The Mac Pro and Apple's Slide | Hacker News Reader

The Mac Pro and Apple's Slide

lexic.co

31 pointsProAm46 comments

> "Steve Jobs was an engineer"

I read the Jobs biography cover to cover, and I'm going to stop you right there, no. The guy who couldn't engineer an Atari game and ripped off his friend's work instead is not an engineer, and the idea that he had any kind of empathy for anyone is frankly hilarious.

He had good taste, and he was a tyrant. In most cases these traits amount to mediocrity. Jobs was in the right place at the right time, in any other situation he'd have been a middle manager at best.

Right place at the right time. Twice. Three times if you count Pixar. Which you should.

Maybe there's more to him.

> Right place at the right time. Twice. Three times if you count Pixar. Which you should.

> Maybe there's more to him.

That makes him an excellent manager. Which he was. Clearly he was a world class CEO.

What does that have to do with him being an engineer?

I believe he did do some technical work as a teenager, IIRC from the biographies of him that I've read. I don't know if that means he was an engineer, but he does have some technical work experience.

He had really good taste, and he knew how to channel that into products. Perhaps that's not usually such an exceptional quality, but for Jobs it truly was.

He wasn't an engineer (for the most part), but he was a designer, of sorts. I don't think he was just "at the right place at the right time", and I don't think the iPod or iPhone would exist without him.

I say most of this based on the Bio, by the way. It seems we came out of that book with very different impressions.

My impression from reading that bio was, if I was superstitious, I'd think his ultimate fate was the answer to a lot of prayers. He stabbed many, many people in the back, or in the face.

The thing that made him different was his foundation in the humanities, and his good business sense.

> My impression from reading that bio was, if I was superstitious, I'd think his ultimate fate was the answer to a lot of prayers.

If anything his ultimate fate was ridiculous luck if not for his own stupidity. Iirc, he had an extremely rare form of curable pancreatic cancer, but because of his own stupid choices he didn't survive it. Which strikes me as kind of fitting for a man like him.

the idea that he had any kind of empathy for anyone is frankly hilarious

As a counterpoint, he was a good neighbour [1]. The guy had some serious issues with the way he treated people, and he may have had a personality disorder, but it's a bit extreme to think he had no empathy for any other human being.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/steve-j...

Edit: whoops! This was the wrong link. Here is the article I had in mind (it's been years since I read it and apparently there are multiple neighbour stories about Jobs):

https://patch.com/california/paloalto/my-neighbor-steve-jobs

that article doesn't say anything about him being a good neighbor? all it says is that he kept a simple home. what kind of weird deification is it that there's an article about a guy walking around jobs house (occasionally seeing jobs himself) and in your mind that constitutes being a good neighbor.

Being a "good neighbor", in much of the US, means that their house and yard are tasteful and well maintained. And that they don't have loud parties.

Op was trying to exhibit jobs' empathy. Does maintaining your yard demonstrate empathy?

Sure. Empathy for your property value.

At one point, I lived across the street from a guy whose "front yard" was basically a loading dock. He was not considered a good neighbor, except by the guy down the street. Whose property included a house that apparently hadn't been painted or roofed for maybe a century. And who spent much of his time drinking beer, sitting on his porch. Often with the other guy.

They hosted great parties, though. One time, they had a live band, with a sound system on a trailer. Too many iffy bikers, though. Fights, and occasional gunfire.

Just read the article. Jobs had a pretty house, that's literally it. The writer never even met him.

Yeah, he was hunting for a word and "engineer" wasn't quite spot on.

Look, Steve Jobs was an integrator. He integrated people. He got the record companies integrated with computers. He got detail-focused engineers working with lateral-thinking designers. He was an asshole with little patience for idiots, and was hard to work with. He paid attention when customers said something sucked and got the right people involved.

I think Tim Cook is just over his head a little. And a new generation (or generations) of apple employees has taken over and lessons learned have been forgotten again.

