Unless you build a hack and drop an nVidia 1080 or two into it. They did just release OSX drivers - haven't used the new ones myself though. If you know of a better GPU, I'm all ears. As for capture boards, you have to be kidding.
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.
You absolutely can try to be anything in life. To succeed and "be" is a different thing. You can try, however, and should aspire to whatever you think you want to be. To get a child to aspire to things is the thing. If you tell them they will get it for nothing, well, then you've failed as a parent.
The whole point of targeted advertising is to deliver ads that the recipient is actually interested in. That is pretty much the opposite of "spamming". The reality of social media is that it is ad supported, and if you are going to be seeing ads anyway, targeted ads are better than the alternative.
The whole point of targeted advertising is to deliver ads to a "receptive" audience. It has absolutely nothing to do with things you're interested in. It's can we close a sale with this person. Teens feeling isolated and left out will be much more eager for our "Hi, mY name iS alexandria, Me just cum across your facebook page and think we common interests have. Cum visit me at https://xxx.pay.me.ru/"
Agile is a manifesto, nothing but good ideas, nothing to argue with really.
I'd disagree. It's a bunch of idealistic mostly empty statements. "The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams." Really? Does it? I'd say some of the best architectures, requirements and designs emerged from individuals or pairs, working together, for starters. Some of the others are wishes or even fantasy.
Agile as practiced is an excuse. Terrible idea to give management an excuse to just 'fake it'.
I'm not sure Agile is even that good. That would mean you could pin something down on it.
Nah, nothing of the sort. I see no use of polarizing terms, even.
This is why 1/2 of America doesn't take the whiny left seriously any more. The left has no ideas left, and all they have is "RACIST, SEXIST, MISOGYNY" chants and rioting.
I think this is why more than 1/2 of america strongly dislikes Trump (and his blind supporters) Being divisive and using polarizing terms and assigning imaginary actions to those not marching to the cliff with you does not make for a conversation starter. You might want to check your meds.
Then you're talking about moderate fiscal conservatives. That viewpoint IMNSHO needs to be front and center with all the extremists on both sides being relegated back to their little niches.
If you're relying on the underlying system to be secure, you're doing security wrong.
I'm relying on the underlying system not to be a porous system designed to run as root. Putting a wet paper bag around the barn doesn't keep the horses in nor the rustlers out.
BTW, hackintoshes are rock stable if you purchase reliable hardware. The upgrades can be a bit tricky at times, but run time is measured in months. I've built and played with 4 at this point. They do have to run Intel CPUs, true. That is a detrimental aspect given that OSX's current requirements are actually better fulfilled by Ryzen's architecture, at least on paper.
Hell of a puzzle, that is. I might just have to go digging into the iMac next.
On the desktop? Windows. My servers still live in Ubuntu land.
Can't do it. No Windows. Ever. I happen to know how the internals of that OS work. It's insecure by design and cannot be fixed.
The Windows 10 "spying" fears are way overblown
1) are they sending info to MS? Yes. 2) can I stop it? No. Then it's not overblown. I want exactly 0 data going to MS. They have no right to anything I'm doing, including whether I'm running their OS.
And, while Windows isn't as bad as it once was, I would posit that OS X (neigh, Mac OS) isn't as good as it once was.
Win 7 was workable, maybe finally better than XP. Win10 is a non-starter for me. The shove it down your throat trust me, you're going to like this update is why.
I agree 10.6 was the last really good rock stable version of OSX. 10.10.5 was getting there, and 10.12 seems allright, but there's quirks in it since the introduction of GCD. I understand why Apple migrated the OS to running on top of GCD, but it certainly hasn't been smooth. Once the last kinks are worked out, it's possible that GCD will leapfrog all other monolithic OSes (CPUs are not really getting much faster single-threaded but they sure are adding more threads and cores) The OSes seem to be tick-tocking on feature adds, performance fix releases. Even numbers are better. So I have 10.10, about to be 10.12, and then I'll wait for 10.14....
You might want to watch those seeds. I've found exactly 0 in the several things I've taken apart.
His first 100 shows or so were ok. They had life. Then he sold out. Watch some of the first 100 or so and note how afterwards he's just a bought fan boy with no opinion: everything's great, love's everything, wasn't that awesome? Geez, sounds like someone else that's being front and centered in the media these days.
I was thinking that I won't be able to retire the way things are....Unexpected, previously undesirable and sometimes unforeseeable things happen in life: wives...
When I first learned of the feature several years ago, back when I was a full-time Ubuntu user, I wanted to get it working on my laptop.
