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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Still don't understand the justification for this machine, I waited years for a MacPro but when it became clear that Apple actually considered it a dead product and behind the scenes were building the iMac Pro to fill the niche I switched to windows and now run a dual 1080Ti workstation (Uses CUDA for 3D rendering path-tracing) for around half the price of a iMac Pro.

Apple bloggers said time and time again the reason they were not making a tower was that there isn't really a market for one anymore, yet when they finally made it they decided to build something that only really serves the highest of high end video editors.

Completely ignoring 3D, mid range video editors, developers who need high core counts + ECC, deep learning, etc.

Before they made it we kept being told "There isn't enough of you to justify them making it"

They finally make it and the narrative turns into "It's not for you it's for people who edit Marvel movies"

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Apple didn’t say those things - like you said, bloggers, critics, people whose interest is in making you read about Apple and continue clicking on articles, they made up all these different reasons why Apple would or wouldn’t make a tower.

I don’t really think Apple cares about that drama. I think they know they have customers who will pay the premium. I think the machine is squarely aimed at businesses making the purchase, not consumers.

Is it really a problem that the Mac Pro is only for ultra high end users? Apple hasn’t made a mid-range consumer tower in over a decade now. If you walk into Best Buy how many towers you think they’re selling compared to laptops?

That’s the market Apple sells in, not the low-margin custom built PC parts market.

Apple doesn’t cover every use case of the personal computer. They are just one OEM. Unfortunately if you like macOS they are the only OEM.

As far as the mid-range video market that you talk about, what about the iMac Pro (has ECC memory) or a high spec iMac is insufficient for that task? Sure, it’s not as nice as your dual 1080Ti setup, but also, NVidia isn’t actually a viable option for Apple anymore thanks to their disastrous support for the platform in the past. If you made a Hackintosh system with NVidia you’d still be SOL. You aren’t getting CUDA on Mac no matter what hardware configuration Apple comes out with. Is Metal supposed to cover that use case and compete with CUDA?

Find me a comparable computer that:

- Ships with anything other than Windows (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc)

- Has a corporate warranty

You'll quickly find that Apple has this market cornered. To many people, you're not paying the extra money for the goodness of Apple. You're paying to avoid the badness of Windows. There's also some software that works on Macs, but not Linux machines that may be necessary for the job.

"Find me a comparable computer that:

- Ships with anything other than Windows (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc)

- Has a corporate warranty"

Support for mac-only software notwithstanding, Dell's workstations officially support RHEL, have Nvidia GPUs for CUDA workloads, and come with up to five years warranty with on-site service. You can probably find comparable HP Z-series workstations too.

>-Has a corporate warranty

Has Apple finally started to offer one comparable to the Big Three? (SLAs, Onsite service with guaranteed reaction times and HW replacements and so on) Serious question - this was actually a big argument against Pro Apple workstations in the past.

>-Ships with anything other than Windows

Well, you won't get macOS of course, but all big workstation manufacturers sell workstations with Linux preinstalled. It's really nothing unusual and hasn't been for quite some time.

In at least some cases, yes.

https://support.apple.com/applecare-enterprise-service

I do not know what the criteria are to be able to get on that program, though.

Huh, consider me (cautiously) impressed. (And slightly ashamed, since I completely failed to find this information before writing my post. :) )

At least at first glance, it seems they have learned their lesson in this area.

Not really comparable if it's only US and Canada.

Dell will ship you a dual socket workstation with either RedHat or Ubuntu, even better is you can get it with an Nvidia GPU.

Apple’s warranty service is terrible compared to the alternatives like Dell. A couple years ago I had a failed key on a laptop with a service warranty. Dell had a tech in my living room with the repair parts in less than 24 hours.

Apple could not possibly do that today. Maybe you don’t need it, but if you care about warranty service Apple is not the answer

https://support.apple.com/applecare-enterprise-service

> You’re not paying the goodness of Apple > You’re paying to avoid the badness of Windows

Are you telling me there is a market of an intermediate OS? Because I would be ready to pay about $250/year/user for a Linux that is as good as Mac, but with cheaper and more maintainable gear than the iMac. It’s almost as if Apple were trying to tell us there’s an intermediate market up for grabs, but they’re still to close to it for any incumbent to try their luck. Canonical was close to it, but stuck to the wrong business model and decided to switch to Unity in 2013 instead of stabilizing Ubuntu. Product roadmaps are hard. Jony Ive is available, just saying ;)

Apple service is atrocious. Don't they make you book an appointment and turn up at their store just to get someone to look at it? I hear of people who spend more time taking their laptops to the local Apple store than most people with major illnesses spend going to the doctor...

