Apple iMac Pro goes on sale December 14th
engadget.com
engadget.com
I keep hearing this story from every creative professional I know. (2 digital artists, 1 painter, 2 video editors)
I've got a beast of a rig that has been flawless. Easy upgrades (though you do have to wait a few days), handoff, continuity, thunderbolt all working 100%.
The only downtime I've had is restarts due to security updates.
Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.
I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.
> I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.
The lock-in to Apple products should also be considered as a large blocker.
The hardest obstacle for me was sourcing some parts because they weren't available here in Vietnam. I had to fly to Singapore for most of it. Ironically, it was cheaper to do that for the parts I could get here, so everything worked out in the end.
Can you guarantee that ? Who is responsible if an upgrade doesn't work or bricks your machine ?
Information on changes for updates come quickly, and it's pretty standard practice to clone your boot drive before major updates.
In a worst-case scenario, you just stay on a version of macOS until it makes more sense to use that same hardware for a Windows/whatever OS change.
Also, at this point, the things that would brick you in the past are no longer applicable with a modern hackintosh.
That may be fine for a home user, but if my livelyhood was dependent on this machine I'd rather buy something less hacked together and with actual support options.
This is not about wether or not it will actually work, it's about liability.
If this machine bites the dust, I swap out the part or I restore from Time Machine. At least with this machine, I have the option of swapping out the part.
It's not some mystical black box. These are standard PC parts that are supported by macOS. I think I only use two kexts that aren't shipped with macOS to get to 100%.
My 10.13 computer is my main one and was on 10.11 before when I upgraded only because I did a clean install right before the newest release. Don't remember noticing any changes.
I'm a huge Apple user but don't keep up with OS changes since they are so minor. This really isn't an issue. And if it's for business then the apps that are trendy and only for newer versions won't matter either.
Other friends in video / photo are still using mac laptops. I never saw any of them pull the trigger on the mac pros personally...
Look how far the other display manufactures have came, too. I don't know if we have Apple to thank but there are some _really_ nice monitors around now that aren't coming from Apple. Maybe it was just the bubble I was in but in ~2005~2007 I don't remember anyone having anything that could compete with Apple's displays for the price.
I think your brother is probably going to get a LOT more for his money going to PC...
I'm in the same boat, as it turns out. I switched from macOS to Windows for post-processing this summer, but I still have my Macbook for image capture and driving a telescope in the field.
The hardware you can get is quite amazing (this is what I built https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/b/6FXPxr). Everything works and it's rock solid, it's also very quiet (something a lot PC users aren't so concerned about).
Windows however I'm finding a lot harder to get on with. Windows 4K support is awful. So many broken and blurry dialogs and applications (including Microsoft ones). Retina, on the Mac, just works.
I missed the Windows 8 disaster, however it appears some of it has spilt over Windows 10.
Seems you can't have the hardware you want and the OS you want, you have to pick one or the other.
Edit: Also, that's a rad build!
Steam is totally broken, not to mention the games. I got QuakeLive (best bit about being back on Windows). Quake was all broken (rendered at twice the DPI), I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).
I could go on.
Not doubting you, but I just opened it and it's not blurry on my 4k monitor. To be clear, I hit Start, typed Services and pressed ENTER when I saw the Services desktop app. (Another way to open it would be to hit Win+R and type: services.msc)
> I have an ongoing battle with IntelliJ and PyCharm, fonts are all broken.
Sounds like a JetBrains problem. What's broken with them anyway?
> I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).
That's called learning how to use a new OS. Also, I can't imagine that you have more complaints about games on Windows than you would on a Mac where there hardly are any games to begin with, are only half-supported or in perma-beta.
As a Mac and Windows user of over 20 years, I feel that Windows is generally more flexible; you can make it do exactly what you want way more often than with the Macintosh OS. Things are simpler on the Mac, but that comes at the price of inflexibility.
I take your point about flexibility and you're 100% correct on the gaming aspect.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/transcript-phil-schiller-c...
I'm also using a PC as media center and gaming system and I envy what €3000 will buy me in PC world. More importantly, it'll be a machine I can selectively upgrade at any point, unlike the iMac. I'm just not sure if the price justifies using Windows, which I kind of tolerate, but really am not fond of.
Apple might have had an edge back in the day thanks to QuickTime, but Premier, After Effects, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, all these things are basically equivalent across platforms.
Except for the fact that on Windows they can run faster on cheaper hardware.
When I did 3D (3D Studio DOS, long time ago) I had a couple beefy rendering slaves. My desktop was not even the fastest machine on the group - it just happened to have a better graphics card (a Matrox one IIRC).
If I had to do it now, I'd have an iMac on my desk (because the screen is so incredibly awesome) and a bunch of Dells (or custom built) boxes on a rack at the other end of a fat pipe).
There are external GPU docks, but if I'm paying $3000-$5000 for a computer I'd rather it just have 3-4 PCIe slots.
Things could be different if you didn't need the screen (I need the pixel count, but not so much the density and color precision, for instance) and would prefer the cash to be invested in memory (32 is enough for me now, but I'd get 64 or 128 for a machine that has to be usable 5 years from now).
I'll also point out that the iMac used to be able to be plugged in as a display (target display mode), but the iMac Pro isn't listed on the compatible models page. For whatever reason, they dropped that feature after the 2014 models and decided not to reintroduce it.