OK, what are you running now? I've been looking for a reasonably supported non systemd infested distro? Yeah, I really don't like systemd at all, it's launchd gone monolithically windows, not that launchd is all that great either. I'm really not looking at spending time on my OS anymore.
It's important for the Apple fanbois (which you're clearly not BTW) to remember, though, without PC users willing to tough-out being on the bleeding edge, there would be no matured and perfected technologies for Apple to adopt and convince the fanbois they had invented.
Yeah, I recall the supposed GPU switching tech, it was in earlier versions of macs too. It pretty much sucked, and if you go back far enough even required rebooting. I don't recall having to reboot or relogin on a mac though, but it's been a long time. Apple did get the smooth switching done first, I thought, or at least what I experienced.:)
Honestly, the 2012s are pretty decent boxes, even today. Not top of the line, but you're not paying those prices either.
That's what I told him, but he doesn't like the idea of a used computer. At least, that was his excuse... a month before he bought an open-box 2014 rMBP.
His objections were validated in the end, though; the headphone jack was busted.
well - if you're buying open box, that would imply you still have AC. I would never buy a laptop without it.
What's interesting is that laptop makes no mention of the integrated Iris graphics. Are non mac laptops still bound by discrete graphics, or have they also included auto-switching to the integrated Iris graphics to save power when convenient?
Mac actually came late to the game with that feature. It's been a standard on the PC side for nearly a decade by now and I recall having it working (for nVidia at least) under Linux at least 7 years ago. The power LED switches between blue and orange to indicate which GPU is being used. Interesting that they don't mention that anywhere in the promotional materials; I picked up that info from the user manual.
It wasn't the hard shift, but the seamless switching as necessitated by the GPUs. That's a pretty slick piece of hardware. And yes, IIRC, that was hardware driven. It's in the 2014+.
I will admit that the m.2 SSD in my MacBook Pro is just as fast as the m.2 RAID in the PC, but that comes down to component choice; to meet a price point, faster SSDs just weren't in the cards. I'm tempted to throw a bout of 960 PROs in there and see where that goes, I know the one in my Ryzen build hits multiple GB/sec reads and writes. A striped pair of them would likely be mindblowing.
Those 960s are smokin. The new PCIe SSDs in the 2016 MBPs are running 3 or 4 GB/s as well. A couple of those will flood your CPU.:)
I ended up telling him to get a used 2012 (and why) and he ended up getting nothing as he didn't want to buy used and didn't want to pay the "new" price for something that was underpowered compared to what he could have bought used.
Honestly, the 2012s are pretty decent boxes, even today. Not top of the line, but you're not paying those prices either.
That's definitely looking like a beast, what little I can make out of the system. Core i7 (quad I'm sure) and 970M graphics? What's interesting to me is that CPU wise, the latest 2016 MBP CPU is a neck and neck comparison, but the GPUs obviously are a clear win for the 970M, and also likely a huge battery eater. What's interesting is that laptop makes no mention of the integrated Iris graphics. Are non mac laptops still bound by discrete graphics, or have they also included auto-switching to the integrated Iris graphics to save power when convenient? Also, that laptop states it comes with dual spinning drives for the price I saw, which wasn't surprisingly high, but in line with what I expected. With bigger M.2 drive (only 1 supported?) and 1 or 2 SSDs, you can probably create a better battery life situation if you haven't already, if that's important to you.
As for heat and battery life, I dunno, both my 2011 17" and my 2014 15" retina run hot and don't last long; the 2011 claims 81% battery capacity still and it does seem to last about as long as the 2014. My wife's 2013 13" does the same, but it also has a bad RAM slot (common on that model) and a slew of other issues, so I attribute all of its problems to the faulty design and manufacturing.
A quick note - as these are older macs, and likely have been upgraded OS wise, you might wish to inspect your running processes. I had a mini just recently that shutdown due to heat sporadically. I traced it down to the upgrade process not having completed successfully due to XCode requiring registration agreement, or something like that. Once fixed, it ran cool as a cucumber again. And yes, there are Apple products with issues, like any other. The 3 year AC is vital on laptops, and I've used it for 3 of 4 of my laptops. The current 2014 is the only one that hasn't had it used. For any of your issues, I'd have immediately taken it to the apple store, where so far they've replaced 2 minis, 2 batteries, and 1 logic board, no questions asked. So yes, I too have my set of failed hardware.:) My list of other systems is far longer, and usually ends with: junked after 'n' months as unfixable.
Now that I've gotten that rant off my chest: thank you for not contributing to that.
Don't intend to - I also run a hack.... That should tell you everything you need to know.
