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It really startled me that the comparison was the Pro vs the Ara, and not the Pro and the Ara. The Pro is very much in the spirit of modularity. True, everyth
by toufka 13y ago
It really startled me that the comparison was the Pro vs the Ara, and not the Pro and the Ara. The Pro is very much in the spirit of modularity. True, everything written demonstrates the different level of granularity of modularity between the Ara and the Pro. But to the consumer, the forward facing arguments are exactly the same: "Buy what you need, each separately, and link them all, as needed rather than a huge AIO - one size fits all".
The Mac Pro is requires you to bring your own HDs, bring your own expansion cards, bring your own network gear. Which centers the Pro itself at the core of a modular computing center.
- atestu 13y agoPrecisely! This is especially true with the chaining capabilities of Thunderbolt. People don't change Mac Pros like they change iPhones, the one you buy today will still be powerful in a couple of years.
- imjoshdean 13y agoFrom the looks of it, it feels like that couple of years could be 5-7 years.
- klodolph 13y agoThat's just the modern PC landscape for you. My Mac Pro is on the high end of that age range and it still does what it needs to do.
- kybernetyk 13y agoI recently bought a new Macbook Air. My old Macbook Pro was 4 years old. Not that the old machine stopped working - it still works perfectly fine. The Core 2 Duo CPU was up to all tasks I threw at it (compiling C++ code). I just wanted longer battery life. That's why I see no problem with the new Mac Pro being so "unmodular". Unless something revolutionary happens with CPUs that machine will be good enough for more than 5 years.
- ksk 13y agoWhat tasks do you do? I have a 2010 MBPro running ML and it slow has hell for doing any kind of iOS dev work. It used to be pretty fast but Apple's software updates - OS + Xcode have slowed it down considerably.
- danbee 13y agoHow much RAM do you have? OS X is quite memory hungry and is terrible when it has to page. I'd recommend maxing out the RAM if you haven't already. I'm guessing you have a regular hard drive too. An SSD will make it feel like a new machine. Also, Mavericks is much snappier than ML from what I've seen so far and makes much better use of RAM.
- ksk 13y agoI have 4GB and yeah, my hdd is non-SSD. But it wasn't this bad back when I was working with snow leopard. Unfortunately Apple forces you to get their new OS to use the new Xcode and that has screwed my performance. I've disabled a bunch of things, Spotlight indexing, dashboard, their notification stuff, etc and also moved swap to a new partition, its helped, but still not as snappy as when it was new. At the moment, I'm weighing my choices .. do I upgrade RAM,SSD or do I get a new one - but then I have to buy apple's expensive ram and cant easily change the SSD in the future.
- oscilloscope 13y agoApple added memory compression in Mavericks, so upgrading to the latest OS may improve your situation. Disclaimer: I don't actually know.
- cjkarr 13y agoI upgraded my late-2008 iMac with Mavericks to see if it performed better than Mountain Lion given that my machine's maxed out at 4GB of RAM and my experience thus far has been that overall, the system is more responsive, but there's a lot more latency in doing things like restoring backgrounded applications that haven't been quit, but are still running. It may be that my machine is too old, but Mavericks has just shifted the latency around in this case.
- jotm 13y agoPretty much - even the base version of the Mac Pro will take more than half a decade to become obsolete (at the rate we're seeing now). And I believe the Mac Pro's processor is still on a socket (correct me if I'm wrong), so it's also upgradeable.
- wlesieutre 13y agoEven if it's a socket, Intel's been churning out new sockets every 2 years or so. On desktops it's gone LGA 1156 (2009), LGA 1155 (2011), LGA 1150 (2013). For servers it's LGA 771 (2006), LGA 1366 (2008), and LGA 1567 (2010). You have a pretty limited upgrade window. One tick/tock, and then your socket is outdated. The new Mac Pro, provided it's socketed, would be on LGA 2011.
