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Comment by VelNZ | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what a torrent of negativity on this thread, I didn't see a single positive comment reading through the top level.

This is excellent news, I'm chugging along on a 2010 Mac Pro and was very disappointed when the Apple Displays were cancelled last year. They are a staple of the lineup and always look gorgeous compared to what's on the market. I will definitely be buying the new Mac Pro and 2 displays to go with it. There is absolutely no way I will ever use Windows and having to downscale to an iMac or, worse, a MacBook Pro, when my Mac Pro is finally too old was filling me with dread. By the sounds of things, they are working on making it modular and expandable, also very good news as I like to keep my workhorse computer for a long time.

Overall very excited to see what Apple announce next year!

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Much as I am keen to see the Mac Pro replacement, It's not unnecessarily negative to point out the absurdity of the fact that in December, 2017, Apple will be selling, at a premium price point, no less, an _Ivy Bridge_ processor. And charging _twelve hundred_ dollars for 48GB of memory.

How do you know it's an Ivy Bridge? They don't like the version of CPU in the upgrade and Haswell would fit in the tdp.

The current one is Ivy Bridge. I don't see a minor speed bump prior to a major revision including updating their custom motherboard design from LGA 1155 to LGA 1150. Especially considering their neglect thus far.

Yep, great news indeed! For me, not regarding the Mac Pro especially, but that Apple is concerned about pro users, and that they are willing to talk about future plans.

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.

> ... and was very disappointed when the Apple Displays were cancelled last year. They are a staple of the lineup and always look gorgeous compared to what's on the market.

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.

I think the parent post was referring to the design of Apple displays, not their display quality ...

The "you can only tilt" design that forces you to put them on boxes merely to change height? ;-)

No, I don't think that was the aspect of the design he was referring to.

> There is absolutely no way I will ever use Windows and having to downscale to an iMac or, worse, a MacBook Pro, when my Mac Pro is finally too old was filling me with dread.

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.

Yep, that's where I'd go if forced to. I've seen some pretty nice screenshots from the newest window managers of late. I value design and ease of use quite a bit though and the number of complaints about things not working or tools not being as good (think Adobe CS) on Linux puts me off.

You could always spin it up in a VM to get a general sense of the UI and software compatibility. :-)

A modern Fedora/Arch system is indeed very pretty and usable and if you pick decent hardware, (i.e. not the trash from BestBuy, spend a similar amount as you would on a Mac Pro, if you expect equivalent results), you won't generally have problems.

I'm sorry but you should be at the very least impatient with them, as a customer. This thing doesn't even come out until 2018 and you're using the 2010.

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. We have still 8 months left. How hard can it be to design a tower? I guess Apple is having some interesting trick in their sleeve, but come on, how long could it take? Just throw a few more engineers on it!

The trash can was a neat design. The problem was is that Apple came up a design that was wrong for the market that wants a Mac Pro. This is a market that wants to upgrade and expand their computers. They want to add some of the largest capacity hard drives they can find. They'll put in an expansion card or two. The GPU that would be fine for me until I bought a new computer, they'll want to replace it next year.

I don't think the tower will be that hard to design. I think the issue will be in making a new motherboard. Or do you think, they'll just use one of Intel's designs?

The whole PC industry is slowing down. I have a gaming rig built around a 2600K, a chip from 2011, and it's perfectly adequate. There's no urgent reason to upgrade to a newer chip like the 7700K just to get a maybe 50% speed boost. The only reason I'm even considering it is because of wanting to bump to a 1080 for VR.

The days of performance doubling every 18 months are completely over. Now it's more about power efficiency and more cores rather than peak single-thread performance.

Excellent news indeed. I was well underway of compiling a hackintosh components list, dreading building a possibly less stable system. I'm really curious at what price points these new macs are going to end up, and if multiple cpu/gpu vendors are supported. (nVidia/AMD)

I remember building a hackintosh about 6 years ago, has much changed since then? It was a lot of fun and a lot more challenging than a regular Windows PC build.

It's dead easy now, the biggest issue might be the sound or gpu depending of your hardware

Hmmh. If you are getting along now with a 2010 Mac Pro you would probably do just fine with a 2017 Macbook Pro.

You can build a hackintosh for half the price, only the laptops are relevantish.

> Wow, what a torrent of negativity on this thread, I didn't see a single positive comment reading through the top level.

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.

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