I bought a Dell XPS13 laptop recently which unfortunately had a non functioning motherboard. I contacted Dell and a technician came to my house first thing the next day and replaced it, no questions asked. Totally hassle free. I'd take that any day over having to book an appointment to see a 'Genius'.

> Apple service is atrocious. Don't they make you book an appointment and turn up at their store just to get someone to look at it?

I had a macbook pro with a logic board that died. I phoned Apple, they couriered me a replacement device next day, and that courier picked up my old device. Literally couldn't ask for better service.

Seriously? My friend was forced to drag his 27 inch iMac into the Woodfield shopping mall location, which if you've ever been there, is a quarter mile minimum walk from the parking lot to the store.

He probably chose to do that. You can't force someone to physically appear in your store. What if they're disabled?

Pedantry. They didn't give him an option besides physically bringing it into the store.

Good question about accessibility. I have no idea. But it's not as though our society is a perfect utopia for the disabled. I can only imagine it would have gone far worse.

I was just thinking reading the comment that you replied to that this goes one of two ways. Some people seem to get wonderful service, others crap for relatively high price.

To be fair, we experimented with a Dell XPS 13 laptop that had a succession of problems, and the service was the worst I have ever encountered in IT, taking several months of elapsed time before we finally got an on-site visit from someone who knew what they were doing (who then fixed the laptop in under an hour). That was what "next day" level support actually looked like in our case.

We were attracted to these as there was a Linux version that potentially offered a good alternative to Windows 10 for some of our people, but the experience was so bad that instead we immediately ruled Dell out as a supplier for any serious equipment for the foreseeable future.

Interesting. I've never had an issue with getting a next day tech to our office from Dell.

I think we just got stuck in endless loops of tier 1 support people trying to run through checklists over the phone and then again via email. It was essentially the business class version of "Have you tried switching it off and on again?" repeated seemingly endlessly, bouncing from one support tech to another. Clearly several of the techs didn't even understand that they also sold these laptops with Linux on them and that's what we had.

Eventually, literally months later, someone finally seemed to escalate it to a person with the authority to send out a technician, who as mentioned before then fixed the actual problem in barely any time at all. We were on the point of just writing off the machine by then, as the amount of time we were wasting dealing with Dell was in danger of costing more than just buying a new box, and at least we would been reasonably confident of having a working system the next day in that case!

> Apple service is atrocious. Don't they make you book an appointment and turn up at their store just to get someone to look at it?

I can't speak for anyone else, but the last time I had trouble with my MacBook (five years or more ago now, the touchpad had cracked, IIRC), I made an appointment in the morning to come in in the afternoon. Walked up, explained the problem, gave them the machine, and they called me back to pick it up a few hours later. That's not bad, IMO.

Home service is awesome, but unless things have changed recently, I don't think that's common. It also may be different for wear-and-tear fixes vs. DOA replacements; Dell has a strong interest in fixing the latter as quickly as possible to protect their reputation. Most companies, most of the time, expect you to come to them to get service.

I've dealt with both Lenovo and Dell with on-site next day service. I thought it was a standard option across the industry for business PC warranty.

It may be. I was thinking of standard warranties, though. I'd expect a business warranty to be different.

They also will ship you a box and ship it to a service center, I've been shocked on the turnaround time on that even with major service. From Me getting the box to getting the laptop back it was just two days (I ship on day one, they get it overnight on day two, they ship back out with a new Logic Board and cables, then I get it on day three.)

>- Ships with anything other than Windows (Linux, OSX, BSD, etc)

It doesn't exactly sound like it would be any kind of a problem for you to install your own OS if you're willing to accept a manufacturer supplied BSD.

HP offers Linux on their Z workstations, which have been reliable workhorses for decades. I believe Dell does, too.

Dell does this.

Hmm, well I'd honestly do just about anything I could to avoid macOS. If only I could compile iOS apps without it, I wouldn't have to deal with their backwards and incapable UI.

Hopefully soon I'll be able to use VSCode to remotely work on my Mac though! - https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/24

> You'll quickly find that Apple has this market cornered.

No they don't. Not the market for people who just need a corporate Unix box. At my consultancy we have a mix of machines with many people running a System 76 tower or laptop and you'll find plenty of folks here on HN who will name Dell, Lenovo or HP as their supplier.

