spec of dust it would be fine.
The feel of the keyboard is indeed subjective (I happen to like the feel of the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro), but in this case Apple genuinely built a buggy keyboard, so much so that people are writing songs about it [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/FdS3tjEIqUA
Largest reason for return: G key. 30% of the time = two Gs. 50% = 1 G. Remaining 20% = 0 Gs/no keydown whatsoever. Hah.
My monitor does video, charging, and USB 3 with full size ports with one cable.
And the keyboard is subjective, I got used to it pretty easily. I actually feel like it’s more tactile than the old one
That is not the most ringing endorsement for a very expensive and supposedly premium laptop.
Even my initial comment about the Pro MacBook being... the MacBook Pro apparently bothered people enough to downvote me.
Needed keyboard repair twice in that time, and was horrible to type on. Useless touchbar, and an over-large trackpad that was constantly activating when typing. The last was odd as I regularly touch the old size trackpad with thumbs when typing but never had an issue. Add in the occasional freeze and crash and I feel it was a complete lemon.
I'm very happy with my 2015 and get longer battery times than I did with the newer model. I have no idea what I'll do when it needs replacing.
My Lenovo X1 Yoga also does everything via one Thunderbolt cable, but it also has a full selection of normal ports on the notebook itself rather than only on the docking station. It also has a 1440p touch screen and a nice keyboard, and still costs 1000 € less than a Macbook Pro ^W Deluxe.
I’d rather pay the difference in AppleCare. Most developers on this site are making large sums of money with their machines, 1000$ or even 2000$ is hardly going to make a measurable difference on the ROI of my laptop.
If the $2k isn't that significant, and minimal downtime is so important; may as well keep a slightly older refurb model on-site as a hot-spare ready to go just in case there's a problem... A policy that would work, whatever your OS / brand preference.
The endorsement was tempered by the fact that around these parts endorsing the new MBP is apparently treason. I’m getting my comments downvoted for implying the MacBook Pro is a fine machine.
IMO best all around monitor being produced today. 38” 1600p ultrawide (equivalent density to a 1440p 34” ultrawide), 75hz which is high enough for gaming without going into gamer aesthetic/retail markup territory, Freesync.
I can’t recommend it enough tbh
With my work my swap usage is 10-20GB at a time, between my IDE, app, tests, and browser tabs. 16GB is utterly painful but it’s the most you can buy.
It's also more than two times slower on my 2013 Dell Precision Xeon workstation.
But that comparison is not really fair, a MacBook Pro has to use a mobile CPU or it won't be able to dissipate the heat. Also, depending on ambient temperature, possible airflow, the MacBook's CPU probably throttles fairly early to prevent overheating.
A desktop CPU can larger power envelopes, typically throttles less and most virtualization has gotten so good that for CPU-bound workloads the difference between running on bare hardware or on a VM is barely noticeable.
to the point where I'd work more efficiently running remote desktop on a $200 chromebook.
Maybe it depends on the field I am working in, but I can't really run stuff on any laptop or desktop unless it is a > 5000 Euro workstation with plenty of RAM, storage, and a beefy GPU. The value that the Mac platform provides for me are the many applications that Chromebooks/Linux don't have good substitutes for, such as OmniGraffle, Deckset, Things, Microsoft Office, Little Snitch, Pixelmator, Acorn, Lightroom, and Affinity Designer. So, it's not just an expensive terminal ;).
But the memory is noticeable. For general performance, but also for running lots of vms and stuff in different configurations.
Still situations where its convenient to spin stuff up locally rather than cloud.
A maxed out Macbook Pro has 16GB of non-upgradeable, non-ECC RAM and a GPU with 4GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 3,553.
Lenovo will sell me a machine with 64GB of socketed ECC RAM and a Quadro P5000 with 16GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 10,281.
The Macbook Pro doesn't have built-in LTE. It has a non-removable battery. It throttles badly under sustained loads. It has chronic issues with display calibration. If you want a useful selection of ports, you'll need a bag full of fragile and easy to lose dongles. They've only just rolled out eGPU support and there's still no official support for Nvidia GPUs. There's no 17" option. It has that damnable butterfly keyboard.
