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I just broke down and finally got a 2015 5k iMac. At some point I just need to get work done instead of waiting for the latest and greatest and the 2015 iMac is

I just broke down and finally got a 2015 5k iMac. At some point I just need to get work done instead of waiting for the latest and greatest and the 2015 iMac is powerful enough. I got a good deal on a refurbished one too, so I'm pretty happy with it. There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level. I just pray that external GPUs will become supported on MacOS. That's the final piece for many people, I think.

micaksica 10y ago
> There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level. I believe there's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with at all. Assuming most of Hacker News is coding, we're spending a lot of time in text editors; even if you are constantly recompiling code, CPU-wise is anything giving you that much of a boost over anything past Haswell or the PCIe/NVMe drives in the current MBP? However, my work machines are a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 with a GTX 960 eGPU / TB2 when I need mobile hashcat, a T440s, and a Surface Pro, all pretty old hardware. 90% of the time I don't notice RAM pressure or that I am CPU bound, even when running a few VMs (say, Kali + Win10 on my MBP, or a few Win10 images in Hyper-V on the T440.) When I need more power than that, I can usually just rent it out of AWS/Azure. I think sometimes the hardware game - especially on the Apple front - seems about keeping up the cycle and appearances of getting the new hotness. Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.
- sedachv 10y ago
  > Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers. A couple of months ago I dusted off an Acer Aspire One netbook (released in 2010, Atom N450 processor, 2GiB RAM) to install OpenBSD 6.0, after a few years with Linux and Mac OS X on other systems. Surprisingly it is my primary machine now. Today I wanted to see if there were even smaller netbooks with usable keyboards around and came across this video comparison of the Sony Vaio P and Fujitsu UH900: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI The video was posted in February 2017 and the thing to notice are the complaints about the mini netbooks being unusable for web surfing and viewing videos in 2017. 99% of users are absolutely convinced that the reason web pages load slowly is not in fact horrible garbage JavaScript bloatware, but that their computers are too old and slow. HN users do things like uMatrix filtering and `youtube-dl -f`. I think that the 99% of users are much more demanding of their hardware than HN readers, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  if not constantly, then, really really frequently, i recompile Android projects. before buying a new machine recently, i wanted to know what benefit a fast processor would offer for my specific usage pattern. so i repeatedly recompiled a representative Android project at different CPU speeds on my existing (over-clockable) machine. the machine needed about 15% less time to recompile at 4.1 GHz than it did at 3.4 GHz.
dovdovdov 10y ago
Well, I replaced my 2010 MBP with a 2015 MBA, just because I got bored with it, and was also bored with waiting for a 'proper' MBP update. I also got it within a good deal, so I haven't had to touch my piggybank which has £1500 in it since 2013 waiting for Apple to hear the voice of developers who are busy with more advanced things than selecting the perfect emoji on the touch bar at a Starbucks.
dvcrn 10y ago
External thunderbolt GPUs are already supported (with a little bit of hacking). Check out https://egpu.io https://egpu.io
nottorp 10y ago
The home user problem is the GPUs in iMacs are shit for gaming. The work user problem is the iMac isn't designed for 100% CPU usage for extended amounts of time. I work from home as a consultant, so I have both problems :) Thus, hackintosh...
zerohm 10y ago
There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore My personal data point of Moore's Law slowing down: my 8 year old Core 2 Quad is still half as fast as a modern i5. For it to still be usable would have been impossible in previous decades. With an SSD and modern video card I still game on it.
rconti 10y ago
Yup. I gave up and replaced my 2006 Mac Pro with a 2016 5k iMac once I realized the prices were sub-$2k instead of the $3k I was expecting. I've always hated all-in-ones but lately have found displays and computers last roughly as long as each other so it's less of a concern. That GORGEOUS 5k display sure doesn't hurt, either.

micaksica 10y ago

> There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore at the desktop level. I believe there's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with at all. Assuming most of Hacker News is coding, we're spending a lot of time in text editors; even if you are constantly recompiling code, CPU-wise is anything giving you that much of a boost over anything past Haswell or the PCIe/NVMe drives in the current MBP? However, my work machines are a 2014 MacBook Pro 15 with a GTX 960 eGPU / TB2 when I need mobile hashcat, a T440s, and a Surface Pro, all pretty old hardware. 90% of the time I don't notice RAM pressure or that I am CPU bound, even when running a few VMs (say, Kali + Win10 on my MBP, or a few Win10 images in Hyper-V on the T440.) When I need more power than that, I can usually just rent it out of AWS/Azure. I think sometimes the hardware game - especially on the Apple front - seems about keeping up the cycle and appearances of getting the new hotness. Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers.

sedachv 10y ago
> Yes, the exhilaration of having the next big thing is great, but functionally I'm inclined to believe that having the old thing is just fine 99% of users, and probably 80% of HN readers. A couple of months ago I dusted off an Acer Aspire One netbook (released in 2010, Atom N450 processor, 2GiB RAM) to install OpenBSD 6.0, after a few years with Linux and Mac OS X on other systems. Surprisingly it is my primary machine now. Today I wanted to see if there were even smaller netbooks with usable keyboards around and came across this video comparison of the Sony Vaio P and Fujitsu UH900: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szbfvV4vwEI The video was posted in February 2017 and the thing to notice are the complaints about the mini netbooks being unusable for web surfing and viewing videos in 2017. 99% of users are absolutely convinced that the reason web pages load slowly is not in fact horrible garbage JavaScript bloatware, but that their computers are too old and slow. HN users do things like uMatrix filtering and `youtube-dl -f`. I think that the 99% of users are much more demanding of their hardware than HN readers, unfortunately for all the wrong reasons.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
if not constantly, then, really really frequently, i recompile Android projects. before buying a new machine recently, i wanted to know what benefit a fast processor would offer for my specific usage pattern. so i repeatedly recompiled a representative Android project at different CPU speeds on my existing (over-clockable) machine. the machine needed about 15% less time to recompile at 4.1 GHz than it did at 3.4 GHz.

dovdovdov 10y ago

Well, I replaced my 2010 MBP with a 2015 MBA, just because I got bored with it, and was also bored with waiting for a 'proper' MBP update. I also got it within a good deal, so I haven't had to touch my piggybank which has £1500 in it since 2013 waiting for Apple to hear the voice of developers who are busy with more advanced things than selecting the perfect emoji on the touch bar at a Starbucks.

dvcrn 10y ago

External thunderbolt GPUs are already supported (with a little bit of hacking). Check out https://egpu.io https://egpu.io

nottorp 10y ago

The home user problem is the GPUs in iMacs are shit for gaming. The work user problem is the iMac isn't designed for 100% CPU usage for extended amounts of time. I work from home as a consultant, so I have both problems :) Thus, hackintosh...

zerohm 10y ago

There's only so much of the hardware rat race worth keeping up with anymore My personal data point of Moore's Law slowing down: my 8 year old Core 2 Quad is still half as fast as a modern i5. For it to still be usable would have been impossible in previous decades. With an SSD and modern video card I still game on it.

rconti 10y ago

Yup. I gave up and replaced my 2006 Mac Pro with a 2016 5k iMac once I realized the prices were sub-$2k instead of the $3k I was expecting. I've always hated all-in-ones but lately have found displays and computers last roughly as long as each other so it's less of a concern. That GORGEOUS 5k display sure doesn't hurt, either.