4 ms·

I hope somebody at Apple can get it through their heads that a Mac Pro desktop doesn't need to be the thinnest, lightest box full of the most exotic parts with

by barryp 10y ago

I hope somebody at Apple can get it through their heads that a Mac Pro desktop doesn't need to be the thinnest, lightest box full of the most exotic parts with corners engineered to within fractions of a millimeter. It just needs to: 1. Run macOS 2. be fast as hell 3. be quiet 4. be reasonably priced 5. be somewhat expandable on the inside with RAM and disks 6. have a variety of external ports 7. be spec-bumped at least once a year. Do that and you'll sell units, and more importantly keep devs and creative types happy

maxxxxx 10y ago
That's exactly it.
karlshea 10y ago
This is literally all I want. I'll even buy what will undoubtedly be an overpriced 8k monitor that they'll be selling along with it, instead of a new iMac. I do not care what the box looks like.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
I would buy two of these today.
ux-app 10y ago
Just bite the bullet and hackintosh. It's ridiculously easy. I put one together in an afternoon with parts I had lying around. It even had GPU acceleration for all those silly UI animations to run smoothly. There are lists of hardware that are guaranteed to work. I'm not a Mac guy so I scrapped the system, but as a bored weekend project it was fun. I had no issues installing updates, networking was fine etc.
- AdamJacobMuller 10y ago
  I tried this a year or so ago, my only stumbling block was getting iMessage/iCloud working properly, which was very difficult, has that improved?
  - ux-app 10y ago
    No idea sorry. I put the system together to tinker with some iOS dev, but lost interest after a few months. I don't use any of the rest of the Mac ecosystem, so not sure how that functions. What's special about iMessage/iCloud which poses an issue on a hackintosh?
  - appendix 10y ago
    I ran into this too. As far as I know, nope, it has not improved.
  - exidy 10y ago
    It's improved in that the causes of failure are now better understood. Getting it working means generating some UUIDs and things. e.g. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/an-idiots-guide-to-imessage.196827/ https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/an-idiots-guide-to-imessa...
  - dplgk 10y ago
    Messages, Facetime and iCloud work for me on Sierra on my new hackintosh without any fiddling. On my previous Hackintosh, which I believe is running Mavericks, those services don't work.
- gambiting 10y ago
  It's not really an option in enterprise environment though. If you run a company and have to use Macs, then none of the options available at the moment give you access to lots of power and/or expandability.
- dplgk 10y ago
  Just built my second one because of their BS. Cost about $1100 for a computer that Apple would charge at least $5000 for. I've inspired friends as well because the process has become fairly easy nowadays.
AdamJacobMuller 10y ago
> you'll sell units Not just sell units, and probably not sell (many) more units, but you can sell units at a way higher profit margin. As pretty as the new Mac Pro is and as amazing as it is as a piece of technology, I have to believe that the one-time R&D costs of the Mac Pro are huge and directly contribute to the stagnated pace of upgrades. While the cheese-grater Mac Pros weren't nearly as slick-looking as the oversized coffee cans, Apple could effectively throw out the whole internals of the cheese graters every year or two, put a mostly generic motherboard in it, with a wholly generic GPU and completely vanilla CPU/Memory/Disks and have a whoppingly fast machine with relatively minimal R&D cost, even while upgrading it in lock-step with external (intel/Nvidia/etc) evolutions. With the coffee cans, every single upgrade will require a huge redesign at a huge expense due to the tight integration. While I understand the benefits of and necessity of tight integration in basically every single other product that Apple sells, its antithetical to the point of a Mac Pro.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Every OEM out there offers trash can form factor PCs these days that are better specced and cheaper than the Mac Pro. I think you overestimate the R&D costs that go into these things.
hcarvalhoalves 10y ago
Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe - they never did, and there's a lot of pressure to innovate since Jobs left. Due to this, they try to innovate on form-factor, which is the aspect they have most control over the product design. The problem is that this is directly at odds with 4) price, 5) expandability and (to a certain extent) easy to 7) spec-bump every year. So I think it's very unlikely the next MacPro will fulfill this wish-list, even if it seems rational at first.
- collyw 10y ago
  > Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe Switching from PowerPc to Intel chips didn't seem to make them much of a difference.
enz 10y ago
8. Be rackable (or at least, parallelepipedic) so the condition 5 holds.