Yes, the Macbook Pro is very thin and lightweight, but Apple have made a lot of performance and usability tradeoffs to get there. That doesn't sound very "pro" to me.
Apple doesn’t make a mobile workstation. They make a Pro version of the MacBook.
Take a MacBook, give it some more power, and you mostly have a MacBook Pro.
If the complaint is why doesn’t Apple make a high-end mobile workstation I'm guessing because the market isn’t there for it? At least not at the scale for Apple to touch it?
A lot of professionals end up being serviced just fine by a “Pro MacBook”. I don’t get this obsession with acting like Apple is doing something wrong by making the MacBook Pro a pro version of the MacBook instead of something like a Dell Precision, they’re two very different things with two very different markets.
If Apple honestly say "we couldn't care less about professional users, we're making money hand over fist anyway", then at least we all know where we stand. Apple haven't taken that approach - they keep making grand overtures about how much they care about professional users. They keep making grand promises about how the perfect professional machine is just around the corner, how they're not updating the current machine because the next big thing is so incredible, amazing, awesome.
There are a lot of very loyal Mac users who have kept Apple in business through thick and thin, but their patience has been tested to breaking point. Those users have been a key part of Apple's marketing; Apple make computers for dreamers, visionaries, artists, the cultural elite.
I don't know anyone who is genuinely happy about being a Mac user, but I know a lot of people who grimly tolerate giving Apple their money. They know what to expect from next year's Macs - they'll be thinner, lighter and subtly worse in a lot of important ways.
What happens to the Mac brand if those users leave? What happens if the resentment felt towards Apple by photographers, video editors, 3D artists and recording engineers turns into a full-scale revolt? What happens if owning a Mac marks you out not as a sophisticated member of the cultural elite, but a nerd who wants a slick *nix experience or a sucker who paid $2000 for a Facebook machine?
Apple are playing a dangerous game. Apple don't need to care at the moment because the iPhone is so gratuitously profitable, but they should know better than anyone that the market is incredibly fickle. They're burning decades of goodwill for no obvious reason.
It wouldn't be particularly expensive to make the majority of pro users happy. Bring back the old cheesegrater Mac Pro and stuff it with the latest commodity components. Bring back a previous-generation MBP chassis and fill the extra space with an i9 or a Xeon E3, four SODIMM slots and a GTX 1070 Max Q or a Quadro P5000.
They don't have to promote these machines, they don't have to display them in Apple stores if they're ashamed of making a functional computer, they just need to make them and promise to keep making them to secure the continued loyalty of their most loyal customers. Apple won't do it, for reasons known only to them. In the long term, that could prove to be a very expensive oversight.
It had gigabit ethernet, FW800, three USB ports, 1 thunderbolt port, ExpressCard/34 slot, audio in, audio out.
With the exact same form factor and updated ports, Apple could offer a hell of a Pro Macbook Pro. Just give it a 4k screen and an option for a second SSD in the space formerly used by a DVD drive.
It's as if Apple are saying "we're making a computer for people who demand peak performance, but are willing to use cheap outdated hardware until we get round to it."
My wife is a designer, she needs much more powerful computers than I do (as just a developer). She constantly runs out of memory, GPU performance is very relevant for Photoshop, Illustrator, and other tools she uses in her work. So spending $2500 or $3000 for a high end (but not pro) imac is a given, even though I would be perfectly happy with the $1900 one.
For her, the advantage in productivity is worth it. I can imagine there are many people who would see the imac pro as being worth it to them also and the price isn't going to bother them much because their time is already very valuable.
It takes effort to set up, but not that much.
I don’t want to fight with my workstation all the time. I want to use it to do... work.
Hackintosh doesn't work for me because my business isn't fixing laptops. Apple used to provide a full solution and it was really great.
In 2014 Apple would sell you a monitor that doubled as a dock which worked great with the RMBP and Apple's own wireless KB and Mouse and even Time Machine.
