What if they simply decided that they didn't care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.
If you're a big enough org or the app is for internal use, this might not be an option anyway. At that point I imagine most people just give up on it and figure out how to run macOS on a generic VM. But at that point you have to convince your IT department that it's worth it doing a thing that is definitely unsupported and in violation of the TOS.
Or maybe some of these are big enough that they are able to approach Apple and get a special license for N concurrent instances of macOS running on virtualized hardware? Who knows.
Adobe is smaller by contrast but I'd speculate has a much deeper relationship with Apple as well
I care to the extent customers care.
The answer that most people would like to see would be a stripped down, non-GUI macOS that's installable at no cost in virtualization environments, or maybe with some evaluation scheme like Windows Server has, which effectively makes it free for throwaway environments like build agents.
That's called "Darwin" and it's theoretically open source, but there doesn't seem to be a useful distribution of it. Whether that's due to lack of community interest or lack of Apple support is the question.
Memory bandwidth is one key feature impacting M1's performance. When Apple builds an ARM-based MacPro, we can expect something with at the very least 5 DDR5 channels per socket. It's clear, from this, the M1 is a laptop/AIO/compact-desktop chip.
So yes, at the very least 8 DDR4 channels, or one per core, but I'd expect more from a workstation-class board.
Now, speaking of the board, all those memory channels will be funny.
However the M1 is already pretty large (16B transistors), upgrading to 8 fast cores is going to significantly increase that. Maybe they will just go to a dual CPU configuration which would double the cores, memory bandwidth, and total ram.
Or move the GPU and ML accelerator offchip.
Important to note 'some' here. I'm a developer and power user, and haven't had a desktop computer in almost 10 years.
Or RAM
Furthermore, how is that relevant to the point _I_ was making about needing more than 64gb of RAM? If you both want to tangent, fine do so, but don’t try to put words in my mouth while doing it.
It is being called "using an example" or "illustrative example". For comparison, I've used a type of RAM that is traditionally much more expensive than you find in laptops.
> This is on “processor package” RAM and will thus have an entirely different price basis than a removable stick would,
No.
1) The same price is being asked for RAM in non-M1 models.
2) You could put any price tag you want, because the item is single-sourced, the vendor can pull a quote out of the thin air and you cannot find exact equivalent on the market. Therefore, for comparison, a functionally and parametric similar item is being used.
> how is that relevant to the point _I_ was making about needing more than 64gb of RAM?
You get a different product, that supports more RAM.
> If you both want to tangent, fine do so, but don’t try to put words in my mouth while doing it.
Could you point out, where I did that? I was pointing out, that your note about the GP being hyperbolic is untrue - he was in the ballpark.
Essentially as in the ballpark as $80 is, both are off by 2.5x. Claiming they are “same order of magnitude, so it’s not hyperbolic” is laughable. $100k and $250k are both same order of magnitude, but are radically different prices, no?
Those requirements don’t dictate a desktop[0]. Also, the physical size of the monitor is irrelevant, it’s the resolution that matters. Your video card doesn’t care if you have a 40” 4K monitor or an 80” 4K monitor, to it, it’s the same load.
The reason I still have a cheese grater Mac Pro desktop at all is because I have 128gb RAM in it and have tasks that need that much memory.
[0] I’ve connected eight external monitors to my 16” MBP (with laptop screen still enabled, so 9 screens total). I don’t use the setup actively, did it as a test, but it very much works. The setup was as follows:
TB#1 - 27” LG 5K @ 5120x2880
TB#2 - TB3<->TB2 adapter, then two 27” Apple Thunderbolt Displays @ 2560x1440
TB#3 - eGPU with AMD RX580, then two 34” ultrawides connected over HDMI @ 3440x1440, two 27” DisplayPort monitors @ 2560x1440
TB#4 - TB3<->TB2 adapter, then 27” Apple Thunderbolt Display @ 2560x1440
So that’s almost 50 million pixels displayed on around 4,000 square inches of screens driven by a single MBP laptop.
(I kid, I kid)
If more than a niche had speed as its sole priority, then they would already use desktops, but most (80%+) use laptops today.
But of the majority that uses laptops, most would like a faster machine. Just would prefer it was also a laptop.
You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?
* in very specific places and conditions.