Perhaps you're thinking of just the market for people who do the absolute highest end video work for the film industry? Other than that, I don't see it.

And Windows has been rock solid for a massive amount of users and developers of various types since Windows 2000.

>> I wouldn't have to deal with their backwards and incapable UI.

Well, that’s, like, your opinion, man...

No, seriously, I feel the same way about Windows’ UI. I mean, did you ever use Windows 8? And Windows 10 has built-in ads by default in the UI/UX?

Windows XP SP3 was peak Windows, IMHO - the awful part about them making an abortive mess bastard child of the UI/UX in 8 was that there are millions of non-techie people who literally know how to follow one sequence of events on their computer, and that usually starts with ‘press start’.

Windows 8’s awfulness is probably what drove a lot of those people to iPads. If you’re learning a new user interface idiom anyways, and even Microsoft Office is on the iPad; why stick with Windows?

I don't know anybody that does serious work on iPads. Every quarter there are only ~9 million iPads sold for every ~34 million Lenovo/HP/Dell laptops and half of those iPads have got to be for kids from what I can see.

Sure, an iPad is fine for consuming documents and doing light markup. However, if you're going to create things you're going to need to be multi-tasking and - hey, I have multiple iPads and I use them all the time - but I'd love to have a contest between what I can get done with Windows/Linux versus what you can do on an iPad because there's just no comparison as far as I can see.

I'll add macOS to that too. It's not even in the same class as Windows/Linux. I watch people using macOS daily and I swear, they are constantly swiping to find that full-screen app they lost because of the complete lack of window management in macOS. They'll put Chrome into full screen and then struggle to get the detached devtools window back up. They'll have to install things like iTerm with it's own tiling manager, to manage 3 terminal windows. Apple just doesn't care about practical things, they are constantly focusing on how things look, how thin or light they are or how they can make the most amount of money by removing options and claiming everything is always better that way, when really it just serves to remove the amount of work they have to do to support things like you know, physical buttons, headphone jacks, options/modes in software and so forth.

Anyway, the UI in Windows 8 and 10 were also completely configurable to make it more like the original Windows UI. If you don't like the default configuration you can change it or install 1 program (7+ taskbar tweaker) to make it just about perfect. What I really, really like is being able to do things the way I want to do them and not the way some godless corporation has decided it should be. Apple just gives you nearly zero choice compared to Windows and most obviously, Linux. They're just on the wrong end of the spectrum for how I like to do things.

And I never got any ads on Windows - just pre-installed apps like Candy Crush and Skype. I'm assuming they installed Candy Crush because it's a lot, lot more popular than Solitaire or Minesweeper with today's crowd. This is no different than Apple pre-installing things on macOS/iOS. And before anyone says anything about Apple not pre-installing 3rd party software...I think that's incorrect. If you want to use any of the Unix aspects of macOS, you have to start off with Apple's lame and old versions of even basic Unix utilities and programming environments until you go and install some other 3rd party things to fix the situation. That's way worse than having to right-click a Candy Crush icon to remove it once IMO.

Pressing Start is one popular way of starting a program on Windows, so I don't understand that line of argumentation.

I don't see the contradiction here honestly.

The only tangible market for a Mac Pro is professional Final Cut users in a professional setting, no?

If this is hogwash, tell me so, but it just seems that any other realistic scenario that requires this level of hardware (like research, rendering and AI) would be significantly cheaper and better supported outside of Apple's ecosystem.

Short of having a pretty device to sit in a studio, what other reason is there for this to exist? (And how much of that audience is more likely to just buy iMac Pros).

As regards development - Most development tasks won't significantly benefit from the performance offered here, and anyone who needs that performance is likely going to buy something significantly better value for money (as regards tech specs) than a Mac Pro.

I'm not aware of any significant tools for 3d modelling or video editing (besides FCP) that are OSX-exclusive, and that audience is surely better served by a much cheaper Windows/Linux machine.

There aren't any serious edit houses that use FCP X outside of gimmick advertising deals like some late night shows. Everyone is using Avid or increasingly Premiere anyway.

In my experience, the past five years have seen a dramatic shift to windows in professional facilities (Oscar winning editors).

I do know one very high end editor who cuts on a Mac mini. The old school guys are used to proxy workflows and you don't need lots of power for that anyway.