I don't know, the mac pro is ridiculously expensive. I think the $400 wheels and almost $1000 for a monitor stand is just stupid marketing. It says that people should blindly pay what we ask instead of considering value.

Personally, I wish they would bring the value back. When they switched to intel, all of a sudden they were the best mac on the planet and the best pc on the planet too. They were competing.

Now it's just different.

I scoffed at Apples for years before getting a 2012 Macbook Pro for the Retina display. I'm still using it 7+ years later whereas the highly rated Vaios and Thinkpads I had before conked out in less than 3 years each. The Unix underlying macOS has been rock solid and I can run whatever I need to. I much prefer Android to iOS though.

I'm worried by what I hear even from full-on Apple aficionados about the new notebooks and Catalina, which I am resisting. I have to use Windows 10 at work and I don't like it nearly as much. Someday this MBP will need replacing and I feel like I am caught with no good option other than dealing with Windows-whatever or paying a huge Apple premium for hardware that may not be worth it.

(I have tried several flavors of Linux desktops and have been frustrated by all of them)

FWIW I have the new 16 inch MBP and I like it a lot more than my 2015 rMBP. Touch ID is a thing you won't want to live without once you've had it on a laptop ;P

I'll second this. They fixed everything that was wrong with the previous generation, and it's hardware I'd actually recommend now.

Catalina, on the other hand...

This is reassuring. I hope that by the time I need to replace that Catalina or its successor will be stable. I keep an eye on refurbished 2015 MBPs because my friends who have them rave about them and don't want to give them up.

BTW, I am still relatively new to HN. This article/thread is marked as 'flagged' for some reason and I have to access it through my own "Comments" link. Can anyone explain why? It seems on-topic. I have not submitted anything yet and am trying to understand the ground rules.

I'm in the same boat. Except a part of me keeps haunting my thoughts: "you still haven't tried FreeBSD...you still haven't tried OpenBSD..."

And there's another part that goes: "Linux just needs a tyrant...maybe System76/PopOS is good..."

but then I go on with my day in macOS.

I haven't used Catalina yet, but I also don't really have any 32-bit apps that I care about losing. I've found a way to make the TouchBar useful (BetterTouchTool). I map CAPS to Esc anyway. I kinda like the keyboard when I'm only using it for short periods of time (ie not hooked up to my full desktop setup). Those are the main complaints that I am aware of, and I don't share them. I know I'm the weird one, but my 2017 MBP is my favorite computing device to date.

You'd think that'd buy some loyalty, but I can still hear voices ("...you will love OpenBSD...just try it...")

I picked up the MBP 16" and I've been pretty happy with it. No issues, coming from the 2013 rMBP. I held off on buying a new laptop for awhile due to all the keyboard issues, glad they've gone back to the old design. I do wish some of the hardware was self upgradable though, but I doubt Apple is ever going to move away from having all the components soldered on.

Not sure about Catalina, I've read a lot of people having issues with it, but personally none of them have affected me. I don't use any 32-bit apps and the security prompts can be a bit annoying but not disruptive to my workflow since it's mostly just a one time thing for each app.

It is a little weird to see the Mac Pro described as so ludicrously high-end that the plebs can't understand it. I would describe it as a mid-range workstation. More than I need for sure, but if you want to talk about Serious Power for Serious People it's got nothing on the high-end Dells or HPs.

A loaded Mac pro has 2 AMD GPUs, 28 cores, 8TB of nvme disk and 1.5TB of ram for $52K.

I went to dell and got 3TB of ram, 56-cores (two of the mac's 28-core cpus), 40TB of SAS HDDs with 8TB of nvme SSDs and triple Nvidia GV100 for $170k+.

I'm sympathetic to the feeling in this blog post, but not the specific examples. It's not about cost-cutting, because Tim Cook's supply-chain wrangling has resulted in us getting nicer stuff while Apple pays less. In fact, I don't think Apple hardware has ever been as high-end in terms of technology and components. But high-end != good design.

