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Comment by verbin217 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a common misunderstanding about the new Mac Pro. Apple has actually improved modularity by liberating expansion from a fixed physical space. Additionally, users aren't required to install scary-looking computer hardware into PCI slots. They can just use the familiar UX pattern of plugging a cable into a port.

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Except the Thunderbolt device is twice the price of the equivalent PCIe card and now you have cables everywhere.

Seems like you missed the part where Apple did it, therefore it finally became good. Just like Intel was a dirty word until Apple switched, then it was good.

Seems like you have an axe to grind? Because I, for one, liked Intel before AND after Apple switched to it just fine.

Who are these mythical people that only liked Intel (or external peripherals) after Apple adopted them? Are they from straw-man land?

Definitely not from straw man land. I remember many people, both that I knew personally and people on the internet that would extol the virtues of the G4 and G5 processors. Especially as Intel started to widen the gap in terms of clock speed, they would explain how clock speed doesn't matter and that the Apple processors do so much more work per clock cycle. Then after the switch to Intel the same people would talk about how great the Intel processors are and refer to how fast the processors could be clocked. Its no longer relevant to anything, but they were a very real group of people.

Coming in 10 hours late, but from the little I know of computer architecture...

Intel won that fight on being at least a generation ahead in semiconductor technology. Intel have efficiency problems compared to the ARM processors now, because they can't just throw many more transistors at their design when the metric is amount of processing/watt.

You already had cables everywhere if you were a professional. I don't know any professional photographer, video editor or audio professional that doesn't use tons of external storage.

It's mainly non pros that argue that a few internal 2TB bays would be enough, which is laughable for pro use.

But if they were professionals didn't they use SAN (or at least NAS) for this ?

Don't get USB hard disks old pretty quick ? (and the performance with GByte LAN is much bigger). So it's just a single LAN cable ?

I suppose it depends whether you consider Pro and Enterprise to be synonymous. I don't think they are.

Anyway, what kind of high end Mac user ever bothered with USB drives, when you could use Firewire and have double the throughput with no CPU overhead?

I am looking at the name of this website and I see that the name of this website is "hacker news".

Could you please explain your comment a little more? I'm honestly curious to know why you think the concept of abstracting technology into easy to use components is in conflict with the "hacker news" ethos.

I was responding particularly to:

"Additionally, users aren't required to install scary-looking computer hardware into PCI slots."

the hacker news crowd is not the "user" in this quote though.

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