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This and other similar things are so often and easily ignored. I see people talking about Macs not supporting pro use. But hey, tell me, how am I going to power
by ztjio 8y ago
This and other similar things are so often and easily ignored. I see people talking about Macs not supporting pro use. But hey, tell me, how am I going to power my 6 external displays on a Surface product of any kind?
I get that people want some more variety and excitement, and maybe feel like the Thunderbolt port thing is problematic (despite absolutely enabling my most “pro” setup I’ve ever had on my ’17 13” TB MBP) and obviously the keyboard design has issues.
But as a whole package it’s still the best commercial product you can buy in its space, and considering actual size, has no real competition even if you ignore the many, many software issues one faces when leaving the warm, design-loving embrace of the macOS software ecosystem.
I’ll reconsider this situation after Microsoft releases a Surface product that isn’t almost guaranteed to require one or more returns to the store and oh, yeah, has Thunderbolt 3 support so I can plug in 2 cables to get: 6 external displays (1 4k, 5 2560x*), NVMe speeds to external storage, gigabit ethernet, digital audio, SD card reader, spare ports, etc. etc. (aka OWC TB3 Dock with nearly every port in use.)
There are a few non-MS laptops that might handle the hardware requirements I meet with my current setup, but, nothing that couples the hardware with the Software. Show me even one single app that matches the care and design of Things for macOS + iOS, for example. These are things I use every. single. day. for nearly every. single task.
Frankly, I look forward to Apple fixing some of their issues with the MBP line and hopefully by then the situation with mobile processors will be improved enough to allow for some bigger memory footprints and the like, though, honestly, despite running minikube based workflows locally, I’ve never ran out of RAM at 16GB. I guess it’s because I don’t use Slack.
- hug 8y ago> I see people talking about Macs not supporting pro use. But hey, tell me, how am I going to power my 6 external displays on a Surface product of any kind? I have many friends, most of whom are professionals, but none of whom are software devs. A bunch of them do devops and SRE work, a bunch of them are creative professionals, and a bunch of them are in other professional services, like finance and law. Personally, I work for an "IT services" company, essentially doing outsourced devops and ops for numerous other professional services companies. What I'm getting at is that I know literally hundreds of professionals, across my personal and work life. The sum total of those in my life who need or use 6 displays: Zero. You are not, in any way shape or form, a typical professional. If you need 6 displays (which you might, but I'd bet a dollar you don't) you're basically so far out of the ballpark of standard professional that you're on the moon. Let's not pretend that the Surface Pro — or the Macbook Pro, for that matter — are in any way not suitable for the vast majority of professionals.
- dxxvi 8y agoI guess he is a stock dealer. That's why he needs 6 monitors.
- ztjio 8y agoI don’t know of any stock dealers using kubernetes, but, maybe I’m just out of the loop. No, I’m a developer, I work in, I dunno what you want to call it, Machine Learning Data Engineering? Stuff like that. I use seven displays because I like spatially organized workspaces. Four of them are only 10”, effectively 1280x800 displays, two of which are always showing terminals. I have a particular way I like to work that I’ve developed around how macOS handles multiple displays/Spaces that benefits more from many small displays than few large ones.
- soyiuz 8y agoYou are a prime candidate for a tiling window manger such as i3, designed specifically with fixed windows at fixed locations in mind.
- ztjio 8y agoI used a tiling window manager years ago when I ran Linux as my main OS. I’ve used similar third party tools to try to get... a similar effect on macOS but it always falls apart. In the long run, I more greatly value the software I get to use on macOS (not to mention things like first party hardware and software support) over the window managers and that type of thing available elsewhere, and frankly, as a geek, it feels cool having a matrix-operator-like setup as my workstation so I’m happy.
- FPGAhacker 8y agoDxxvi beat me to it, but yeah, traders. Old friend of mine at Raymond James told me once he had ten. But I don’t think they were all one computer.
- voltagex_ 8y agoYou must be close to PCIe limits pushing that many displays.
- ztjio 8y agoIt’s up there. Well, kinda. The eGPU asks for all of the PCIe bandwidth available on its TB3 controller, actually, it asks for it twice, once for the video and once for the audio devices. But in reality it requires far less. For one, the entire screen data set isn’t sent constantly over TB3, that’s going to be highly variable but never especially demanding since I’m not running any games or anything like that there. And two, the displays on that are all 2k (2560x1600) resolution. On the other controller, although it’s the one that doesn’t actually offer the full 40GBps, we have a 4k and a 2560x1400 display actually driven via DP over TB3 so that does eat up a lot of bandwidth. About 24Gbps. What’s left is basically powering a USB 3 hub with a handful of devices rarely using their full capabilities simultaneously. So it’s plenty of remaining bandwidth. But the official requested throughput is actually well above the real capability of the hardware so it’s hard to say exactly how close to maxed out it all is. Just that I’ve not yet had any issues or conflicts with the setup.