Ars reviews the 12-core Mac Pro. Worth it for the intro image alone | Hacker News Reader

Ars reviews the 12-core Mac Pro. Worth it for the intro image alone

arstechnica.com

39 pointsquux32 comments

My "base" early 2008 mac pro is still fast enough that I havent felt a need to upgrade. It really is the first 5+ year PC that I think I have purchased... I think the expense can be justified in those terms...

I'll agree with you here. I bought my wife a Mac Pro the same time I built myself a PC. I paid about 1/3 for the PC and it feels really dated. Her Mac Pro, meanwhile, is still incredibly fast. It plays SC2 on max settings without slogging while my PC slogs on Medium (and enough Marines running around).

But you paid 1/3 for it... If you had paid the same for a PC, I can pretty much guarantee you'd be getting better performance on the PC. Mac's are nice, but gaming isn't their specialty.

That shows the perception between quality, though. So many people fight the fight with regard to price -- which I did, and failed. Now I have a PC which isn't really upgradeable because the CPU Socket (AM2+) and RAM-type (DDR2) are obsolete.

As far as I know, Phenom II processors are backwards compatible with AM2+ sockets [1]. And they work with DDR2 when in an AM2+ socket.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenom_II

True, the perception is probably more skewed than reality. For gaming, PC's are still definitely the way to go, but Mac's aren't quite as marked up as most people think. They do use quality parts.

Apostrophes indicate possession, not pluralization.

Why didn't you use an Intel platform, just as Apple does?

You got screwed on the PC, too. I bought parts for mine about the same time (March 08) for a total of about $600, and it plays SC2 on max detail with no issues at all.

You're probably right. I paid $800 in Nov '08.

Been a while since you re-installed Windows?

Same. In fact, I'm still rocking a Rev A Mac Pro (c. Aug 2006). Aside from adding a bunch more memory after market, the machine is incredibly capable to this day. I'm considering upgrading the video card in a few years, but I'm expecting to get at least 3 more years out of it before even considering upgrading to a new machine.

My "base" inspiron 640m bought in 2006 is still fast enough that I haven't felt the need to upgrade either. Displays 720p video, boots in 20 seconds, and I just purchased a replacement Inspiron 640m for 150$.

Who actually buys these? I was buying myself a new work machine last week, and wound up going for the 27" iMac since I really couldn't think of any possible justification for the Mac Pro.

The price gap is really quite significant, for what doesn't seem to be much of a gain in performance.

People who need to run OSX and need multiple cores and lots of RAM or support for hardware expansion cards. Think high-end RAID cards, graphics cards, specialized AV cards, etc.

If you don't know you need it, the Mac Pro was not built for you.

I bought one. This post by Marco Arment explains it better than me: http://www.marco.org/868606627

Well, the reviewer seems to be putting it to good use in his video production/3d effects job.

I bought one in 2008 because a Mac Pro with 30" ACD was my "dream machine" and I had the money. A bit like buying a stupidly overpriced dream car, I guess.

Turns out, I hardly used any of the power and now it sits unused (for the past year) and I'm more than happy with a more practical 27" iMac that actually fits in my lounge..

I bought the 2010 3.2 Quad for the following reasons:

* I can't stand glossy monitors they give me a headache. * All-in-one equipment is like writing a huge multipurpose function, one part breaks the whole thing is junk or very expensive to repair. * Expandability, I plan on having this machine for a while. * Lower priced after market components versus notebook sized components.

Fundamental reason: Apple doesn't release old, bottom of the barrel, price compromised junk.

Go find a laptop that compares, feature to feature, with a MacBook Pro. Once you're totally frustrated at being unable to find IPS displays, firewire 800, optical digital out, and the same weight target, I can guarantee that the comparable models will be about the same price points.

That said, if all you want to do is play SC2 on a cheap 18 bit display and don't need the features mentioned above, go for it.

That all said, Apple could and should put better GPU's and pay more attention to game developers than they currently do.

MBPs are TN film, not IPS. Their color gamut is pretty pedestrian, certainly pales in comparison to my ThinkPad T510. Their panels are low-DPI too, which makes text much harder to read (you should see Linux/Freetype on 15" Full HD - blows my mind every day).

