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Modern 'Hackintoshes' Show That Apple Should Probably Just Build a Mac Tower (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report written by Andrew Cunningham via Ars Technica: Apple is working on new desktop Macs, including a ground-up redesign of the tiny-but-controversial 2013 Mac Pro. We're also due for some new iMacs, which Apple says will include some features that will make less-demanding pro users happy. But we don't know when they're coming, and the Mac Pro in particular is going to take at least a year to get here. Apple's reassurances are nice, but it's a small comfort to anyone who wants high-end processing power in a Mac right now. Apple hasn't put out a new desktop since it refreshed the iMacs in October of 2015, and the older, slower components in these computers keeps Apple out of new high-end fields like VR. This is a problem for people who prefer or need macOS, since Apple's operating system is only really designed to work on Apple's hardware. But for the truly adventurous and desperate, there's another place to turn: fake Macs built with standard PC components, popularly known as "Hackintoshes." They've been around for a long time, but the state of Apple's desktop lineup is making them feel newly relevant these days. So we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the computers are being used -- and what they'd like to see from Apple.
They're not "highly illegal", the worst you're doing by installing OS X on a hackintosh is violating the EULA, assuming you obtained OS X legally in the first place.
For Hackintoshes to become popular, presumably, there is some software on a Mac that isn't available elsewhere. What is driving the Hackintosh need? Personally (note the qualifier), I totally fail to see the need for a Hackintosh - I think all operating systems are fairly advanced and usable now, and it doesn't take long to be proficient in Linux or Windows (or FreeBSD or whatever). Why push a path that isn't supported by Apple? Just use Linux (or Windows) instead - whatever alternate platform your preferred tools work on.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Sorry, I couldn't track down the earliest appearance of this classic on /. , apparently google doesn't go back that far.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So we spoke with people who currently rely on Hackintoshes to see how the computers are being used -- and what they'd like to see from Apple.
2TB NVME m.2 boot drive (+2x NVME m.2 slots)
Intel Core i7 6950X overclockable liquid cooled
2x NVidia Titan X
4x empty drive bays for expansion
8x PCIE 16x slots
Subwoofer built into case
RGB lighting
-------
$900
If the small (yes small) number of people who use Mackintoshes proves that Apple should build Towers, then the small (yes small) number of Windows Phone users proves we should all be using Windows phones. Stop believing that YOUR needs/wants = the majority, they aren't.
I guess he had a broken Mac and did nit realize it.
At that time I owned Macs and an 486/66 PC.
The PC was fastest on Linux, Slackware (0.9 or something close). There was no noticeable difference between Macs and PCs regarding file operations (why would there?) the PC run Windows 3.1 and later 3.11 and in the end Win95.
Needless to say that I never used anything else than the IDE under Win 3.1/3.11. The whole system was basically unuseable.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Built a powerful hackintosh a few years ago. Gathered all the parts from tonyosx86.com (or something like that) and kludged my way through an install of OSX. Every update required more hacking to keep the thing going. I eventually gave up and went back to Windows (10).
All in all it was more of a pain in the ass to keep this thing running with sub optimal driver support, more tricking of the boot loader, and staying behind the time for patching that drove me away from bothering again. Apple will never build a desktop for the masses outside of their Mini line (which works well for desktop work). People who want to game on Mac's go get a MacBook Pro. Getting one of those trashcan towers is ludicrous.
To start with of course, all of the MANY developers for iOS need to use Xcode, and that is absolutely Mac only - not to mention a huge base of people who want compiles to be as fast as possible.
Also some software that has become very popular with designers is Sketch, which is Mac only.
But on top of that, even if you are using something like Photoshop which is cross platform, you may well just prefer how OS X works over Windows.