Today you're stuck with USB-C docks which are pretty awful. Pretty much on par with a Dell or HP laptop dock. The new Macbook Pros are the worst device I have used from Apple.
The thread you are replying to is about hackintoshes. The point of a Mac for me is that it Just Works (tm). If I want to fight with something I'll buy a Thinkpad and install Ubuntu. I have no interest in fighting with macOS, it's only useful to me if it is easy.
No. Their complaints are about the laptop itself. The keys are constantly breaking. The software constantly crashes. We're all a bunch of consulting devs and the 2017 macbook pros have cost every single one of them at least a week's worth of billable hours in the past 6 months. Most of them have gone back to their 2015 models.
For consumers who just really want to run macOS, I can see the appeal.
It's the market filling in the gaps of Apple's engineering & marketing plan.
A computer that takes a bunch of fiddling to set up and might not work if updated doesn't seem like a productivity booster to me.
If Hackintoshes have motivated Apple to release a new Mac Pro after a multi-year gap, then Apple-only shops will benefit from the Hackintosh investments of other shops.
Other people use a Hackintosh and help to define requirements for Apple's next computer.
Apple gets free R&D. Those who need performance get it. Everyone eventualy gets the benefits in the next computer.
Works perfectly in a home office and saving $2500 is not a small thing.
Not all updates are critical.
A Core i7 is not the same as a Xeon. ECC memory matters. The Apple premium simply isn't that much higher.
I also wanted to add that the cost of a person's time eclipses the cost of hardware (especially with computers). As a business, I simply wouldn't risk having days of downtime from a bad update, just to save $2,000 for something that's used for years, when the lost time in paying a creative person's salary will eclipse that.
What could you possibly be doing on a workstation that requires ecc?
For every 8 gb of memory, you are potentially looking at a single bit flip every 9 years. With ecc, only once every 45 years. And in exchange, you are looking at a 10% performance penalty.
What could you possibly be doing on a Mac pro that would need that kind of accuracy?
http://www2.ece.rochester.edu/~xinli/usenix07/
And not that Row Hammer should really be a concern for a workstation, but ECC does not necessarily protect against it. Some types of ram are vulnerable and some aren't. But ECC is not necessarily a factor.
http://www.thirdio.com/rowhammer.pdf
My argument is that every time someone says "I can build the same thing for 1/3 the price", they are literally using completely different parts. They AREN'T building the same thing.
The idea of an Apple Tax is that apple arbitrarily marks up everything. But if you bought the same parts independently, you'd find the markup is very little. More like 10%.
Look at those $10k HP workstations. They are more comparable to Mac Pros.
Except, at least with a fancy purse, you can carry it around and signal your wealth to others. My workstation is hidden away under my desk.
I just want to buy a car for $20k that goes 70 miles an hour. But you’re only selling me cars for $50k cuz you insist on putting things like carbon fiber brakes and titanium alloys. I don’t need any of that. I can build something that perfectly meets my needs for way less. Because those enhancements are meaningless for what I’m trying to do (go 70 MPH)
You want to sell me a car for $50k that can go only 60 mph. But it has carbon fiber brakes and titanium alloys, requires premium gas, and has a fancy logo. Oh, and it has a flux capacitor which does nothing.
Or I could just buy a car that can go 100 mph for $20k.
You can use different parts and end up with an equal or better outcome.
Yet every single one of them I follow has used only MacBook Pros for the last 5 years or so which obviously don't have ECC so yeah I feel the importance of it is overstated.
https://www.cultofmac.com/485914/imac-pro-pricetag/
To anyone with an understanding of PC hardware it's clear this list was composed specifically to justify the iMac pro's price.
Here's a much more reasonable list: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/xanderstrike/saved/mNDWXL
The new imac pro has the entry Level xenon and still throttles after 10 min.
Schools for sure. The staff believes that Macs are better and have bough trash cans to replace the cheese graters.
