4 ms·

> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music

> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production. Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops. That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either. People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro. [1] https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418 https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418

jltsiren 4y ago
The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office. I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.
- lostapathy 4y ago
  > While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, most offices I’ve been around have internet that tops out no more than a little faster than a decent home connection, but have dozens of people sharing them.
- mfld 4y ago
  A while back I built a linux box for bioinformatics and was happy with the performance [1]. You might need to look for suitable main boards to support your RAM requirements, though. [1] https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Mainstream-Desktop-PC https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Ma...

jltsiren 4y ago

The switch to working from home made high-end workstations a bit more relevant. While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, the quality of home internet is often much worse. You can't rely on the cloud as much from home as from office. I develop bioinformatics methods and software, and I see significant productivity gains when I can run tests with full datasets locally. So far I've been using an iMac with 128 GB RAM, but I'd like to upgrade to something with 256 GB or even 512 GB. As the Mac Studio is pretty underwhelming from my perspective, the options are basically a hypothetical Mac Pro and a Linux box.

lostapathy 4y ago
> While offices had fast and reliable internet connections, most offices I’ve been around have internet that tops out no more than a little faster than a decent home connection, but have dozens of people sharing them.
mfld 4y ago
A while back I built a linux box for bioinformatics and was happy with the performance [1]. You might need to look for suitable main boards to support your RAM requirements, though. [1] https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Mainstream-Desktop-PC https://www.ecseq.com/blog/2020/Whole-Exome-Analysis-on-a-Ma...