Obviously Linux is simply a non-starter for any people that need a professional platform that is not primarily for development...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey, Apple! If you're really interested in maintaining control of the HW design -- and I mean in a meaningful way, not the cheeseball gee-whiz pretentious way where indicator LEDs are entirely absent because they disrupt the "line" of the machine -- then may I suggest you start selling... Motherboards. Yes, design a motherboard you're happy with, then stick it in an anti-static bag alongside an OS X DVD. The owner can then add their preferred CPU, RAM (quad-channel DDR4, natch), and GPU, and put the whole thing in a case that meets their needs. Hell, you'll probably be able to squeeze even higher margins out of the thing, since you won't have to design or build custom casework, which can get kinda spendy.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I've probably owned almost every model of Macintosh that ever existed including the "pre-Mac"; a Lisa (1MB RAM, 5MB hd). A long(!) time ago I owned a computer graphics/media company and while it grew to include a lot of Windows (at first NT!) boxes and SGI machines, it was founded around Macs (and Quark Xpress, Cosa (Adobe) After Effects and Electric Image. Still love Macs (for the fit and finish and polish if not performance :).
However, my experience in using a "Hackintosh" is: don't do it unless you have no other option. I needed (okay wanted) my VR system (HTC Vive) to be portable but the new MBP didn't have nearly enough graphics power :(. So I got a Razer Blade Pro with 4K display, 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD and made a VirtualBox partition with MacOS. I realize it's not a "Hackintosh" but since I can use the native Windows environment to run my graphics heavy apps, I figured that the performance hit from running the OS in virtual mode would be acceptable. I also didn't want to spend (days? weeks?) trying to make the drivers and such working for a dual boot system. Basically I would just run my MS Office apps (ironic isn't it?) and mail on the Mac virtual machine and everything else under Windows. This would allow me to not have to move from my comfy Mac environment when I needed to go on the road with my VR setup (I got battery packs to power all the other components of the Vive like the headset and trackers).
It works but the experience is so clumsy that I only use it because I don't want to lug BOTH my Razer Blade Pro and MBP around. The user interface is okay but because it's in a window, you can't zip the cursor to the edge of the screen to hit the pull down menu (or Dock), you'll overshoot and end up in the native Windows environment. The software rendered graphics is slow (duh) in some cases to be annoying (forget video). What's worst is the fear that with every update you'll break something; this isn't helped by the fact that when the "App Store" app tries to update stuff, sometimes it says "Macintosh model not recognized" (duh) and doesn't update some of the Apple apps (I think FCP or Garage Band or iMovie, iForget).
Anyway, the only reasons why I still use it at all is because of First: iCloud now keeps all of your data on all of your Mac systems synchronized (if you purchased enough space). So if I create a document on my Mac Pro, it'll appear (relatively quickly) on my MBP and my Hackintosh. (You'll need a decent internet connection). So I can still (painfully) use my Hackintosh while on the road with my Razer Blade Pro and have access to all of my documents exactly as if I were using my Mac Pro or MBP. Secondly, because my Hackintosh is really just a virtual machine running in it's own little partition, a complete backup of the state of the machine is easy. I just shut it down and copy the virtualBox file.
This is the only way I've been able to figure out how to have a state-of-the-art machine while not completely abandoning the mac environment. Even then, I only use my Mac environment on the Windows machine when I don't have my other, "true" Macs around. So for almost all cases, it isn't worth it.
I don't think Apple will let go of the case design that easily. I could see them selling barebones systems, though, or at least ones with only token amounts of ram and storage like they used to. Like yeah, I'm going to use a IIci with 1MB RAM and 40MB disk, honest. I'm definitely not going to just immediately slap in a bigger disk (still a Quantum, though, since they made really nicely reliable disks back then) and... I forget who it was who did the worthy knockoff Mac ram way back when, I want to say it was Kingston? It's been a long time. And thanks for going Postscript, because QMS has got a laser printer which performs just as well as a LaserWriter II, and I'll just install this PPD.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Perhaps a file system that was still in 68k code slowed it down. Leaving the network stack running emulated was particularly dumb.
People soon forget just how incredibly awful MacOS pre X was (architecturally much worse than Windows 3.0). Granting they did _eventually_ get all those parts ported to power, it took years.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I assume the OS X DVD is there to absorb shipping abuse.
The other possibility is that somebody finally got their D-Wave into the right superposition to write universal device drivers (technically, universal self-writing device drivers—plug in a new piece of hardware, and your system gets very warm for about a week, and then everything Just Works).
You say "cheese grater" semi-sarcastically
Damn right- have you ever tried grating cheese with one? They're completely useless.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I like *nix. The corporate IT folks built stuff around Windows, and support Macs since makes do fine in their environment.
