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What Would It Cost To Build a Windows Version of the Pricey New Mac Pro?
zacharye writes "The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and flexible computer Apple has ever created, and it's also extremely expensive — or is it? With a price tag that can climb up around $10,000, Apple's latest enterprise workhorse clearly isn't cheap. For businesses with a need for all that muscle, however, is that steep price justifiable or is there a premium 'Apple tax' that companies will have to pay? Shortly after the new Mac Pro was finally made available for purchase last week, one PC enthusiast set out to answer that question and in order to do so, he asked another one: How much would it cost to build a comparable Windows 8 machine?"
This is a business level product.
While you can build one cheaper using DYI parts, however the time spent in wages, for souring the hardware, software and doing the software can add up very quickly
.
Then there is also support and maintenance - will having a custom built machine cost more in the long run?
The more you spent on the machine - the bigger the margin for the DYI version - however at the end of the day - is the cost worth it for business?
Simple, add $199 for a copy of Windows, and you have an equivalent Apple machine, duh.
Why would you put Windows 8 on a work computer?
I bought my Mom a Mac Pro for Christmas.
She says GMail runs so much faster now.
Site is starting to get Slashdotted.
The Mac tax has always been about the actual parts they use and that there are cheaper alternatives. For this comparison, they try to match the parts exactly. That of course is going to cost more because you are paying 3rd party markup prices while Apple is being direct from the manufacturer. The article even admits that you can buy things like a different video card that is equivalent for half the price. The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
They've speced a machine with half as much RAM, and the Mac has server grade ECC RAM. They've replaced PCIe storage with SATA. It's not a comparable machine. For a fair comparison, compare the Mac to a similarly speced HP server. Alternatively, at least spec the Mac lower to match, rather than maxing out everything.
Also, the Mac includes little niceties, some of which the HP will match better. I have the Macbook Pro, not the newer Pro, but by way of analogy compare Apple's reversible magnetic power cable vs. everyone else's barrel plugs. Apple does a lot of little things better on their computers. (Unlike their iOS iPhone and iPad, which I wouldn't buy.)
Your "apple tax" will come in the form of support costs. Help Desk jockeys and NT admins are a a call to TekSystems away. Admins with experience on a Mac enterprise are a touch more scarce.
Yes because a business is going to purchase a Mac Pro tailored for say video editing, then 1 year later switch to high end scientific data processing? not likely.
You're missing the point - If Apple is building what you want, why pay more to build it yourself?
Whether you can build a Mac Pro equivalent and save even 50% is irrelevant. The costs of the folks that offer the talent necessary to "git 'er done" in a lot of the film and graphics industries (to use popular examples) times the efficacy of the software they harness for their best productivity is all that matters. The fact that the majority of pro-level (compositing/whatever) apps are Mac-aware and optimized - and now more so or soon to be for the new Mac Pro, pretty much close the book. Have built large Linux clusters to crush a number of large computational tasks, and have always argued the "yahbbut... I could build that cheaper" case, but I think this one hits the mark *for its target market*. Buy it and get the job done. ...but damn, those monitors... ;-)
Of course you pay for the brand, what do you think Apple is, a charity?
And these comparisons are always stupid. You can get incredibly cheap hardware for windows/linux, or you can get really expensive hardware.
A compatible windows machine can be the same price, or even a lot more, or you can always build one for 1/4 the price or less.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
True. If you're one of the folks who get into upgrading or modifying their computer than don't buy anything from Apple. Given that such folks are a huge percent of Slashdot but a staggeringly small portion of the marketplace, Apple's not losing sleep. I'm sure most vendors seek to get cheapest standard configs while gouging the snot out of those who like to click extras.
Y'know, sometimes it's nice to not have to muck with drivers...
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
E pluribus unum
The new Mac Pro is the most powerful and flexible computer Apple has ever created
Apparently the author hasn't had to service a Mac recently. It might be flexible in some directions, but maintenance friendliness is not one of them.
Now if it was saner like the older Powermacs, then things might be different.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Being able to upgrade the CPU or the video cards would be quite handy, wouldn't it?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Why do I think they ordered those parts from the most expensive sources possible?
Well, if you read the fine article (the original, not the bgr rehash), you'd see that all the proces come from NewEgg -- not the cheapest, but also not the most expensive...
Spec out a $5k mac. How much does the PC equivalent cost?
Also, I think "as small as we can" is bogus. If this is supposed to be a business product who gives a fig about smallness. Make it functional and normal looking.
why limit to Matx? it's a high end system not an mini system.
and there low end system has a better CPU.
It is stated that the $10,000 mac pro has Windows equivalent ATI cards (dual) costs over $7,000!
Also the Mac Pro has an SSD PCI Express card that is insanely big (1 TB) that can delivery gigs per second! That is pricy on the Windows equivalent cards too.
Bare in mind Windows 7 is showing its age. I know its cool here to be conservative and love XP/7 since Vista came out on slashdot, but TRIM is not supported for SSD PCI cards or in raid :-(
I do not think Linux is either. Of course those who are smart like to say it doesn't matter as they run Cron jobs and other hacks to get around this which is nice on a server but a little unpractical for 99% of users.
The real question at the end of the say is not that what it would cost a PC equivalent, but why would you need it?
Yes, some geek here will say (insert fringe case scenario for their mathmatica or engineering assigning or crappy SQL database) but that is becoming more and more fringe. 10 years ago when computers took 30 damn seconds to launch OpenOffice, 8 tabs in Firefox took all your damn ram, autocad would not run very well at all on your gaming card (which was just a 2d card with 3d features and not a real GPU) then workstations were more popular. 20 years ago pcs were expensive and just for light typing and simple spreadsheets where every accountant at wall street just had to have a damn $20,000 sun workstation at his desk, or photo artists needed $4,000 macs for photoshop effects etc.
If I was given a free $9,995 Mac Pro I would think it is cool for a little and maybe get a few more fps in SWTOR but nothing else. ... ok Vmware would be fucking sweet! but with a single ssd on my 3 1/2 your old PC with upgraded 16 gigs of ram they run just fine. Why bother to upgrade?
I do not think these are going to sell well at this price point just like PC workstations do not sell well. They sell in niche markets and that is it.
http://saveie6.com/
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/24/apples-new-mac-pro-a-better-value-than-the-sum-of-its-parts
But this has happened before.
Initially Apple gear can boast this kind of disparity; then, in fairly short order, PC hardware which exceeds Apple specs arrives and sells at a cheaper price point due to economies of scale.
Apple then holds onto the original specs for years (the last Mac Pro being a perfect example), until they are forced to retool. I'll even go out on a limb and predict a five year interim before we see another significant revision.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The Mac tax has always been about the actual parts they use and that there are cheaper alternatives. For this comparison, they try to match the parts exactly. That of course is going to cost more because you are paying 3rd party markup prices while Apple is being direct from the manufacturer. The article even admits that you can buy things like a different video card that is equivalent for half the price. The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
So if you can build a cheaper equivalent... why aren't you in business, building cheaper equivalents and getting rich off the fact that it's costing you less to build equivalent hardware?
These are like portable SGI machines. What's the point? Nobody is going to walk around with a $10K machine. They'd be appealing if they had functional cases, though. This is the kind of machine that needs to be easily upgradeable and customizeable.
I don't respond to AC's.
Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).
See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).
The parts aren't the only thing. It would cost millions to hire a team of developers to develop a decent OS and take years.
We already know you can replace the three major components people generally replace in systems - so it's not like you have to max out any of those three initially. Except for the fact Apple is generally charging you less than you'd have to pay on your own for that part right now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The people who buy these ... cough the corps who buy these never upgrade them.
They just replace them when a fan dies etc. They do not give a shit about upgrading. They view it as rapid depreciation and feel their job generates more revenue than the cost of a slower machine even with an upgraded part.
But maybe good employers exist or I needed to major in something else?!
http://saveie6.com/
Does anyone else think it is strange that Broadwell is on the way, and they have an Ivy Bridge processor in this thing (Xeon E5-2697 V2)?
I know. This is what Intel sells, but still. It just feels "old".
Corps never do these to workstations.
They replace them instead because depreciation wise it is not worth it to put another $7,000 card in a machine now worth just $2,500 3 years later right?
PCs are different as the workers who use them are treated like crap and cost centers. These are for producers who add value to the bottom line etc.
http://saveie6.com/
Maybe not in a large business but in smaller ones? Sure to some degree.
But beyond that...you need a cutting edge workstation like this? Ok. In 12-18 months it's no longer cutting edge and your upgrade path is ... replacement. If your business is that profitable and hardware dependent you don't care...then you'd probably do much better getting some datacenter space and loading up a server or blade farm.
Having no upgrade path is less of a concern when you're talking about a 500-1000$ computer.
Still a nifty but this is definitely aimed at a small niche market.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
AppleInsider had a similar article a few days ago.
Their conclusion was $14k, somewhat higher than the Slashdotted article... it would be interesting to see when it comes back up how the component choices differ from the real thing and AppleInsider's.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you were willing to budge on the form factor, shop for bargains, and substitute various components (such as a Quadro card instead of the FirePro, as suggested in the article), then you probably could build a comparable DIY system cheaper. But people who buy the Mac Pro really don't care about that. Businesses, in case you haven't noticed, tend not to go with DIY systems for the most part. They prefer having them purpose-built by OEMs. This system is aimed squarely at businesses in the creative sector: graphics design, modeling, rendering, and so forth. (Presumably a lot of them will be dual-booting with Windows 7.)
You'd be hard-pressed to build a system that has this much power at the same low noise levels (remember, you've got two graphics cards with about a 200W TDP each, plus a powerful Xeon CPU). You might be able to pull it off with the right case (most likely a Silverstone FT02 or FT04) and some careful use of fan controllers, but this would be a lot bigger than the Mac Pro, and you'd likely need to keep it under your desk instead of on top. No DIY system is going to match the Mac Pro's combination of high power, very low noise, tiny footprint, and excellent fit-and-finish. It just isn't possible within the limitations of the standard form factors of DIY parts.
Let's let grandpa tell you kids a story since the Apple bashing has reached a bit of a frenzy lately with the introduction of a professional-grade computer.
First things first. This is not a computer that little Billy is buying so he can run the latest warez torrent of today's game du jour. This is also not a computer that dad is buying for the family to sit in the living room and run quickbooks on. No, your average neck beard is probably not looking to max one of these out so he can whip up the the latest build of the development branch of his custom linux kernel.
This computer is a business computer. It is designed and offered at a price range that will appeal to a customer who uses the computer to make money. No, not some bit coin mining operation, but real tangible money. These are designed for professionals who bill out to real paying customers for between $200 and $800 per hour. Yes, you heard that right. In the grown up world, highly productive and effective professionals bill their clients real money. When people grow up and begin to afford products like this, they are not wearing skinny jeans and sitting in Starbucks trying to look cool on a financed Macbook.
So, this is a $10,000 computer. So what? For a business purchase, let's evaluate this whole thing.
This is a computer that based on its speed and performance may allow that professional mentioned above to be 1.5 - 3 times more productive. That means more money. At $200 per hour, that's only 50 hours to recoup the cost. That's one billable week. It's a drop in the bucket. One client engagement. But wait, there's more
You see, in the business world, there's also this neat thing called depreciation of assets. It's an accounting thing. I know, I know, they aren't elite computer dudes, but the accountants do stuff with numbers and things like that. Anyway, in a basic system, the business that buys the computer gets to take the money spent off their taxes based on certain formulas. One way they do this is taking the acquisition price minus the residual value at the end of the effective lifespan (5 years) and then take the total left and divide it across the total period. Say the company buys a $10,000 computer and estimates it will be worth $1000 in 5 years time, it then takes the remaining $9000 and divides it by 5 years, which gives $1800 per year. The company can then take $1800 each year as depreciation expense on the asset. (Disclaimer for those with some accounting background, this is straight-line depreciation and there are other allowable forms that handle things different)
This means that not only does the company get to reap the rewards of more productivity but they also get to reduce their tax liability on the money they earn from it. I know, evil capitalists are keeping the man down by denying tax money. However, this is how the world works.
That is why a company will happily spend $10,000 on a high end Apple computer that some of you can't wrap your head around.
But, can't it be done cheaper by building it themselves? Probably yes. Although TFA was a non starter in that regard. Here's a hint for you just beginning your career. Business does not care that you can twist a screwdriver and put something together off newegg. Apple, for the money, provides someone that will happily offer mature support and a one-stop shop to handle repairs and other needs. Yes, the genius bar is not perfect nor is it what is usually considered enterprise level support (believe me, I do know the difference). But, it's a good option.
Move past the point that things are upgradeable or hackable or DIY or whatever. These things are productivity appliances. They are like the big screen televisions in the conference rooms or the phone systems. If something breaks, it gets fixed or swapped out by the vendor. It's cost effective and gives management someone to yell at when things go south.
So, y'all can continue to bash the product. You can happily laugh with derision at Apple while
"Draw them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion." Sun Tzu
They did. It's called Linux.
There might be incompatibilities with linux on Mac (I don't know firsthand, I'll take your word for it). On the other hand, they didn't design and test it for that purpose.
It's been my experience that Apple's notebooks work very well when used as intended.
The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.
This is exactly what people seem to not understand. Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ). When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
Granted, not all software will be fully tweaked off the bat with the new mac pro, but its a system that no doubt the big players (The Foundry, Autodesk, Maxon, Avid, Adobe, etc) will target for testing and make sure their software works and takes advantage of as much of the hardware as is possible. As opposed to testing on randomly built DIY solutions.
For the price, how can you really beat a high end system thats custom built (down to the pcb level), using mostly off the shelf stuff (just assembled in a way thats not convenient to the DIY/tinkerer), supported by a single company, and is / will be used in testing by the actual companies that write the software you want to run on it?
Have you ever priced out professional level Linux video editing and 3D composting software? (Not Blender, as interesting as it is). The kind that major movie production houses use? You can't because you won't find a price on any web site. You call up a sales rep and discuss your potential build. It's one of those things that if you have to ask how much it costs, you can't afford it.
Yes, that software is out there. But it is for the big boys and girls who don't give a fig about the costs of a particular workstation since their overhead is mostly professional people and professional video and audio gear whose prices often start in the five figure range. The Apple tax is just chump change.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The Mac Pro was updated every year from 2006-2010; it was only the 2010 version that was stuck in place, probably in part due to the development of this new machine.
There is no way that system is the same, or even close to the same as a Mac Pro. Either the storage is slower (very likely), the GPU is slower (very likely), or some other aspects are also not really the same (you say "similar" Xeon CPU).
The Mac Pro *does* have an upgradable GPU. It's proprietary but that doesn't mean Apple will not be offering an upgrade later, or that third parties may do so (they have with Apple's custom storage chip interface in the past).
It's great you can build a powerful and flexible system, but it does no-one any good to claim it is really comparable. And would it really be nearly as good as even the cheapest Mac Pro configuration?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why do I think they ordered those parts from the most expensive sources possible?
Or it could just be the riced up hipster case.
... $9,599 which includes 64GBs of ECC DDR3 memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD, two AMD D700 (W9000) GPUs, and a twelve core Intel Xeon 2.7GHz processor.
While there is nothing really remarkable about this list of parts, it’s the way that they are integrated that provides both pros and cons. On the pro side, you have all this workstation grade hardware in a cylinder that is less than 10 inches tall and under 7 inches wide, with the power supply inside. This makes it very easy to take it on site or pack with you.
Pack with you? Because that's a concern with desktop workstations? I guess you can discount the dual monitor setup if portability is the key? Oh, right, OSX, so you basically have to bring it with you because everyone else is running a different OS and your programs aren't compatible. I don't give half a crap about the story, or I'd go to build the thing online in a tower configuration. Maybe throw in some LEDs, black-light ground effects, a custom body job with clear side panel and glitter+glue monogram too -- You know, really rice it to the next level.
I'll bet this thing just smokes. I've always aimed high when redoing my desktop, back in January I loaded up 32GB of DDR3 RAM, 6 TB RAID V, 250GB SSD for boot and OS space and a 6 core AMD CPU, which is fairly adequate. It has to be as I'll expect it to run for 5 or 6 years before I upgrade again. I built and even beastlier machine for a friend who's doing a lot of media work. It's an absolute screamer, but again, he is expecting it to be competent for the next 5 or 6 years. I build his last one and it motored along well until he decided it was time to upgrade, too. When you spend money, you don't want to do it often.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
i think it's cheaper to have middling computers every 2-3 year cycle than a gargantuon every 6 years
Final Cut Pro and Lightroom work so well in Linux.
Apple spent much effort in making the Mac Pro power efficient, drawing at most 450W. And, I would guess far less on average. If you're paying about 11 cents, per kWh and using it 8 hours a day, at most it's going to cost you about $144. With all the fans and other things in a typical PC, I have to imagine that it would be possible to double or triple the annual power consumption costs of the Mac Pro.
Betteridge's law says the answer to this question is, 'no'.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
The OS I don't care about one way or another. I prefer it to Windows in the sense that it has a functional unix-ish command line, but beyond that the GUI is irritating in different ways. I'd prefer to run Linux on it, for my own reasons, but I'd rather wait until the Haswell-EP (or whatever they're calling their 2P Xeon's these days) is released. Hopefully Mac Pro doesn't miss that generation...
