The Mac Pro Lives

If MacOS had: up-to-date OpenGL support, Nvidia made drivers that supported new cards for it, was not locked into Mac hardware - that would be tremendous.

On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous.

If Linux, any desktop variant (Fedora my poison), had Adobe's support for their DCC apps and great battery management for laptops - that would be tremendous.

If Windows and Linux had the above + Preview from MacOS - that would be tremendous.

Finder is even more horrible. It reminds me of the Windows 95 Explorer. A network drive hangs? Good luck with Finder..., the whole system halts.

I am specifically saying "Ubuntu" and not "Linux" because I don't care that it's a bloated distro, I don't care about tweaking things just right. I don't care about the freedom and flexibility that "hardcore" distros give you. I just want to turn on my computer and get to work, and Ubuntu gives me exactly that.

i finally switched for same reso Dell units on my desk and really happy about that.

A thinkpad + ubuntu I think, will hit all your needs. Lenovo preinstalls Ubuntu on some of their thinkpads in some cases (afaict, large enterprises). The thinkpad line IIRC works to use well-supported hardware for Linux. You can check the certification list to be sure: https://certification.ubuntu.com/certification/make/Lenovo/

Dell also ships XPS models that ship with Linux. http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productdetails/xps-13-linux

I was on the mac a long time, but eventually switched to Linux and am much happier.

EDIT: Thinkpad P series has 16/32gb of RAM, donno about battery/size/weight, as there are a few models, and you'll have to figure out what your preferences are in trade-offs.

In 2015 the macbook pro had a 99.5 watt-hour battery (100 watts is the limit to take on airplanes). Now it has 76 watt hours.

So you could get approximately 30% more battery life had they not prioritized thin and light.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/macbook-pro-october-2016-battery-l...

I know one is discouraged from questioning whether a commenter read the article, but I'll point out that Gruber is on about the Mac Pro, which is a desktop machine. I'll doubt the new one will have "longer battery life".

Lately I even tried elementaryOS, and it's worse than Ubuntu. They keep saying how it's not a copy of OS X, and it evidently isn't as far as user experience is concerned, but on top of that they're obviously inspired by a design that's now completely outdated. At least Ubuntu is looking ahead and thinking of touch interfaces.

Ubuntu is genuinely the only somewhat passable option for people who don't know, nor should know, what process thread is, or even how many cores are in their CPU. Ubuntu has a somewhat consistent UI but still suffers from all kind of major bloopers. I mean, what the fuck. It's 2017, and it still doesn't save the last window size & position in most apps. It drives me mad. Some do, some don't, so it ends up worse than not supporting it at all.

I got fed up with Windows and Ubuntu so I bought a five year old Mac Mini. Sierra looks amazing, and it runs silky smooth. I don't AAA game and this will most likely serve me very well for web development. Came with a big SSD drive too.

It's kinda sad nobody can compete with Apple. But if anybody will I don't think it's the "free software" world.

Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying.

I really like Finder and Spotlight, but not enough to be tied, via licensing, to any specific hardware.

Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps on windows

Native package manager-- I guess Windows has Chocolatey and I use npm for dev work.

I can understand lighter, but thinner? Why do you wish for it to be thinner? I consider it to be thin enough.

I'm genuinely curious - why do you need 64 GB of RAM on a laptop? Are there industries where this is a necessity? At that point, wouldn't you be better off having remote machines?

I bought this Samsung Chromebook 2 to test out a 13.3" laptop size and the keys were close to being "counter sunk" into the frame (not really but they were noticeably low) and seeing one of the new Macbook Pro's in person at a store I was like "WTF is up with those keys."

Yeah I love the software optimization giving to long battery life on Apple's behalf but the whole "gaming on Windows, and software like CAD/Solidworks on Windows" I don't know. As I said run three operating systems as Linux is my primary OS to develop on. I'm not looking forward to learning Apple OS, at least Visual Studio Code is on there.

I'm kind of dumb though in some ways, I keep thinking "If I have a computer like a Macbook Air I can develop on the go" but I'm most productive on my desk, two monitor, desktop. But I want to get setup for a moving/traveling digital nomad lifestyle so one device and barely any possessions would be great, particularly in the event of theft my device is outdated/protected enough that it will destroy itself and I can replace it relatively easily... but that's far from my current situation in life as a mere peasant.

This autobiography brought to you by, schizophrenia, you gotta love it.

That might be the lock-in talking, Apple would have to screw the MacBook line over as badly as they did the Mac Pro line to get me to switch.