At my last two jobs, the corporation officially supported Mac, which isn't surprising because they are easier to support in a Windows-centric than Linux, FreeBSD. On a Mac you can use Microsoft Office, Active Directory, etc. So the employer will provide a Mac.
The Mac is also full-on certified UNIX. Pop open a command line and can do anything you can do on Linux. Your Perl amd ahell scripts work just the same. (Obviously system administration is a bit different).
I was dissapointed by incremental updates of the cheese grater, and I got sick of waiting for the update on the garbage can, so I ended up running hackintoshes since 2010 or so. have been running on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge i7's on z68 and z97 chipsets, and new haswells have been easy to move over to. When i started i was running Snow Leopard, Lion, ad they were airgapped video production computers that let us move through a few legacy FCP7 projects, and transitioned to FCPx.
Game changer was the new EFI tools which streamlined the install process greatly. biggest PITA for me was support of USB3 in the sandy/ivy bridge chipsets, and getting a smooth initial install with various video cards, as apple has shitty, inconsistent support for AMD and nVidia. for me, currently everything runs stable on sierra which autoupdates. (i always pucker up a bit for each update though)
built a media server for video editng and digital assets, and all the hard drives, hotswap sleds, multiple boot drive configs all fits into a 4u rackmount form factor. I have mulitiple workstations where i can variously collaborate on sequencing, audio mix, photo editing, video compositing, and i would go fucking insane if i had to conform everything for the current, anemic, limited imacs for sale right now.
otoh until apple closes the hackintosh loophole with some trusted computing model in the near, dystopian future, i will be building, running, and maintaining hackintoshes. OSX install and feeding is still less of a hassle than windows, and osx still is a better workflow for us than linux.
The other possibility is that somebody finally got their D-Wave into the right superposition to write universal device drivers (technically, universal self-writing device driversâ"plug in a new piece of hardware, and your system gets very warm for about a week, and then everything Just Works).
Apple doesn't have to support everything. People who want a Mac and want expansion slots are probably smart enough to do their homework and figure out what is and is not supported, perhaps with help from some sort of fan-created website.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Most Slashdot articles that I care to read i've already read where they linked from - ArsTechnica. Is Slashdot now just an aggregator of other sites now?
... from a law firm back in 2000.
When I hired on there, users showed me that it took 5 full goddam minutes to pull up a document and print it.
I spent about $100,000 replacing all that shit with a Windows NT server, 45 Compaq Pentiums with Windows 98 and a shitload of HP printers.
Were these Mac Pluses on PhoneNET LocalTalk (a matter of hardware generations?) Did you have the skills to run a Mac network?
The PowerMac G4/400 was the first to have gigabit on the motherboard that year, so probably everything installed was 10/100. Appleshare/IP 6 was slightly slower than Netatalk but either could fill a print spooler at near wire speed and I doubt a law firm was generating gigabyte print jobs such that 100Mbps would be a problem.
If your printers were Old AF and had puny rendering engines that really has nothing to do with the client or spooler.
n.b. I ran Apple, NT4, Novell, and Unix networks at that time. None of the users were tolerant of slowness.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That led me to this ad. It reminds me of a time (up until around OSX 10.6) when every single release was faster, more efficient, and clearly an improvement over the previous system.
That is no longer true.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I went Mac-exclusive in 2001 and stopped buying Apple products entirely in 2014. No Apple laptop made since my 17" 2010 MacBook Pro is as durable or expandable. No Apple desktop holds as much storage as my 2010 Mac Pro, and iPhones are no fun to use if I have to run iTunes on Windows. I've made peace with the notion that Apple makes more money selling gateways to their 30%-commissioned walled garden than they do by selling tools to people who write code and run lots of virtual machines. Rather than selling me a $3000 machine every other year, they passively collect constant income from easily-distracted end-users. Even if the numbers didn't make sense, the reduced level of effort certainly does. See also: Valve and why Half Life 3 is vaporware.
In the time since it became really clear that Apple didn't want to chase the business of people like me, I've switched away from software that's OS X-specific. I built a CentOS desktop and a Windows 10 desktop to see which one I'd run next. Either is fine. I'd prefer FreeBSD, but graphics and power management are a little behind the curve.
