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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

I'm a programmer and so buy middle of the line macbook pros with mid range CPUs, mid range RAM, and integrated GPUS. Ironically, my wife, a designer, always chastises me for getting such slow hardware: turns out what works for a programmer doesn't work for soemone who has to use a lot of Adobe CSS :). I assume this iMac pro would be for her, not for me.

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I'm a programmer and I tend to buy the thing with the largest numbers. I justify it by admitting to myself that I am only buying it because it has the largest numbers, and that it will last me longer, thus causing less pollution. But really it is just because of the numbers.

I do this too. You'll never have buyers' remorse if you buy the one with the largest numbers, nor will you ever run out of disk space.

I tend to squeeze every penny and I have a bit of buyer's remorse for buying a refurbished MacBook 2015 with the smallest storage: 128 GB.

Everything else is great, but I'm constantly finding myself in situations where I am about to install Docker, or go-lang, or something I am experimenting with and eventually come to the conclusion...not worth it to install.

Should I fire up Garage Band? Nope, I probably will use it twice and then it will sit there taking up disk space.

I'm trying to take advantage of more "cloud" solutions but they're not the same :(

You can replace the ssd on that MacBook. It won’t be cheap, but storage that fast isn’t anyways. I have the 1tb ssd from a MacBook in my windows desktop

It won't be the same tho. The system doesn't detect it as a 'native' disc.

Do you have instructions on where to buy and how to install? Thanks!

When nVidia's model numbers rolled over, I had a true moment of panic. Didn't know what to do with myself anymore.

That makes sense to me... I do some side work which involves media assets and that’s where my current machine is slow. I only “slice and dice” the completed assets in order to add them to the app so it’s not really a problem.

But if I were working with that stuff all day, I’d want as much power as I could get.

But as a programmer, my biggest and by far most frequent bottleneck is when my computer is idle and I’m sitting motionless, thinking about what the best thing I ought to type next is.

I'm researching how to get more of that thinking augmented by the computer, since with the programming tools that we have today, much of what we do still happens in our heads. If our programming experience were much richer, we'd probably start clamoring for more advanced hardware to go with it.

As a programmer I'm reading this while waiting for a 4 minute Swift compile on a MacBook Pro

Is a fully specceed Macbook Pro / iMac really not enough for her? This thing looks way too overpowered

Never underestimate the ability of Adobe to make a computer feel slow. I'm a user and fan of their Premiere and Illustrator products, but I believe they need to invest a lot more energy into: 1 - making their stuff crash less often! and 2 - optimizing some of the unreasonably slow features. In a way, ever more powerful computers like this have enabled Adobe to stay lazy.

But it is what it is, and at the end of the day an extra $1500 to not hate life every time you try to pan around in a piece of art is worth it.

I do some video editing to make goofy videos for friends

On a whim I tried out the latest version of Adobe Premiere (I normally just use Sony Vegas, or "Vegas Pro" as it's now called)

On an i7-4790 with 16 gigs of memory, a GTX 970 and an SSD, Vegas loads in roughly 5-6 seconds

Premiere took roughly a minute, and rendered the entire system unusable while it loaded! after loading, just sitting at an empty main screen, it was consuming a monstrous 8GB of memory all by itself

Vegas by contrast, even when I shovel Blu Ray videos into it, barely peaks above 1.5GB, and I'm able to multi-task even while rendering

who needs to write more efficient software when hardware manufacturers ensure your slow code automatically gets faster year after year?

oh and when you've already cornered the market and become an industry standard

She always wants more power. I tried to get her to divide her giant Illustrator files into smaller ones, but I haven't been successful so far. But ya, we aren't getting this, too expensive :).

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