I really just want Apple to make something that I can actually use. I greatly prefer Mac OS to Windows (I'd prefer Linux to either of those if the apps I need ran on it), but the hardware just isn't keeping up. I'm buying a machine for the long haul and I need it to not already be 2-3 years out of date when I buy it.
BTW, that hack runs a 980x, which hasn't been worth upgrading since 2010. Latest hardware just doesn't mean much in desktops anymore. Yes, I can double the performance of the desktop, it'll cost me something like $5K to do so, and run some rather interesting hardware. It doesn't seem cost effective until I need a new machine. However, I'd agree that if I'm paying top dollar, I should at least get current hardware. The minis and mac pros have not been keeping up to date.
it's something a company with Apple's resources and engineering talent could pop off on a monthly basis, which is faster than the new parts come to market on average.
Actually I read an article on the latest Intel processors, Kaby Lake?, and why they weren't in the 2016 refresh. Essentially, the MBP design was already finalized, tested, and sent to manufacturing before the processor was available. That CPU also required new supporting hardware on the logic boards. I
Last I checked, you can be an engineer, just not a practicing licensed one, i.e., PE, unless you happened to be licensed. At least that was the original intent of the PE designation. It indicated you were licensed, others were not.
Well, as listed on that page, it's 4k. Come on, man, I know you can read:)
Actually - I get a twitter page on that link.... I was slightly confused.
As for battery life, continuous integration. Tests run nearly constantly; every time I save a file, the functional test suite runs. Whenever I upload a file to one of several VMs (one for each type of server in the application cluster), another test suite runs that interacts with the site hosted on that cluster of VMs to verify that critical use-cases function correctly.
The 2014 rMBP did a fine enough job keeping up, provided I didn't mind the system bogging down as the test suites ran, or artificially limiting how fast they'd run in order to avoid that (hey, we all like taking more breaks, right?) but, really, it got annoying after a time. Running that load, the rMBP could manage a couple hours of battery life, tops; seems about on par with the PC, but the PC doesn't bog down under the load. I wouldn't really say it eats batteries, considering it slightly edges out the rMBP under similar loads.
Most interesting. I run a similar suite, including DBs, webservices, etc. Granted, I at most run 2 VMs concurrently now, I ran as many as 6 previously. Still never ate this MBP battery in less than 6 hours unless I was running some hi-res or poorly coded game that kept running at 100fps or something standing still. Now that will eat battery, and make for an uncomfortable lap. The alienware machine did the same FWIW. And weighed over 10 pounds doing it.
This is the laptop. I'll admit, I can't really evaluate battery life as I never really use it unplugged for more than an hour or so. As one would expect, it will vary with workload and yes, I've had it nealy death after just over an hour, but I've also experienced the same with my 2014 rMBP; I've also never topped 5hr with that rMBP, but I've had that PC over 80% after an hour.
I use my laptop unplugged for at least 3 and sometimes as many as 7 hours at least once a week. Battery life is somewhat important in my use case. I'm curious how you have yours configured and what you run that you don't get at least 5 hours on battery. I have mine configured for power savings on battery, which means falling back to Intel graphics if possible.
Considering that it's pushing a much heavier GPU and higher resolution display, it really wouldn't surprise me if it didn't manage to win any awards for battery life. Lighter and faster than my rMBP, though, and I've noticed it runs a fair bit cooler as well.
It's pushing a significantly higher built in resolution than 2880x1800? (I've seen a few 3200x1800s but for all intents and purposes that is an equivalent load, 3800x2160 is generally far more expensive by the time you get comparable memory/disk hardware) What you're describing sounds impossible though - beefier GPU, higher resolutions and at least as fast as the MBP, but runs cooler and eats batteries? Something doesn't add up there.
I'm sure they do - this minute's MAC anyways. IIRC, they started randomizing MACs in iOS 9 to prevent wifi spots from tracking you as you moved about town.
When you don't need to replace your laptop or desktop every 1-3 years like a Dell, well, I suspect your sales numbers won't be quite as growth oriented.
Funny, I have a $299 Toshiba that was bought in 2010 that's still in use. Well, I don't have it, I gave it to a friend 2 years ago, but they're still using it daily. I was actually going to reply with something along the lines of "that only happens when you buy the cheaper models, but you're still ahead dollar-for-dollar and get periodic performance boosts as a bonus; when you spend as much on a PC laptop as you do on a Mac, they tend to last as long"; then, I remembered that $299 gem.
