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You know what would be nice: Apple engineers and designers finding this thread and others like it and using it as inspiration to build another lovable Mac Pro.
by robotresearcher 9y ago
You know what would be nice: Apple engineers and designers finding this thread and others like it and using it as inspiration to build another lovable Mac Pro.
The coffee can Mac Pro was a swing and a miss: an engineering achievement of sorts and an aesthetic bold move, but not loved by devs or scientists. I want an excellent case I can pack full of RAM, disks and GPUs, not external expansion with $70 cables that glitch and mess up the aesthetic in the process.
I don't know if Apple can make enough money on workstations to keep their attention, so maybe those days are gone.
- nine_k 9y agoDo scientists use OSX much? Just asking. OTOH a fully-packed graphical / video / audio workstation could be well-received. I just don't think Apple want users to tinker with their machines at all. Fewer configurations = fewer support calls.
- make3 9y agoscientists I know have osx laptops and run jobs on linux compute clusters.
- walshemj 9y agoAKA an expensive way of running telnet or xwindows sessions - when a basic leveano or dell would be cheaper and run full fat office and not the cut down mac versions
- robotresearcher 9y agoResearch profs travel a lot, and thus enjoy battery life and light weight. Many CS and math profs live in LaTeX and shell and not Office. Mac is handy.
- walshemj 9y agoAnd a lot more expensive in a bang for buck way.
- robotresearcher 9y agoDepends how much you weight the battery life and form factor bang. And UNIXness. I value these a LOT. Also: trackpad. Apple's is the best by a mile.
- make3 9y agomore like, having a beautiful ui experience with a full shell, and sending the heavy lifting to a machine made specifically for that
- walshemj 9y agoThat's a matter of opinion and finder is a terrible UI for a file manager for any one who has used windows or Linux file managers. And the way Apple has diverged from a more traditional UNIX like Linux is a big problem if you are developing to run on Linux as it adds a whole new set of risks.
- make3 9y agoalso got what is worth, modern version of Mac office are really good
- walshemj 9y agoIll give you that the latest version of office is an improvement you can go beyond 56K rows in excel now! but its still not as good as the real thing.
- TetOn 9y agoGeneticist in a large academic lab here, I'd say 99% of all computers in use are Macs. Some instrument-tied PCs, a couple of Windows laptops, and that's it. Any data analysis (and these are predominantly sequencing scale datasets) that isn't running on the institutionally provided cluster is also being done on Macs. In my ~20 years on the job in various places, OSX really changed everything; labs used to have a few Macs around for non-analytic tasks where the old MacOS was just easier. Post OSX, it's nearly all Macs unless it ships with an instrument of some kind (and then it's likely Windows). The analytic tool chain is/was massively unix based, so adapting to OSX was easy and came with a very nice GUI that also did the aforementioned easy non-analytic tasks.
- qubex 9y agoThe high-tide of Apple machines in genetic research actually has nothing to do with what most people might presume and has a very specific, very technical reason. The AltiVec (“Velocity Engine”) present in G4 and even more so in 64-bit G5 machines was discovered to be extraordinarily efficient at performing the calculations required for the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (commonly known as BLAST). At the time, the G4/G5 architectures had a massive lead on other chips present on the market at the time (i80x86-derived machines such as Pentium III, Pentium 4, and Pendium M; but also other exotic architectures such as MIPS, SPARC, and DEC’s Alpha. Eventually other architectures caught up by adding vector units or vector instructions of their own, and Apple stripped any basis of fact out of this when they switched to Intel, but by a form of institutional inertia, Macs still rule in the genetics segment.
- robotresearcher 9y agoA non-scientific mental inventory gives the common setup among my CS colleagues: - Personal computer: MacBook Pro (Linux on Thinkpad or XPS 13 runners up) - Lab workstations: Linux on Dell - Compute server: Racks of Linux on Dell / Generic box of NVIDIA GPUs / Amazon ECC
- masukomi 9y agobut do "lab workstations" really equate to "workstations of people in the business" or "computers this school got a good deal on" ? I think the latter. I suspect that they're irrelevant to this discussion.
- robotresearcher 9y agoI choose my lab workstations. Institution discounts factor in to my decision, but I choose.
- Eric_WVGG 9y agomy impression is that the predecessor of OSX, NeXT, was pretty much the OS of choice in sciences for a good ten years…
- pvg 9y agoIt was certainly its ambition to be an academic workstation originally but lots of other things were. 'OS (or hardware) of choice in sciences' doesn't really reflect reality.
- robotresearcher 9y agoHuh? It’s a market. Not the biggest market, but a real market that spends billions, has extreme needs in some cases, and influences well-trained people who become decision makers in other markets. Why is it not reality?
- pvg 9y agoComment says 'NeXTSTEP wasn't OS of choice in sciences', not what you misread it as.
- jcadam 9y agoBack in college (1998-2002), I had an old, white-bearded CS professor who kept (and actually did work on) an old NeXT Station in his office. He was a little... off.
- cat199 9y agonot really. More like Sun in those days (or maybe SGI or IBM rs6000, possibly HPUX though it was more for business) depending on whatever proprietary things you wanted to run.. but really Sun. from there: linux PC's until OsX, then a mix of both.