But building a comparable Windows machine with parts available on the market through your favorite sources (ex. newegg) is not possible at any price. You can integrate components with equal or greater functionality, but how much system test is there? Who is going to root cause every blue screen? Trust me, more of those blue screens are hardware related than I would have believed years ago. Who is making sure the PSU can deliver the needed power for the various application loads, and that it is performing with margin? Who is doing thermal measurements, checking airflow and ensuring parts are being kept safely in their operating region? This is what Apple is doing that "justifies" the price. The double quotes are there because no other system's company out there is holding to any quality standard except Apple, and as long as that's the case, Apple can charge whatever it likes.
It's not 1999 anymore. It used to be a computer would be obsolete before anything broke. Who cares about quality in this case? DIY made a lot of sense (and Apple suffered). But now even high end users can miss 3 or more processor generations and not care. It's better to pay a bit more for something that's going to hold together.
tl;dr, as a former motherboard designer and employee of a large OEM that is dying spectacularly, I assure you that Apple's computers are worth more than the sum of their parts. I
Cheaper, certainly. But a PITA. I hate, hate, hate installing Windows.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The last time I did the comparison, it came down to deciding which specs were really important to match and which weren't. There are many different versions of various 3ghz processors out there with vastly differing prices.
Some have more cores, some run cooler, some have more on-die memory, or more more threads, or some instruction that may or may not be useful to you. More banks of FPUs. Smaller process size. Bigger process size.
Other components are similarly difficult to compare. RAM has it's speed, bus size, timing - should you get a balanced set? Is that a thing still? Was it ever? ECC?
Anyway, I found when I gathered all the "hidden" specs and priced things out (several years ago) that the macs were actually competitive for the hardware. However, the hidden specs are hidden because the market doesn't really respond to them when they're revealed. Are they irrelevant? If you ignore the hidden specs, you can select hardware that is vastly cheaper, which although isn't the same, maybe is close enough.
Objective comparison is hard to find, and I think part of it is that there are plenty of sites doing hardware comparisons and presenting them in ways that really obscure the difference between the hardware, and there is really no consumer friendly software profiler available on the market.
Doubling your RAM isn't going to help if the programs you run are bottlenecked on loading data off the disk. Adding more L3 cache isn't going to help if your program already fits in what you have or if it spends most of its time waiting on user input. Better sleep/downclock modes would help there. The won't help for high-performance gaming.
How do you really know what you need? Which specs are really relevant?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I thought that too (specced one out), but recently I found out they are in fact shipping to people already. The two months is just for new orders as they are in heavy demand...
It still may be possible to pick one up at an Apple store though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes but high society won't be impressed by your machine you built and will think you are a mongrel.
They will point at you in horror like a Roman pointing to a barbarian and say things amongst themselves and think you hideous and definitely not one of their kind.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Here is a breakdown of diy.
:Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 12 core - $2,524.00 :480 GB - $1007
Cpu
Motherboard: ASUS Z9PA-U8 - $277.99
64GB 16x4 (4 slots still free) - $720
PCIe ssd
Power supply 1500 Watt - $374
Case: $274
Video cards: ??? not currently available
Total: $5,176
Apple with similar specs: $7,899
So that leaves $2,723 for video cards, I can't find any suggested prices on the D500 or D700, except that Apple charges $300 per card to upgrade from D500 to D700.
Of course if you wanted 12 cores you could save a bundle and just get a dual socket board and 2 6 core cpus. Also the MB supports a lot more ram etc, but is a lot bigger.
Sources:
CPU: http://www.compsource.com/ttechnote.asp?part_no=BX80635E52697V2&vid=211&src=14
MB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131915
RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147307
HDD: http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-Drive-Series-Express/dp/B0058RECOU/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1388118274&sr=8-9
PSU: http://www.amazon.com/SILVERSTONE-ST1500-CrossFire-Certified-Modular/dp/B002BH3Z84/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1388118413&sr=8-2&keywords=1500watt+power+supply
Case: http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Obsidian-Series-Performance-CC-9011035-WW/dp/B00EB6O4N8/ref=sr_1_1?srs=2529199011&ie=UTF8&qid=1388118511&sr=8-1
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
Why would you install Windows? Oh, sure, I get there might be some Windows-only apps you want, but put a reasonable VM on the box, install on that once, and just move the VM to successive new machines. You can allows throw more virtual hardware at it.
-- Alastair
Yes, that software is out there. But it is for the big boys and girls who don't give a fig about the costs of a particular workstation since their overhead is mostly professional people and professional video and audio gear whose prices often start in the five figure range. The Apple tax is just chump change.
One word.
Autodesk Flame.
xeons already have a luxury tax...
and while it doesn't make that much of a difference in the total their case was 160 bucks.. motherboard 280 bucks.. going mATX really bites. and get this, 50-75 bucks for bluetooth and wifi(wtf??).
and then going for luxury taxed firepro's. 3400 bucks each. the point with going with the pc is that you can choose something else as well. heck, you get a monster of a machine just by going with two 1000 bucks gaming cards, if you don't need that bit switched on to make it a "pro opengl" card(or just nvidias "pro" cards, either way you would shave off a whopping 4800 bucks!! that's nearly HALF OF THE FUCKING PRICE for no practical performance loss - or heck, maybe even a gain).
it's their choice of parts that makes it expensive as hell, not the choice of where they priced them from.
*luxury tax here refers to paying for something someone just building a pc at home with their own money would never buy... something that is marked up just because some companies don't give a shit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I've seen JavaScript heavy sites that make my i7 laptop's extra fans kick on...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Recently, we built a Supermicro Workstation 7047GR-TRF configuration. I am revising the system configuration to update the parts to get a comparable overview:
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2643 v2 (fastest available) - $1552
Memory (4GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $240
Firepro W8000 (x2) - $2560
Intel SSD 910 400GB - $2000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $7,172
The base system will be pretty much high vs the $3,999 cost
In another comparison
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Firepro W9000 (x2) - $6800
Intel SSD 910 800GB - $4000
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $15210
The configured system is still pretty high compared to $9599 from Apple pricing
Although specifications cannot be matched one is to one, I believe that the Windows workstation can be reduced in pricing by changing the Intel PCIe SSD and GPU to avoid using the top of the line products.
For example, using the following
Supermicro Workstation 5037A-i - $580
Xeon E5-2697 v2 - $2750
Memory (16GB/ECC/DDR3-1866 x 4) - $840
Quadro K5000 (x2) - $3200
Intel SSD DC S3700 200GB - $500
Windows 8.1 Pro - $140
Others Accessories - $100
Total - $8110
The configured Mac Pro is $8119 for the 256GB Storage and Dual D500.
So I guess the configuration will depend on the system.
For us though, we have found a more cost efficient alternative by buying a Supermicro 7047GR-TRF dual Intel Xeon socket and not using the top of the line for everything. But we are able to achieve 12 cores 2GHz, 64GB RAM, Nvidia K4000 for Display, Dual GTX680 GPU for compute, 8Gb FC Celerity HBA for around $5,000.00.
It will really depend on the applications to be used at the end. For us though, most of the applications are available in Windows and Linux configurations will limited Mac exclusivity so the PC solution is economical for us.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Apple gets creamed by Wintel in that market space, so it's not really much surprise that there's no Apple tax. otoh, I'm looking at a Mac mini for some entry level Mac development I want to do porting my Firefox Plugin to IOS and almost cry. The Mac Mini all blinged out with an i7 and 16 gigs of ram will set me back almost a grand and doesn't compare that well with my 6 year old Athlon XP 3000+ and GT 240 (albeit with the DDR 5 on the 240). Comm'on Apple, at least run Street Fighter 4 at 60 fps and 1600x1050...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You can replace the first two things via a PCIe card attached through Thunderbolt.
Why would you WANT to replace the fan which is perfectly tailored to the system and for noise levels?
But why would you replace the first two? It already has two GigE ports. You can get Thunderbolt to FiberChannel adaptors if that's what you were after. And it already supports a pretty modern WiFi stack, 802.11ac.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The service aspect is not all positive.. With a vendor built, a component failure means a 2 week minimum turnaround where you're out of a machine. If you've built it yourself it's an overnighted part and you're up and running again...and if you're crazy desperate, a drive to frys/microcenter.
If you remotely know what you're doing, your home built cooling setup easily beats the cost conscious compromises built into vendor designs, even the boutique brands like apple. It's not difficult to design a cooling system for stock clocked chips.
Finally, there's performance. It's quite easy to build an overclocked machine that'll outperform anything apple offers, even while staying away from benchmark warrior speeds. I'd rather have 8 cores at 4.6 ghz than 12 or 16 at 2.6 for 99% of the applications out there, including 'embarrassingly parallel' media heavy ones like 3D modeling and video encoding.
Yes, if you don't know what you're doing, your build's reliability will suck, but really, it's not that hard to build a decent machine yourself that outperforms apple in performance and reliability.
You can't assure me jack shit. This is an appeal to emotion. Try getting help from apple when your machine is out of its expensive applecare warranty. Good luck. At least with a home built, it'll last as long as you want it to as parts are always readily available, and at no worse reliability than the crappy refurbs apple sticks into supposedly 'new' computers when they fail. They're usually cheaper too.
It's not Linux's fault that the developers of Final Cut Pro and Lightroom specifically chose *not* to support Linux. It is also not Linux's fault that both Apple and Adobe guard and keep their programs' source code secret, so it is impossible for anyone else to compile it for anything other than the operating systems that these two companies choose to compile these programs for themselves.
when buying equivalent hardware
Even in the example that is "only" 11k instead of 10k from Apple, there were significant shortcomings in the hardware used compared to what Apple ships. It's not going to be equivalent - probably not even to the cheaper Mac Pro configurations that are just $3k-$5k.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your infographic is outdated by nine months. Windows 8 has probably stolen quite a chunk of Windows XP usage share since then. But then I'm typing this into a PC that's part of the 2% "Other", so what do I know?
Then the question comes up how it can be integrated into the workflow since the macpro is built around thunderbolt connectivity and not much else.
FibreChannel Thunderbolt Adapter for SAN access?
10GbE Thunderbolt adapter?
Final Cut Pro and Lightroom work so well in Linux.
By the way, there exists now an open source Lightroom clone called Darktable.
It was however a generation+ behind state of the art despite charging state of the art prices for most years 2007 onwards.
No, there's no shortage of Hatebois on this site. Why do you ask?
My last corp (admittedly, "just" a $500M/yr revenue CE company) upgraded the video card in my desktop CAD workstation...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The title of this story is "How much would it cost to build a Windows version of the Mac Pro", so I described a system I specced that is very similar.
The user wanted a system, I specced it for him. It was built and he's happy. Your comment notwithstanding. And I am hideous :)
It's not Linux's fault that the developers of Final Cut Pro and Lightroom specifically chose *not* to support Linux.
Yes, it is. Get back to us when Linux can deliver an equivalent to the IOKit.
For which devices do Final Cut Pro and Lightroom include drivers?
If you remotely know what you're doing, your home built cooling setup easily beats the cost conscious compromises built into vendor designs, even the boutique brands like apple. It's not difficult to design a cooling system for stock clocked chips.
Go on then, show me how you'd build a self-built cooling system for a 12 core Xeon, and 2 high end pro video cards that's near silent, and fits in a 7" by 11" cylinder.
Finally, there's performance. It's quite easy to build an overclocked machine that'll outperform anything apple offers, even while staying away from benchmark warrior speeds. I'd rather have 8 cores at 4.6 ghz than 12 or 16 at 2.6 for 99% of the applications out there, including 'embarrassingly parallel' media heavy ones like 3D modeling and video encoding.
Right, and that's *really* going to be quiet, that'll *really* please the video and audio editors who need the machine to stay silent and out of the way so that they can hear what they're actually doing.
I have the Macbook Pro, not the newer Pro, but by way of analogy compare Apple's reversible magnetic power cable vs. everyone else's barrel plugs. Apple does a lot of little things better on their computers.
Meh, I have a macbook pro too, but I'm more than a little non-plussed by the newest one... no ethernet without dongle is a joke in a pro level product. But on the upside its the first time they've finally had the sense to put a video port on it that anyone actually will be able to use without an adapter. (Mine has mini-displayport... I have encountered the ability to use it with someone elses equipment without an adapter that I brought myself exactly 0 times.)
So yeah, I like the magsafe adapter a lot, but I wouldn't say Apple does a lot of little things better. They seem to have their head up their ass just as much as the others.
As for the comparison, its meaningless. The number of people who would need or could need those mac specs is vanishingly small.
Lets look at a mac that compares to my current workstation. Oh. No. Can't do that Apple doesn't make one at all.
The mac mini is woefully under powered compared to my desktop. The imac gets closer, but still falls well short in key areas that can't be upgraded. The Mac Pro... ok that hits it out of the park... but its overkill and has a price to match.
THAT is the problem. Lots of perfectly normal people need and want to exceed the limitations of a mac mini or imac but jumping into a mac pro is absurd.
To use a car analogy Apple makes a VW Golf Hatchback (mac mini), a VW Jetta Sedan (imac), and an 18 wheel semi tractor trailer (mac pro).
Lots of people out there need or want something with more power and capacity than a Jetta or Golf but they need a semi tractor like they need another hole in their head. Does apple make a pickup truck? an SUV? Nope. Yet lots of people want those sorts of vehicle.
I specked an "equivalent" at newegg and crucial (newegg didn't have the 16GB RAM DDR3 1866 ECC chips that apple uses). It comes between $9800 and $12000 depending on what SSD you are going to stick in. $14K is a bit excessive. Apple's price is in the ballpark, considering that they save quite a bit on whole sale prices and large scale manufacturing, but have invested considerable amount of money in a design for a niche market. What is more interesting is their effort to "encapsulate" the workstation the same way they did with the laptop and the desktop. I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals. Making upgrades possible only using external attachments is pretty transparent effort to create a market for expensive accessories. I am curios how this will turn out.
There are many different versions of various 3ghz processors out there with vastly differing prices.
A 3GHz Pentium 4 should come off cheap. ;)
Actually, Thunderbolt on Macs deviate from the specification a fair bit. The Thunderbolt spec is simple: Expose devices as hotplug PCI-E, let the BIOS do everything.
Thunderbolt Macs go out of their way to... not that. Read more at http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html.
You forgot the spoilers and the furry dice...
For most users, the biggest expense on high end workstations like this are the video cards. If you work at a smaller firm and want to save a few thousand dollars on your new workstation, my advice is to read the online forums for others users of whatever key software you need to run and find reports of what consumer level video cards work. For example, we run Revit at my office. Autodesk only certifies Revit to run on a select number of high end Nvidia and AMD cards. The reason for this is because Autodesk doesn't do the certifying themself. They give Nvidia and AMD a copy of Revit and tell them to send back a list of cards that will support Revit, and surprise, surprise, Nvidia and AMD only send back a list of their most expensive professional level cards. They do this because they know that a user who is dropping $5000 for a seat license for Revit is going to bend over and take it when they're told they need to buy a $1500 video card as well. The thing is, though, plenty of Nvidia's and AMD's consumer level gaming cards will run Revit just fine, and some of them will actually run it FASTER than their pro level cards. You can usually pick up a consumer level card for around a quarter of what you would have payed for the comparably specced "professional" level card. Autodesk isn't the only computer that does this, too. If you're at a big firm, it's probably a better use of time to just buy a standard, pre-built workstation, but if you're at a smaller firm, telling your boss you can put together four new Revit workstations for $10000 less than you'd pay if you ordered them from Dell will definitely score you some points.
Pack with you? Because that's a concern with desktop workstations?
The CPU and two video cards have a combined TDP of 680 watts--and that's not including chipset, RAM, drives, power supply, etc. I hope this thing has lead weights in the bottom; otherwise, the fans needed to keep it from melting into a pile of slag will scoot it across the desk when they spin up.
They don't even make Creative Suite anymore, wisecrack.
I'm not sure you got the point of the article - they were trying to match the specs of the capabilities in the Mac using commodity parts. The GPUs in the Mac Pro are the same as those firePro parts that cost a small fortune, and even a couple of R9 290x's wouldn't keep up because of a lack of VRAM (6GB of DDR5 vs 4GB on the 290's)
I'm not saying you need those gpu's, but if you're trying to match specs, those are the ones to choose. I think it's also clear that Apple are pushing gpu-based computing at the high end (they designed OpenCL after all), so high-load gpu code is likely to be common in the pro-apps. Those GPUs will be used on a mac.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Typing on a Macbook Air that has the imprint of the keyboard on its screen because of the way the screen closes. It drops out wifi periodically. I had a Macbook before where the plastic started cracking after 6 months and Apple refused to replace it, saying it's normal wear. So no, I don't buy that a newegg component will be less well designed.
Finally, there's performance. It's quite easy to build an overclocked machine that'll outperform anything apple offers, even while staying away from benchmark warrior speeds. I'd rather have 8 cores at 4.6 ghz than 12 or 16 at 2.6 for 99% of the applications out there, including 'embarrassingly parallel' media heavy ones like 3D modeling and video encoding.