The NeXT Cube had three NuBus expansion slots that accepted boards something like 11"x11". (There were actually four connectors on the backplane; one was used for the NeXT motherboard.)
Granted, there weren't many boards produced for use in the Cube. There was NeXT's own i860-based color video card, the NeXTDimension. I think there was a third-party card with multiple i860s, and there was a 3rd party card with multiple Motorola 56001 DSPs.
Though the big aluminum desktops they made years ago were probably a high point for balance of beautiful and functional.
https://simson.net/hacks/cubefire.html
This. I think existing and potential future Mac Pro users would be perfectly happy with a cheese gater that has 2018 innards (ok, they could make it Space Gray).
When it comes to Pro hardware, I think that Apple has lost the balance between aesthetics and functionality. The trash can Mac Pro is a good example of this - it's beautiful, overheating all the time and not extensible. So is the new MacBook lineup, they are beautiful. But really? 1 USB-C port on the MacBook 12" and 2 USB-C ports on the MacBook Pro Escape? I don't know of any MacBook 12"/Pro user who doesn't dislike the port selection.
Instead in 2020 we'll probably get something like the desktop computer version of the RED camera system, and priced to match. Something that Apple's very very VIP consultants can use and afford but which doesn't meet anyone else's needs or budgets.
The processors they've developed for iPhones and iPads are getting into laptop territory, but it's a big step from there to 2x 6-core Xeons.
That's the only reason I can think of
https://i2.wp.com/www.yuppiegadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
Sphere on a stick would be cool to mount on a walk so it looks cool and then have wireless video (or video through the stem) so you just remote into it from your local network from tablets or light notebooks as terminals.
You could do that when the workstation cost $25,000, (in 1990 dollars!) I'm not sure how viable it is when the workstation is less than $5,000.
That said, I really miss using software products where that level of thought has gone into its design. The three 'creative' apps I use (other than writing code) are drawing, schematic capture/board layout (EDA), and writing. All systems that benefit from people investing in how the flow of these things work, and all of which have degraded over time.
The worst thing is the linkage between knowing what you want to do and assembling the right tools to do it in the app you're looking at. Most of my drawing is technical in nature (systems, small components, software architectures, Etc.)
They could have put out a cheese-grater with fresh Intel chips every year like clockwork, but they were too cool for that. And the failure is all the more striking when they continue to "crush it" in other categories.
I think it work because the customer spend is of comparable magnitude. Back in the mid 90s you might have a couple of dozen game devs working on $2000 PCs with a few $45K Onyx machines used for back end rendering or part time use of a few artists = ~$200K. Or (in my case) you only had a couple of AI developers but each had a pair of $50K 3650s = ~$200K. Or your prop traders had a $25K Sparcstation on their desk and one at home, but the rank and file just had a Bloomberg terminal.
Now you have much larger teams with more uniform machines (+ some cloud resource). The total institutional spend is probably higher in constant dollars.
Speaking of which it will be interesting to see if Apple is able to push some of their APIs into the cloud so you can develop on a mac pro and dynamically push the heavy lifting into an apple rendering cloud. This article just talked about scaling ios <-> Mac Os <-> MacOS+iOS+eGPU (nice!) but left out "<-> cloud". That's where editing on iOS could really shine: chop up / assemble your downsampled rushes on your tablet and then stream them to the AppleTV at your bosses' office. Remember Peter Jackson used to bring his to LA every week on an iPod in his pocket.
I'm wondering if it'd be viable to have a 'compute unit' shared by multiple users. i/o would probably be a bottleneck, so maybe have it link up macs via usb-c? It might help with e.g. compile times (which last time I did iOS development, two years ago, was kinda slow (>1 minute for our app, CPU bound)).
But that's probably too specialized a thing. Apple wants to sell units by the million, not the hundreds (if that). Which is why they discontinued the mac pro and the 17 inch MBP.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/dgx-2/
These days I get astoundingly better performance than whatever that low volume hardware did back then out of a $700 desktop with a $800 graphics card and a $500 monitor.