You see, Apple's disdain for pro customers isn't new, and it comes in long stretches. When they had the educational market in the US sewn up, they didn't need professional users. When that dried up, they successfully sold GUI Unix to hackers. If they need us, they know how to get in touch, but until they need us, they won't.
That said, I do love my last two Macs. They mostly Just Work. They're not fast anymore (8 years of software bloat will do that), but they're acceptable. I lament that they won't be replaced by other Macs, but life goes on. In the interim, I have work to do that I can't do efficiently on a single-disk/single-screen machine or a tiny notebook with soldered-in storage.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
So the short answer is: "Instead of figuring out what the problem was, I got to spend $100K of someone else's money to play the to toys *I* wanted".
MS sucked big time in 2000. You couldn't reliably format a printed job, something that I'd think a law firm would have found a necessity. Nothing like Joe printing something on Printer A, and Jane printing the same doc on printer B, and then referencing something on page 221 second paragraph... wait... what?
And no, there were no solutions for that other than to run non MS software.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
legal is a binary property. Something cannot be highly illegal. It's just legal or illegal.
Wrong, it can also be "undocumented."
Grand Central Dispatch is the cause for that. The monolithic computing entity in 10.6 and before basically was going to hold up performance increases as time moves on. You're going to get more cores, not really faster cores, and OSX has been positioning itself for that new reality.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Which means it may have had everything to do with the age of the equipment, not the platform. And you just wasted everyone's time with your comments.
It still exists. It's a $19.99 upgrade to Mac OS X from their app store. The only difference between the desktop and server edition were the software packages and some settings anyway.
Actually I don't know anything about The architecture of Mac OS.
My first programs I wrote on it where done in Modula 2, which had its own windowing and event library (to be portable), which was 100 times easier to use than the Pascal version of Mac OS.
Later I programmed in Think C, a subset of C++. No templates (don't think they were invented that time already), and no multiple inheritance. But a nice and clean programming environment.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
First, this is 2000. That's ancient in this context. The situation today is very different. Windows 98 was just crappy for a serious computer even at that time. A professional organization would have done better with NT all around (or 2000 as Microsoft would probably have recommended at the time). That was really an awful time though, professional organizations very often used high end workstations (at least in engineering) because the PC world was still transitioning away from home/toy computing, things didn't really improve until Windows XP.
Today, you could fix the servers only and still have Macbook pro laptops as the desktop, as they do very well. Even in 2000 I would suggest 95% of the problem was with the servers anyway.
Also civil vs criminal. You don't go to jail for breaking an EULA for your own personal use. The worst case scenario is a lawsuit, and that's not even going to happen unless you insult the CEO's mom.
I think I love you. Seriously, in all my pleading with Apple to re-release an actual Pro-level system like they used to make back in 2012, why did I never think of this?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
stick it in an anti-static bag alongside an OS X DVD
Even whole Macs don't come with those. Just enable Internet recovery on the motherboard.
The motherboard is basically the computer - northbridge (now just CPU) and southbridge are where most of the driver issues are. It doesn't matter which hard drive you buy, which SATA optical drive you might need, and it's easy to see which GPUs have Mac support.
So the short answer is: "Instead of figuring out what the problem was ...
No.
The short answer is, I fixed the fucking problem by donating that shitty stuff to Goodwill.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Windows 98 was fine.
It got the law firm business through the day.
Windows XP was a nice replacement.
That NT server is still up and running a legacy app.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
No, it's because good OSX engineers left, and were replaced by product managers.
Having an extra core should not slow things down, if it does, you are doing things horribly wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You said there was no reason for Macs to be slower in file operations. Thought you might be interested in why there was a _huge_ difference (for a while). Emulated 68k code is the answer.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The year 2000 was not last year.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
What does that have to do with anything at all? You never looked into it 17 years ago - it may have had everything to do with the age of the equipment at that time.
Yes, it is a 'potential' answer, but I saw no difference in speed at that time.