by barryp 10y ago

maxxxxx 10y ago

That's exactly it.

karlshea 10y ago

This is literally all I want. I'll even buy what will undoubtedly be an overpriced 8k monitor that they'll be selling along with it, instead of a new iMac. I do not care what the box looks like.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

I would buy two of these today.

ux-app 10y ago

Just bite the bullet and hackintosh. It's ridiculously easy. I put one together in an afternoon with parts I had lying around. It even had GPU acceleration for all those silly UI animations to run smoothly. There are lists of hardware that are guaranteed to work. I'm not a Mac guy so I scrapped the system, but as a bored weekend project it was fun. I had no issues installing updates, networking was fine etc.

AdamJacobMuller 10y ago
I tried this a year or so ago, my only stumbling block was getting iMessage/iCloud working properly, which was very difficult, has that improved?
- ux-app 10y ago
  No idea sorry. I put the system together to tinker with some iOS dev, but lost interest after a few months. I don't use any of the rest of the Mac ecosystem, so not sure how that functions. What's special about iMessage/iCloud which poses an issue on a hackintosh?
- appendix 10y ago
  I ran into this too. As far as I know, nope, it has not improved.
- exidy 10y ago
  It's improved in that the causes of failure are now better understood. Getting it working means generating some UUIDs and things. e.g. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/an-idiots-guide-to-imessage.196827/ https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/an-idiots-guide-to-imessa...
- dplgk 10y ago
  Messages, Facetime and iCloud work for me on Sierra on my new hackintosh without any fiddling. On my previous Hackintosh, which I believe is running Mavericks, those services don't work.
gambiting 10y ago
It's not really an option in enterprise environment though. If you run a company and have to use Macs, then none of the options available at the moment give you access to lots of power and/or expandability.
dplgk 10y ago
Just built my second one because of their BS. Cost about $1100 for a computer that Apple would charge at least $5000 for. I've inspired friends as well because the process has become fairly easy nowadays.

AdamJacobMuller 10y ago

> you'll sell units Not just sell units, and probably not sell (many) more units, but you can sell units at a way higher profit margin. As pretty as the new Mac Pro is and as amazing as it is as a piece of technology, I have to believe that the one-time R&D costs of the Mac Pro are huge and directly contribute to the stagnated pace of upgrades. While the cheese-grater Mac Pros weren't nearly as slick-looking as the oversized coffee cans, Apple could effectively throw out the whole internals of the cheese graters every year or two, put a mostly generic motherboard in it, with a wholly generic GPU and completely vanilla CPU/Memory/Disks and have a whoppingly fast machine with relatively minimal R&D cost, even while upgrading it in lock-step with external (intel/Nvidia/etc) evolutions. With the coffee cans, every single upgrade will require a huge redesign at a huge expense due to the tight integration. While I understand the benefits of and necessity of tight integration in basically every single other product that Apple sells, its antithetical to the point of a Mac Pro.

dogma1138 10y ago
Every OEM out there offers trash can form factor PCs these days that are better specced and cheaper than the Mac Pro. I think you overestimate the R&D costs that go into these things.

hcarvalhoalves 10y ago

Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe - they never did, and there's a lot of pressure to innovate since Jobs left. Due to this, they try to innovate on form-factor, which is the aspect they have most control over the product design. The problem is that this is directly at odds with 4) price, 5) expandability and (to a certain extent) easy to 7) spec-bump every year. So I think it's very unlikely the next MacPro will fulfill this wish-list, even if it seems rational at first.

collyw 10y ago
> Apple has trouble seeing themselves as sellers of commodity hardware like you describe Switching from PowerPc to Intel chips didn't seem to make them much of a difference.

enz 10y ago

8. Be rackable (or at least, parallelepipedic) so the condition 5 holds.