It comes at a cost of stability. You may argue that you can build an overclocked system that is rock solid...but by nature, an overclocked system is never as stable as one that is not. If it were, they would sell the processor at that speed!
You may say that it's 99% as good, or perhaps higher. Your overclocked system may only fault once or twice more per year--remember that this thing is full of ECC RAM. But in some applications, that may not be acceptable. One or two additional failures may be very expensive. If the computer is used for complex tasks, it may not be possible to save data too often. If a save takes 5 minutes (large, large data or not so efficient programs), you can't save it every 15 minutes because you'd lose 25% of your time waiting for the files to save (1 hour = 45 minutes working, 15 minutes waiting for saves). Every hour might be the best you can do and an hour or so of lost work might be incredibly expensive and damaging to productivity.
That's the sort of environment this Mac Pro is meant for. To save a few grand...it's not worth the risk. The cost of problems could be several magnitudes of order higher than the $3-5k you might save on a DIY project, at which point it's better just to pony up for a proven product. If it doesn't work as expected, Apple will ship out a new one ASAP. Sure beats the hours of downtown you'll lose to having a tech guy figure out what exactly went wrong.
Why would Apple create a super overpowered desktop machine when all services are being moved to "Cloud-based"? Certainly you don't need that much power to run a web browser. All you need is a Pentium 4 and a super fast internet connection.
I want to play star trek Armada on the computer that can run Final Cut Pro and Lightroom.
If it can't then it's useless to me.
(yeah, i am comparing platform dependent items ( and hard drive partitioning storage types ) here. and I have no use for Final Cut Pro and Lightroom In fact, I have no idea what Final Cut Pro and Lightroom are..)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Yet the Mac Pro is ...
a) Round
A shape chosen for better cooling characteristics - they can get away with a smaller case, and a smaller fan to cool the same components that a square case would use.
b) Shiny
This is the only one of the items that really has little practical use. Yet what case maker WANTS a butt-ugly case? And in a design shop it looks better to have better looking gear.
c) Cool looking
This is only because it's small, but small has utility too. It means it's much easier to move around, and modern workers change workspaces more frequently than they used to. Have you tried moving one of the older Mac Pros? They looked great too but you sure wanted to leave them where they were.
d) expensive
That's not even right. For what you get it's NOT expensive, which is the whole point of the Slashdot story to begin with. It gives you a lot of power at a fair price, and some people do in fact need that much power. Anyone who does not can just buy an iMac.
There are a few rich people that will buy one just for fun, sure. But most of the people buying this system will do so because they have a PRACTICAL need for the power the system offers in a smallish form factor.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
An AMD server at that price is 64 cores, 512GB memory.
I am really curios how the so called "professional" users will react to not being allowed to upgrade the internals.
Well, they probably will find out they can, then they won't care.
You can upgrade the RAM, storage, and video cards. Yes they use proprietary connectors for the last two but third parties have offered upgrades for apple proprietary connectors before. It also means Apple could well offer GPU upgrades in the future.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Umm, Dell!!! Have you not heard of them? Seriously, they do have their own R&D department whom works directly with 3rd party manufacturing. They do things like environmental testing, acoustics of the machine noise, thermal, and other stresses. While I prefer to build my own rig because 1) I can, and 2) I take pride in my own creation, Dell does make a good business class machine from basic office usage to workstation class CAD and GPGPU simulation/render-farm-in-a-box.
Life is not for the lazy.
Because you have never priced workstation class parts maybe?
It is hard to find a Xeon that exactly matches the one in the Pro but the very top of the line socket 2011 Ivy Bridge EP xeon CPU is over $2500 on newegg.
The one closest to the one in the Mac Pro is this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117273 and it is $1111.99 on newegg. So there is one third the price of the Pro right there.
Two Firepro w7000 GPUs are 700 each and you are at 2800 more or less. now add in the motherboard, ECC ram PCIe SSDs case and power supply and you can see the Pro is actually a good deal for what you get. Those are the prices off Newegg so yes you might find them cheaper but they are competitive.
A Dell workstation configured close to the Mac Pro is actually more expensive.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Thunderbolt has only a passing acquaintance with pcie. It most certainly is not just a pcie bridge over wires rather than on board connectors. Thunderbolt is a switched packet network transport, and can route data packets of many types (including video, pcie, raw thunderbolt dma, etc.)
In addition, every thunderbolt port is a switch, using source-embedded routing to decide whether the packet ought to be forwarded n hops or whether it's destination is local - so the local CPU only gets involved if you're traversing thunderbolt controller chips, or if the packet is for the local machine.
There's a lot more to thunderbolt than just pcie, so if linux just treats it as pcie then linux is getting it wrong.
Physicists get Hadrons!
With a vendor built, a component failure means a 2 week minimum turnaround where you're out of a machine
Not with Apple, and AppleCare. If they have the same system in an Apple store often they'll just swap it out if something is really wrong...
But the way the Mac Pro is built, it would be pretty easy to swap in replacement storage or GPU or memory to fix one of those items going bad. Or two switch all your custom cards into a set of cores they had stored in the back for replacements.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You position the fans pointing upward, that keeps the machine firmly on the desk
6-core AMD just ruined the build, I have an 8-core AMD with 32gb RAM and SSD and its a dog compared to the same specs with i5 or i7 on just about everything.
If you want a beast of a build use a supermicro board with dual xeon cpus and 8 or 16 dimm slots. ;)
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The only problem with this is if you use it for gaming. VM = No go for GPU support
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
He also skimped a bit by using gaming Motherboard on one of the builds.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Well, you could, but not easily in that form factor.. I never said it wasn't a trade off. The box will be bigger. It belongs under your desk anyway, not on top of it. Why pay extra for that weird form factor that works against performance? This isn't a compromise for portability like it would be for a laptop.
You're really missing it, aren't you?
People and companies who buy Apple gear for production don't address failure by ordering new PARTS and self-installing. Seriously? This is Apple.
They take their broken shit to the Genius Bar or drop a few thousand fully-refundable-inside-of-fourteen-days dollars (sometimes minus restocking fee, but not always) on an emergency replacement machine.
What you and many super-self-sufficient geeks don't understand is the value of a full-service vendor. Apple is not perfect, but for buying gear they're pretty damn close.
blog
Oh, because someone doesn't like Apple stuff, they're a "Hateboi". It is possible for someone to genuinely not like their style, you know.
Actually, it took a while (due to GreatFirewall-itis) for the original page to come up, but I find the actual computer to be very un-Apple-like...and I actually quite like it.
The monitors, though, I still don't like.
This computer is the first Apple product I've genuinely thought was good looking since the old PowerBook Titanium...I had a twinge of 'hrm, not bad' for the iPhone4 (hated the prior ones), but that didn't take hold.
I must take a closer look at it...I somehow don't think the photos do it justice.
Of course, I don't much care for Aqua either, so I'd wipe it and put on Ubuntu...which I find an interesting proposition...
Max.
You mention service, which is not what i was talking about - and indeed you can overnight or run down to Fry's if you have one and replace parts immediately. If you correctly guess the root cause of the failure, which is not so easy to do even if you know what you're doing. Usually you replace the obviously broke part, and it happens again some time later. What seems like a bogus PSU frequently very likely is something else that individually it makes no sense for you to root cause. A system test team would certainly do this, particularly for servers. It happens less with consumer goods.
You mention overclocking - I know many people do this, and for their own reasons it makes sense to them. However you're definitely aging your system prematurely, and you're exposing yourself to subtle data corruption via numerous mechanisms. You probably don't care for your application, but I suspect the majority of us wouldn't knowingly expose ourselves in this way. Unless you work in silicon manufacturing and you have looked at the PVT test results for several wafer lots and can convince me that a particular part should work faster than its rated frequency at a particular temperature and voltage, I don't trust what you're doing. I spend my time debugging CPUs that were binned to WORK at 50% over their rated frequency and find subtle problems for a living, I would rather trust the MFG about their speed grade. If you want to risk it, great, and if you have a system where you can justify doing so, even better. I just want the damned thing to work for as long as possible.
I never pay for Applecare, ever, and never mentioned it. I've never needed it, that's my point. I don't buy extended warranties of any kind. A product works or I stop buying from that vendor. I will happily endorse Apple, or Honda for that matter, as long as they build quality products. Once they screw me, I turn on them like a rabid animal.
I'm not trying to take your homebrew away, it has a place, I always have one or two around. But for machines that have to work, that I can't afford to be messing around with, I prefer to stick with something that was properly designed and tested.
I'm not sure how you got "a pcie bridge over wires rather than on board connectors" from "Expose devices as hotplug PCI-E". Presenting devices to the operating system as PCI-E hotplug in no way implies they actually are PCI-E devices or are in any way electrically similar (much like how "file descriptor" hardly means "file").
In short, I agree with everything you said in the second paragraph, and I think it supports my point. The OS (local CPU) only gets involved with the Thunderbolt controller for communication relevant to it. The controller chip hides all the complexity of packet switching and routing etc. Unless you're on a Mac, which takes all that brilliant design and says "We're going to require the kernel to manage everything the controller chip should be doing for us".
Source: same as before, from someone who has read the relevant spec and implemented a driver - http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html
Weird.
The PSU is only rated for 450W.
Is it powered by magical unicorns on the inside or something? Or is there some kind of lame throttling where you're either using the CPU, the CPU and a single GPU, or both GPUs, but not everything at once?
they weren't trying to match the specs capabilities.
they were _trying_ to match the components 1:1, but failed at even that remarkably. but it did lead them to use 3400 bucks gpu's rather than something on the same spec capability level. those two fucking cards make up more than half of the price!
because apple sure isn't paying 3400 bucks for it's version of the amd chips in the fire version of theirs..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Heh, I'm posting this from Slackware, but you speak like someone who doesn't use windows applications that do any heavy lifting. Try running some higher end video editing software in a VM and let me know how well that works for ya.
Right tool, right job.
TL;DR: $11,530.54
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I've heard of good results for pass through GPU with Xen for gaming, though haven't tried it myself.
Don't think KVM is quiet there yet though.
Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).
See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).
And of course that could only ever be Apple's fault, it's not as if Linux ever had crappy drivers.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Putting a VM gets in the way of the performance. For media work, a lot of the hardware is not virtualized adequately or at all.
You are shooting yourself in the foot if you do that. I much prefer the big box every 5 years approach.
Or, buy a machine with 2nd best CPU, GPU and RAM, but very upgradeable with lots of SATA, PCIe and DIMM slots.
Then upgrade individual components over time as they drop in price, as opposed to rebuilding a whole new machine.
Ie. the exact opposite of the Apple approach, which is to build disposable, closed, non-upgradeable machines.
What are you implying? That wealth encourages ignorance? Well, I can't argue with that. It's not always necessary to buy the overpriced, underperforming ECC enabled xeon workstation, esp in a formfactor that necessitates further reductions in performance. A professional shouldn't have trouble doing basic maintenance on equipment he depends on, esp when it would shorten the down time from weeks to hours. The mac pro is targeted at the freelancer or smallish media production company. This is where self-builds work quite well. Their workloads are not 'that' different from the high end gamer set.
The value of a vendor? Like what? Long turn arounds? White listed BIOS peripheral lists that drive up upgrade costs? Overpriced service plans? Constant arguments with service phone jockeys over what's wrong and whether it's covered? I agree apple's service isn't terrible when compared with others, but it's still a lot worse than just doing it yourself and getting it over with. The sooner I'm back to work, the happier I am.
I don't see how you can implement a lower-level protocol (eg: raw thunderbolt DMA) using a higher-level abstraction of that protocol (eg: pci-e traffic). That's like saying you'll implement Internet-layer frames only using TCP. Similarly, I don't see how you can expose something that doesn't conform to anything remotely like pci-e as a hot plug pci-e device - the latency tolerances to remain in spec are way different for a start.
I too have implemented a driver, from a high-end FPGA to the Mac, and the OSX kernel does not get involved unless you're traversing controllers within that Mac, or the route cannot be expressed within a single transaction, or if the destination is local. It just doesn't. These are to my knowledge the only 3 reasons for the local CPU to get involved:
[1] If you have a machine with devices (1,2,..) on multiple thunderbolt controllers (say A and B), it's possible to have a route like A2 -> A1-> A0 -/-> B0 -> B1, and of course the kernel is involved then because the individual controller chips A and B are not bridged together in any other way. The kernel has to route between A0 (local) and B0 (also local).
[2] The initial spec for thunderbolt allowed a lot of flexibility with source-defined routing tables, but it wasn't taken advantage of, and the later chips from Intel removed some of that functionality (or, more likely, just reassigned the chip real-estate to something more useful). There are now potentially valid routes that can't be expressed within a single frame, and the kernel has to be involved at that point as well, to make sure packets get to their correct destination. It is, however, unlikely that users will see these routing issues in real-world scenarios, you have to have a lot of devices on multiple busses before it's an issue.
[3] The destination is the local machine. Of course, the kernel has to get involved then.
I have a lot of diagnostic code that monitors bandwidth, packet lifetime and routing, and latencies. I've run massive stress tests on multiple machines and devices connected via thunderbolt, and so far, the above 3 reasons are the only ones that an OSX machine enters the kernel for any thunderbolt-related cause. It is quite clear when the kernel does get involved compared to when it doesn't, so I'm confident that if it doesn't have to get involved, there is no interaction.
Physicists get Hadrons!
>they thought
>In that way it would be "Linux's fault".
Logic does not work that way, son.
In a similar vein, there is a Gamespot.com comparison of the Steam Box price versus the retail prices of the parts:
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/steam-machine-teardown-reveals-1300-price-for-components/1100-6416814/
"The sum of the system's various components--including its processor, motherboard, and hard drive--came out to around $1300. The most expensive component was its Zotac GeForce GTX 780 3GB video card--estimated at more than $500. It's important to note that the 300 Steam Machine units available today for beta testers are prototype systems. Specifications, and thus price, could change before the system launches publicly in 2014. It's also important to remember that several boxes will be available, featuring an array of specifications and price points. We've asked Valve to comment on the $1300 price point, but haven't heard back."
The Steam Box, a Gabe Newell subsidized bargain or will they just minimize profit as can be done to gain traction? Newell vs Jobs, I sense a difference.
(BTW, I still think Apple sucks, even if I have to admit the new Mac Pro design is nice.)
I mention service because that's what is always brought up to justify not-always-needed expenditures.
Sure, theoretically, but not within the lifetime of the system (again, assuming it was configured correctly). The fact is you're already exposed. The difference in magnitude may seem large, but the probabilities are so tiny it does not matter. If these probabilities do matter to your workload, you're not depending on a single workstation because you've got a farm of machines correlating each others' calculations to ensure integrity. The xeons are binned no differently than the core i7 parts. Same with the 'pro' grade video chips, except that the drivers detect which mode the chip operates under (usually set via straps on the board), and cripple/uncripple themselves accordingly. Sadly, even when buying the pro boards, it's still cheaper to self-build, and still get slightly faster performance without any overclocking whatsoever. That mac pro case compromises performance for size.
Well that's good, but what happens when you've got no where else to turn? When you have to accept the possibility of getting fucked, and the probability that getting the vendor to do the right thing is more frustrating and time consuming than just ordering the new video board from an etailer and installing it yourself?
Well, in my experience, for my workloads, which the mac pro is targeted at, I've never had issues with my home builds, but I don't do a half assed job either. Moderately overclocked, they run cool and quiet, well within the temp ranges defined by the mfg, even while under load. If intel cared that much about being conservative with thermals, they wouldn't dare ship their xeons with the heatsinks they do.
Why do I think that the prices somebody pays buying single components has no similarity to the prices paid by a company that buys in the thousands or more
Actually, you can certainly reduce disk I/O with more RAM by caching frequently used data. Sure, it won't help if you need all different data all the time, but that's usually not the case.
http://astutehosting.com/
What? I've had several hardware failures on Macs over the years, and the *longest* was a five day wait -- the second longest a two day wait, and every other failure was a same day or next day fix.
That five day wait was with a moderately aged (2.5 years: out of warranty) Mac Pro having a motherboard failure and they had run out of replacements in-house, so they sent out for new ones and it took a few days to get there. They got more then just mine in on that shipment, so someone else comes in tomorrow, next week, they will have a one day turnaround. Its worth noting that the mac is still going two+ years later with no other issues after that replacement.
That repair cost me not a dime. There are worst-case scenarios with Apple where you may be sans a machine a few days, a week maybe -- *MAYBE* even two weeks, but that seems to require a level of outdated hardware that you're better served going to an independent repair shop -- but it is *absolutely* untrue that the general, average component failure of a "vendor built" machine, if built by Apple, has you out for two weeks.
It doesn't happen. Apple Stores can do a huge number of component replacements in-house, and they keep a stock of parts to do it.
Yeah, I got charged for another machines fix that was out of warranty, but it took absolutely no special work. There was no effort or drama attached to try to somehow convince them to deign to help me as you suggest. They had the part on hand, and charged me a reasonable fee for the replacement + work, and I picked the box up the next day. This was out of warranty, without AppleCare. It just cost me. Had they been out the part, it might have taken longer to get replaced-- but my experience says looking at a week as the *extreme* and not average is a reasonable expectation.