Considering that I/O speed is basically based only on the hardware, you could perhaps run an emulator running 6502 code in an 68k emulator running on a PowerPC and would not notice any difference to native PowerPC code, probably not even in CPU usage.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I saw the writing on the wall in 2008 and went back to Linux with a little bit of Windows. However, Dan Benjamin is pretty sharp and has a great guide if you still need/want a powerful mac desktop.
http://hackintoshmethod.com/
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
That was far from true while MacOS had 68k code all through it.
You were likely benchmarking either before power chips or after they finally ported the network stack and file system code. It performed terribly.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
legal, illegal, file not found.
Otherwise known as
Free, Jail, setting precedent.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
No.
The short answer is, I fixed the fucking problem by donating that shitty stuff to Goodwill.
I doubt it.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
no southbridge either.
When GMCH was split and the GM part went into the CPU the CH and southbridge became the PCH.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
You're missing the point. They fundamentally changed the OS to be message passing. Look up exactly what that means in terms of parallelism. It's an amazing feat of software engineering to make an OS truly message based and still function with all of yesterday's software. (I don't believe they're really there yet, however.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You're talking in "maybes."
I dealt in certainty.
I know my shit: It's brown, about that long, and don't stink.
In the year 2000, Apple could not support business.
It's still like that.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I know this is pre-OS X, but you had a HUGE knowledge gap.
Statistics have nothing to do with OS X's worthiness today.
Knowledge gap? You know this because you had the knowledge I didn't?
How's that work?
I was there.
I fixed it.
I doubt Goodwill had any takers on that Apple crap.
Reach much?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
My coworkers didn't doubt it.
That's the proper metric.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Because you threw it out without looking at it. You only learn one way of doing something and if it doesn't fit, you can't handle it.
And what is with the linking on marketshare data? Statistics have nothing to do with suitability.
While other pro workstations had TB add in cards with an old voodoo video like loop back cable they pushed all video over the TB bus even HDMI and went with the laptop like custom video cards.
Apple could of even had an low end video chip on board like server boards and some workstation boards to route TB over with real pci-e slots and real video cards with HDMI and DP versions higher then what you can get with TB.
and the 1 cpu system cut down on the pci-e lanes forcing apple to only have 1 SSD card.
OK.
You're trolling.
And me a professional.
Well played.
You're dismissed.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If that's professional, I don't want to be one.
Sadly, Apple make it virtually impossible to set up and run a virtual machine on my main development machine. I've had some success at running Snow Leopard by installing my distribution disk on a Virtual box on an aging Mac mini, booting it, then copying the running but saved Virtual Machine image over to my development machine. Rebooting the computer involves a copy of the system to the mac, reboot, then copy back, with multi GB of data being copied, is not a speedy process. I do a somewhat similar thing with Sierra, after exploiting Hackintosh tools and techniques in order to install Sierra on a Virtual Machine running on the Mac.
It was all incredibly painful, time-consuming and utterly necessary. I would much rather give Apple a few hundred bucks, and spend the time spent farting around Apple's ridiculous restrictions on actual productive work that pays me money. But I can't, because Apple won't.
Soldering storage is a very bad idea and hurts us all. and the lack of ports in there laptop as well.
Since actually licensing and opening up their OS to other vendors isn't going to happen....
Apple should just ship a couple "Apple labelled" standard format ATX'ish motherboards. A desktop Intel, a desktop AMD, and a multi-socket "Pro" of where applicable. Drivers for peripherals... That someone else's problem. Done.
Given how off-the-wall Apple has become, I expect them to build a Mac tower that resembles a dildo.
It does exist, but it's fairly useless for anything remotely corporate. I use it at home, and even then only to provide wireless time machine backup points that actually work properly. The webserver stuff is super-primitive, not even permitting local forwards to other servers (I ended up installing nginx to get that working), or certificate-required authentication (something I also use nginx for).
However, I will say this. If you have a problem using OSX Server, there's an email link somewhere in the apple menu or something, and you get a quick reply from an actual human, who will actually help you with your problem.
I have a couple of hackintosh machines and a couple of macbook pro's at work i use an imac.
My hackintosh machines have more ram and better graphics than the imac and 2 screens and an internal Sata Raid not quite as quiet as the imac which is a negative.
My older hack can triple boot which is sometimes handy. I have a legacy nikon scanner which plugs into a legacy scsi card. The software is old as the hills but I booted windows 7 and used Parallels to run Windows 2000 which I passed the Scsi card too and it works great.