MBPs don't have a trackpoint in the middle of the keyboard, hence are not typist-friendly, they are not nearly as rugged (flaky lids), their screens also don't even open at 180 degree angle and MBPs don't have mouse buttons under your thumbs. They also run twice as hot (and loud) than Thinkpads. Shall I keep going? I can: the keyboard is crippled and not waterproof, hard drive is not easily swappable and Apple uses cheap fans that get quite noisy after a couple of years.

The bottom line: fanboyism is silly.

To be fair, the MBP high resolution option isn't exactly low-DPI. It's lower than FHD on a T510, but not by much.

MBPs also have battery life I wish I could get out of my T400. Sitting through an afternoon of lectures, I would have to crank my screen all the way down to get through with my 6 cell, while my neighbours with their MBPs could happily cruise their with their screens nice and bright.

Still love my T400. (And I'll admit, sometimes I wish I didn't have those mouse buttons right under the space bar. Sometimes having a giant trackpad is sooo nice)

> Fundamental reason: Apple doesn't release old, bottom of the barrel, price compromised junk.

I'm not so sure you can make this sweeping claim with the state of their GPU choices. I compared the MacBook Pro to the HP Envy when it was possibly the worst time to buy it[1] as well as the best time to possibly buy it[2], and both times the MacBook Pro had a graphics card that was shamefully outdated.

Not only did they sell more-than-two-year-old hardware, they charged the same price for it as the hardware refresh they sold the next day.

Before the refresh the MacBook Pro had a 2-year old video chipset. Even now, the Pro's video card cannot do better than DirectX/OpenGL 10.1/2.1. They still use the tagline "Next-generation NVIDIA graphics" on their page, which seems a little misleading.

Also, what MacBook Pro has an IPS display? I couldn't find any version with one.

They do have an excellent range of ports, though.

[1] http://simonsarris.com/blog/19-mac-envy

[2] http://simonsarris.com/blog/22-mac-envy-2

The GPU capabilities are gated by Apple's software, it seems. The windows drivers for the same card are quite happy with OpenGL 3.2 or thereabouts.

I'd bet that the lack of internal use of fancier GPU features and a push towards using OpenCL all over has influenced both the choice of GPU and the roadmap for exposing hardware capabilities greatly. How much of the delay in supporting the latest greatest features is a reluctance to support multiple codepaths for vendor extensions to OpenGL and how much is a lack of manpower is an interesting question, I think.

If we ignore the fact that you are wrong about macs having IPS screens, assume that a USB 3 is a reasonable substitute for a firewire 800 port and that 500g more is within the same weight target, then finding a cheaper laptop that compares favourably, spec wise, to the MacBook Pro is no problem at all. Took me about 30 seconds. You even get 1920x1080 resolution.

Now I'm no anti-mac zealot and will happily accept that the MBP almost certainly has better battery life, certain is much better looking and better designed and may even have better build quality. I'll even admit that if I where looking for a new high end 15-17" laptop I'd probably pay the necessary premium to get an MBP. But the bottom line is that on a simple spec sheet comparison Apple will almost always lose out on price.

> Fundamental reason: Apple doesn't release old, bottom of the barrel, price compromised junk.

I've always thought that this was a marketing thing. If you look around, you can find all sorts of crappy computers designed to run Windows, but every Apple computer you see is going to be powerful and shiny enough to never leave you with a bad experience.

Right now, I'd like a bottom-of-the-barrel laptop that does nothing but ssh somewhere else, so while I can deal without nice displays and ports, but I'm definitely in the minority.

Why do you think Mac laptops have IPS displays? They have TN screens - always has been.

Thinkpads are one of the few laptop brands that had IPS displays in their lineup in the past.

Apple doesn't release old, bottom of the barrel, price compromised junk.

I don't know what you're replying to, but the hypothetical i7 xMac that people have been clamoring for is none of those things.

"Fundamental reason: Apple doesn't release old, bottom of the barrel, price compromised junk."

The standard graphics cards on Mac Pros were kinda wimpy until recently (GeForce 120).

While I love the reviews, I just wanted to point this awesome page out, it's my go-to page soon after a new Mac's release:

http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/

Credit to John Siracusa for the title of this post.

The intro image alone was not worth it.

Please don't copy linkbait.

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