In short: I have never bought AppleCare, have had a few service needs, and only one wasn't what I'd call fast-- and it was five days (COUNTING a weekend in there, not five "business days" extending to seven or eight) and that was on a device solidly outside of their normal, expected maintenance window -- even under AppleCare.
I don't doubt it might not happen that some Apple user sometimes has a two week wait, but that is the exception and not the rule. I can get to Fry's and hope they have the part (they have /frequently/ been out of a particular one I've wanted... and I won't even talk about how often I've bought items from there which turned out defective or the service issues I've had with them as a result...) or I can make an appointment, go in, drop off my box, explain an issue, and 80% of the time, come back later that day or the next day, and its fixed.
That 80% is based on personal experience, YMMV.
Yeah, quite. The base Mac Pro actually turns out to be fairly reasonably priced for the combination of components inside, but - and this is important - there is essentially no reason to get that combination of components unless you have no other choice because you're buying a Mac. For instance, they're paying out quite a bit of extra money in order to fit everything into a smaller case, even though that'd actually be a downside for many customers. Also, most of the professional applications out there that use GPU acceleration can only make use of a single GPU, so the second $3400 GPU will be sitting completely idle for most Mac Pro buyers. What's more, as the article mentions many apps run better on NVidia GPUs anyway. Also, how many of the GPU-accelerated apps can also make full use of a 12-core CPU?
Sure they do, they just don't sell it. They rent it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You, sir, are daring to bring facts to a gunfight.
The audacity!
I bet you're one of those guys that use a pirated version of Photoshop to crop your camera phone pics at home, and then demand that your employer drops 4k on a PS license, because "GIMP is sooo useless, it doesn't even have the contrast settings in the same menu as I'm used to!".
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
Component upgrades are definitely the exception in my experience. In a network of 3500 workstations that are currently under support, I am aware of 5 that have received an aftermarket component upgrade excluding RAM, all of which was done simply due to a need for their department to increase their monitor count from 2 to 4. Everyone else gets precisely what they have until there is a business case for them to get a replacement, after which their workstation will usually get a RAM upgrade, wiped and given to someone else.
Thirty four characters live here.
All this means that Apple has committed a pricing blunder by under estimating competitor's pricing. They are unlikely to repeat this next time. Don't expect any pricing reductions any time soon.
If you cannot installatie a modern version of Windows in onder 30 minuten these days I would consider you top dumb to be even let naar a computer. Let alone that you'd be actually capable of building your own HW. The Windows cheap shots are getting old, really.
30 minutes might be pushing it if you're using optical media, but with a USB 3 flash drive and a moderately fast computer with an SSD, it's certainly possible. But then you spend the next four hours waiting for Windows Update to do its thing.
DarkTable isn't a clone of LightRoom. It is a program that is used for the same sort of work and the UI has a lot of resemblance with LightRoo, but that's about it. While LightRoom has some features that aren't (yet) implemented in DarkTable, DarkTable has many features that don't have anything equivalent in LightRoom. For instance the equalizer and the profiled denoise are absolute killer features that make working with DarkTable give you results that would require much more work in the Adobe creative suite. Also, DarkTable has openCL support, making it one of the fastest tools ever to do complex manipulations on large images in (near) realtime.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
This Mac is not the most expensive Apple Computer. To tell you true true, is in the historical average for its class: in the nineties, the Quadra 950 was sold for 7200USD - something as 11200USD nowadays, as calculated by http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ .
Apple Computer was never a cheap computer shop. Since the Apple II era, their computers was far more expensive than the competition. It's a computing niche, where quality and user satisfaction worths more than money.
The cost/benefit ratio is far from reasonable, if you ask my opinion. But the same can be said about Ferrari cars, and you can bet your damn mouse I would drive a Ferrari if I could.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Sure, if you try to match size for size, spec for spec as closely as possible, you have a problem.
However, the article notes that if you went with nVidia chips rather than AMD - which may be preferable for some workloads - then you have the GPU bill, and immediately bring it below the cost of the Mac Pro.
And if you don't care to much about the size, changing the case and motherboard will likely bring your costs down further.
That's without taking advantage of what is good about DIY- the ability to make your own trade-offs as to where it is important to spend your money. Which is my biggest gripe about Apple hardware - to get the one or two things you really *must* have, you end up spending an awful lot more than you would for a PC, because you have to take a load of other things you simply don't care about.
You can really really use all the RAM you can get with video editing. The same applies to the 1TB SSD. If you're a pro photo or video editor, you're wasting time waiting on your computer processing and time is money. In a 3 year write off period, you can make a business case for spending $5K more on a computer that will easily save you over $100 a week in hours you can bill a customer. I bet that if these were supported hardware for Linux, AutoDesk would waste no time whatsoever getting these tested and certified as hardware for their Discreet Logic video editing product line. They use HP stuff now and those are more expensive than this apple with less video editing power in them.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And then you have an Apple branded indoor skydiving facility.
Most of the above post is true, Apple designs and build some nice servers in a pizza box format, and they are used extensively in the digital broadcast environment to serve up your favorite tv programs. But if you want to keep on using them, you either replace all the fans in them at 6 month intervals with even noisier, higher speed ball bearing versions or keep 50% spare stocks on hand. So we are now, and have been for 3 or 4 years, building our own in-house. And generally speaking, they Just Work(TM) for however long it takes a hard drive to die once spun up & virtually never again stopped.
Install sure, getting it to a usable state takes a lot longer..
Download/install any drivers which don't come with the stock install, probably reboot a few times too.
Update, reboot, update, reboot, etc...
Install apps by hand (since windows comes with only a crude set of apps and no package manager)..
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
They also skimped mightily by using a SATA SSD instead of the Mac Pro's much faster PCIe flash. Part of the Mac Pro's speed like the almost instantaneous app launches comes from the PCIe flash.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
OK then, no PM on windows, granted. But on any platform, installations take time. That's not a Windows only thing. Try installing a full latex system on any platform and check how long it takes... To name just one example.
And regarding the need for reboots, that situation has vastly improved in my experience. But then again, what's the problem with rebooting (which takes seconds on angry ng but Tue most slow systems anyway)
But that's the point... Watching the progress of your apt get or whatever tool you using or watching an system reboot... Reinstalling always takes some time but to hold that against any single system? Please...
It's not Linux's fault that the developers of Final Cut Pro and Lightroom specifically chose *not* to support Linux. It is also not Linux's fault that both Apple and Adobe guard and keep their programs' source code secret, so it is impossible for anyone else to compile it for anything other than the operating systems that these two companies choose to compile these programs for themselves.
Why would i care whose "fault" it is?
The same reason a lot of Brits write "should of" instead of "should have", I suspect: they're writing it the way they say it.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Actually it's not Linux's fault that Final Cut Pro is made by Apple now; they bought it years ago.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
And I had a plastic Intel Macbook years ago, that was discoloring, cracking and out of warranty, and when I took it into the store, the Genius just took it into the back room and came back out 10 minutes later and it had a new palm rest. Free of charge.
Nah.. you would want to outsource your products componants. You get the benefits og easily being able to rid yourself of old stock, not having to warehouse materials, at the ability to take advantage of lowering prices. That is a key benifit of just in time freight from third parties. Rumor is that dell and hp only have 10 days working stock on hand at one time and they pay the going rates as it comes off the trailers in the shipping docks.
At minimum, if you owned the production or resalrd companies, you would spin them off so they couldn't drag profits from the main company effectivly creating the same scenario.
> On the other hand, they didn't design and test it for that purpose
Bro, when they didn't design and test hardware for running linux, linux ran better.
Powerbook Titanium II, converted to linux in 2003. 3d and wireless and gigabit ethernet and firewire working out of the box with free drivers. Only thing that did not work was the wintel modem and I did not try very hard. Tell me which current laptop in either apple or MS land does that.
Hardware producers do not like linux just like apple and ms, because it makes planned obsolescence impossible.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Or the wall if you're so inclined.
Oh no it's the "We want a stable ABI" crowd again.
Not true. Minimum turnaround time for applecare is a few hours on hardware. Throw in directly overnight and you are probably talking well over 85%. A few days and I'd be you are around 99+%. A few weeks and they would just give you a new machine and refurb yours.
How is Qt for exampke not comparable to Cocoa?
Yeah, I'd like to spend $3k telling Adobe to use a second GPU. Oh, without actually telling them.
The only thing the Mac Pro is ahead of the curve on is form factor, and they've clearly made serious compromises to achieve that.
450W power supply? That's not a lot - it doesn't sound like you'll be getting maximum performance out of that hardware.
And this is a hardware discussion. Apple's hardware has always been competitively priced - good quality components, decent build quality, generally a good design - but only for the first 2-3 months of its life.
The next 2-3 years it's horribly overpriced, and especially if you live in the UK where Apple charge a significantly higher price than in the US.
More processors also means more bandwidth. Processor clock speed isn't all that matters.
Slashdot, come for the news for nerds stay for the spelling/grammar lessons?
You will find the prices are about the same from HP and Lenovo for workstation class machines. But the truth is you can not even buy the parts to build a workstation as powerful as the Mac Pro for the same price.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Most Xeon processors are vastly different from "equivalent" consumer-grade hardware. If yiu can't tell the difference, they're just not for you.
Remember the applications are going to be OSX applications. So by late 2014 or so the applications will be targeted for your particular hardware configuration and tested against it.
As far as the more general issue, Apple machines tend to be balanced for general use cases in a way that PCs aren't. The result is you often get features you wouldn't have paid for but really love. For example I bought the rMBP for the SSD and the quadcore. The retina screen, which on a PC I wouldn't have gotten however has been by far my favorite feature.
10k is the normal price of a server with decent computing power. If you're surprised by this price tag, clearly you have never bought one.
Oh, because someone doesn't like Apple stuff, they're a "Hateboi". It is possible for someone to genuinely not like their style, you know.
Actually, it took a while (due to GreatFirewall-itis) for the original page to come up, but I find the actual computer to be very un-Apple-like...and I actually quite like it.
The monitors, though, I still don't like.
This computer is the first Apple product I've genuinely thought was good looking since the old PowerBook Titanium...I had a twinge of 'hrm, not bad' for the iPhone4 (hated the prior ones), but that didn't take hold.
I must take a closer look at it...I somehow don't think the photos do it justice.
Of course, I don't much care for Aqua either, so I'd wipe it and put on Ubuntu...which I find an interesting proposition...
You mean like everybody around here who finds some fault with Android/Google/Samnung/Linux however legitimate it may be and anybody around here who actually finds something positive about Microsoft or Apple products is automatically ripped to shreds and accused of being a paid shill? Different people have different tastes and different experiences and there is nothing wrong with that in most places. On Slashdot, however, people tend to be a bit extreme in their views. You just happen to be somebody who has found that Apple products are not to his taste without being so fanatical about it that you have morphed into a hateboi ... unfortunately for you that makes you part of a minority around here since most people here are __way__ more fanatical about not liking Apple than you are. Just about the last place you want to look a fair, civilized and structured debate around here is in any discussion having to do with Apple, Microsoft, patents or copyright.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
This sounds like an advert for Apple, simply. Already for that reason alone, I am not going to read the articles.
Calling what I suspect is just a souped up fashion statement a "work horse", is probably just a symptom of cluelessness. And wanting to do the same with Windows supports that diagnosis. A "work horse" is a big, sweaty and dirty animal, not a dainty thing to take on a fashionable stroll along the promenade; and a souped up Macintosh or PC is more like a rich kid's toy car than a tractor. I don't know if you have noticed, but you don't often see a Ferrari pulling a plough - there's a reason for that.
As for the price - for $10000 you could get a decent sized Dell PowerEdge server; or even a Sun SPARC, IBM pSeries or HP if that takes your fancy. All of them are real work horses and all run operating systems that are meant for real work. True, you can't play games on them, and they don't pull chicks, but it is amazing how often that is not a major concern when you need to hold down a job.
Yeah, why actually bother read stuff, let's just judge books by their cover and then make informed comments about what you think is written in them.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The easies method: You open a taskmanager and have the user recreate its troubled session.
/proc, performance counters via WMI.
Then you look at what is starved (memory, cpu, IO) and by whom and you upgrade hardware
and tweak/replace the software if possible.
Sometimes you need to do this over a longer period then it's time to write some scripts to poll
"The only thing the Mac Pro is ahead of the curve on is form factor, and they've clearly made serious compromises to achieve that."
They appear to have copied Bysen LED's heat sink design for 360 degree vertical LED lighting. I don't see much innovation, there.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't why, in your mind, that Mac Pro can't be both a fashion statement as well as a work horse.
There's lots of off-the-road cars that are available with leather upholstery and shiny aluminum rims. It's still an off-the-road car.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
How did this get marked insightful? How? Since when is a PowerEdge server a sensible comparison to a graphics / scientific-computing workstation? They are not remotely the same thing.
I bet you know better than Greg does. I mean, he's only a kernel engineer with access to the docs.
-- Linux user #369862
Linux's end-user experience is way behind because their driver model doesn't play well with binary drivers over the long term. It isn't a question of whether the apps require drivers, but rather how many years behind the Linux graphics drivers are, how many devices don't work with it out of the box, and so on. Sure, the major GPU vendors are starting to open source usable drivers recently, but getting there has been an uphill battle for the roughly 17 years that I've been using Linux on the side. And when it comes to having a usable desktop experience, that's important.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
As for the price - for $10000 you could get a decent sized Dell PowerEdge server; or even a Sun SPARC, IBM pSeries or HP if that takes your fancy. ...Or you could work with the required 2K video that a professional will want to be sending in to make a movie or a TV show.
I appreciate you pointing out that its a lot of money to play video games. It's likely if you aren't processing 50 gig files and 2K streams than this Work Horse isn't for you. What a concept.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Yeah, why actually bother read stuff, let's just judge books by their cover and then make informed comments about what you think is written in them.
You say that as a hypothetical but; "bam!" that just happened.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I think the mistake being made is people are judging this Mac Pro based on current Apps. It's like judging the iPhone as just a cell phone and MP3 player. I'm fairly sure Apple is making a new platform, and the developers who take advantage of dual GPUs will be around shortly to make a big splash. The software cannot come out that competes with a Flame until the hardware is there.
Just grabbing some hardware and trying to reproduce this Mac pro with raw specs is not getting down to the research on latency and data pipelines that likely went on with this new Mac. For the same reason that race cars don't have trailers hitched to the back. Also -- there's a very good reason they didn't make an expandable cabinet and wanted every peripheral on a Thunderbolt attachment -- because they have a closely coupled device with little margin for error at the top end.
I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that PC manufacturers are not going to make STABLE replicas of this box for some time. They also might not have the software that justifies the investment.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
450W power supply? That's not a lot - it doesn't sound like you'll be getting maximum performance out of that hardware.
That's because they've got Flash Ram and not a hard drive. The most power hungry thing in the box is the graphics cards. Note that the add-ons will be via Thunderbolt? How does WATT usage translate into computing power?
IN 3 months you can make a point about it being too expensive, but by then there will be "apps for that" over-priced well designed system and not for the PCs that don't exist. Maybe Apple will upgrade their device? Who knows... maybe in 3 months you will have a useful point.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
It's Apple's fault.
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html
Yeah, why actually bother read stuff, let's just judge books by their cover and then make informed comments about what you think is written in them.
You say that as a hypothetical but; "bam!" that just happened.
You must be new here, it has been happening on /. with monotonous regularity for years.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
That was my reasoning as well, and my last three laptops were Apple. On my one year old retina macbook pro discrete graphics card died and I only had 10 days before the 1 year warranty expired. Unluckily I was on a ship and I had to buy apple care online so I can get this garbage serviced. Exchanged motherboard when I got back home a month later, and two weeks later the same problem happened again. Also the display has the burn in problem, ^H^H^H, I mean "image persistence feature" and I'll get them to replace it as well.
My previous laptop was second gen Air and was great and still runnning as new. But the moral of the story is that without my last minute purchase of applecare I would be hosed completely (I still had to pay for it though) as the repairs on this kind of computer are crazy expensive.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
So in summary you are saying; Extending the PCI-E bus to peripherals is a better option for data than SATA because there is less CPU overhead? Or are you saying that Thunderbolt is like a "networked" version of PCI-E?
And what is everyone arguing about beyond which end of an egg to open first?
Then I read "ustolemyname" say; "Actually, Thunderbolt on Macs deviate from the specification a fair bit." I was under the impression that it was Apple and INTEL that worked on Thunderbolt to CREATE THE SPEC in the first place -- so does that comment have any validity?
I'm just curious -- this is a low level discussion but I can't really tell so far what it means other than that Thunderbolt and PCI-E extensions are implemented fairly well in the real world.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Meh. Thing is, I don't need to upgrade my system except for what I do in windows; for the most part.
I spend the majority of my time on a Linux desktop. Anything serious, is done under Linux. Windows however, I keep around strictly for gaming. That is the issue. The last time I upgraded my system for anything I was doing under Linux; I doubled the RAM. Games have me upgrading video cards or even the whole machine.
This use case does not indicate VMs as the solution.