Unfortunately they will probably point to the poor sales of this model as justification that this pro tower market really is dead. “Sorry guys, for some reason only Marvel editors bought these so were canning the line”

I kind of feel that Apple needs its own pragmatic Satya Nadella to regain relevance in many niche applications. Sure, Apple is nowadays a consumer company mainly, but what is the problem having a competitive professional line as well?

Profit? And that the audience is limited.

If I have a resource heavy problem, I can solve it for a fraction of the price outside the Apple Ecosystem.

Who buys these? When you look to the source you will understand.

Were people editing Marvel movies really waiting a decade for this though? Pretty confident they've moved on to PCs years ago. I struggle to find the target audience for this, now that they are alienating home users.

>Were people editing Marvel movies really waiting a decade for this though?

Given the number of posts telling people in Hollywood not to restart their Trashcan mac Pros because of the Google Raven screw up, I would say that yes, in fact, plenty of people in Hollywood are using Mac Pros, and likely will buy this new one.

> I struggle to find the target audience for this, now that they are alienating home users

This machine has NOTHING, and I mean nothing to do with home users.

Next you'll tell me that Tesla have alienated "normal" car buyers because they make a $100k P100D rocket ship. Tesla also make a $35k regular sedan. Apple also make much cheaper iMacs, and Mac Books and Mac Books Airs for home buyers.

I don't understand why people time and time again bash Apple for making something that isn't in any way designed for "home users", while they still make plenty of things that are.

The base price has more than doubled from the original cheese grater we all fell in love with. I'd be willing to bet the home user MacPro community is much larger than Hollywood. People have been clamoring for an updated cheese grater for the better part of a decade. They are STILL actively developing hacks to keep their 2008/2009 models running. Shit, I just retired mine this year in favor of Hackintosh, because I'm not dumping $10,000 in a modular Mac.

I think this new MacPro is going to be a huge failure. Professionals are running PCs now, and home users won't spend the money.

Many of the home users who were buying $3000 base model cheese grater Mac Pros could get by now with a 6-core i7 Mac Mini.

Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.

This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.

> Price would be around $1300 for the computer, $300 for an eGPU enclosure, and $700ish for a Radeon R7, plus aftermarket RAM. AMD's not in a great spot for high end GPUs right now, but when the Navi 23 cards land next year it will be looking better.

I used to want an eGPU. Then I learned that you need to disable SIP in order to do so...

> This doesn't scale as well for multi GPU machine learning workloads and Apple needs to get over their shit with Nvidia, but as a lower end "modular" Mac than the $6000 cheese grater 2019, it's an option.

No one is going to wait for that hypothetical future where MacOS supports Nvidia GPUs.

> I used to want an eGPU. Then I learned that you need to disable SIP in order to do so...

I hadn’t heard that. A quick search suggests it’s only necessary for loading Nvidia kexts or using TB2 https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/8lybin/macos_egpu_wit...

> No one is going to wait for that hypothetical future where MacOS supports Nvidia GPUs.

True, but their Navi cards are at least competitive in the price ranges where they exist. Hopefully the high end ones next year continue that. If you’re looking at Titan or whatever the current ML thing is in the $1000+ range, then you might be stuck with Nvidia.

> I hadn’t heard that. A quick search suggests it’s only necessary for loading Nvidia kexts or using TB2 https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/8lybin/macos_egpu_wit....

Interesting. I might ask around to verify this.

> True, but their Navi cards are at least competitive in the price ranges where they exist. Hopefully the high end ones next year continue that. If you’re looking at Titan or whatever the current ML thing is in the $1000+ range, then you might be stuck with Nvidia.

I am rooting for AMD's Navi cards too. It's just unfortunate that CUDA seems to be more supported than OpenCL.

Agreed on that. AMD put a bunch of work into the Cycles rendering engine (for blender) to get their OpenCL support up to par with CUDA, and now it's completely disabled on the Mac version thanks to Apple deprecating it. Disappointing.

https://developer.blender.org/rBbb0d812d98

You could sure, but people buying the MacPros bought them because they wanted modular. A glorified laptop attached to a giant monitor isn't an option.

My Windows machine is admittedly more modular than a mini+eGPU would be. I can pull the CPU out and put in a new one whenever I want! But over the course of 12 years and 3 computer builds, I've never done that once. By the time there's a noticeable CPU upgrade available I'd need a new motherboard to go with it.

So I think there's a big segment of the "modular" market that only really cares about having GPU options and upgradeable RAM.