- rleigh 9y agoYes, but can vary much from department to department. A decade back the immunology department I was in gradually switched almost entirely from Windows PCs to Apple Macs. Primarily by people seeing how much nicer and more productive a user-friendly Unix-based system was than Windows; even the die-hards eventually switched over. We also had a large number of Linux/Unix people as well, particularly for bioinformatics, who bought fully maxed out Mac Pros from the G5 onward to do work which required a lot of memory and disc. Back then, they were good value for money. Today, Mac usage is declining. The cost:value isn't there and they don't manufacture any high-end kit. Given how much PC you can buy for the same price as a MacBook, like a 32- or 64-core Threadripper or EPYC with a massive GPU which blows any available Apple hardware away, it's not hard to see why. For computational biology, running Linux on it gives you a much more capable and productive system, and even Windows 10 with the Linux subsystem is perfectly adequate. Apple's mistake has been to focus upon only profitable consumer product lines, and drop the ball entirely on the high end. They didn't sell as many high-end units, but they were the driver for Mac adoption in many places, and without that Mac usage will continue to decline. A mediocre laptop isn't good for a lot of scientific uses.
- moonbug22 9y ago> Apple's mistake has been to focus upon only profitable consumer product lines, Yeah, what idiots.
- rainbowmverse 9y agoIgnoring an entire market is how BlackBerry got clobbered by Apple. They didn't see a consumer device company as a threat. I don't know what vectors of attack there are on Apple from the business and research machine market, but someone is going to figure it out.
- exikyut 9y agoSeems there's no real attack vector; it's just a matter of waiting and doing small tests to see if Apple are completely blind yet, then doing some big thing.
- chaosphere2112 9y agoI can report that the climate scientists I knew mostly worked on macs (laptops, largely; a variety had trash-can Mac Pros as well). Fairly sizable motivator was the Unix CLI; they all had come up working on supercomputers with C/TC Shells, so having that locally was a big win.
- Fomite 9y agoMy lab is pretty much exclusively OSX-based workstations/laptops and Scientific Linux servers.
- frou_dh 9y agoThey're already on record as acknowledging it was a swing and miss, so you get your wish. https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
- cjsuk 9y agoThis is really good news. Enough for me to hold onto my Z620 for a bit longer.
- knodi 9y agoya right, look at all the other "feedback" they have ignored on the macbook and macbook pro.
- fineline 9y agoI wonder if in a few years people will be fondly writing articles like this about the 2013-16 Retina MacBook Pros. Mine is getting a bit long in the tooth, but what to replace it with?
- krallja 9y agomarco already wrote an article like that https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever
- knodi 9y agoYa, i'm holding on to my 2013 Macbook Air. Hoping there will be a new version of it soon. I'm going to wait one more year before jumping ship to a Linux ultrabook.
- digi_owl 9y agoI suspect the can was Jobs last hurrah of sorts. It seems to be kinda like a followup to the Mac Cube, where priority is put on surface design.
- lostgame 9y agoWhich was a brutal failure as well, for virtually the same reasons. Guessing ‘learning from the past’ isn’t Apple’s strong suit.
- Clubber 9y agoIf they had used a standard SSD interface, all else I could get around, but their proprietary connection rather than M.2 was a dealbreaker for me.
- stuaxo 9y agoI'm tempted to wack a mac mini into an Akito case with a decent graphics card and see how it goes.
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoAkitio? Certainly some of their products bear more than a passing resemblance[1] to the Apple towers... 1: https://www.akitio.com/desktop-storage/thunder3-quad-x https://www.akitio.com/desktop-storage/thunder3-quad-x
- derefr 9y ago> I want an excellent case I can pack full of RAM, disks and GPUs, not external expansion with $70 cables that glitch and mess up the aesthetic in the process. I feel like Apple was onto something here, but they screwed up by trying to scale up the mobile paradigm (black boxes connected by cables) when there's a very similar paradigm much friendlier to professional use—the server rack-mount paradigm—that they could just scale down. Imagine a small "compute core" just like the trashcan Mac Pro (CPUs + RAM + GPUs, replace it all at once when the time comes)... except it's in the form-factor of a server blade, and is sitting in a rack roughly the size of a workstation PC. You'd buy a "Mac Pro", and in the box would be the (very elegant, Apple-y) rack, one "compute core module" to slot into it, and one "storage module" as well (which is your boot device, making the compute-core diskless and so a commodity.) You could customize your order to get a RAID storage module instead. You could buy more pre-populated modules from Apple, or other vendors, or buy empty modules to install whatever components you want. Third-party empty modules would probably cost about as much as a USB hard-drive enclosure costs today. And, of course, the modules would all connect to a shared backplane... which would just be PCIe. So it's all the same Thunderbolt idea, just shaped differently.
- bluedino 9y agoApple-specific modules would be expensive and limiting
- derefr 9y agoIf the backplane is PCIe, it'd be really hard to prevent third parties from just making their own modules. Or selling generic $10 PCIe-card enclosures. But that's rather the point: if Apple made this thing, they'd know that, so they probably wouldn't be trying to prevent an open ecosystem of modules at all. They'd be encouraging it, since that's the whole pitch behind why it'd succeed as a "workstation" product in the first place.
- Jyaif 9y ago100% with you, and I still hope this is what they'll replace the trashcan with.
- 9y ago
- tw04 9y ago>I don't know if Apple can make enough money on workstations to keep their attention, so maybe those days are gone. Then they need to partner with hp/Dell/Lenovo/whoever to build the hardware and sell the software to run on it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]