There is the old adage when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail well here i have a box where I have the whole tool set OSX Windows and Linux what is there not to like.
I like osx it puts me first, windows doesn't and Linux doesn't have the commercial software I use.
I'm really hoping Apple get round to a new mac pro sooner rather than later there are decent mainboards around that could easily be used for a Mac Pro, I would buy one just because there would be no hassle with upgrading and they would be near silent multi head and run everything.
Apple probably makes more on software and media than hardware these days, the only win for pc's is they are relatively cheap. If you want to create you need something better than a laptop or an ipad
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
OSX is built on the Mach kernel, which is message based, since the NeXT days. Grand Central Dispatch didn't change that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The webserver stuff is super-primitive, not even permitting local forwards to other servers
The 'web server stuff' is Apache with a little config GUI. There are many reasons to prefer nginx to Apache, but not being able to configure forwarding is a bit of an odd one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When we moved into our new building back in 2003, we went to 100MB Ethernet -- manually set. So when a machine got hooked up to the switch and was set to auto negotiate, it would negotiate itself to 100/half and the switch port would be at 100/full. Stupid. It took a few years of my haranguing them and they finally made it standard that the switches and computers (on the user segments, not the DC segments) would be auto negotiate.
Is that legacy app a command and control server for a bot net?
Even if there were a new Mac Pro from Apple, I doubt that most people who built a hackintosh will buy one. Isn't the appealing of the hackintosh the low cost to build versus the Apple models?
My coworkers didn't doubt it.
That's the proper metric.
Said the lead lemming "Let's go this way!!!!"
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It is built on the mach kernel, but OSX itself wasn't really message based. GCD moved it in that direction. Several other OSes are built on the Mach kernel as well. AFAIK, none of them are message based either. Message based systems require a different thought process to work on as, for one, hiding things in thread associated constructs doesn't work.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Damned newbz can't be trusted.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Message passing isn't that expensive. Again, if your system slows down as a result of adding a core, then you've done something wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The Pentium Pro was released in November 1995. Systems became readily available in 1996. It was not the success that Intel had hoped for in desktop applications because it had a serious performance issue when running 16 bit legacy code. (It was more popular on servers, which had migrated to 32 bit code by then.) Referencing both the AL register (the lower half of AX) and the AX register in the same code sequence caused a complete pipeline flush, as did loading a segment register. Both of these things were rather common in 16 bit code.
Desktop adoption of Intel's new P6 microarchitecture didn't really take off until the introduction of the Pentium II in May 1997; it included a segment register cache and improved handling of register aliasing to solve those two problems so it performed much better on old code. It was also much cheaper for Intel to manufacture because it eliminated the multi-die packaging that the Pentium Pro used to incorporate cache and instead used a pluggable CPU module that contained the processor and the cache RAM. That was succeeded by the Pentium III, which started with the same SECC modules as Pentium II but later moved to on-die RAM when it became possible to put more transistors on one chip.
After THAT we got the failure that was Netburst. But that's a story for another day.
Message passing is not expensive, in fact, it's likely far cheaper than excessive synchronization required in "standard" mutable data structures. It's the message passing under the single threaded process mutable state assumptions where performance hits come into play.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Message passing is not expensive, in fact, it's likely far cheaper than excessive synchronization required in "standard" mutable data structures
Exactly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There is a very easy reason they don't do that, support.
Apple has learned from the Macbook and iPhone that the less difference you have in the hardware, the easier it is to deal with problems.
The idea of apple is that it just works. OS updates only need to be tested on a small subset of devices. There's no need to worry about the myriad of RAM suppliers and SSD manufacturers. You only need to deal with a small subset of CPUs and GPUs and there's no general purpose PCIe slots anywhere. The only thing with unknown hardware are the USB and Thunderbolt ports, and they have very specific protocols that make them much easier to test with.
The cost of supporting the desktop line so that from the casual user it's as easy as the laptop and mobile lines is far too high to be worth it. Yes expandable desktops would still be profitable, but any bugs or glitches that are out of their control could be a public relations nightmare for them.
It's annoying, but I get it. The computers need to be just good enough that they work nicely and for 99% of Mac users they do.