It's not for everyone, but the people in between the high end Mac Mini (6-core i7 + thunderbolt GPU) and the low end Mac Pro (8-core Xeon W and internal expansion slots) are a small enough slice that Apple doesn't care.

Missed the edit window but for GPU I meant the Radeon VII not R7. Double checking benchmarks, the RX 5700 XT compares pretty well to that, but 2nd gen Navi will have a new higher end card.

You can only focus on so many products... I don't see why it's confusing when people are upset by what they choose to focus on

Yea, I remember when PowerMacs could be had at a wide variety of price points. That was nice.

If Apple doesn't want to serve the "I need a decently powerful machine but don't want to waste money on what is basically a status symbol" market, maybe they should license MacOS to someone who does. Something like that might actually bring me back to the platform. As it is, I stick to PCs running Linux.

Yeah, I've waited years for this machine, was excited when it came out, and in an epiphany last night, will probably pass on it and opt for a beefed up Mac Book Pro instead. It will be cheaper and fill my needs.

I'm a programmer. If I want to prototype a multi-component stack, I've got a Raspberry Pi Cluster running K8 for that. If I want to play around with deep learning, I'll just spin up EC2 instances. Games? Let's be honest. That war was lost decades ago. I've got a good PC rig for that now. The days of a general machine to do everything are gone.

The only issue is the storage space, which I can get from a multi-bay drive enclosure.

> Let's be honest. That war was lost decades ago. I've got a good PC rig for that now. The days of a general machine to do everything are gone.

Businesses listen when their bottom line is hit.

They used to do this and it almost led to the death of the company. I’m sure they’re quite hesitant to try again. Instead, you can look into the hackintosh project

They’re making money, now - they have no reason to license MacOS, and all the more reason not to.

Apple’s hardware/software combination is the reason a lot of us have stuck with them for so long. It’s quality control. No drivers to fuss with; just plug in and go.

>It's quality control

My MacBook's keyboard disagrees

Yes. The mighty have certainly fallen since 2015.

That was back when Apple was primarily a desktop computer manufacturer. In any case, they could place restrictions on licensed clone makers to avoid cannibalizing sales of their more popular products (e.g., no laptops).

> ... I switched to windows ...

Some people do not want to do that.

I didn't do it lightly, I haven't owned Windows machine in 17 years.

But as I said dual GPU machine for half the price of an iMac Pro that can run Octane Render[0] which requires Nvidia cards with CUDA left me asking why I didn't do this years ago after using that for 15 minutes I couldn't go back to how I did my work on my old Mac.

If Apple wanted my business I would have given it to them but they were pretty insistent that they had no interest in my money.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE83n0qhe48

I agree! I find Windows quite cumbersome and unpleasant to use and would rather pay more for macOS; not because it is a status symbol, but because it is simply a better product for me.

I find macOS cumbersome and unpleasant to use and would rather pay more for windows or linux.

It's it wonderful that you can have an opinion that works for you too?

It's sad that Windows users have a plethora of hardware options available for them while Mac users are stuck with few choice options.

I need a Mac where I can replace the harddrive when it fails after 18 months like Mac drives always do, and also I'd like a bay to put a decent optical drive and not the low quality Apple SuperDrive which they finally gave up on, and add a card so I can have more than 1 USB port which is ridiculous.

And it should cost around $500, not $12,000.

$500 with what I request is certainly available on the PC side of things and I have that and run Linux on it and have transitioned everything I can off Apple because they can't produce the desktop that I need. I've put Mac versions of my products on bug fix only status and when customers ask me when the new version comes out I tell them never and advise them to try Linux.

Doesn't the new top tier Mac Mini fill a lot of the role the trash can Mac Pro did? You can hook up GPUs to it with the thunderbolt ports. I think the top model is faster than the trash can Mac Pro.

> You can hook up GPUs to it with the thunderbolt ports

Thunderbolt GPU cases are hundreds of dollars.

For a dual GPU Mac Mini setup (which would be a mass of cables and require 3 outlet plugs) you could afford a 3 GPU Windows tower.

As someone who used to be a pretty extreme Mac evangelist I really did look into all this before I made the switch to a Windows machine.

Sure, Windows machines have always been cheaper for similar specs and performance. The Mac Mini and GPU setup is way cheaper than the new Mac Pro and hits a bunch of the use cases (development, machine learning, gaming) that people wanted a Mac Pro for.

The current and last generation of Nvidia GPUs are not officially supported by MacOS. How is that good for use cases which uses CUDA cores?

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