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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

The big issue with older mac pros is for how long is it able to install the latest versions of MacOS?

There are ways around the official support drop as well, I run macOS mojave fine with a Mac Pro 3,1. These original cheese grater macs are truly still the best desktop tower they'll ever make at this point. It'd be fun to trick one out with a 3rd gen threadripper, which is probably faster than the 28-core rumored $35,000 mac pro.

Here's the patcher: http://dosdude1.com/mojave/

There are caveats, but I've found it to work well. Of course it's totally unsupported so here be dragons, etc.

I get where you're coming from but the whole point of getting a Mac is "it just works". I just don't have the time to deal with a Hackintosh. Also from past experience, there's a reason why they sunset older machines. At some point the OS updates are just no longer compatible with the old hardware. The Mojave patch notes that you linked further confirms this.

Another issue is that Windows 10 is now at the point of working decently and it has Ubuntu baked in. Apple also has iCloud sync software for it. I will miss Mac Apps, but given economics, most people just crank out electron apps anyways.

I give up on Apple computers. imo There's no viable option for iPhone or iPad though, so I'll still will be with Apple on some level.

I'm not sure if you can say Macs just work anymore, and obviously this is the realm of people who like to tinker or make things work for the sake of the process. If only there was a word for it... Oh wait I think it's up up next to that Y up there :)

The old hardware is pretty well supported in the Mac Pro because of how modular it remains. The majority of the incompatibility comes from not having a GPU that works with Metal. Those patch notes are mostly for devices with soldered components, like the GPU.

They don't just work any more; I have an older cheese grater mac pro; and new video cards for it are a dismal lottery. You could say this is why a modular Mac is a bad idea. My Apple MAC SE; still just works; it runs Word 5; which is all it ever did.

macOS 10.15 drops support for the MacPro5,1 (and for no other Macs).

dang. that is a bummer. i picked up a MacPro5,1 from a govdeals auction and it is a pretty nice computer. it even runs dark mode in OSX Mojave. guess it's days are numbered =(

i do have to say though, the single core performance of my MacPro5,1 is pretty abysmal. even with similar clock speeds, my 2015 mac mini is 50% faster in single core performance.

Which cpu model do you have in the MacPro5,1?

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz quad core, dual cpu. so 8 cores total. multi-core performance is great!

we use it as a Unity build box and it functions great since we're normally doing multiple builds at a time, and image compression & shader compilation are multi-threaded. but it's definitely slower if you are just doing 1 build at a time.

sucks that in 2 years when Apple starts requiring the latest Xcode for iOS build submissions we will have to retire this guy =(

As an upgrade thought, that box should be able to handle dual X5675's, which are fairly cheap on Ebay.

There's a very noticeable performance improvement from (eg) the E5645's, let alone the E5620's.

Saying that as I used to use a self build box (Supermicro motherboard) with dual E5645's as my desktop, but it always "felt" a bit slow. :/

Had the opportunity to upgrade to X5675's, and now it "feels" fine interactively due to the higher base and boost clock.

The highest model, X5690's, from all reports are literally no faster in use than the X5675's (maybe thermal throttling?). So not worth the extra spend. ;)

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