$5000 is probably still too high, unless you see the Apple product line as your only option.
I guess I'm no longer part of their target market for their computer systems.
Wat.I just went googling after reading this comment and at first glance, it looks like this is an officially supported method to run GNU apps in a Windows terminal? Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
It's hardly limited to GNU apps. Most of your Linux applications should work fine on it. I've had no problem with all sorts of non-GNU releases when I use it on my desktop.
>Can you boot directly into Ubuntu desktop without messing with BIOS and UEFI?
No, it is a Linux userland on top of the NT kernel with an emulation layer written to handle all of the syscalls.
It works well. The only really glaring issue is ConEmu and related Windows terminal ecosystem is still hot garbage compared to any Linux or OSX terminal.
...and that bites you in a surprising number of ways.
I recently tried porting some software that runs just fine under Ubuntu-on-x86 to Ubuntu-on-WSL, and I found three different failure modes in the console/pty mechanism before I gave up. I then tried running it under Cygwin and it ran correctly out of the box.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to try to run a program like GNU screen under WSL, but the core problem isn’t any specific application. Any program that does anything even moderately tricky with ptys is likely to fail under WSL.
Does that mean Ctrl-C is still "copy" on Windows even in a bash shell?
My 2017 MBP is less than 6 months old and two keys don't attach to the switch anymore. They literally come off with my finger as I type. They aren't broken, the C-clamps are still intact. They have just widened enough with wear such that they don't clamp anymore.
It's so bad that I use my 2014 Macbook Air when I need to do a lot of typing.
Most of the people I know IRL are having the same issues with their newer model Macbooks, especially my developer friends since we of course tend to be harder on our keyboards.
So you aren't missing anything.
My dad had is IPhone 6+ battery replaced under the $29 plan. 6+ week wait for the battery. They call, the battery is in, dad shows up at 11:30am on a weekday, it'll be ready by 3pm. He shows up at 3, and it takes until nearly 4 o'clock to get someone to get the device back out to him. I'm reaching the point where I may as well go with Dell/Samsung because shipping a device in is guaranteed to be less of a hassle than the "Apple Store Genius Bar" experience.
I've seen the phrase "not part of their target market" deployed at developers and particular users with increasing frequency for years.
Seems inevitable that eventually people will go somewhere else.
Most Mac Pro users have moved back to PC, or iMac's/minis just for iOS/macOS related dev, with most work being done on PCs.
Apple had a window where developers needed a heavy Pro Mac for iOS, nix development like python/ruby/etc, even Unity dev back when it was only on Mac (2007-2010 ish), it was also great to have a Mac after the 2006 Intel processor move as it was the sexiest nix and great for developers from 2006 on, but those days are over.
Somewhere in 2013, they just moved on from the cheese grater and Pro market that included developers and content creators. Now they want to regain it? There was so much momentum squandered here and hearing Tim Cook repeat "Post-PC" and Apple messaging that desktops were like trucks, only developers need them, caused them to move on, so did the pro users and developers. Apple even watered down their developer laptops and Macbook Pros, 17" screens were relegated to being 'lapzillas' and Apple went only mainstream. Content creators and programming were not something they focused on anymore after the iPhone took over, eventhough those influencers were always the focus. I thought they would use the iPhone and iOS/macOS platforms to get more people on their desktops as well, instead they went the other direction.
We used to be Mac Pro heavy now we just have iMacs/minis for the last mile or iOS/macOS export and testing with performance heavy beefy PCs for most of the day to day work. Additionally, taking your jet engine/trashcan new Mac Pro or iMac to the mall for repairs instead of just popping in a new video card or drive also sucks.
Developers can get two performance PCs for the price of one Mac Pro. Usually you can get more power out of both as well since Mac Pros from 2011 on were 1-2 years behind. There is no getting back pro users such as devs/game devs that had switched over and have now gone back to Windows/PC.
But even if true, so what? What are you doing on a workstation where a bit flipped every 3 days is going to cause a problem? Anything critical is going to have a software check. I just have never seen any legitimate argument for needing it in a workstation.