That said, the latest gen system is a few years old now, and its looking like its going to be fine even for gaming for some time to come. And who knows, with steam on Linux, maybe my final need for windows will finally vanish?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I knew someone who worked at an Apple store for a while, as a 'genius'. He said that when there were software/driver bugs there was basically nothing they could do (obviously) so they were told to just say that Apple were going to fix it in the next software update. Pretend like they know about it and Apple is on the case.
I really don't think Apple tech support is going to be much help in the scenarios you describe. Worse still if your business is a monoculture based on Macs they may all have the same problem, where as at least with a variety of PCs the chances are greatly diminished.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There aren't terribly many apps that require 12 core Xeon with twin GPU processing power that run on workstations.
There's a reason servers are so popular.
Unfortunately, it's not available for Windows. If you want people to switch from Windows to Linux, have them addicted to open source programs before you switch them over.
Currently using Chrome, Mozilla and Thunderbird, so I'm almost there..
Would love to try Darktable on Windows, but no luck.
Harald
tbh most flaky ubuilds are because of bad static electricity mitigation, bad CPU mounts or bad grounding.
its more complicated than you think.
Don't you want to know who to vote for with your money?
ayottesoftware.com
When i install linux i do a full install. That is about 10min now with a SDD drive. That includes full latex, open office, about 5 desktop environments, open office a bunch of browsers and almost everything i need out of the box. I have never needed to reboot after install or "update", hell i have laptops with uptimes at almost a year.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Because buying a complete machine from Dell or HP is cheaper than putting together parts bought from Newegg? Oh, but wait...you're right, the prices aren't similar.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The Mac Pro line is assembled in the USA. The argument is moot, I'm more then happy to pay the premium for premium quality; if I were a mechanic I wouldn't hesitate to buy professional tools, and the same is true for the mac. The mere suggestion of building your own system is insane, professionals don't have time to tinker around with a piece of shit personal computer. It's not easy to assemble a production system from off the shelf commodity parts, and anyone suggesting as much has never done professional systems engineering and integration; assuming you have the knowledge, I'd think there would be revenue generating projects you could be working on instead.
This is stupid and pointless. Frankly you can keep your commie windows system, it's the mac operating system that I want anyways.
It was obvious from the day the Mac Pro was announced that a system containing Xeon, ECC RAM and dual FirePros would cost $6 - $10k if you priced up the components, and that if Apple brought it in at a comparable price to the old Pro it could be made to sound like a bargain, and putting it all into a tiny tube was the icing on the cake.
The real issue is whether those features bring any real advantages to you - particularly those two GPUs. What seems pretty well established is that 'workstation class GPUs' like FirePro and Quadro are nothing special unless they're paired with pro applications that have been optimised for them, and that part of the 'premium' is for the pro (windows) drivers, and stability features like ECC RAM. We're really still waiting for the in-depth teardown to determine what those Mac Pro GPU cards really are, how they compare to PC FirePro cards in terms of clock speed, ECC RAM etc., whether the OS X drivers are any good and whether they can do Crossfire (which might make them more impressive for games). Otherwise, 'FirePro' is just a sticker (which Apple will leave off rather than sully the shiny case).
I suspect the vast majority of Slashdot readers, if they built a PC, would just go for an i7, a couple of 'consumer' GPUs and non-ECC RAM unless they really, really needed that secret 'workstation-class' sauce - which would be a fraction of the cost, and isn't something Apple really has an offering for (unless you want an iMac with built in display, or a Mac Mini reliant on the integrated GPU). The reason that Apple don't offer such a thing is that there's no bloody money in competing directly with such generic commodity low-margin hardware - it would look expensive c.f. Dell et, al. and/or cannibalise sales of higher-margin laptops, SFF and workstation systems. It will be interesting to see what happens with the next iteration of the Mac Mini, though.
The interesting thing about the new Mac Pro is whether it will encourage more general support for OpenCL in Mac software - one thing the reviews so far seem to agree on is that OpenCL optimised software such as Apple's Final Cut goes like shit off a shovel.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
And why bang your head against the wall trying to run Linux on it? A primary advantage of having a real Apple is being able to run real OS X on it.
I've had my for over a year. You rarely use it and in places you need to plug in you just attach the dongle and leave it for weeks.
Finally not that many people need more power than the iMac either. More over it isn't a joke to jump up to the Pro because the price spread isn't that large.
Nothing new about that, according to a nuncle I once had, who used to wear a napron while eating a norange.
However, regarding Brits who write "should of", if I had my way, I'd have all of them shot.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
This is true if you go to an apple store, and perhaps if you call the regular support lines. Companies generally get their own sales reps who can put them in touch with higher level support people, sometimes even the developers.
A local school had some issues with afp (who doesn't? ;-) and it got to the point where the local rep, regional rep, a few developers and the head of the group that deals with afp actually showed up to trouble shoot and fix it.
A 2 week minimum turnaround? Who's crappy service are you using?
AppleCare has fixed many a Mac problems in
xeons already have a luxury tax...
and while it doesn't make that much of a difference in the total their case was 160 bucks.. motherboard 280 bucks.. going mATX really bites. and get this, 50-75 bucks for bluetooth and wifi(wtf??).
and then going for luxury taxed firepro's. 3400 bucks each. the point with going with the pc is that you can choose something else as well. heck, you get a monster of a machine just by going with two 1000 bucks gaming cards, if you don't need that bit switched on to make it a "pro opengl" card(or just nvidias "pro" cards, either way you would shave off a whopping 4800 bucks!! that's nearly HALF OF THE FUCKING PRICE for no practical performance loss - or heck, maybe even a gain).
it's their choice of parts that makes it expensive as hell, not the choice of where they priced them from.
*luxury tax here refers to paying for something someone just building a pc at home with their own money would never buy... something that is marked up just because some companies don't give a shit.
It's not really a useful comparison if you do not go for, as far as possible, the exact same specs on the PC side. What is the point in saying "well, our PC does not have the same components and it's slower, but IT IS CHEAPER!". They wanted to find out if Apple is putting the usual "luxury tax" on the hardware and it seems that this time, they did not do that - if you choose the same or very similar PC components (e.g. THE SAME graphics cards and not "ah well, just as fast in games and who cares about certified drivers and more RAM for professional software anyway" gamer cards), the PC will be more expensive.
This model uses a Xeon. Can't using an i7 reduce it a bit, while still keeping it in a similar, if not identical league?
You can't assure me jack shit. This is an appeal to emotion. Try getting help from apple when your machine is out of its expensive applecare warranty. Good luck. At least with a home built, it'll last as long as you want it to as parts are always readily available, and at no worse reliability than the crappy refurbs apple sticks into supposedly 'new' computers when they fail. They're usually cheaper too.
A whole pile of PC computer vendors can be accused of the fact that it is impossible to get support after the warranty runs out. As for Macs it is not as if they are somehow welded shut and impossible to repair. Some of the later model Macs can be hard to strip down but that's only what anybody with even a basic knowledge of computer repairs would expect from a super compact machine and the Macs are not that much different in this respect from what you get in super compact Windows/PC machines. While I haven't taken apart too many Mac Pros I have lost count of the number of out-of-warranty MacBooks and Mac Minis that I have stripped down, repaired, upgraded and restored to life. Spares are perhaps not quite as easy to come by as they are for home-build PCs (which is not surprising since that market is way bigger) and Mac parts are not as cheap as they are for home-builds (especially the lower end models) but there is a whole pile of parts vendors that specialise in Apple computers starting with Other World Computing.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Also, most of the professional applications out there that use GPU acceleration can only make use of a single GPU, so the second $3400 GPU will be sitting completely idle for most Mac Pro buyers.
That may be true of Windows & Linux apps, but is the same also true about Mac apps? I would think they picked all this after studying the CPU & GPU workloads, and then deciding how much is appropriate
Tweaked off the bat? How about no weaking whatsoever has been performed.
Right now Adobe Premiere uses the CPU on the Mac Pro. Apple has been working on this hardware for a long time. You would think the companies you mentioned would have optimized already for the set up. So unless you are using Final Cut Pro X (many professionals jumped ship after 7) this machine is slower than the previous generations Mac Pro. Adobe is not on great terms with Apple, and may be inclined to drag their feet on this one.
> If you cannot installatie a modern version of Windows in onder 30 minuten these days I would consider you top dumb to be even let naar a computer.
My last Win7 install was ugly. NOTHING was auto detected by the installer. The wired NIC wasn't even supported. Sorting out drivers was a pain and auto update was absolutely no help.
If you don't plan for the worst, you're just asking for trouble.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Has Apple stopped negotiating directly w/ component vendors, like Intel, AMD, WD, Seagate, et al? Or have they accepted that they'll never have the volumes of this, and are therefore going the Newegg route?
Because we colonists have evolved *beyond* grammar. You understood what OP was saying, so he wins. You should join the winning team, and move on with your life.
> Oh and speaking of thermals what the hell is a safe operating region?
It's something that ALL electronics require in order to not cook themselves. Apple fanboys may delight in their own ignorance but many of us prefer not to.
The new Mac Pro is just a PC that's trying really hard to behave like an 8-bit Atari. Beyond the nonsense with lack of memory or upgrade slots, it's just a PC with mundane components.
Want to replicate any Mac? Just go to NewEgg.
You don't even have to be exact. You can come up with a BETTER tradeoff. You're not just stuck with Apple's choices. That's the beauty of the PC market.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO MATCH THE MAC SPEC FOR SPEC.
You can dump things you don't want, or use better parts, or use a different brand of GPU.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Oh and on Linux driver issues NEVER happen, all non Windows OSes are Powered by Magic unicorns (tm) :) please...
So the Core i7 ain't a workstation class CPU?
Who cares about how loud a workstation is it would be like complaining that an old school class B rally car from Audi isn't as quit as a leaf electric car.
And I bet with a decent dual 120mm radiator in the roof of a decent case you could get it quite enough for the office.
I take it you've never heard of GNUStep? I'm not sure how well it's keeping up, but it is intended to be not only comparable, but a source-compatible replacement for Cocoa.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I can hit the $11,000 price point with a 1TB PCIe SSD or beat it with 4x240 GB SATA SSD's. Although I did skimp a little (about $300) by using slower RAM, my system can be upgraded to 128GB or more if you fill the second CPU slot, and I went with a standard tower. How many people have a use for a $10,000 workstation being small and portable? If you really want a nice system you can move, then bundle it with some sound equipment in a small rack.
The off the shelf FirePro W9000 that it is being compared against is a more powerful card than the D700. If you're running two of them, the DIY PC will have 8 TFLOPs (single precision) and the Mac Pro 7 TFLOPs. Considering I can get the PC parts for only an extra 15% cost, and that AMD is charging a HUGE premium ($3000 vs $1410) to go from 3.23 TFLOPs and 4GB RAM to 4 TFLOPs and 6GB RAM. That last bit of power is always expensive, and I could hit the price of the Mac by using 3x W8000 cards, while providing 38% more GPU power.
As long as we're swapping out top end parts for multiple smaller parts, I can go with 2x 2.8GHz 10-Core Xeons and 3x W8000 Cards. I get 73% more CPU power, 38% more GPU power and a faster disk array for the same money. Plus, as a $1,000 add-on I can get 18TB RAID-6 storage. For another $6,000 I can also double the RAM and upgrade to dual NVIDIA k6000's (12GB RAM, 5.2 TFLOPs each0. Given that the only benchmarks I found show the W9000 regularly losing to the older Quadro 6000 and that labor costs and potential returns will dwarf workstation prices, this is probably a good extra investment.
The parts aren't the only thing. It would cost millions to hire a team of developers to develop a decent OS and take years.
But on Apple's part, it's already taken those years and done the work. It is OS-X. They started w/ NEXTSTEP, ported it from NeXT boxes to Power Macs, and later to Xeon Macs. Over time, they upgraded different parts of the OS - the Mach part of XNU was upgraded from 2.5 to 3.0, the BSD part of it upgraded to a relatively recent version of FreeBSD, and in the meantime, they've been updating Quartz. So if anything, their OS would be perfect for this sort of a configuration.
Given the FreeBSD underpinnings of OS-X (aside from XNU), PC-BSD would probably suit this better. But if one is paying $10k for this box, why would one want to change the OS from a tried & tested OS-X, that has all the advantages of FreeBSD, to something else, whose UI may or may not be intuitive to the average user? Especially when there are far more native useful applications for OS-X than there is for either Linux or PC-BSD.
So could they build this to something like GNUSTEP, and then the OS-X apps would work wherever GNUSTEP is installed?
If I owned a billion dollar company, I would purchased other manufacturers instead of just the parts.
That's why you don't own a billion-dollar company.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
This guy chose crappy shit. "Can't find a 1TB PCIe SSD, so, raid-0 two SATA SSD" and other cheap tricks.
Unless those processors are trying to use the same bus, in which case, more processors can mean more contention. Worst of all - by a superlinear amount.
Don't try to optimise until you've measured what you are most often doing with the box, in particular what you are most often waiting for. If you're very lucky, you might be compute bound, in which case, the more the merrier when it comes to CPUs (but only if the software is coded to scale sensibly). However, in my real-world experience (rather than hobby stuff), being I/O-bound is far more common.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'm sure you would like to make $3k statements, but it isn't likely to happen while you're whining from mum's basement.
Form factor is a minor detail, huh? Yeah, externalizing storage & everything else that people used to install in the box is a mere detail... As I've stated elsewhere in this thread, the MP is what your PC will look like in 6 years (if you still have one).
If the Mac Pros PS was underpowered, the reviews would have noticed and pointed out throttling. Methinks you've got a bad case of sour grapes. Too bad you live in a backwater where Macs are overpriced I'm lucky enough to live in or regularly visit countries where this isn't the case.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Ah, so according to you a Mac Pro is a 360 led light? I suppose that the two holes in your head just above your mouth are for storing coins?
One can always point out prior art. You know it's innovative when everyone else could have done so before, but didn't & then copies it afterwards: See the iPhone.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Good point. In other words, "try to assemble the Mac Pro by buying the individual components piecemeals and see if you can beat the cost of a factory Mac Pro."
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Also do not need a $400 pair of jeans to cover them. Sorry, Apple - you're hip and trendy and build a very capable device, but I don't NEED one...
Page 1: http://www.futurelooks.com.nyud.net/new-apple-mac-pro-can-build-better-cheaper-pc-diy-style/
Page 2: http://www.futurelooks.com.nyud.net/new-apple-mac-pro-can-build-better-cheaper-pc-diy-style/2/
Page 3: http://www.futurelooks.com.nyud.net/new-apple-mac-pro-can-build-better-cheaper-pc-diy-style/3/
Actually, if we're assigning fault it is partly Linux's fault, for being fragmented. There is no such thing as a Linux installer, although you can get pretty close with a .deb and an .rpm. The range of possible setups compared to the size of the market is also discouraging, increasing potential support costs. If pretty much everybody ran Ubuntu, or pretty much everybody ran Fedora, or something like that, it would be a more attractive market.
It's not Apple's and Adobe's fault that they keep their programs proprietary, unless you adopt Richard Stallman's ideology completely. Even Stallman doesn't suggest pirating proprietary software. If there's a "fault" here, it's the F/LOSS communities for not developing good Final Cut Pro and Lightroom replacements (assuming they haven't; otherwise, why the bitching?). There are simply no good replacements for a good many proprietary Windows/MacOSX programs. I can (and have) set up really nice development environments, but a lot of stuff is missing or has inadequate substitutes. F/LOSS simply does not work as well as selling proprietary software for quite a few things.
Moreover, the Mac Pro is made for people who want to use computers, not computer people. A graphic artist will normally see this as a tool for his or her calling, not something important in its own right. The artist will happily pay for hardware and software that assists him or her, and won't care where the software comes from as long as it is either supported or works well enough without support.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Well you could get it from the cheapest sources possible... However that may mean you got parts the fell off the truck.
The idea of the Apple Tax is a myth.
The reason for Apples higher cost per class, is the fact that they don't have as many options as their competitors have.
For Dell, HP there are dozens of models that allow you to pick and choose what you want and don't want. Apple has less models and the features are grouped together. Don't need a back lit keyboard on your laptop, if you getting an apple you may have to pay for it anyways.
So if you build a System that matches the specs as closely as possible to an Apple system you more or less pay the same price.
However if you try to match an Apple system with one of the many PC specs chances are you will find the PC cheaper, because Apple with have features that you are not caring to match up.
It isn't the Apple Premium tax, but the fact there are less options to choose from.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Your installation seems to have omitted the spell checker.
Joking aside, the install itself is quite easy. The re-installation of all the applications and the setup is the PITA.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Dude, I'm just describing what I see. I have the docs too, for both protocol and controller chips, and I have the code and measurements to prove it.
There's a clear difference in the time taken to process packets once the kernel gets involved, and (within experimental error), that time difference is nicely quantized.
I can't say it any clearer, when the kernel doesn't need to get involved (see above for criteria), it just doesn't - at least on a Mac. Perhaps the bios's Greg is using are not implemented well, I don't know (I have no experience there) but the Mac does it intelligently.
Physicists get Hadrons!
So, how many of these Server rack systems will you be selling? I'm sure that given how superior they are, you'll be selling thousands, or that if you won't someone else will, right? Orrrrr, in 6 months we'll see that PC sales have gone even further down -- with the exception, once again of Apple (& Lenovo).
