Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Apple's relationship with pro-anything is collapsing.

I write Mac software for a YC company in the pro video space. Our new product started deployments a couple of months back, and a major source of problems has been the Apple platform -- both hardware and software. It's so bad that we're actively working to move off the Mac completely. (I've spent 15 years doing Mac software, so this is a big deal for me.)

Apple doesn't have pro hardware anymore. The 2013 Mac Pro is a complete failure, maybe the worst computer they've ever made. We deployed a dozen Mac Pros, and four of them suffer from a GPU overheating problem that's widespread but little talked about -- Apple has been replacing Mac Pros quietly for years.

The original Mac Pro was a great computer for the pro market: lots of extensibility, high-quality cooling system. The new Mac Pro removed all that and offers no benefit to users like us. It's really more like a cylindrical rebirth of the infamous Power Mac G4 Cube.

The same heat problems apply to their laptops. Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements, which Apple is providing through a special replacement program. (My previous MacBook Pro has had this done three times.) Apple's drive towards ever-thinner and ideally fanless computers like the 12" MacBook suggests that this trend isn't going to change. I'm afraid the next MacBook Pro will be the "worst of both worlds", a combination of traits from the 12" MacBook and the Mac Pro.

Meanwhile on the software front, macOS has become an unstable and unpredictable platform for high-performance media applications. The emphasis on power saving, sandboxing and relentlessly throttling down userspace applications has made it quite hard to ensure that all our processes keep ticking along as they should. Working around macOS features designed for fanless laptops is such a waste of time when our deployment environment would ideally be a rackmount old-style Mac Pro.

Looks like there's going to be lots of Windows 10 in my future :(

It would be an amazing thing for the world if professional-software developers like you began to target Linux (as well).

I work in TV and film and use all three operating systems daily! I go where apps go. OS itself rarely matters since all I usually see is an application itself. Linux and MacOS (well, basically anything GNU-based) offers a lot more flexibility and automation. Not that Windows cannot do it, but that my colleagues and myself are more used to ye olde *nix. Windows, on the other hand, just works! Sorry, couldn't resist.

I use MacOS, these days, mostly for writing (occasional coding) and on the go editing on macbook. Nice example of what you've mentioned is Fade In Pro http://www.fadeinpro.com/ which filled vacuum left by impotent Final Draft (this is changing now with FD 10 slightly). It's just GREAT that you can use the same application in all three environments. In case of Fade In Pro you don't even have to buy separate licenses.

It's difficult for us because we need GPU stability. The best place for that, for now, is going to be Windows.

With Windows we can more or less hope customers can use a more mixed variation of hardware and get ok results. With Linux, it's unlikely we'd be able to let people go it alone.

Could you have recommended hardware configurations for Linux? I guess it would limit your market though.

I would love to leave Windows completely, but I need Ableton Live to work. Microsoft have completely lost what little goodwill I had towards them with Windows 10 and it's spying.

I owned my own studio and do video production from time to time still to this day (Video People your audio SUCKS learn how to use the RIGHT microphone and learn the term ON AXIS, rant over)

In the 90s as I was buying I actually was going to go with BeOS and had a Tascam DX2424 external hard drive recorder (Thing was awesome). Steinberg, as I was a week away from buying my first Apple computer, pulled the plug on BeOS applications. I went Windows NT Nuendo 1.0. 80% of the studios my size were all ProTools. I HATED ProTools and their hardware lock in.

After a while I kind of got a niche going and I would also work at mixing or engineering things at Apple based studios about once a month. I have always had the unfortunate luck of making every single Mac crash while I use them. I would speak about my frustration and the "Mac Guy" would shake his head and say I don't know as I would have to redo hours of work.

Later on in Video. I would be on Premier or Final Cut Pro and the same thing would happen where I was in the middle of hours long sessions and I would get some crash that wouldn't lose me work anymore but it got me out of "The Zone." If you ever did major video editing you know what that feels like. The Apple "crash" was different because sometime it would take a while to realize that while I have the video gui up what I was doing wasn't actually changing anything, or I couldn't grab a clip from a folder and import it OR the codex just isn't working so I can't see a preview and I would have to reboot.

I hate Apple software like Final Cut Pro because they use their own vocabulary. It was always not the standard vocabulary of the industry pre-digital nor what the other video/audio world was using.

Software Synths (Windows/Linux) seem to just work for me these days. My buddies swear with their Macs they can do the same things and then boom back to sampled sythns after a month or so due to "little issues" but they would never blame their machines or OS. I have noticed a ton more Windows in music performance the past year or two, but I really think that Linux could make a niche in live audio production a reality if the Native Instruments would provide a Linux port.

Non-Apple world is pretty ripe for Apple to lose massive market share like they are seeing the last 3 years in video.

Ahhhh back in the days when BeOS was new and exciting, speedy and swift and there was much talk of Apple buying Be Inc.

How different the world would be today if that had happened.

Seriously we still don't have Windows, macOS or Linux that can do the things BeOS was doing in 1998.

Pentium II at 300 mhz has more videos playing then most computers could play today https://youtu.be/Qv6twfh2SgI?t=2m30s

The thing was you could unplug the computer by pulling the cord out and boot up and everything would immediately play where you stopped.