Not everyone crcs 100% of their structs.
If they don't, data is being slowly corrupted.
Hardware was at fault. Turns out suppliers push the truth a bit here and there about their chips, what is supposed to be an identical part # isn't always identical, parts from different manufacturers that are supposed to be interchangeable aren't, and technical manuals aren't always the best.
We had (what we thought was) rigorous memory testing in place at the factory, but under certain extreme conditions there was a 100% reproducible flip of a few bits in RAM. It was almost always the same bits, thankfully, that made it possible to track down!
Depends what bit flips. Given some of the file formats out there, the bit flip just before it is written to the disc might be fatal.
> Anything critical is going to have a software check.
I would love to see someone go through github and analyze if that is true.
I just cannot imagine why it would be acceptable to have bit errors when a preventative measure is available. If the industry would stop looking at it as a value add, the cost would come down and we all would benefit from a more stable platform.
What instability are you talking about? Has anyone experience any instability ever on a workstation that could have been attributed to a cosmic ray bit flip?
I wouldn't trade a 10% memory performance drag for ECC if the memory was cheaper than standard.
By definition, if the bits can flip in a way that wasn't intended then it is not stable. I'll take the 10% because I pretty sure getting to wrong 10% faster is not worth it to me.
There was an anecdote[1] about a Power Mac cluster at a university, which basically couldn't get past boot because the memory errors was so frequent.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Effect_on_electroni... [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-s... [2] http://www.pld.ttu.ee/IAF0030/curtis.pdf
There was also a window where Unity was only available on Mac from 2007-2010 where lots of Macs were purchased by game devs.
Also making Linux/Apple/web games there was a little blip for a while where Macs were making inroads especially after going Intel processors. OSX is arguably the sexiest nix compatible machine and is quite fun/efficient for development.
Overall game devs have always used PC as the main for desktop, but with mobile and iOS taking over handheld gaming in 2007, game studios all had to buy them.
Now, most end up just getting a few iMacs or Mac Minis to export on and debug otherwise much of the game dev work is done on PCs.
Apple truly lost game devs, but also other content creators like video editing/production, graphic designers, photographers, audio production and more. These professionals were always the focus of Apple, amazing they just let those people wander off as they are also influencers. I even see lots of devs going from Macbook Pro to Surface Pros now because their main machines are back to PC, that could eventually start causing people to switch from iPhone to Android/Samsung/Google as well.
Wasn't there a statistic from github recently, that 75% of the PRs created in 2017, were done from Macs? They are bigger in the market for devs then ever before, the thing is, that the majority of this peer group is totally fine with a MBP. I see this whole new MacPro story more as a marketing campaign, the driving factor behind this is not the demand from the market, it's only for their long-term reputation.
At far as desktops though, even creative/advertising agencies are moving to PC for 3d, photography, graphic design, audio production, video production and more. These were always the target market of Apple but they lost many.
Apple iPhone lost ground to Android and laptops may also do so starting with development. I see many devs that went from Mac to PC desktop go from Macbook Pros to Surface Pros but that is just starting. Eventually it could also start switching people from iPhone to Android/Samsung/Google hardware as well as the hardware has caught up.
Apple being a hardware company, it is strange they did not take more advantage of the desktop inroads they were making in 2006+ with Intel and iOS development.
I don't think this is really true, all the creative agencies I'm aware of are still firmly mac shops. Do you have a citation or anecdotes to back up your assertion?
Adobe Creative Cloud apps tend to work better on PC now so this is a big reason.
The areas I mentioned (video, photography, audio, gamedev, 3d etc) are moving to hefty PC machines that need 64GB/128GB/256GB+ of ram, latest GPUs, many drives and many cores (16-40+)[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], no iMac can do that and Mac Pros have left the building. Many of the PCs are cheaper and more powerful as well, custom built ones especially. Many web developers or graphic designers still on iMacs, but the other areas on PC.