People are tired of buying poorly integrated parts that don't quite make a whole into a PC. Hey I used to make my own systems from parts too, until I found better & more profitable things to do with my time. So have almost all of the many people I know - even the kid going to the engineering university I went to 20 odd years ago knows few who do so.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Yeah but all these bullshit articles misses the point and why the PC is frankly better for most of us and that is the fact that YOU get to decide what you need and YOU get to decide what is most important to YOUR way of doing things instead of being told by Apple Inc what you should and shouldn't have!
Take the system I'm typing this on...I wanted a system that would start out easy on the wallet, but could ramp up with me, that had plenty of upgrade room down the line, and because of their frankly antitrust worthy compiler rigging and OEM bribing I didn't want to go Intel. So I ended up with an AMD dual and later upgraded to a hexacore. Plenty of power for my A/V editing and plenty of horse for my gaming, the ability to go Crossfire down the line, It does everything I need and more, plenty of space at 3TB, and 8Gb of RAM means Win 7 has al my most used cached into memory.
What would have been my "choice" if I had went to Apple with those requirements? A fricking iPad, which would have been completely worthless for what I wanted to do. Sure a $10K Mac pro could do the same job, but it would be a waste of money and would spend most of its time idling. this way i have the amount of power I need and that $9300 is better off in my pocket than in Apple Inc's coffers. The simple fact is most of us aren't processing raw RED camera footage so the Mac pro would be total overkill and if you don't mind a little DIY (or you can just ask your friendly neighborhood PC shop to do it, most of us are happy to throw kits together) you can get an octocore for $450 after MIR, just slap in a copy of Win 7 and there ya go, a nice system for under $600. For most even this would be overkill so for those folks I usually recommend something like this triple core for $250 although I usually pick an Asrock board (as I've been seeing better than 70% unlocks on the Athlon triples so they get a Phenom II quad for the price of an Athlon triple) but this will do most folks for the rest of the decade easy.
The problem with Apple is their "Our way or the highway" where you are SOL if your need doesn't fit into one of only a couple use cases and thanks to everything being locked down its not like you can pick up a system and then just add what you need. My system started as an Athlon X2 with 2Gb of RAM and an HD3450 GPU, now its an X6 with 8Gb and an HD7750, no need to replace the system, no need to reinstall the OS and programs, it "just fits".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What I'm saying (not implying), and what the OP may have meant, is that you do best when you do stuff you're good at, and pay other people for their expertise in stuff you're not so good at. In some cases, you can do well by hiring some other individual who knows their stuff, but I've seen that backfire horribly. (Worst case I was peripherally involved with, the firm hired a college student on the basis of apparent ability - which they were really unable to judge - and religion. The guy had a lot of fun setting up what was for the time a really hot system on their dime, then when it was more or less working headed out to the East Coast, taking all the technical documentation and setup software with him. Once the hard drive caught fire it was all over, with no way to rebuild. Somebody might also have warned them about putting the computer in the next room to the skate-sharpening machine, but it's doubtful a commercial firm would have warned them either.)
If you buy Apple, you get good equipment and good support, without really having to know your hardware. You're buying Apple's expertise. It costs more than DIY, but for somebody who isn't a computer expert, it's much more reliable, and cheaper since you're not wasting $X/hour billable artist time on technical functions they aren't good at and which can be done faster by a specialist. You don't worry about trying to match low-cost peripherals, because you use what Apple provides. You don't worry about troubleshooting systems, because that's what Applecare and the Genius Bar are for. If you buy from one provider, such as Apple, you don't worry about who covers what. You don't argue with service phone jockeys about what's wrong, instead you say "Machine not work good" and let them take it from there. If you're willing to spend some money, you don't get long turn arounds from Apple.
I don't do my own plumbing, although it would be cheaper for me to do so, if I didn't value my own time. I hire people to come in and do it, and then I know it was done by somebody who knew what he was doing.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Does the Intel® Core i7 Desktop Processor support Error Correction Code (ECC) memory?
The Intel® Core i7 Desktop Processors typically do not support ECC memory. ECC memory is usually used on servers and workstations, rather than on desktop platforms. This is mainly due to the price premium of ECC memory and chipset support. Check with your desktop board manufacturer to see if ECC memory is enabled on your board."
Only for very small values of 'workstation'.
http://www.intel.com/support/processors/sb/CS-029913.htm
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
What I'm really saying is that thunderbolt is like a transport layer protocol, and pci-e, Ethernet, video, etc. are all protocols layered on top of this transport protocol. It's very like the OSI stack, in as much as there's a link-level protocol and service-level protocols building on that basic transport.
I have no experience with PC motherboards so I'm not *sure* what they're doing, but I suspect that they are exposing any pci-e level protocol traffic as hot-plug pci-e (as does the Mac), and that the OP is misunderstanding what the author of the HTML page he linked to is saying.
Thunderbolt itself is a lower-level protocol, but one that can be addressed directly which can be useful for particular applications. One example is raw dma, so any thunderbolt device can dma into any other device without the CPU getting involved (modulo the conditions I mention above).
I thought the spec comment was a bit odd as well, but I think he might be referring to the fact that the spec (and the hardware) has changed over time. There are several revisions...
Physicists get Hadrons!
nah just add a huge aftermarket spoiler, all the downforce you need.
He's not an idiot, AC. That's Dutch!
Ok, building a comparable PC will cost nearly the same as what you'd pay for one of these Mac Pro's, give or take a few dollars since you cannot make an exact clone of this thing. The real question, in my opinion, is one more based on cost per performance.
When building out a PC, if you specifically set out to have top of the line, best at the time components you will pay a premium for that. Often, you can get 'the next best' component for a substantially lower price, which would only be a minor decrease in performance. From a performance per dollar perspective, getting the top tier stuff is wasteful.
I suspect that one could build a machine that generally performs 80%-90% in comparison, but cost half of the base model. It would've been nice had Apple offered such an option, but I can see why they wouldn't want to dilute their brand by doing so.
This configuration looks ideal for CAD applications - both the workstation, as well as the OS. Question - how many popular CAD applications are there for OS X? I recall when people would do HDL simulations & the like on such workstations: this looks ideal for that. If Cadence or AutoCAD or Parametric Technologies run their software on this platform, it would be just fantastic!
There is a fair amount of irrational Apple hatred on Slashdot. Slashdot attracts a lot of computer geeks who appear to have little empathy, and don't really get that other people can be different without being inferior. These geeks aren't Apple's target market, and Apple doesn't really care what we geeks think. We can always get a computer that suits our purposes well by deciding what we want and ordering components from Newegg, and it will come out much less expensive than an Apple computer that similarly suits our purposes. For us, the extra stuff Apple provides is not as attractive.
Other people don't necessarily think that way. Most people just buy a prebuilt system from Dell or Best Buy or Apple, and never upgrade it. Many of these people find some of the things Apple does to be very nice, sometimes very useful, and often find an Apple computer more pleasant to use. If you're going to buy a laptop and use it heavily for the next three years, paying another $500 to make it more pleasant can be a really good deal.
This means that lots of people are buying computers the typical geek simply wouldn't buy, and many geeks just can't grok that. Since many of them don't seem to be able to really conceive of people who are just as able, but in different ways, people who do different things tend to be considered inferior, and doing things for the wrong reasons. Apple's success must therefore be blamed on things like "marketing" or "fashion", which most geeks (including me) just don't get easily, or on fanbois (strange that Apple seems to have an unlimited supply of them).
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
And I'm not sure you got the point of GP. When building a custom system you spend money on the features you need. Build a gaming system, or a home theater, or whatever; there's rarely a need to build a super duper can-do-it-all system.
Two week turnaround? Maybe if you drop it off at the Genius Bar and the part was on backorder. If you use the on-site support the guy is going to show up in a couple days with the new component in hand. That's not even specific to Apple. When I did warranty repairs in the 90s we could turn a consumer repair in 2-3 days and a business repair 1-2 days.
These days companies can join a technician program with a vendor and do their own repairs. Often that means they have a parts depot on-site and can do a repair same day. If down time is a concern there are plenty of ways of mitigating the risk.
I'll bet this thing just smokes
Yeah, I'm not sure about the cooling either.
Windows "ages". I'm not sure if that is the technical term :) A new machine feels faster, not just because of the new hardware, but also because you blow away all of the Windows cruft. You could probably achieve something similar by carefully keeping snapshots and such, but frankly I just don't have the time for all of that. My Windows machine is my wife's machine anyway - I spend as little time on it as is humanly possible, only hitting it when I have to for work stuff or when something goes wrong and my wife complains.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Steam and GOG have me re-visiting all of those old games that I heard about, but either didn't have the time or money for when I was younger. Now they are under $10, work great even under emulation (and you can still use the computer for other stuff!), and yet still represent a fantastic time sink since they are new to me :) I had never played the Masters of Orion series before, because when that was hot I only had a Mac. I guess my point is that since I've discovered this old stuff, I've come to realize that being behind can actually be beneficial...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My last corp (admittedly, "just" a $500M/yr revenue CE company) upgraded the video card in my desktop CAD workstation...
In general, CAD is the only time I think about upgrading a video card instead of replacing the whole workstation - but the rest of the workstation really needs to be fairly current to justify it. There has to be at least 2 years left before we planned to replace it anyway, and there has to be a significant (and necessary) performance increase.
There's just no way we upgrade the processors. Too much hassle, and you're losing vendor warranty support.
Pretty much, you pick the base computer off the list that closest matches your needs ("standard" desktop, "standard" laptop, "power" laptop, "power" workstation), maybe get a RAM or video card upgrade, and that's it for a few years. (Unless you're a VIP, which pretty much everyone is not... but the VIP's usually want standard stuff too, not custom builds.)
It occurs to me this is Apple's way of spreading out the "early-adopter tax" over their product life cycle. Their new graphics hardware isn't available yet, but will be soon. In three to five years, a new Mac Pro will be at least a generation behind, graphics-wise. The generic hardware that follows will benefit from manufacturing and integration efficiencies, as well as driver support. Apple customers will have underwritten all that.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
It's like comparing Kraft Mac & Chesse to your own homemade. Sure, making your own is less expensive and has more options for upgrades (bacon)... but Kraft is much more convenient if you don't want to sweat the details, has a nice box & packaged look, and a taste you cannot fully replicate on your own.
That includes full latex, open office, about 5 desktop environments, open office a bunch of browsers and almost everything i need out of the box
You forgot OpenOffice.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
What they call a "Mac" these days, is a PC that comes with OS/X preinstalled instead of Windows.
No, you would have ended up with an MBA or an iMac.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Too bad friends are playing totally other stuff, and gaming has moved on from single player solitary activity to multiplayer with friends. Yes i have GOG as well, but the vast majority of my time is spent shooting people in the face with friends in Borderlands, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Have you not heard of msiexec?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
msiexec /i /q foo.msi
But hey, lets not let the truth get in the way of a nice windows rant.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Sounds like you didn't choose your hardware properly. If we're going to use that argument for Linux, where hardware selection is FAR MORE CRITICAL then bitching about windows not working on the wrong hardware is just as invalid.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Or indeed, the rest of Cocoa.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A custom built machine may be fine. A custom built mmachine is one data point - it may be fine or may have a lot of problems. Half of the servers in my rack have been custom built, half are top brands. The custom builds cost less to build. The top brands have engineered cooling, designed by thermal engineers, perfectly routed cables, and other niceties. The manufacturer lists certain hard drives and RAM that are thoroughly tested for compatibility and other drives that while they SHOULD be compatible, don't actually get along with the controller very well.
In my experience, the top brands are a little more reliable. For home use, the low cost of a custom build makes sense. If downtime is expensive, such as for a workstation or server, the extra 10% reliability of a professionally engineered system makes more sense. A $10,000 maxed-out Mac Pro is a workstation. You buy that for an employee who costs $3,000 / day in salary and benefits. You don't want that employee idle for a day because something overheated.
Its not keeping up very well at all. Though i hear development is moving along a bit faster and there is a kickstarter campaign for it. To get it up to par with 10.6 or 10.7 at some point in the future. Meanwhile, apple has 10.9 out the door and shows no signs of stopping. And those aren't just version number bumps for marketing's sake, there is real development going on there.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
In the real world, people have tasks they wish to accomplish, and buy the product(s) that enable them to do the tasks they want to do. I vote with my money for the entity which enables me to do the things i want to do. Not piss it away on ideology.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This is a $10,000 workstation, not the Acer your kid uses for their homework. Your data is on the Netapp or at least the Western Digital NAS.
Depends what you like I guess. About 99.9% of my gaming is single player. Generally, I either like something with a decent story, or a wide open sandbox (leaning more towards sandbox).
That said, one example I was going to toss out, Kerbal Space Program; which has eaten a disproportionate number of hours compared to other recent games; is in fact looking to go multiplayer in the future.
I have tried a few MMOs, and just couldn't maintain interest long. The longest was probably EVE Online, which was quite engrossing with all its possibilities. In the end I think I like the idea of what can be done in an MMO more than I like actually doing it.
That said, juist in the past few days my wife and I picked up Path to Exile (I like that they have staked a line in the sand that it will be free to play and NOT pay to win). As Diablo was her favorite game of all time; and I liked it alot; its a fun one and we are running through as a team.
But, aside from that we don't do a lot of multiplayer even both being gamers. We still haven't even done a Portal 2 Co-op run.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
OS X is not FreeBSD. The FreeBSD part(s) of OS X are actually largely irrelevant as far as the actual application framework(s) are concerned (when it was still NextSTEP, it was all 4.4(?) BSD). Until there's a decent open source competitor to Cocoa and the other apple frameworks, Linux application development is going to continue to lag.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Uh.... apple support = take machine to apple store, obtain replacement, restore from time machine backup. Not 2 weeks. That day, generally.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You position the fans pointing upward, that keeps the machine firmly on the desk
Or would that create enough lift to hover above the desk? I like the idea of a floating desktop...
Until you've used an actual quiet machine, you have no idea how fucking annoying PC fan noise is. And I type this from one (a haswell box built 2 months ago) sitting right next to me, pissing me the fuck off. With a 2 month old case with 200 mm fan in the top.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
True. One of the first things I ask with any piece of hardware is "can I put Linux on it?". However, Mac OSX machines come with a very Unix preinstalled, one tailored to the hardware. OSX can run all my favorite free software that I run on Linux, so I don't see any reason to put Linux on a Mac. It already HAS Unix.
Also - i do know hardware. I've been building machines since 1989. I've been working in the industry since 1996. I don't want to be fucking around with my own machines on my own time. I buy apple gear for home. If it fucks up, it's not my problem - if it isn't easily fixed within 15 minutes of googling, it gets replaced.
Life is too short. I have ZERO interest in wasting my own personal time (i.e., outside of paid work) fixing broken shit.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yes, Dell tests things so rigorously it is hard to believe that their laptops overheat and burst in to flames....
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Exactly. My billable rate is say, $70/hr. On WORK time. My own time outside of work? I get far less of that, so I value it at 2-3x the rate I get paid at work. I really do not want to be fucking around fixing broken hardware on my non-work time.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The amount of ignorance you are spewing reads like a vendors sales pitch. So you are either wholly incapable of independent thought or just run of the mill variety ignorant.
I'd fire any technician that decided that all workstations need to be Apple. Luckily the request would have to be approved by me, and it wouldn't happen. This is being written while there is about $8k of my own Apple hardware in view. There are scenarios where Macs are appropriate and they are a minority. If I could operate an entire enterprise off of Mac/OSX then I could easily use Linux and white boxes. Saving OSX for the machines that had applications that were OSX specific.
"A good way to determine who's hirable in IT, is if they pick Apple workstations." A good way to be ignored in an interview is to spew closed minded gibberish like this. This is almost as stupid as the claim that you can't run a server that isn't Microsoft. Not in a 'serious" work environment. Well I hope you like your mac mini servers. and the 29.99 OSX server OS. They scale so nicely.
With a Slashdot ID as low as you have, I'm surprised you aren't in my situation... my friends all have kids and wives and it is rare that we could all network together at the same time.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What is your opinion/ideas/experience on how a ~$10K computer can generate a return for the investment for the average software developer?
$10,000 was the price of the first Lisa Computer from Apple - um 30 years ago. The Pro seems fairly priced in comparison:)
You might want to double check the qualifications of the average tradesman.
If your going in blind, I put your odds at about 1:4 of getting a competent plumber.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
i7s aren't really in the same (or even similar) league as a Xeon. No ECC memory, for one, which is a big deal breaker if you're doing anything actually serious with the machine. Never mind that the xeons in the mac pro have 12, 25 or 30 megs of L3 cache.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
How many companies can you name that have large amounts of Mac Pro's that are relying on the genius bar to have parts in stock and to beable to do anything more than offer a refurbished system as a swap (likely they wouldn't even have a matching system in stock) You can't even buy a Macbook pro with a bigger hard disk they have to have it shipped to them.
Anyone who is supporting large amounts of Apple hardware usually have a licensed technician in employment in house or has a paid service who brings the appropriate gear on site to repair in house.