If there's one part where I like Windows and Windows applications a lot more than macOS, it's in the support of keyboard shortcuts (like all the Alt+ or Ctrl+ combinations). The apps as well as OS on macOS severely lack in keyboard shortcut support and depend more on a mouse or trackpad. I know I can define my own shortcuts for application/system menu items in macOS easily, but that's a big chore to do.

All the praise of macOS aside, I avoid Apple's own apps for anything where I need longer term availability. Take iWork for example. I never use it for anything that's not a throwaway project. Apple could, at any point in time, just decide that it's not worth it, junk support for all the files you've created (in its proprietary format) and then start afresh. So I use LibreOffice for all my longer term spreadsheet needs. Or Thunderbird for mail (and so on). The shelf life of Apple's own applications and their proprietary formats and cryptic file organization systems are relatively much shorter compared to FOSS offerings or even Microsoft's offerings. Apple's consumer side iLife apps also have hit some people hard in the past with data corruption and data loss (IIRC, iPhoto was notorious for that). Since I don't upgrade my hardware every few years, these factors hit me harder on the Mac side.

Linux is a lot more time consuming to manage for me (even though I'm fairly tech savvy). But a good combination of UI (looks, readability, fonts), usability along with perfect hardware support would be a great thing to have.

Well, you seem to have isolated yourself from counterargument. I was given an 2016 Macbook Pro from work. My normal dev workstation is Ubuntu 16.10. I do truly prefer Ubuntu to OSX. I like the customisation, and even the default look and feel of Ubuntu just works better for me.

Also, as a developer doing mostly Haskell and Python, derping with Elm, rendering documents with Pandoc + LaTeX, all of my tools are perfectly at home on Linux. Everything works with OSX too, but it is usually a bit easier to get things working. I prefer apt to brew. I don't know what else there is to say, but here is a counter argument. If OSX and Ubuntu were both for-pay products and cost the same, I would pick Ubuntu.

Oh and the XPS is better looking and non-hypey like the touchbar Mac book.

I really suggest you give the Fedora livecd a try.

>- Thiner/Lighter

>- Longer Battery Life (5+ hours)

>- 32/64GB RAM

These goals are diametrically opposed.

I disagree. I moved from a MBP to a notebook with Arch and i3. The UX of a tiling window manager such as i3 is in my opinion much better and more efficient than the floating wm on OSX. There is no real tiling wm for OSX (don't mention divvy here, it's a nice tool but far away from a real tiling wm).

The vast majority of the world disagrees. The only reason anybody uses OS X is because it's Unix. Other than that, the UI is atrocious and severely lacking. It doesn't even come close to the robust utility that Windows offers.

Someone who is processing lots of video or audio for money may spend most of their week at a desk in one or two apps and the faster the throughput of their machines the easier it is to meet client deadlines. And hardware starts to matter a lot and throwing hardware at the problem is often a good idea...the logic of rendering farms is the same as server farms.

Not any more. Mac OS looks and feels very antiquated compared to Windows today.

As a developer, Windows has caught up to MacOS for the shells and beats it in pretty much all the other areas (UI of the OS, keyboard shortcuts everywhere, great file manager(s), much more productivity tools available, etc...).

And of course, Windows laptops are anywhere between 1/3rd to half the price of the equivalent Mac laptop.

These days, I use both Mac and Windows to develop but once I can no longer use my Mac Book Pro, I won't be getting another Apple laptop, it's going to be Windows all the way for a few years until Apple catches up again, if they ever do.

No, you're not the only one. I can't stand non-OS X anymore.

The only thing that bothers me is the lack of window-based Alt+tab (Cmd + ~ and Cmd + tab are not equivalent).

> And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot.

There certainly are some specific areas, like 4K support, which are still being worked on, (and is in fact worse on Windows), but other than that, I cannot see what macOS offers over a modern GNOME desktop, UX wise, can you offer specifics?

On my MBP, I always feel constrained, doing any heavier compilation slows it to a crawl and sends the temps to the very edge of what the CPU can handle, there's not even a point in having a CPU that can turbo up to 4GHz, since I never, ever, saw it happen under macOS, Finder is a joke, (Path Finder is good, but you can get there with built-in File Managers on Linux), Xcode is a joke of an IDE, stuff like syntax highlighting and autocompletion is randomly gone every couple of minutes etc.

My main problem with macOS and the hardware it runs on, is that even on a top quad-core model, you don't really feel like 'this thing has power to spare', the last thing I want to feel when working on a computer that costs over 2k.

> god forbid you have a problem (especially a hardware problem) and then try to debug it. Good luck searching online for a resolution.