Basically, anyone that needed a Mac Pro, where an iMac or Macbook Pro was not enough, has probably switched/back to PC. You'll see most people do this around 2013-2014 when the Mac Pro was un-cheese grated and put in a jet engine/trashcan, looks cool but too expensive and not for hands-on pros or expanded easily.
One video/photography/3d guy I know is running 40+ core/thread machines 256GB RAM, hard for Mac Pros to compete with that[9][10].
[1] https://www.creativebloq.com/advice/the-digital-artists-guid...
[2] https://www.slrlounge.com/apple-is-dead-to-me-trey-ratcliff-...
[3] https://www.stuckincustoms.com/2017/02/10/switching-from-mac...
[4] https://petapixel.com/2016/12/03/im-leaving-apple-microsoft-...
[5] https://petapixel.com/2017/07/18/5-reasons-pick-pc-macbook-2...
[6] http://philipbloom.net/blog/makingtheswitch/
[7] https://uxdesign.cc/designers-workflow-on-windows-57393856ae...
[8] https://medium.com/charged-tech/why-i-left-mac-for-windows-a...
[9] https://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xe...
[10] http://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-X399-Dual-Intel-Xeon-E5-...
Apple can't regain the 3D, design and production market unless they can get a solution that's competitive in price with PCs. I'd suggest keeping Macs as the most delightful to use desktop and transparently offloading the heavy lifting to racks of commodity PCs running headless Apple software (which may even run on top of Darwin if that makes the porting easier).
OTOH, if Apple can develop a significant edge in performance like it had with early PowerPCs. Then Apple becomes the best bang for the buck again. Since they are designing CPUs, they can be pretty creative here.
(and personally, yes I'm stuck with a laptop due to work atm. Wouldn't mind having an office or fixed work place with an imac pro though)
No, there wasn't. Github posts lots of stats but nothing about OS shares.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/101/
Are any visual effects or animation shops still on macOS? I was under the impression that this world was mainly Linux (Pixar, Disney, Weta, ILM, etc, are all on Linux).
Maya/Houdini/Modo/etc run on Linux (this is what Weta, Disney, and Pixar do). Creative Cloud definitely does not, which is a bit of a problem.
This page seems to indicate that Maya is not compatible with Linux.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/...
A $3000 mac would be lucky if the games even supported OSX.
Which obviously is a very Appley thing to do.
But I wonder what the hell the people at Apple were thinking when they put put the "trashcan"-design. It looks awesome, I cannot deny it, and I imagine it is very convenient to handle.
But something deep inside of me cringes when a computer in this price class has everything soldered on and has no real option to extend it. You cannot upgrade the CPU, the RAM, the GPU, nor can you install any additional PCIe cards.
In the end I moved my creative work over to PC and currently run a nice compact mATX PC built for GPU computing with two 1080Tis. Still cost me less than half the eventual iMac Pro and presumably this Mac Pro.
If this had been released a few years back maybe I'd never have moved to PC but at this stage they'll have to be still supporting the new Mac Pro in 3 years before I even consider moving back at this point.
Been a Mac only user for 15 years now, I didn't move away lightly, but now I've switched it'll be hard to convince me back.
They have managed to keep the music recording industry; a new macbook pro or imac is plenty powerful enough to be the heart of a recording studio.
It also depends on the music you do and the plugins you run.
This is great. Sounds a lot like Microsoft's recent change in culture away from using Windows as their worldview lens for everything to seeing their work as being platform agnostic (with non-Windows OS, mobile, IoT, watches, cars, etc).
I've never done ML professionally, though, so it may be a totally different use case that you're thinking about.
The Macbook Pro is unarguably _not_ pro. Maybe anything above $4,000..?
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
If they get the LibreOffice git repository, then run:
eventually it will get to the unit tests and one of our exports kills the display server. Only happens if you run it on a iMac Pro 4K screen running max resolution.We know it's something we are doing around graphics, but for the life of us we can't work out what that is. But also: I would have thought killing the display server like this should be something that shouldn't be possible...
For anyone who wants to find out about the above-referenced bug, see:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8171956
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G4