Once you're no longer using it as your primary workstation, that gorgeous 5K panel is going up on Ebay or wherever along with the rest of the computer. If you want to spend your money efficiently, I have a hard time believing that's a better deal than a workstation and monitor from Dell or similar.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/06/15/2017-4k-5k-imacs-w...
That's a fair point. With this machine you are committed to a certain performance over a long period before you commit yourself to the next machine. With a modular design, you can change the asset in smaller increments, at the cost of having an upgrade process to manage.
I do make incremental upgrades on my personal desktop though (mostly gaming). The last rebuild was triggered by some failed parts, so I ended up doing a new motherboard and processor and switching to DDR4, but I still have the GPU, screen, SSDs, and some other miscellaneous components. If I'd had an out of warranty failure on an iMac Pro motherboard I wouldn't have been able to salvage those. Or perhaps knowing that giving up the computer means losing the screen along with everything else, I'd have just shelled out a couple of thousand dollars on repairs.
I was a pretty early adopter of 4K screens and I'm still using the same one more than three years later.
Yes, seriously
With all the cloud offerings available, this is very fucked up. I can pretty summon a Top 500 cluster in minutes and can't use it to render my 30-second spot in 8K HDR for downscaling into broadcast...
That's an interesting idea. I loved my imac for portability while travelling to a "fixed location". I still have my iMac from 2011 with the box and foam it came in and with the carrying handle it makes it super easy to securely pack up and move.
I was about to comment that this really is too litte, too late, for too much money IMO but the idea of a large screen portable might actually have an audience.
What I've seen from my friends working in media is that they would never buy something like this. They know enough about the hardware they need that they wouldn't buy an all-in-one desktop when they can snag a laptop and if they need the render horsepower mac / radeon might not be their first choice.
I'm curious to see how this pans out... can't see it having much of a market appeal at the current hardware / price point unless I'm just under a rock and out of touch with what people are doing these days with $5k to burn on compute resources.
You don't need a lot of processing power in the grand scheme of things, you just need something that the photographer, AD and client can use to make decisions without incurring the cost of a potential reshoot. The grunt work of post-processing is done elsewhere and elsewhen - that's much to costly to do on location - but you do need a "close enough" representation of final colour and contrast, along with focus checking, page overlays and that sort of thing.
Isn't this why a lot of professionals turned to brands like Dell years ago?
A top of the line 27-inch Mac with VESA mount adapter currently costs $2,339.00. That's just shy of a $3,000 price point I would expect a proper Mac Pro, not an iMac Pro, to sit at.
You can't build a Dell to match that, even if you rip Windows out and install Linux or a BSD.
Of course you can't build a Dell to match that. The point is this is less of a computer for the longevity that the Mid 2012 Mac Pro originally priced at $2,499 provided. (Guess what, the Apple Thunderbolt Display then was also priced at only $999.) Why in the hell would I pay twice that, for a computer I can't use for twice the lifespan? There are _still_ people selling their Mid 2012 Mac Pros for a large fraction of the original price.
But, no you're right, it's totally acceptable that Apple's only VR-capable machine is $5,000 to produce VR content that no one on the Mac platform can use.
Genius.
Provided you don't go for the lowest spec one, it's probably more than enough to cover most needs of most power users for the next 5 years or so. Even if you go for the low-spec one, it'll be fairly decent 5 years from now just like my aging MacBook Pro is.
Re: Price - when I saw the Iphone priced at $1k, I thought it was very expensive but they still sold like hot cakes.
I've met a couple of Data Grips before (the guys who manage all the digital files on set). First, these guys are hired on contract and they usually need to have some of their own equipment. And second, they all use macbook pros... and stacks upon stacks of hard drives. The macbook is their personal computer that they use for all their jobs and carry around in backpack. The hard drive arrays are owned by the production company and are kept in sturdy boxes on wheels so they can be moved around the set easily and locked up at night.
It's a joke to think that data grips are going to buy a desktop computer and lug it around everywhere. You don't do any editing on set, just store the video and edit it in the shop. The on set computers are just throughputs to the hard drive arrays. Even in the shop, the rendering isn't done on the computers you do the editing on. The production company probably doesn't even do the final rendering, they'll just ship off the uncompressed files to a post-production company to handle all that.
It's going to end as well as last time they did that.
If you live in Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator, with the new subscription service that Adobe has for their apps, the switching cost is almost nothing (your time costs you of course).
Capture One is very good on Windows, 4k works fine, etc.
Cheaper and more powerful, also you can replace parts as they break and mine Ethereum 24/7 when PC is not in use.
I think 3D artists prefer windows (I know c4d and maya work on apple, I wonder if Houdini works on apple)
The 3D shops I used to work at (Pixar, Weta) both used Linux, actually. Houdini does work on macOS, but the super outdated OpenGL drivers were a major problem.
Apple's problem is that for 3D art you need a current, beefy graphics card with good drivers. Apple only supports up to OpenGL 4.1 (an old version) and recommends using Metal for fast 3D graphics (which is used nowhere else). Under Windows Direct3D 11.x (for legacy purposes), Direct3D 12, current OpenGL versions and Vulkan is supported by the drivers of current GPUs (why do I mention DirectX, even though it is proprietary to Microsoft? Because in the past the driver quality was much better for DirectX than for OpenGL).
With Vulkan support available under GNU/Linux I can imagine that in the future the situation will also improve under GNU/Linux (where in the past the quality of the OpenGL implementations was even worse than under Windows). But I see no plans of Apple on how they plan to improve the situation under OS X.