- jotm 13y agoThat's beneficial for those who will want to upgrade - once the new sockets are out, the prices for the previous generation chips will go down - you can potentially upgrade from the base quad core to a six core processor, giving it a good boost in performance.
- CPAhem 13y agoYes, the socket thrashing by Intel is a bigger problem. You'll probably have an interesting time updating an LGA2011 in 2015, never mind the RAM.
- gutnor 13y agoThat has almost always been a problem. Even in the past when you could keep socket for 5 years, the chipset on the motherboard was limiting you upgradability to processor of the same generation.
- Arzh 13y agoYea the only things you can't change are the CPU, the GPU or the RAM. You know the things that I might want to upgrade the most over time.
- avdempsey 13y agoExcept the RAM is upgradeable: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57588607-263/how-upgradable-is-the-new-mac-pro/ http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57588607-263/how-upgrad... ...and the GPU may be upgradeable: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/25/graphics-cards-in-new-mac-pro-may-be-user-replaceable/ http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/25/graphics-cards-in-new-ma...
- 2muchcoffeeman 13y agoAnd even if you can't upgrade the internal GPU, you have 2 thunderbolt ports. Just plug in a new card.
- Sanddancer 13y agoIntel hasn't approved an external graphics card that can connect via thunderbolt, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. It's one of the big issues I have with thunderbolt -- it's micromanaged to hell and back.
- 2muchcoffeeman 13y agoAre you saying there is no all-in-one external graphics card? Sonnet makes an external PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure that you can pop a graphics card into, and there is that DIY guy: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162652-diy-external-thunderbolt-gpu-turbo-charges-macbook-air-graphics-performance-by-7x http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162652-diy-external-thund... Granted that is not pretty and there are OS support issues. But it is possible and I am hopeful it gets easier.
- dnissley 13y ago
- verbin217 13y agoThis seems to be a common misunderstanding about the new Mac Pro. Apple has actually improved modularity by liberating expansion from a fixed physical space. Additionally, users aren't required to install scary-looking computer hardware into PCI slots. They can just use the familiar UX pattern of plugging a cable into a port.
- rsync 13y agoI am looking at the name of this website and I see that the name of this website is "hacker news".
- joshstrange 13y agoCould you please explain your comment a little more? I'm honestly curious to know why you think the concept of abstracting technology into easy to use components is in conflict with the "hacker news" ethos.
- wmf 13y agoExcept the Thunderbolt device is twice the price of the equivalent PCIe card and now you have cables everywhere.
- pekk 13y agoSeems like you missed the part where Apple did it, therefore it finally became good. Just like Intel was a dirty word until Apple switched, then it was good.
- verbin217 13y agoThis seems to be a common misunderstanding about the new Mac Pro. Apple has actually improved modularity by liberating expansion from a fixed physical space. Additionally, users aren't required to install scary computer hardware with SATA cords and PCI slots. They can just use the familiar UX pattern of plugging a cable into a port.
- xlayn 13y agoInterestingly you don't touch one of the arguments, physical connections limit the connections (as in bandwidth and future updatability) but the same is true for the internal of cpus and their connections with the RAM and when evolution it's not enough disruption comes to the play, optical connections. Regarding the screen size and the usability factor, same could have been said about the pc (the keyboard has certain size for some reason) but the goal is not to carry a pc but to extends our capabilities through it and eyes sir are a weak link in a bright future of tech I'm not sure I'll see or may never happen (<dream>and this is totally offtopic and it's even daydreaming but... sci-fi like the extremis armor were mechanisms and tech are fused to the actual human may be the path... with the appropriate tech, you never know when one of those "damn nature you screwed this time with this human" times, curiously the errors make him an uber genius; will create it</dreaming>). remember we are machines of ideas and our body the bare metal on which our vm runs.
- gibwell 13y agoThe Mac Pro is from Apple, so it is fair game as an example of something 'passé', bad or a dead end.