I don't think that is really true anymore, places like the Arch wiki and forums are a sure way to get almost anything resolved. On the other hand, try having a hardware issue, (personally experienced WiFi drops, dead pixels and GPU glitches), on macOS, nobody even tries to resolve it themselves, you're told just ship it back to Apple.

> Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations

Not really a problem in practice, (but a very tired talking point), you just stick to your distro's 'ecosystem' and be done with it.

> Anyone figuring out the Linux/Laptop problem is re-inventing the Macbook Pro/OS X.

There are surely people doing just that, but I don't think that's the majority.

Linux with GNOME just 'clicks' better with my workflow, the system feels a lot snappier, the package manager is in charge of every update and systemd is powerful and easy to use, so I always have a very clear picture of the services running on my system and their health.

Additionally, my Linux laptop is aprox. 3x as powerful as the MBP for less money. The only thing I really wish my Linux laptop had was the MBP's superior build quality, but things like the XPS line are catching up fast, so there's hope...

The built-in apps aren't cluttering I don't think. If you don't use them, what's cluttering about them? I'd rather have them than not.

Things Mac OS is missing compared to Windows: - COM - Stealthy updates There may be more.

How can plaintext configs be confusing for a competent software engineer?

On Linux, you can make your OS work for you just the way you like it.

Good luck changing anything significant in Apple's walled garden

But currently, on the french layout, you can't even pipe things.

A Macbook dual booted with a normal keyboard would be my dream machine I think.

I agree Canonical should have first-party laptops and demand quality.

But Apple not having an open package management ecosystem, where people can manage/create their own repositories, kills it for me.

You can build a much more powerful computer and put OSX on it.

A lot of the other things you list are in direct conflict with thinner/lighter, and Apple's obsession with thinness is probably why you don't have them.

I feel like they could keep things the way they are, and offer an AOSP-like vanilla version for people who generally know what they're doing (Google does a pretty good job with limiting it).

I'd pay hundreds of dollars more for this software option (have previously considered hiring someone to do it in the past on a new PC, but I have had bad experiences with PC repair shops).

I bought my spouse a new PC and literally had to spend HOURS removing software and decoupling McAffee from Windows. An i5-based system was out of the box crippled while it downloaded updates and software from the Windows store that I didn't even want to begin with.

OSX is markedly better, but I don't need siri, icloud, chess, ilife, dvd player, photo booth... the list goes on.

Deciding on using Macs for your work is not only about the devices themselves -- you're buying into the whole Apple ecosystem. That's not something that's easy to change in a heartbeat according to which vendor currently has the best offering. And the more concerned you are about the future of Apples products for professionals, the more tempting it is to look long and hard at Windows or Linux, even if Apples current devices fill your requirements just fine.

Have you looked at what's on the market? There are many great displays out there now, all far better than Apple's offerings. Apple's displays were good for about a year before the competition surpassed them.

There is a third choice: Linux. I've been using it as my desktop for 18 years now, and it really is wonderful. With a tiling window manager (no GNOME, no KDE, just X11) the UI gets out of my way and lets me work.

Yeah, I do kinda sorta wish that there were lighter or prettier laptops around, but on Linux I can get work done: on macOS or Windows my productivity is severely hampered.

Look, I use Apple products all day, damn near every computing device I have is made by them. It's just astounding how they've let this languish. Very bad.

This is a thing many comments nowadays capitalise on. First, I'd rather read criticism than lodes, to see for myself if all the good in sth. is eliminated by criticism or not. Second, your statement is false, as there are as many positive comments as negative ones. If the negative ones are higher up, that means people upvote them, i.e. agree those negative comments, a right to which they're entitled.

I would have been willing to spend several thousand £ on a Mac Pro that met my needs, ended up having my needs met by a PC with a GTX 1080 that cost less than the baseline iMac and within 15 minutes of 3D rendering using CUDA and Octane render I asked myself why I didn't do this years ago and my wallet thanks me.

Now I don't really see the point in going back to Apple, feels like they've only just decided to care about pro users again and this was probably a decision that came out of a meeting where it was 50/50 if the line was killed or rebooted.

We have some big Linux advocates in our company, so I've also tried switching to Linux twice before going to OS X, a couple of years apart. The claim from them was always the same, Linux is ready for the Desktop. The problem is that it's been "ready for the desktop" for ten years. I can't imagine ever going to Linux over Mac OS.

I've still got my Macbook Pro, so we'll see how things develop, but I've already started the process of migrating away, and if we're looking at 2018 it'll be pretty far along by that time.

