Do scientists use OSX much? Just asking. OTOH a fully-packed graphical / video / audio workstation could be well-received.
I just don't think Apple want users to tinker with their machines at all. Fewer configurations = fewer support calls.
I just don't think Apple want users to tinker with their machines at all. Fewer configurations = fewer support calls.
In my ~20 years on the job in various places, OSX really changed everything; labs used to have a few Macs around for non-analytic tasks where the old MacOS was just easier. Post OSX, it's nearly all Macs unless it ships with an instrument of some kind (and then it's likely Windows). The analytic tool chain is/was massively unix based, so adapting to OSX was easy and came with a very nice GUI that also did the aforementioned easy non-analytic tasks.
The AltiVec (“Velocity Engine”) present in G4 and even more so in 64-bit G5 machines was discovered to be extraordinarily efficient at performing the calculations required for the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (commonly known as BLAST). At the time, the G4/G5 architectures had a massive lead on other chips present on the market at the time (i80x86-derived machines such as Pentium III, Pentium 4, and Pendium M; but also other exotic architectures such as MIPS, SPARC, and DEC’s Alpha.
Eventually other architectures caught up by adding vector units or vector instructions of their own, and Apple stripped any basis of fact out of this when they switched to Intel, but by a form of institutional inertia, Macs still rule in the genetics segment.
Today, Mac usage is declining. The cost:value isn't there and they don't manufacture any high-end kit. Given how much PC you can buy for the same price as a MacBook, like a 32- or 64-core Threadripper or EPYC with a massive GPU which blows any available Apple hardware away, it's not hard to see why. For computational biology, running Linux on it gives you a much more capable and productive system, and even Windows 10 with the Linux subsystem is perfectly adequate. Apple's mistake has been to focus upon only profitable consumer product lines, and drop the ball entirely on the high end. They didn't sell as many high-end units, but they were the driver for Mac adoption in many places, and without that Mac usage will continue to decline. A mediocre laptop isn't good for a lot of scientific uses.
Yeah, what idiots.
- Personal computer: MacBook Pro (Linux on Thinkpad or XPS 13 runners up)
- Lab workstations: Linux on Dell
- Compute server: Racks of Linux on Dell / Generic box of NVIDIA GPUs / Amazon ECC
Also: trackpad. Apple's is the best by a mile.
And the way Apple has diverged from a more traditional UNIX like Linux is a big problem if you are developing to run on Linux as it adds a whole new set of risks.
Why is it not reality?
More like Sun in those days (or maybe SGI or IBM rs6000, possibly HPUX though it was more for business) depending on whatever proprietary things you wanted to run.. but really Sun.
from there: linux PC's until OsX, then a mix of both.