Ask HN: Buy new Apple hardware given none was announced at WWDC? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Buy new Apple hardware given none was announced at WWDC?

12 pointsjason_slack21 comments

I was planning on buying a Mac Pro and hoping for a new model to be announced today at WWDC. It has been about 18 months since it was refreshed.

No hardware at all was announced.

Now, I don't know if buying a new machine is a good idea or if they are going to do a refresh in the near future.

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Bought a MBP in May of 2015. AMD GPU means no CUDA. Two months ago, the screen went black. Lost a few days. Same thing happened to a friend with same model. Still have a MBP Retina from 2012. That model has a Nvidia chip, so probably as fast or faster for ML. Also, there is a recall on the 2015 display that flickers. Have put off requesting a fix on mine. Am hoping that after the new MBP comes out with a (rumored) Nvidia chip, that Apple will replaced my flawed AMD version. If Apple comes out with another AMD GPU, then will abandon Apple for something better.

A major new high-end MacBook product announcement should have happened at WWDC 2016. It seems that Tim Cook has decided that only software announcements are appropriate at WWDC.

Steve Jobs had a better sense of timing when he introduced the first iPad at WWDC in 2010. Apple missed an opportunity to bring down the house at WWDC 2016. Apple execs need to recognize that Apple developers, the audience at WWDC, badly need and want improvements to the high-end MacBook products.

The old saying at Apple was that "software sells systems". Apple Hardware Engineering is still a world-class organization and is directly responsible for most of Apple's revenue. Why not play up this strength at WWDC?

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro

The only one that is "buy now" is the MacBook and it seems only because it was the most recent updated. This isn't totally useful for decision making.

Is based on the average refresh cycle for those product lines. Given how Apple is usually pretty scheduled in their updates, it works pretty well usually.

If you NEED it, buy it now. If you can wait, wait.

I have a retina 15 inch MacBook Pro with 16gb of RAM and also an iMac that is dedicated for work.

I was hoping to get more into AI and OpenCV with c++.

I've done computer vision/machine learning with a much less powerful MBPRetina, you'll be fine even if you start now.

fine on the hardware I have or fine if I buy a Mac Pro even thought they might upgrade it soon.

In case parent doesn't return:

fine with current hardware, based on >...done computer vision/machine learning with a much less powerful MBPRetina...

Yep, that's what I meant, fine with the hardware you already have.

Can you clarify one thing for me. My rMBP has a AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB this means no CUDA, but OpenCL should be just fine?

If those application domains are driving a hardware purchase, a workstation that can be stuffed with GPU's might make more sense. With SSH all the interaction could be through just about any device.

I thought about this too (an Ubuntu workstation), but there are so many options as to what to buy. Seems overwhelming. Any suggestions?

I am afraid I am net an expert in AI and OpenCV, but I do know how to build a custom desktop. I would research what hardware other people are finding effective, and then just double check Ubuntu/Debian will have the driver support (its pretty good nowadays) for what you want. Building a rig is a great experience and quite fun too!

a recommendation on a motherboard that supports a number of GPU's and a decent amount of RAM?

When I built a Bitcoin mining rig a long while back I had to use riser boards and this took a log of custom work on my end :-) Looking to avoid that now.

This describes the machine I am in the midst of building for my boy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11884519 I'm in the US and it the used Dell Precision T7500 [1] was about $300 including shipping. There's another ~$40 apiece in a new 120gb ssd and a new Nvidia GeForce 710 GPU from NewEgg. The 710 does ~350 gigaflops which is about $0.11 per, and better than anything else at a price that's rounding error on a high end GPU.

So why am I a fan of the Dell's? They're seriously robust machines. I've got a dual E5405 T7400 that's 8 years old. Last month on a whim I looked at the SMART stats for the original disk drives: more than five years powered on. Still whisper quiet. Never a hardware problem. These are machines Dell ships with a three years Next Business Day warranty. They're designed and built accordingly.

[1]: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/precn/Dell_Pre...

If you're looking to do primarily CUDA/OpenCV work you'd be crazy to not build your own PC/drop in a new Pascal card. $450 will get you a GTX 1070 that should easily do 7 TFLOPs of SP (w a slight overclock), and for $600-700 a GTX 1080 that could push 9+ TFLOPs.

As far as price/performance, a high end Mac is only worthwhile if you have very specific software requirements (mostly, if you use Mac-only media production software).

Any help on a board that supports multiple cards and lots of RAM?

How much RAM do you need?

I can recommend SuperMicro boards but it's just a guess because it's better to know what exactly do you want.

>No hardware at all was announced.

No hardware was announced yet. There have been occasions in the past that speed bumps and minor changes (i.e., not worthy of announcements) just appear in the web store without fanfare.

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