Because workstations haven't had enough power?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
What's your point? IN real world testing, the thing smokes. In the real world, finding an app that maxes the CPU, both GPUs and all the peripherals AT THE SAME TIME is not likely to occur, hence the power management can deal with it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
It's not Linux's fault that the developers of Final Cut Pro and Lightroom specifically chose *not* to support Linux. It is also not Linux's fault that both Apple and Adobe guard and keep their programs' source code secret, so it is impossible for anyone else to compile it for anything other than the operating systems that these two companies choose to compile these programs for themselves.
At some point it IS the fault of the RedHats, the Oracles, the Canonicals, the SUSEs etc. for not attracting ISVs.
Or, if nobody is trying, what's the point of laying blame elsewhere?
Well if i have a desk and rather than fitting a full tower on it, i fill the space with mac pros, i can run xgrid to load balance between them.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You rarely use it and in places you need to plug in you just attach the dongle and leave it for weeks.
So you have to carry it with you wherever you go, just in case. That is not convenient.
Finally not that many people need more power than the iMac either.
Lots of people want more than an nvidia mobile graphics card.
Lots of people want multiple monitor setups (yes the imac supports it but its clumsy because you its difficult to match monitors or use the monitors you like due to having your computer glued onto one.
People defend the macpro's lack of room for internal storage by claiming that "anyone using one" is using rack mounted external stuff anyway... and that's fine... but I'm not using rack mounted external stuff and I want more storage than I can fit into an imac without having extra crap sitting on my desk.
There are lots of other scenarios where the imac falls annoyingly short.
Yes its enough for most people. But it falls well short for a lot of people.
. More over it isn't a joke to jump up to the Pro because the price spread isn't that large.
But its jump forwards in price, and sideways to what people actually want. I don't want a Xeon. That's a bunch of money for something I don't need at all. And I still can't put the video card I want in one... I can put a powerful video solution in it sure... but at an exorbitant cost that isn't at all what I want, nor priced at all where it makes sense to buy one.
No, it's not. No ECC, a lot less cache.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yeah, quite. The base Mac Pro actually turns out to be fairly reasonably priced for the combination of components inside, but - and this is important - there is essentially no reason to get that combination of components unless you have no other choice because you're buying a Mac. For instance, they're paying out quite a bit of extra money in order to fit everything into a smaller case, even though that'd actually be a downside for many customers. Also, most of the professional applications out there that use GPU acceleration can only make use of a single GPU, so the second $3400 GPU will be sitting completely idle for most Mac Pro buyers. What's more, as the article mentions many apps run better on NVidia GPUs anyway. Also, how many of the GPU-accelerated apps can also make full use of a 12-core CPU?
Whoa, I thought you were going to say something about the Xeon and ECC memory. What exactly is highly unusual about the video card and number of cores?
This thing is built with server grade equipment, so my wild guess is that means they intended it to have very long uptime, and again, what's highly unusual about that in a high end workstation?
Look, we don't all need to drive tanks to work, but some do. The rest of us don't need to play the "I could build a tank for less, but without the turbine engine, armor, or tracks" game. Well, you can do that, but they are just going to be laughed at by the people that drive tanks, and what else matters...
Guess what assumptions make out of you?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
the other strategy all these companies use is a little tax dodge called Vendor Managed Inventory -you make your vendor keep all of your subassemblies and materials in a bonded stores warehouse right next to your assembly plant and keep it off your books until the parts actually hit the assembly line so that they don't show up as inventory until right before they are assembled and shipped leaving the manufacturer with almost no inventory on their books -the vendors then have to eat the taxes for storing the stuff for the manufacturer
.com boom and they were even doing it back then
I did supply chain for HP and Converge during the
Looks like it is also popular for Retailers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor-managed_inventory
-I'm just sayin'
Steve Jobs once said of adult content and Apple'attempts to keep it away from iOS a "people who want to see stuff like that should get an Android device". I took his advice. Apple truly believes that which web sites you visit in their business, that they should control or influence what you read. An iDevice is for listening to music you bought from Apple, the Apple approved version, for as long as Apple thinks is suitable.
On any other device, I just copy-paste my mp3 files. The Apple device also costs twice as much.
I realize there are counter-points to the above, but those are the reasons that I personally don't buy iOS, though I like my old Mac Pro and new MacBook Pro.
No. The tax this time is hidden by the thunderbolt devices. Each and every thunderbolt device and cable is a profit for Apple. Can;t use your old monitors without a thunderbolt adapter. Firewire enclosures? Get a thunderbolt adapter and cable and or replace the enclosure and get a cable. $50 per cable. Plus the enclosure pays Apple to use the technology. If they could get away without using USB then they would give you no other choice but thunderbolt. The tax is hidden and heavy handed.
Aren't they exiting this business to focus on their high margin business - outsourced IT services a.k.a. Perot?
>DVDs .. external drives are invariably more costly and slower than internal drives
I tried about 20 drives and found that for optical, external is consistently faster with much lower cpu usage. I guess it's something about the controller that converts to USB and the few MBs of buffer in the enclosure.
My point is that wanking over the hardware specs neglects the pointlessness of spending several thousand dollars on hardware you can't actually use properly.
But hey, it's a nice little desktop PC. Go ahead and buy one, I don't mind. I think it's really nice, I like what they've done. I just wouldn't ever buy one.
This is the key point that we are disagreeing on. I don't see it. Let's say I put you in a high end iMac aiming the way you said:
3tb storage
Nvidia 780
32g ram
quad core i7
you are at $3300. You can throw a 2nd monitor on for a few hundred plus cables, so let's call it $3750. 30% above that puts you at $4875. So what minor change do you want to make that's an upgrade that a $4875 Pro setup can't handle? You wanted better video seems to be it and the pro has that.
____
If your point is that Apple has a limited number of configurations and doesn't let you choose exact components. That's absolutely correct. But frankly I don't see how there is a gapping hole between iMac and Pro.
I'm the one doing it. Yes it is. It goes in my laptop bag at the end of the ethernet cable I carry in there. No extra space and maybe a few extra grams. I'd love to dump the ethernet cable, that takes up space and adds weight.
The service aspect is not all positive.. With a vendor built, a component failure means a 2 week minimum turnaround where you're out of a machine.
This is why many professionals choose to either buy equipment that comes with, or pay a little bit extra for, 3 year on-site next business day hardware service that includes replacement parts.
The key here is "on-site". Unfortunately for people who uses software that require OS X, Apple doesn't offer this.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I hate to say it, but the choices they made and tried to justify are absolutely shit. First off, the board doesn't suppport the selected CPU, meaning it probably wont even boot. Strike 1.
Strike 2 is the memory selected. It's not ECC or even the right amount.
From what the article title indicates, I expected them to show the parts to match the stated specs of the new Mac Pro but no, they screwed the pooch from the beginning for an Epic Failure.
Closest I've found is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182336 which is an ATX workstation/server board that supports (Certified List) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147307&ignorebbr=1 - these are 16GB sticks, so 4 of them matches the amount the Mac Pro has so you now have a size. Price ins't to bad.
For the rest of the hardware, I didn't bother as you have lots of choices. On the PSU front, I'd probably go with a Seasonic over the Silverstone. Case would be a full tower. Hell I want as many drive bays as possible and would use a pair of 64GB SLC SSD's in RAID 1 as the boot with the rest of the storage being the new 4TB Seagate drives - max the fucking case out as the drives are only $200 ea.
Add in a DVD drive for software installation (who bothers with that anymore when a flash drive is faster). Don't foget a Model-M keyboard or equalivent and a good mouse. Then there's the monitor and your good to go. Ballpark estimate is about the same if you go with some nice monitors (4K units with IPS panels).
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Meh, I have a macbook pro too, but I'm more than a little non-plussed by the newest one... no ethernet without dongle is a joke in a pro level product.
It seemed odd to me. I believe that their idea is that you should use an Apple display with the Ethernet provided via Thunderbolt. In this setting, you don't need the GigE connection on the machine, because it appears as soon as you plug in the display, and whenever you're not at your desk you use WiFi. I almost never use the GigE port on mine anywhere other than at work, so it's not completely silly (I don't have the Apple display, but I leave a Thunderbolt GigE adaptor connected to the network cable, so I just plug it in when I arrive).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Absolutely! Spending your money on what you want is not only the best way to spend your money for you but it is also great for society and the market as well. Before spending your money, don't you consider the company's reputation though? Do you not look a bit further than the price tag and build quality?
I made the mistake of buying a Motorola Atrix a few years ago. The device was made with great quality but Motorola never delivered on their promise to support it. Now I'm stuck with Android 2.3 on a smartphone that could easily run KitKat. Motorola has lost my trust and I'll be voting differently next time.
ayottesoftware.com
Also, something that do-it-yourself PC builders always overlook is the warranty, phone support, documentation, etc. that comes with a manufactured product (like a Mac Pro).
Those kinds of things are not free, obviously, but are almost never taken into account.
Typically caused by people using pirated batteries where they're labeled "Dell", but in fact are not. Ditto cell phone batteries. Amazon is rife with pirate shit intermixed with the real stuff.
The only other incident in which Dell was responsible, it was because of some bad Sony brand cells being used. It effected both Lenovo and Toshiba pre-emptly issued a recall to 340k customers. It was an industry wide issue pointing to one supplier. Though it would be stretch to blame Dell specifically for not in it's direct control and only happened after a large volume of units shipped. You can't test each one under the same conditions prior to shipping. It was below the QC count threshold to show up on the radar.
Life is not for the lazy.
It sounds like you know more about Thunderbolt than I. This statement seems odd, though:
> I don't see how you can implement a lower-level protocol (eg: raw thunderbolt DMA) using a higher-level ...
> That's like saying you'll implement Internet-layer frames only using TCP.
It's common to run lower level protocols on top of higher level, and I think you know that. PPPoE is just like that, isn't it?
Nvidia 780
The imac has a 780M. Maybe I want a 780. The 780M benchmarks at about half the 780. they aren't even in the same ballpark. A sub $200 GTX 660 ti as fast as a 780M.
You can throw a 2nd monitor on for a few hundred plus cables, so let's call it $3750.
Except that the 2nd monitor doesn't match at all. And maybe I want a 3rd or even fourth. Or maybe I want a narrower bezel for my multi monitor setup and I'm kind of stuck with the imac bezel since my computer is glued to it.
3tb storage
I can do triple that in a mini tower without breaking a sweat.
you are at $3300
Yeah, for a 780M and 3TB. I can build a desktop using premium parts and come in under 2k for the same performance.
For $3300, I can load it with 8TB put in an actual GTX 780 and still have cash lying around for a decent 2nd screen.
. So what minor change do you want to make that's an upgrade that a $4875 Pro setup can't handle?
See above. The desktop PC with 8TB and an actual GTX 780 runs about $3k, you now want me to spend $4875 on. And that doesn't include a screen, never mind two of them. And the dual firepro D300's? They're equivalent to the FirePro W7000, which individually benchmark even worse than the 780M in the imac. And the GTX 780 in the $3k PC is easily better than two D300.
But hey for $1000 more I can get dual D700 which is pointless as for $500 I could add a 2nd GTX 780 to my $3k PC ... so $3500 all in vs what $5500 now? And I'm still short storage and screens? So $6500?
The MacPro is better for OpenCL I would hope and the Xeons and ECC ram have their place... but its not what I need by a long shot. And it almost twice the price for the same performance I get from a $3500 PC? And that 3500 PC literally runs rings around the iMac.
That is hard to believe both Lenovo and HP make solid workstations... for now anyway.
Apple is relying on ssd on the pci bus to gain speed, sorry to say this but those ssd drives have a short life span when used for heavy lifting. Currently my workstation is a lenovo and runs sas, with a raid 10 set of 4 900 gig 15 k drives. Blindly fast and quiet. Dual 10 Core Xeons and 32 gigs of ram, I can run most anything on my workstation and it doesn't break a sweat. It's solid even in 80 degree heat here in colombia.
I run linux, and use a macbook for mobility. Hiring based on seeing what workstation someone selects is just a bad way to even joke about getting talent in the door. My Lenovo has a 4k price tag to our business, show me an apple product that low with those specs and I'll be the first to line up to purchase.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner
I routinely use ethernet at home and work for larger file transfers. My home office is now GigE -- but even 100Base-T is markedly faster than my home office wifi, especially as my home wifi-AP is on a different floor from my office so as to give better signal to the tablets and toys (kids 3DS, WiiU, etc..) in the living room.
I still run into needing ethernet at client sites regularly. And in hotel rooms in many places. Lots of businesses do not deploy wifi. As someone who does a lot of IT I also use it routinely to program routers and other network devices too.
Its just plain silly to need a dongle for all that in a "pro" laptop.
Uhhhh...you DO know there are these things called "PC Shops", that pretty much every town has one, and the vast majority are more than happy to do the work FOR you,yes? You don't even need to know anything about parts as you can just walk in and say "I want a PC that does X, here is what I want to spend" and we'll be happy to sit down and go through the options and help you pick what is best for YOU, and what YOUR needs are,yes?
I just love how so many try to make it a false choice between some POS Dell and doing everything by hand. Frankly even figuring the cost of paying a shop guy like me to put one together you can get a monster for a LOT cheaper than anything from Apple inc. For example look at this Core i7 monster. You figure in the cost of an HD7790 or HD7850, Win 7 X64 and having somebody like me put it together? You'd still end up cheaper than some gimped imac or Macbook.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Install and Update All Your Programs at Once http://ninite.com/
And yet no one who actually works with it calls it NT, and we certainly do not call the admins "NT Admins".
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
The two biggest categories of apps that can take advantage of multiple high-powered GPUs and all those processors are: 1) Video editing/compositing software, and 2) 3D Modeling/animation/rendering programs.
I was doing work 12 years ago on a dual-proc 350MHz P3 Xeon that would still use up all the GPU and CPU availability on this new monster of a machine. Until photo-realistic Virtual Reality is possible in real-time, there will always be demand for capabilities that far outstrip your consumer desktop.
Guess what the target market is?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Air or water cooled?
Office space yes. Desk space no. I've never had the problem of needing a computer crammed into a small cylinder because otherwise I just couldn't fit it into an office of any size.
> Oh and speaking of thermals what the hell is a safe operating region?
It's something that ALL electronics require in order to not cook themselves.
I was joking. But my point was thermal management is critical to equipment stability and reliability only when it's not integrated on the die. Older CPUs would fail destructively without a heatsink, Tom's Hardware showed you could fry an egg on an Athlon 1200. These days safe operating region won't be exceeded unless you purposefully put your computer in the oven.
The article is either totally incompetent or totally biased. It chooses to put in the PC configuration 2 AMD FirePro W9000 cards at $3400 each. According to AMD though FirePro W9000 has 6GB of RAM and delivers 4TFLOPs whereas the more expensive of the Apple cards has 3GB of RAM and delivers 2.2 TFLOPs. A closer much to an Apple video card would the FirePro W7000 which has 4GB of RAM and delivers 2.4TFLOPs. That however costs not $3400 but $700. So the PC system price was overestimated by $5400 (2x$3400 instead of 2x$700).
That will work... for some fraction of Win installers. There are several varieties of installers. I try to keep a collection of stuff up to date using Ketarin, but some installers are hard to use "blind".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Vux you are now arguing something very different than a hold in the lineup. What you are arguing is that if you want a configuration substantially different than Apple's you can do much better with PC hardware. That's always the case. Apple mostly offers a single line of improvement as Steve Jobs put it: the products should relative to a particular price point and features set line up: good, better, best. The idea being that there is essentially a line with each one gets faster, better and more expensive than the previous. Pricewise they need to be close enough not to leave a gap but not so close that the customer is making complex choices.
PCs conversely have a complex matrix of possibilities where customers weigh options and get a best fit.
Excellent point. Apple is making huge sacrifices for light and thin. I own a rMBP. I love my machine but I'm not sure that I wouldn't like thicker, more like the old Macbook pro form fact and some of those features. Not having a builtin DVD drive is a pain. I have a great external BlueRay writer but it isn't internal. Huge sacrifices for light and thin is now part of the brand across essentially the entire product line. You don't like that, you don't like Apple. You were unhappy with the lack of an ethernet port. Same thing. Light and thin is expensive, you either figure OSX is worth it or you go PC and forget Apple as a vendor.
As far as the 780 for a pro machine. According to online reports the 780 doesn't holdup well for some of the more expensive pro applications. Which is typical of consumer vs. pro-grade equipment. The AMD chips are not tweaked for gaming. So for example Apple's FinalCutPro works wonderfully doing 4K editing on this chipset in a way that would be impossible on your GTX 780s because those are tweaked for gaming not video editing and CAD.
And this is the same things Xeons. You seem to be talking about a $3k PC with high end consumer parts and you don't care about sacrifices for looks. Apple just doesn't make one of those. HP or Dell or Lenevo. What about Apple would you like? I'm having a hard time figure out why you don't just decide you are a bad fit for Apple entirely.
I think the iMac might support that via. Thunderbolt but mostly the idea is that iMac customers don't want that kind of setup. But mainly the assumption is if you want 3 monitors that's a pro setup you are supposed to be in the MacPro. Otherwise you are doing something funky (which Apple allows) and don't
Agree here. iMacs IMHO have gone from pricey to a total ripoff. I'm hoping that Macmini revision makes these practical for people. That being said lots of people love these computers for the look. And those good looks + OSX IMHO is what you are buying with the iMac.
