Hacker News Reader

Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess. Why haven't they kept selling the cheese grater is beyond me.

They are spending a fortune to understand what Pros need, while we have been screaming for the better part of the decade: lots of user accessible RAM, storage, PCI & GPU. How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro? Teenagers can do it for peanuts, I'm sure the largest company in the freaking world could manage. If they were truly sorry or marginally “cared”, that's what they would have done years ago.

I'm fine with them playing the “let's reinvent the Pro computer” game as a side project, they have this massive amount of money burning a whole in their pockets after all, but some of us need to work.

View on HN

> What are Pros supposed to do in the mean time? Keep buying PCs I guess. > How much would it cost R&D to update the Mac Pro?

I hope/think that Apple is thinking that bringing back the cheese grater or in other word a PC running MacOS is not going to be enough to bring back the pro. They need to come back with something that has something unique.

The TrashCan failed but you can see where Apple was going. A small, silent, powerful machine infinitely customisable on the fly via TB.

So of course if failed and this attempt has a good chance to fail too. I'm not quite sure that Apple has in its DNA the deep understanding of the type of Pro that are not content with either the iMac Pro or MBP in the same fashion they get the consumer sphere. It is just that for a long period of time the intersection between the 2 world was large but are now diverging. Perfectly happy for me to be wrong though.

> I hope/think that Apple is thinking that bringing back the cheese grater or in other word a PC running MacOS is not going to be enough to bring back the pro.

Before they can think of "bringing back the pro", they need to stop the bleeding: pros who need to upgrade this year have no choice but to go PC. An upgraded cheese-grater would have been a good stop-gap while they go back to the drawing board on their 2019 product.

Certainly.

Right now I program Rails on an old 2012 MBPr. I want to get a faster machine. Possibilities:

1) Spend 5k on a iMac Pro. That's an absurd amount of money.

2) Get a new MBP limited by USB C, new keyboard, and the abominable Touchbar. That's a lot of money for a downgrade.

3) Get a decent specced iMac or Mac Mini. Most viable option.

4) Ditch Rails, start learning .NET, so I can go Windows 100% to build my own PC. I save money. I lose a lot of time.

5) Build PC, install Linux. Viable but might be a configuration nightmare. I just want to work.

6) Run Linux under Windows host as a VM. Second most viable option.

I'm pretty frustrated. Suggestions?

7) Build a Hackintosh

While I have a Hackintosh, I'm not sure I'd want to get one if it was my primary computer. Granted, I haven't had any problems with mine, but all it takes is an update from Apple to break or brick it. Native Macs don't have that issue.

Its also a legal risk to do any kind of billable work on a hackintosh.

It might be unethical, but the risk is zero. Apple isn't going to sue you. Running unlicensed Windows is a significantly bigger risk.

The risk is pretty real, see my other thread.

If you don't have a legal office declared for business activities to the regulators, then yeah it might be zero.

If you have a real Mac/Macbook and a Hackintosh it would probably be hard to prove which was used for the work.

Except if you happen to live in a country where goverment authorities are entitled to search your office for illegal software.

Then good luck in court.

I've had pretty good luck with Linux "just working" these days. That said, this is coming from the kind of guy who runs Arch Linux, so take that as you will.

System 76 sells machines with Linux pre-installed. I've had good luck with these (replacing the default Ubuntu with Arch of course).

But:

7) continue developing Rails using Windows 10 and the Windows Subsystem For Linux

Overall my experience with WSL has been great.

You can run ubuntu natively without a VM on windows 10. It works really well.

Also configuring Linux is not the beast that it was years ago. Even on laptops it is fairly straightforward.

I feel the pain here too. It feels like macbooks have stagnated the last 5 years. I am struggling to do java / microservices development on my MBP. I just don't have the RAM and cores to run a lot of server processes.

I wouldn't touch the current slate of MacBooks. I prefer the Dell 2-n-1s - either business line or bought from the Microsoft store to avoid the bloatware.

The only Macs worth buying now are the iMacs.

7) buy an XPS or precision. Install ubuntu or another linux on it, or buy one with it preinstalled.

I did this, bought an XPS and a precision. Both refurbed in sales/with coupons, great specs. Cost me ~500 less than retail. Both like new.

Sure I'd prefer a mac, but its over double the cost for similar specs. I could look past the touchbar and ports. But not the keyboard

8) buy a librem. I don't know how good they are, though

What's wrong with the iMac for development? $2500 for a quad core 3.44Ghz Core I5 with 32GB of RAM would make a nice development machine.

If you need more power for $2900 you can get a Core I7 4.2Ghz quad core with the same specs.

I'm not a Mac fanboy by any stretch of the imagination - I haven't bought a Mac in 12 years but I want to get away from Windows and don't want to futz with Linux. Getting an iMac would allow me to develop for iOS, Android, Windows, and give me a real Unix environment.

You can do .Net Core with a Mac. I am a Windows developer now, and will probably stick with .Net, but especially for hosted solutions, using Linux is a lot cheaper for deployment.

I agree that the iMac is a good choice, although it's a bit pricey for a stationary machine that shouldn't be constrained by power, size, or cooling. I am OK with paying a 100% markup for a well-designed laptop, however. Even with these objections I think that I will end up getting an iMac. Reluctantly.