Anyways, producing nice-looking stuff that doesn't work all that well has long been in the Apple DNA, I think. Anybody remember the circular Apple mouse? And who actually enjoyed using a Magic Mouse over, say, a Logitech mx518?

Apple’s mobile chips are definitely “high end” and have been about 2-3 years ahead of the rest of the industry lately.

> It's arguably the best workstation money can buy, with a forward-looking architecture that should satisfy any professional in need of massive performance

This seems like nonsense. It may be the best looking workstation, but money can buy more powerful workstations with high end Nvidia GPUs.

Yeah, HP Z4 or Z8 (or the Dell equivalents) seem to be used a lot in the film VFX industry, which at the high-end is mostly Linux...

If you ever get a chance to venture out of the Mac galaxy, you will find the HP-Z8 galaxy a lot more interesting!

On a serious note: does anyone know which CAD platform Apple uses to design their products? ie products like Solidworks, Catia, ProE etc? I’d love to hear more about how their most powerful workstation in the world helps them design the next iteration on itself?

Steve Jobs the engineer. That made me laugh.

I think this guys got it wrong. Apple's last half-dozen years of design interation are (IMO) the fault of Jony Ive, And his relentless dedication to how the product looks rather than how useful it is.

Apple likes making a particular kind of computer for a particular kind of user (the iPad) and the Mac has really suffered under the ethos of "The computer for the rest of us" taken to the extreme.

> But it doesn't signify a new direction for Apple. It's the exception that proves the rule.

I hope the article is wrong on that and the 16'' MBP and the Mac Pro are actually a new direction for Apple.

I hope it’s not the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see this new hardware abandoned for five years now that the hard work has been done.

Despite incredible resources, Apple can’t multitask.

I don't know. I'm a recent Mac user (couldn't hold out any longer for an updated Surface Book) and the author makes some good points. My $4K 16" MBP is nice enough, but definitely doesn't "feel" like a $4K machine. Worse, Catalina has not been a great experience for me. I've had 3 reboots due to Kernel panic in the last few weeks and just today I had to hard reboot because Finder completely lost the plot and crashed hard when it couldn't connect to a mapped network drive from work (I was on my home network).

My previous Dell laptop + Windows 10 was more stable than my current MBP, which is quite concerning to me. I do like a lot of things about OSX but just as with Apple hardware, their focus on OSX and shipping a refined OS seems to be slipping.

I've been using macOS daily since 2007 and the past 5-6 years the QA of macOS has not been great. Apple ends up fixing most problems but it's never a good idea to use a recently released major version. I'd suggest you to go back to Mojave if you can.

Yeah, unfortunately this shipped with Catalina. Might go down that path if things don't improve.

What makes the OP think Tim Cook had any real say in any of the design of the MBP? If anything, Tim probably lets the hardware leadership make the decisions.

I think the Watch and Apple's shift to privacy are Tim's contributions to the world.

For one thing, Tim didn't fire the "hardware leadership" (Dan Riccio?) who shipped a garbage keyboard for N years in a row.

Also how did soldering the RAM in place “save them a few bucks on parts.”?

By eliminating the socket probably.

My understanding of the soldered RAM is that it allows them to use LPDDR. It's not about thin, it's not about spending two cents on a socket, it's a genuine engineering trade-off as part of their near-obsessive take on power management.

Interesting that he starts off claiming that Apple sweat the details instead of trying to blind you with numbers - and then proceeds to completely miss such details.

There's been a noticeable decline in Apple quality under Tim Cook's leadership

I’m the last person to defend the MacBook keyboards for the last 3 years, but let’s put the MacBook in perspective. The entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and some of those are desktops.

The iPad that was around before Jobs passed were really just big iPhones. There were hardly any affordances for the larger screen. The iPad didn’t come into its own until around 2015.

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