PC $11,530.54 US
MAC $9,599 US
But building a comparable Windows machine with parts available on the market through your favorite sources (ex. newegg) is not possible at any price. You can integrate components with equal or greater functionality, but how much system test is there? Who is going to root cause every blue screen? Trust me, more of those blue screens are hardware related than I would have believed years ago. Who is making sure the PSU can deliver the needed power for the various application loads, and that it is performing with margin? Who is doing thermal measurements, checking airflow and ensuring parts are being kept safely in their operating region? This is what Apple is doing that "justifies" the price. The double quotes are there because no other system's company out there is holding to any quality standard except Apple, and as long as that's the case, Apple can charge whatever it likes.
All the major name manufacturers do the same in their enterprise-class workstation PCs (HP Z Series, Dell Precision, etc). The cases might not be as pretty, but they're doing the same level of QA.
Air. is plenty cold enough and the fans are fine. Vibrations in the case panels, etc. are the cause of most of the noise.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Depends what you define as "use properly". If you take "use properly" to mean run all the components at some arbitrary clock rate / workload concurrently then sure. If you take "use properly" to mean "run OS X software faster than any other machine on the planet" then opinion may differ.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Not at all what you were saying earlier, but whatever. For anyone in the position of needing real workstation power, the Mac Pro is neither overpriced nor under PSUed nor only to be considered "if you have no other choice" (which is the bigoted comment that I came in on).
Will I buy one? No, my Mac Mini is enough CPU/GPU for my needs but I do lust for one.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Either the plumbers up here are better than where you live, or I'm better at picking them. I do like sticking to one place once I've had a good experience; no point in taking unnecessary chances.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yeah, quite. The base Mac Pro actually turns out to be fairly reasonably priced for the combination of components inside, but - and this is important - there is essentially no reason to get that combination of components unless you have no other choice because you're buying a Mac. For instance, they're paying out quite a bit of extra money in order to fit everything into a smaller case, even though that'd actually be a downside for many customers. Also, most of the professional applications out there that use GPU acceleration can only make use of a single GPU, so the second $3400 GPU will be sitting completely idle for most Mac Pro buyers. What's more, as the article mentions many apps run better on NVidia GPUs anyway. Also, how many of the GPU-accelerated apps can also make full use of a 12-core CPU?
If you're spending $10k on a computer you're probably buying at least one feature no software can take advantage of. $10k on a computer is ultra-high-end. If you're spending $10k you're betting the next version will take advantage of the feature.
And if the feature is on Apple's desktop you can be pretty sure somebody will take advantage of it, because the only software that uses both GPUs will be really easy to sell to all the people who had to buy both GPUs from Apple.
Did anyone ever say that your ability to choose specs was worth nothing? If you don't want Apple's specs you have the right to not buy their products.
The point of articles like this isn't to prove that a guy who needs a shitty computer with one good spec would save money on Apple, it's to prove that Apple isn't charging a premium for the actual hardware in the computer he would have gotten from Apple. He's paying more, but he's getting more too.
My general strategy in the past has been to buy their machine with the worst processor, because with that machine you pay for the least other cool hardware toys, and upgrade the RAM and HD with third-party parts. Generally I used Other World Computing. I may have to switch (possibly even from the Mac) if they keep making it harder and harder to upgrade RAM/HD.
So you've never even seen one of these workstations, nobody you know has seen any of these workstations, and it will in fact be impossible for you to know how they perform for two months; yet you're confident they'll "under-perform?"
As for "basic tasks" I think you may simply be mistaken. Nobody asks graphics artists "can you replace a graphics card," during the job interview. Nobody asks "can you troubleshoot driver issues." If you can do these things you will clearly be a better a bigger asset to the company then otherwise, but they are simply not part of the basic package.
As for the wait on the phone, why didn't you just take it to the Apple store? They might charge you for the diagnosis, but the geniuses are a lot more customer-focused then the poor schmucks who man phone-banks. There are no BIOS Whitelists in Apple products. That's everyone else. It really seems like you have absolutely no experience with Apple products at all.
Do you live in a country with lots of Apple stores?
I've found that the store Geniuses are much more focused on getting things fixed for their customer then getting paid for it. Possibly this is because I like to talk to them about Apple history, so they know I've been a Macuser since '92, but I've gotten lots of great support from them basically for free.
A post I made earlier in this thread mentioned that they replaced an out-of-warranty Magsafe board for $10, and the time they let me leave my laptop in their store overnight so I could back up my data on an external drive before. But the time you bring to mind was when I spilled Dr. Pepper all over my laptop, it was out-of-warranty, I told them the problem was caused by Dr. Pepper, and they replaced it for free.
So I'm pretty sure they woulda replaced that motherboard for free if you'd told them your sob story about being stuck on a ship.
There're some people who're reasonable about Apple-opposition on slashdot. Unfortunately they tend not to talk much, so you get a debate between Apple fanatics (that would be me) and jerks who only stopped using the phrase "MacFag" because they got sick of being downmodded. A lot of the latter have clearly never even tried to use Macs, and definitely have no idea why somebody would rather drop off a broken computer at a store then spend the entire goddamned weekend figuring out which driver update screwed up their system.
Pretty shocking. I'm not a plumber[1], but I get it right nine times out of ten. And the rest of the time I can usually put it back no worse than I found it.
[1] as in I've never had one hour's formal training nor read a book on it. The nearest thing to instruction I've had is drinking tea next to one while he was working.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I own a rMBP. I love my machine but I'm not sure that I wouldn't like thicker, more like the old Macbook pro form fact and some of those features. Not having a builtin DVD drive is a pain.
I agree. The trouble is they had the formula right last generation.
The macbook air was extreme light and mobile.
The macbook pro was bigger, and did everything... and I bought one, and other than it having a minidisplay port instead of something sensible like HDMI I've been very happy with it.
So I WAS a good fit for apple's product line, but with the new generation I seem not to be, because I still care about ethernet, and I'd have rather they kept the form factor and used the extra space for an ethenet port and more battery and better video than intel integrated, but instead the new 13" mbp is now just a faster macbook air with all the "pro" sucked right out of it.
But mainly the assumption is if you want 3 monitors that's a pro setup you are supposed to be in the MacPro.
And that's the issue. Three+ screens is a godsend for doing even simple stuff like developing websites or accounting or trading stocks or any number of other creative or professional jobs.
But what on earth would one need a Xeon and dual firepro video cards to write HTML and CSS pages?
The mac pro isn't a general purpose computer, its not even a general purpose workstation... it feels almost like "Final Cut Pro Appliance" in the sense that its configuration options only make any sense to very very specific niche markets.
As far as the 780 for a pro machine. According to online reports the 780 doesn't holdup well for some of the more expensive pro applications.
Right. But the people buying the 780 aren't using it for those. If I wanted a FirePro because I was in the market for a FirePro optimized application then it would make sense... but I'm not... so I'm in the market for a desktop computer.
But apple doesn't make one at all. And that's the gap. They make a "professional film editing workstation" and they make laptops. Their so called desktops are just laptops. The mac mini is a laptop without a screen. The imac is a laptop glued onto the back of a screen.
They don't make a desktop computer and I call that a gap.
What about Apple would you like? I'm having a hard time figure out why you don't just decide you are a bad fit for Apple entirely.
Good question. I still run windows on my desktop computer. I'd like to have OSX on it too though, because I have other OSX devices, and like consistency from one computer to the next.
My brother faced the same conundrum, and he built a hackintosh.
The hackintosh market exists in large part not because people are too cheap to buy a mac, but because apple simply doesn't make a desktop computer, and it doesn't make sense to move into their film editing appliance just to get some basic flexibility and decent consumer parts that don't belong in a laptop.
You're grandma.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's obviously true to anyone who knows which end of screwdriver to hold that anything small is intrinsically fiddly to disassemble, and an order of magnitude worse to reassemble.
However that's not the same as intentionally designing heptadecahedral screw-heads or a case where you have to press simultaneously in 23 different places to unclick the magic lugs of doom.
You're talking out of your arse, fanboy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Don't you mean net profit?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is exactly what people seem to not understand. Not to mention trying to get support when your custom built system starts to have issues (blue screening due to drivers, hardware incompatibilities, etc.. ). When you have a project due for a client and some key piece of software starts crashing, or crashing the machine, the last thing you want to have to deal with are the numerous vendors playing the blame game.
I can tell you've done this, tk77. Your description of what happpens is exactly what happens.
Before I retired, I was bombarded with this kind of crap. Every so often, someone decides those pesky Macs are just too expensive, and besides, anyone who uses a Mac isn't very smart about computers - Right?
But then reality intrudes. Updates hose the PC, Software isn't as good. Every different manufacturer blames every other manufacturer, and you're left with extra time proving what you already know is wrong. And sometimes, a deadline is missed, or a distinctly substandard product goes out the door.
All costing time and money. And for what? Saving a few dollars on the tool you are using. That's being penny wise, and pound foolish.
And there are a lot of people who do word processing and spreadsheets who belive that their knowledge base and experience translates exactly into the world of video and audio production.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yeah but all these bullshit articles misses the point and why the PC is frankly better for most of us and that is the fact that YOU get to decide what you need and YOU get to decide what is most important to YOUR way of doing things instead of being told by Apple Inc what you should and shouldn't have!
Umm, is Apple forcing you to buy one, or do you just have a troublesome rage issue.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yes, you've identified one of the big problems with speccing out new machines. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a good solution. It is possible to profile various pieces of software, but I'm not aware of any consumer product that does this in the kind of detail that would allow you to decide if you really need another 8 GB of ram of if you'd be better served with a processor that has an extra 3MB of L3 cache.
That fog exists for everyone, btw, not just people choosing between buying a Mac or trying to play systems integrator on their own.
One thing that seems to be missed a lot in these threads is the cost of building your own solution. Someone has to put time and effort into choosing the hardware, and for a business that only needs a few workstations, it might be more cost effective just to buy a complete off-the-shelf solution that you know is planned to be around for at least 9 months.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
> and definitely have no idea why somebody would rather drop off a broken computer at a store then spend the entire goddamned weekend figuring out which driver update screwed up their system.
I don't recall any such problem on my Ubuntu system. I'm sure I have had such problems in the past, but so long ago that I can't recall them.
On the other had, my wife's iPad won't back up to my wife's MacBook Air (need to do it in order to upgrade) due to some ID problem, so now I have to take both to some Apple store to get some "Genius" to sort them out. TBH, I doubt they will be able to, but we'll see. I've been before to attempt to sort out the crappy battery life on the AIr, which they tested and said it was 'as expected' - but the experience involved much waiting in a crouded noisey shop and not something I really want to repeat, if I can avoid it - which I can't because Apple seem to want to 'think different' (as well as 'spell different').
But, yes, the New Mac Pro does *look* great, at least - and it's been many a year since I thought that about an Apple product. IIRC, even the Apple logo is not "in your face" nearly as much as on their other products.
Max.
The Mac Pro was updated every year from 2006-2010; it was only the 2010 version that was stuck in place, probably in part due to the development of this new machine.
Don't forget the G5, which was updated every year before that since 2003.
Or the Power Mac G4.
Or the Power Mac G3.
or he listed it twice and I was being sarcastic. how about fuck you?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"Ah, so according to you a Mac Pro is a 360 led light?"
Your brain must not function properly in order for you to say such an astoundingly stupid thing. It's as if you missed the quote above my comment and in fact didn't pay attention to it at all.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Bahhahhaha
Sorry, was LOL before I got to your Score:5 Funny..
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
The only astoundingly stupid comment was yours, comparing the Mac Pro to a led light. Here's a dime to add to your head coin collection.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
You still fail to read or understand.
The only thing the Mac Pro is ahead of the curve on is form factor, and they've clearly made serious compromises to achieve that
That is what I replied to. FORM FACTOR.
And I replied by saying "It's not an innovation as they're using an LED company's own heat sink for the interior."
http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/579269880/Unique_360_degree_beam_angle_vertical.html
And it's true. The heat sink inside THAT EXACT LED is the EXACT SAME HEAT SINK in the Mac Pro.
They didn't make any compromises, at fucking all. They took a note from the LED industry, like every other tech company on the planet has been doing for the past half decade or longer.
Protip: I am very heavily involved in most semiconductor-based industries where thermal considerations are a major issue.
Now go back to school and learn how to comprehend that which you read.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Oh, because a led light uses a central heatsink for LEDs (where the heat sink needs to be on the inside because it'd block the LEDs otherwise), it's not innovative for apple to break with the rectangular form of every other desktop computer & design the MP around the heatsink and fan.
I suppose this is prior art too then. Because, of course you can build things out of it and naaaturally that makes anything using a similar form, whatever the use, non-innovative. You're a rube. A twit. A troll who wouldn't recognize innovative design if he was being guillotined ("No innovation there, same deal as an executioners aCHUNK...").
Heavily involved in semiconductor based industries with thermal issues? Suure you are: Ladling soup in the kitchen (gotta keep it hot).
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
For CSS development the new mini or an iMac would be fine. You are right that Apple doesn't serve this market well. The PC market offers far more choice of hardware configuration.
That's fair. Though I'd amend according to the higher end video companies (i.e. software in the $10k-50k per workstation) it is a great fit. So your "professional film editing workstation" I used to always joke that Apple was SGI 10 years later. And the MacPro is a lot like the Onyx or Altix in terms of design and function (though obviously not cost).
Have you considered: http://synergy-foss.org./ Just run it on your windows box with the OSX box as a client. You can also use a KVM or just pop the monitor back and forth. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817399101)
interesting article ... in October i got a new box to replace a 2007 2P Opteron dual-core box (w/ 16GB of ram, 2 LSI SAS HBA's and all Seagate Cheetahs) that had cost me over $5K back then ... when i ordered the new box, i told friends that i was basically getting the new Apple Mac Pro ... i.e., my new box runs an E5-1650 v2 off a SuperMicro X9SRA mobo w/ 128GB of Kingston ECC ram, two new LSI 12Gbs SAS HBA's (9300-8i and a 8e) and is stuffed in a Corsair Obsidian 650D case, and runs their Hyrdo H100i water cooled CPU cooler and one of their AX860i psu's ... as the case only has 6 internal drive bays, i also added an Icy Dock ToughArmor 4 x 2.5" SAS/SATA cage module ... the 650D case is cool b/c it has a SATA docking station built into its top ... i have all Samsung 840 Pro SSDs ... a 256GB one as C: (for Win 7 Pro) hung off one of the mobo's 6Gbs ports (the other mobo port is used for the SATA docking station) ... all other SSD's are hung off the 9300-8i: 2 128GB 840 Pro's as a RAID 0 D: (for a remapped Temp space), another 128GB as E: (for all my programs/code -- i've been coding SAS [the software] since the 70's) and a 512GB 840 Pro as F: (where i relocate My Documents to) ... and i scored this for $6158 from a firm in Fairport NY (i'm in Sacramento) ... i then added 4 more SSD's that i already had in hand: 3 256GB 840 Pro's as G:, H: and J: (I: is another 128GB 840 Pro) .. all for SAS datasets (i do hospital/healthcare consulting) ... lastly ... the 9300-8e is connected to 4 of my older Seagate SAS drives: two 300GB 15.7 Cheetahs and two 2GB 6Gbs Seagate Constellation ES (7200 rpm) ... so far this new box is GOLD ... an amazing beast
The service aspect is not all positive.. With a vendor built, a component failure means a 2 week minimum turnaround where you're out of a machine. If you've built it yourself it's an overnighted part and you're up and running again...and if you're crazy desperate, a drive to frys/microcenter.
I've had Apple machines shipped halfway across the US to Texas and back with a new motherboard in 2-3 days. Just saying, for reality's sake.
"it's not innovative for apple to break with the rectangular form of every other desktop computer & design the MP around the heatsink and fan."
No, because tons of other companies were doing it WELL BEFORE Apple ever dreamed it possible.
"Heavily involved in semiconductor based industries with thermal issues? Suure you are"
http://i.imgur.com/YDWt3We.png - 1,000w in 30mm x 30mm package. THE most powerful grow light ever designed (and also can be retrofitted with regular white LED dies for architectural/industrial lighting.)
That's not easy to keep cool. I had to design a graphite-core heat sink solution for that.
http://i.imgur.com/jT6x5H1.jpg - Oh look, here I am testing not only thermal outputs from these different thermal designs, but also running visual cellular scans on test crops - see I also do biology as well. It's kinda part of the job of RESEARCH DIRECTOR FOR A GLOBAL COMPANY.
Go back to wallowing in your ignorance, sir.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Oh, because you don't know the difference between stating a reasonable position and visible-from-space Hatorade? I don't like the size of the Samsung Galaxy because it's too big to fit in my pocket comfortably. My response is to....not buy one. And I don't go around pretending that my product preference is Samsung's design flaw. As opposed to the Hatebois whining about SD cards or batteries.
And it is perfectly possible to....not buy their products without bitching about them. I don't like Country music, but I don't go around talking about how the people who make it suck and the people who buy it are sheep swayed by marketing and fashion. As opposed to the Hatebois who aren't content to buy whatever it is that does whatever they want, and be happy about it.