Actual numbers from every single credible survey puts macs at a grand maximum of 25%.
This is where I'm at.
I don't know if other people are built from sturdier stuff than me or what, but typing on a laptop to any significant extent leaves me with tendonitis for several days. And staring at a laptop screen too long leaves me with neck pain.
Laptops are a nightmare in terms of ergonomics.
It's been a bit of a blessing for me because I only have a laptop at home, and it basically means I can't take work home with me.
But I'm pretty seriously considering upgrading to a traditional desktop sometime in the next year.
I also use a Wacom tablet comfortably placed on a table to my right.
This has become steadily less true since about 2012, in my experience. I don’t know any full time developers still using an Apple laptop. The keyboard situation caused a lot of attrition. I finally stopped support for all Apple hardware at my company months ago, simply to get it out my headspace. Will Fusion360 again be completely broken by an Apple OS update? Am I going to have to invest time making our Qt and PyQt applications work, yet again, after an Apple update? Are Apple filesystem snapshots yet again going to prove totally defective? The answer is “no”, because we really need to focus on filling customer orders, do we’re done with Apple. ZFS snapshots function correctly. HP laptop keyboards work ok. Arch Linux and Windows 10 (with shutup10 and mass updates a few times per year) get the job done without getting in my face every god damned day.
Fascinating. I can name a few startups in my town that use Apple. One just IPO'd (Root), another is about to (Upstart). There are others as well.
The big companies it's hit or miss. Depends on if they are working on big enterprise applications or mobile/web. Mobile and web teams are all on MacBook Pros, and the big app dev teams aren't.
When I was last in Mountain View they were on Mac as well but I know that depends on personal preference.
For a while osx had the edge because it had a nice interface while still offering a lot of unix. Now windows and linux has caught up in the areas they were lacking before. Meanwhile apple has been caring less and less about people using the cli.
I'm guessing very few developers need the extra power a desktop offers over a high-end laptop.
This perception strikes me as having warped in from a different decade. Nowadays, at least in my neck of the woods, developers almost universally use laptops, and Apple's still plenty competitive in the (high end) laptop department.
For the most part, the only developers I know who still use desktops are machine learning folks who don't like the cloud and instead keep a Linux tower full of GPUs in a closet somewhere. And then remote into it from a laptop. Half the time it's a MacBook, half the time it's a XPS 13. And they were never going to consider a Mac Pro for their training server, anyway, because CUDA.
I couldn't speak to power users, but my sense is that, while it meant something concrete in the '90s, nowadays it's a term that only comes out when people want to complain about the latest update to Apple's line of computers.
They choose to make the mac pro as some kind of halo product, I guess. But really the slice of people who need more power than an iMac, and less than this "Linux tower full of GPUs" or a render farm, they judge to be very small indeed. This wasn't true in the 90s, when laptops (and super-slim desktops) came with much bigger compromises.
But I don't think that we need to beat a dead horse like that. The more interesting one would be to figure out some interesting and non-trivially-sized cross-section of people who both need a workstation-class computer, and have the option of even considering using OS X for the purpose.
The last time I used it (the last MBP with Ethernet built in. I want to say 2012 or 2013?) some of the features "missing" in Bootcamp
- No EFI booting. Instead we emulate a (very buggy!) BIOS
- No GPU switching. Only the hot and power hungry AMD GPU is exposed and enabled
- Minimal power and cooling management. Building Gentoo in a VM got the system up to a recorded 117 degrees Celsius in Speccy!
- Hard disk in IDE mode only, not SATA! Unless you booted up OS X and ran some dd commands on the partition table to "trick" it into running as a SATA mode disk
The absolute, crushing cynic in me has always felt that this was a series of intentional steps. Both a "minimum viable engineering effort" and a subtle way to simply make Windows seem "worse" by showing it performing worse on a (forgive the pun) "Apples to Apples" configuration. After all, Macs are "just Intel PC's inside!" so if Windows runs worse, clearly that's a fault of bad software rather than subtly crippled hardware
I have the feeling that Apple just cares about Apps for iOS (money wise). What's the minimum they need to do so people write iOS apps?
If this hardware, incidentally, is good for your use case, all is good. If not, they might just shrug it and decide you're too niche (i.e. not adding too much value to their ecosystem) and abandon you.