- I want to configure a laptop with a 1TB spinning hard disc, so that I get a lot of space without paying $3000. I can get such a Dell for $1500 with a UHD screen. I'd prioritise disk space over weight and battery life.

- I want to configure the Mac Mini with a 6TB spinning desktop hard disc, rather than a portable one, which is costlier and has limited capacity. To reduce footprint, make the machine vertical. I also want to be able to configure the Mac Mini to drive a 5k monitor via Thunderbolt 3, and 32GB memory. All of this should be upgradeable. It's a shame that the Mac Mini isn't. It doesn't even have the "thin and light" excuse laptops have.

None of this is sexy. It won't make tech reviewers go ooh and aah. It won't earn a place in the MoMA. But it will be more useful to customers.

One thing I didn't like about the Hackintosh was maintaining it during updates, having to wait for the right NVidia web drivers, and then remembering how to update all the stuff specifically.

What I did like was that I had a computer that I built for $1100 that scored about 16,000 on the Geekbench, without overclocking.

Note: I still use a Mac Book Air 11" because it's the best laptop I've owned. I think the trackpad and sleep/wake functionality that just works is the best ever, and makes it really convenient. Obviously, these two killer features for me matter a lot less on a desktop.

Second Note: I built mine with an aluminum Rosewill Legacy U3-S – Silver/Aluminum Case that was both compact, and really good-looking.

[Edit, updated type of computer cost from $110 -> $1100]

Really wish more PC component companies focus on high quality good looking components without the gamer branding.

After the critical reception of the new MacBook Pro range amongst the Apple community, especially pro users, everyone was questioning Apple's commitment to pro users, and the Mac as a whole.

I'm glad to see Apple doing this, but I can't help thinking this was totally reactive and pre-emptive damage control. If Apple had just released the Mac Pro speed bump, there would be even more of an outcry that Apple has given up on anything more than incremental changes.

The pessimist in me thinks that Apple simply had no idea that there was this sort of demand for pro Macs. Phil and Craig mentioned the iMac numerous times, as though to say "hey pros, there is a great Mac you can use", so they can still claim that they do make great, high-performance pro devices.

My guess is "next year" means "Holidays 2018", and my guess is that Apple has only recently started work on this. Apple hasn't been about modular design or expandability for a long time. With the rise in adoption of VR, there has been even more discussion about upgrading graphics cards (remember Oculus comments about the Mac?), and the age of the CPUs is another criticism. I just can't imagine Apple starting work on this some time ago.

Once you've spent five years transitioning to, say, a Windows setup, there's a significant additional cost to going with Apple, and it's not like Apple has felt like a deluxe experience lately.

But its like when you're on the freeway and see billboard for your favorite restaurant 40 miles away. It gives you the motivation to not settle for something else.

It might work.

As for a "top of the line" MBP, the 2016 15" is already the fastest MBP ever overall, even if you count the few benchmarks which put it slightly behind 2015 models in one or two metrics.

I had a HD4870 running strong until a couple months ago it died. I replaced it with a GT 640 I had on hand; it works fine. Your mileage may vary.

Not really, what are people supposed to do? Move their entire ecosystem to Windows?

Just because it sells doesn't mean it's a great product. Balmer's reign is testament to that so I'm getting pretty tired of (non-shareholder) people pointing at spreadsheet numbers to justify Tim Cook doing a good job.

I am absolutely curious as to what you're talking about because I have never seen this before, please correct me because I want to learn more.

Apple is talking about prosumers, not the rendering firms that need such massive GPU workloads. They'd be better off using server farms to render that much work. No one is going to work next to a noisy workstation with fans that has to disperse 2,000 watt worth of heat at full load.

Seemed more of a case that no one wants to actually code for OpenCL on AMD...

In other words, GRAM sizes, and max single card speed are the driving factors in GPU adoption. Which makes sense, because you only get the large increases in GPU speed if you can fit everything in memory, and throughput is not high enough yet to ignore the cost of copying data to GRAM.

This is a tacit admission that Pro users are increasingly _not_ concerned with RAM capacity or CPU speed, but with GPU power.

The other mistake made was their assumption that Thunderbolt would allow nearly unlimited peripheral expansion, which turned out to be a complete bust.

Neither of things is solvable without completely changing the dimensions/specs of the Pro.

I can see how photographers want faithful color reproduction with a wide gamut, good image consistency across the whole display, good resolution, and a decent size (maybe 32" tops?)

But AFAIK, monitors with those qualities are already available. The only thing I can think of that would make them better suited for professional work is to bring their prices down. (Because even pros have a budget.)