> I'm pretty frustrated. Suggestions?

I suggest an upgraded 2009 Mac Pro.

The upgrades would include: flash to 5,1, 3.46 MHz Intel Hexcore proc, 32 GB RAM, SSD on a PMCIA card, and 5770 GPU. This should cost $1K USD or less, dual CPU (12 core) for a bit more. Mine Geekbenches at 3800 (S) and 17,800 (M).

I'm running one of these and it has been bulletproof and 100% hardware/software compatible.

That actually sounds fantastic. Can it drive a 4k display?

7) remote into a box in Azure or AWS when you need more power, still would be Lin or Win tho’

On 5, it's my home setup. SSH'ing to a local Linux box is fast and I'd already be using a terminal. I use it from both Linux and Macs and the only thing that bothers me a little is syncing the working directories. Most server grade boxes from Dell or Lenovo work with Linux perfectly and the tower ones are great workstations.

The iMac Pro is overspecced for Rails development. You can get a very decent Mac for much less. If you keep your work environment synced via iCloud or Dropbox, the problem of syncing I mentioned doesn't exist (I prefer the minor discomfort to syncing through a third party).

As for 6, get a Linux PC and run a Windows VM when you need it. It's better to have the decent OS host the crappy one than the other way around.

> They need to come back with something that has something unique.

Why?

> They need to come back with something that has something unique.

That would be MacOS itself. That's all they need to bring a huge number of Pros who bailed on the entire Apple ecosystem back into the fold.

Well yes, but macOs was also much less buggy and much more stable a few years ago than now. I miss the days of Snow Leopard which was rock stable.

But until they bring back that stability, macOs won't be sufficient an argument to bring back pros I think

The margins are too thin on a boring desktop PC. If they spec bump the cheese grater, that will cannibalize the ground-breaking new Mac Pro. Same reason why they won't put it out this year, they don't want to cut into the imac pro sales.

A crappy PC with a best-in-class 5K monitor can easily get more expensive than an iMac Pro.

They could at least spec bump the trash can. Thermal design issues aside, performance per watt has only gotten better for the design they already had, right?

They said they can't spec bump it. https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

> I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture. That that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.

Seems like a poor excuse. Just add in modern CPUs with the same TDP, and for the GPUs two Quadro 5000s (I think even the 6000 would work) have lower TDP than the FirePro D700s currently used.

To be more precise, according to Anandtech, their design wasn't able to cool 250W GPU in it. This significantly limit the GPU selection they had.

The biggest problem is how they didn't know this when they were designing it? And how they managed to find out in 2014 and didn't spoke a word until 2017. And now their answer is 2019.

Not to mention, as the OP suggest, they could have fitted Modern Intel CPU and 150W Vega GPU in it, and sell it for lower price.

Pros are supposed to buy an iMac Pro in the meantime, and then buy the modular Mac Pro Pro with all the pro trimmings - iPads for touch control, and such - when it all arrives next year.

It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro. It's entirely possible they won't, especially given Intel's security issues.

What that means for performance remains to be seen.

It's going to be interesting to see if they stick with Intel for the Pro.

Wouldn't the apps that the pro users dictate that to a large extent? If the truly "pro" apps don't get rebuilt against ARM then it would be like Apple never really released the Mac Pro if they ditch Intel so early into its return.

I think they meant go AMD Reyzen2 or more likely Eypc (or possibly Rome.)

Arm is not going to cut it in the dual Zeon workstation role

Aren't Apple developing their own CPUs?

They are supposedly not directly x86 compatible and thus will need to emulate it at a performance penalty. Not something you'd want in a "pro" machine.

I don't see that as the major problem. It seems like they could rely on third parties to have them ported in a matter of a few months.

I'm more doubtful of their ability to produce something sufficiently competitive.

Even if they were fast enough you would still want to launch those chips on less performance critical machines first and give the pro apps plenty of time to update before migrating the pro hardware.

Usually consumer software moves faster to adopt new tech stacks anyway. OS X supported x86-64 in v10.5 in 2007, but Photoshop didn’t go 64-bit on Mac until 2010 with CS5.

My best guess is that it’s because big pro applications have a mess of dependencies and some inner guts in the high performance code where it drops to assembly. Building that for alternate architectures isn’t as simple as checking a box in Xcode.

If going from almost a standing start to fabing chips that compete on par with intel was that easy some one else (elon musk or china) would have done it already.

I am sure major shareholders of apple will not want to bankroll a 7nm fab and the massive massive costs in producing a competitor to AMD and INTEL

Mate, AMD themselves are already fabless. Apple uses suppliers. Apple makes their mobile SoCs already. This is feasible.

I completely agree with that. Actually building pro-quality chips that compete with top end Intel chips is really hard and is likely more of a bottleneck than 3rd party software.

I really still have a lot of doubts about this idea that they will even try it. It doesn't seem that there is really anything in it for them in doing this.

Critical software or drivers may not be supported any longer. Source may not be available.

Rosetta 2: Stone Harder

No Intel != no x86. There's this one company that also makes x86 CPUs.

Steve would have unreasonably said get it shipped by June 2018.

And it would have shipped.

No, they're spending a fortune redefining what "Pro" means in order to make everyone feel like they're a pro and need pro hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com