I sort of understand what you mean. I've been in music production, more of a hobbyist, for the last decade and need to upgrade my hardware. Seirra doesn't seem like a great upgrade and Apple hardware seems like garbage. I'm shocked. My 2009 MBP is obsolete but then there's nothing for me to migrate to. I'd go 100% Linux if it wasn't for Logic and Photoshop + Illustrator.

New Macbook Pros are widely expected to be introduced in October.

People have been saying "next month" for the last 18-24 months.

All of the usual rumor sites agree on the Q4 timing for the redesigned Macbook Pro, I'm not sure what your source is.

My source is the last 18-24 months. Every month for the last two years, someone has said "new macs are coming!"

Except this time it's Mark Gurman saying redesigned MacBook Pros are coming in October. That's as close as you can get to confirmed.

> Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements, which Apple is providing through a special replacement program. (My previous MacBook Pro has had this done three times.)

I can confirm anecdotally that this occurred with a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010). Despite claims that Apple hardware is reliable and holds its value, I'll never buy one of their personal computers again.

My 2012 15" rMBP has had probably every part of it replaced (display, logic board (twice), I/O board, battery, top case [includes keyboard/trackpad], bottom case). All except the battery was under AppleCare.

How many hours of your life were spent at the genius bar?

The nearest Apple Store is 4 hours away, so rather I spent weeks without my machine as it was sent to their central repair center.

Many Apple customers discover an issue with their devices just after the eligibility period for repairs (typically three years) expires.

As somebody who worked almost exclusively in Windows (with varying results for many years), predominately in semi-pro level audio work, I'm curious what you think about the capabilities of the Surface platform vs. the current Mac approach. I'm thinking an external video card would be a huge plus, if possible, but from what I've seen performance wise, I'm looking to transition to a Surface Pro in the future from an otherwise perfectly satisfactory Lenovo. Granted this is for audio but a lot of great audio equipment is USB 3 and workable in offloading a lot of the power needs (and external storage for large files). If video could eventually be served well by the same approach (modular?) that'd be interesting.

Thank you for the warning about the new Pros.

I have a 2008 Mac Pro that is still incredibly reliable, but I am starting to feel the need for a new computer for music production. And it doesn't look like they will even support the 2008 Pros with the next OS release.

I miss Snow Leopard -- Logic on Snow Leopard was an incredibly solid platform for music production!

I'm contemplating whether it might be possible to do all my music work on Mac Minis. I really like having four hard drives and a tower case...

>Many MBP models with NVIDIA graphics end up needing yearly motherboard replacements

Yearly? I know multiple people who need to get their 2011 MacBook Pro motherboard replaced on a monthly basis. One managed to make Apple give in and swap it for an equivalent 2015 model, and the others are still trying…

This, and it's incredibly depressing not merely in its result but in its sheer needlessness. Sometimes even the best companies make choices that really don't fit someone's use case, maybe to the extent of ending the relationship, but it's possible to step back and see the business case for it. It's not happy but it can be logical. But I always feel a special set of negative feelings when a company I like well enough does something bad and it's just doesn't even make any sense period. In this case while yes the old Mac Pro case could have used some minor refreshing to make better default use of space in a world of 2.5" drives and such, frankly I suspect most of us would have been reasonably content if Apple took the absolutely utterly laziest, cheapest possible approach, kept the exact same thing and merely kept updating the chipset and CPU and graphics card and that's it. SB-E, IB-E, etc., the same old dual socket boring workstation, just with the internals refreshed. Maybe swap the ports for USB-C eventually. They could have kept a higher profit margin, done much less engineering work, and had a better product.

Instead they actively expended money making it fundamentally worse, and not just that but making it a zero-sum game. Many people correctly compared the Cylinder (it's hard to resist the more colloquial in our office "trashcan mac") MP to the old Cube in terms of basic thermal and design tradeoffs, but the Cube never inspire active dislike because there was still the MP. On the contrary the small niche of users that actually found its set of tradeoffs worth it had a soft spot for a long time. Nobody lost anything at all from the existence of the Cube, so the only people who got were those fine with it, and anyone else could just look from afar. By making the neoCube the only thing though Apple shot any hope of that.

And the Cylinder was form over function in a way I can't recall from Apple in a very long time, and also seemed a fundamental misreading of what they're good at and what they want to be actively engaged in. The mirror of an easily expandable pro friendly system offering flexibility on user side is that it also provides flexibility on the manufacturer side: because 3rd parties can do more entirely on their own, the manufacturer in turn can get away with doing less because the gaps can be filled in by the market. The more control a manufacturer takes for themselves, the more responsibility falls on their shoulders in turn, which is why command-and-control economics tends to have scalability problems vs approaches that make more use of markets.

At any rate it's a real bummer. I've looked at Xeon hackintosh efforts but that's definitely getting into pretty shaky territory and with Apple abandoning pro systems themselves support is probably only going to get worse. I agree it is time, probably past time, to start planning to abandon the platform but boy will it be painful (closer to 25 years in my case).

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