The Touch Bar seems like a pretty apparent failure in that even most of the "until death" apologists can't or won't defend it, but Apple's not going to give up this quickly. I think you'll get your wish, but not soon.

It's not like killing the current Mac Pro sales is exactly going to put Apple in trouble - they're raking in money from the iPhone and MacBook (Pro) lines.

This is a carefully thought out plan from Apple for sure, unlike Osborne's blunder.

It's a pro level desktop, size (within reason) constraints aren't really an issue.

I happen to use Windows today, because it runs the most apps that I want to run (in particular, some Steam stuff not available on Linux or Mac), but with the help of dual boot, I could just as easily be on Linux or Mac (all other things being equal, I'd prefer single booting).

Personally, I left Mac after a bad experience with the 2011 MBP and not liking the design direction of Apple hardware, but I still consider Apple hardware (for the most part) to be the gold standard in build quality. Macs may not suit my use case, but thankfully there are plenty of other fish in the sea.

> Apple’s research shows that 15 percent of all Mac users use at least one “pro” app frequently. These are apps for things like music creation, video editing, graphic design, and software development.

> Schiller, on Apple’s own pro apps: “I just want to reiterate our strong commitment there, as well. Both with Final Cut Pro 10 and Logic 10, there are teams on those software products that are completely dedicated to delivering great pro software to our customers.

As a few people have noticed (Recall Arment and possibly even Gruber pointing this out) for a while now almost all their Pro user footage used in advertising and announcements has either been photographers, directors or people sketching down ideas on iPad Pros.

Kinda seems to be ignoring the intersections of creativity and computing that the original Mac pioneered.

It's going to be an iPod, a Phone, AND an internet communications device

I installed Gimp for basic photo editing (cropping, basic toning), and it's really not too bad once you get used to it. I have a long history with Adobe products too.

But seriously, Apple has a history much closer to the opposite of that. Never admit fault. If something really isn't working, pretend that it is right up until a replacement is launched. Just like PowerPC to Intel. Just like the Mac Pro until today. Just like the Apple Watch and Touch Bar (admittedly these last two are a little more speculative on my part, but I think it'll happen).

Right now she uses Windows 7 Pro. We can't stay on it long-term because of security (and eventually driver) issues.

Migrating to Windows 10 (non-enterprise) isn't an option because the forced updates are an unacceptable risk to downtime, especially at certain points in her business calendar (e.g., highschool yearbook photo season).

We may end up migrating to a new Mac Pro, but it won't be because the hardware is awesome. Truth be told, it will likely be overkill for her needs, and definitely overpriced.

We'd migrate her business to a Mac Pro because OS X doesn't have Windows 10's problems, and because we can probably recover from a hardware failure quickly due to the system's expected modularity.

There's one number to call, and they'll repair any part of the machine up to and including swapping out the whole thing. Anyone buying a machine that expensive they really need would(and should) be looking at 24 hour turn around on site service anyways.

And the only way to really get that is to buy a whole prebuilt machine from $BIGCOMPANY

Then a Synology NAS for long term storage - also contains my entire iMovies library since gigabit is plenty fast for SD video.

Lots of different types of 'pro' user; there was mention in the post of xcode developers being either the largest market, or the largest growing one. As a developer who currently uses a 2014 MBP (mainly docked), I am very, very likely to be in the market for either a new iMac later this year, or a Mac Pro next year. I'm glad Apple is, finally, looking to address this issue.

He's mostly using it for video editing (4K/5K) and it screams along in Final Cut Pro X.

At the time of release, their asking price for the dual D700 system was less than the price of buying just the two equivalent FirePro W9000.

None of those things speak to a hemorrhaging segment of users whose needs are performance and expandability.

It's a show of strength for the modern era of Apple that they are willing to switch strategies when necessary.

But maybe it's just a matter of them realizing that they have to announce something because they know releasing when it's ready means next year... and last year was already late.

The company has changed in a lot of ways since 2011, some in a bad way, some in good. Times are changing too. Get on with it.

No, that's not what they said at all. They said the choice they made was dual GPUs because they thought that was the road everyone was going to take. That turned out to be incorrect and the cylinder suffered because of that decision. They weren't talking about field upgradability.

They did the licensing thing in the mid-90s. Mac clones were a thing.

To license macOS means to support infinite hardware variations, and to rely on OEMs not to suck. It is an impossible technical problem for a company whose whole ethos revolves around integration of h/w and s/w.

Windows is not inherently bad. But the premise of it working everywhere means some trade-offs are made. Same for Android.