There's always exceptions. The general rule with all the company laptops I've dealt with was if you got more than 1 year out of a battery, that was a net plus. If the laptop itself didn't implode due to one of many different causes within the first 2 years, that was a win. This was primarily Dell, HP, and other lesser name brand laptops. The desktops generally lasted 2-3 years, tops, before things started going squirrelly.
But I'll still elaborate on my point: I can spend $2400 on a 15" MacBook Pro (I'm pulling this from memory of my purchase in 2015, prices may be different today) and hope it lasts me 5 years, of I can spend $300/yr on a cheap PC, only have spent $1500 after 5 years and, at the end of that 5 years, have something faster than the Mac I would have spent $2400 on. Going the PC route gives me a $900 savings every 5 years and continuous performance upgrades.
Here's the thing - I'm not looking purely at cost. I freely admit you can get a $200 laptop, saw one today, in fact, a Core2 Duo running win 10 - I'm sure it smokes, or will, as soon as you try to run some video processing through it.:) Seriously, when you compare a high res screen, fast memory and disk I/O in a package with weight and battery life, you just can't touch the mac specs for much less than a mac. In fact, I ran those comparisons for screen resolution, memory, and disks against the various offerings from Dell, Lenovo, and HP, and in only 1 instance could I match the performance specs with a cheaper machine. However, it weighed 2#s more and, being a Dell, you'd have to figure in a new battery every year and about half the stated battery runtime. If all I needed was a web browser, I'd firmly agree with you. My particular needs involve much more than that, and those requirements actually make the mac very competitive just on price. At that point it's a few trade offs: can I live with replacing the battery, shorter runtime, and almost always greater weight vs slightly reduced connectivity or extra dongles? Plus, of course, can you live with Windows and its restrictions/invasions, or the extra overhead of maintaining your own Linux/BSD installation, or deal with the pain that is OSX...
Just kidding..:)
Of course, I need more performance than the $300 PC laptops will give me, so that's not a viable solution for me, but it does illustrate how the Mac doesn't necessarily demonstrate "better value" based on "lasting longer". For the average user, that $2400 Mac would have to last 8 years to match the value of the $300 PC; and that's generously assuming the PC is upgraded yearly like clockwork. Additionally, at some point in that 8 year cycle, the $300 PC will surpass the $2400 Mac in performance.
Just for fun, I had a 2004 Powerbook, not top end, but nice. Sold it after 5 years for over $400. It had a relatively new battery, thanks to a recall program, and generally ran great at the time. The 2006 MBP that replaced it is just now getting ready to be put out to pasture. It was limited to 10.7, but has 10.6 on it. Note that this is 11 years old, and was used for 4 straight years as a daily development machine. It was replaced by a 2009 MBP in early 2010 for heavy development purposes. That machine was used daily until t
We'll see. Honestly, of the entire Mac lineup, the Mac Mini had the most enterprise appeal (after the rack-mountable Mac servers were discontinued) simply for the ability to cram a shit-ton of them into a small space. You can easily rack-mount 6 of them in 1U so, if you wanted to run OS X on your servers, or just wanted a multitude of smaller discreet servers, you could really pack some reasonable power into a rack. That changed when they downgraded the Mini in 2014 and I do hope they reverse course.
Yes, absolutely true. 6 in 1U is a bit tight....
I'm a software developer, I run development servers in VMs....Before WSL and Bash on Windows being able to do all the things I need a UNIX-like environment for, I did miss the Mac, but that reality has changed.
Agree on dev and load types, totally not on the WSL/Bash comments, because that's not all I use in dev environments. In fact, not having to deal with anything windows has been a blessing. I have less trouble switching between various Linux/BSD installs than I do going back to Windows GUI of the day. And no, I have not run spy on you Win10. I likely never will.
The new Mac Pros might be too little too late.
As long as they can still run Windows and Linux, though, there is still hope for a refreshed Mac Mini, for the above-stated reasons.
Mac Pros may or may not be interesting. It depends on what they come up with. As long as refreshed minis have minimum quad core CPUs and expandable memory to at least 32GB, they'll make awesome little boxes. They can have a "consumer" dual core version for all I care at $300. I won't buy a dual core anything until core technology leaps to be able to run 4 or more threads each at 100% core speed.
Outwardly, Apple states that they are still dedicated to the Mac, but I think that ship has sailed. We're also seeing iPad sales on the decline and there's nothing going on in iPad land; the iPhone is really what's keeping Apple afloat at this point. Yes, they're making money hand over fist, and they've got cash reserves that could pay everyone's salaries for a decade if money stopped coming in all of a sudden, I don't think Apple is going to die. But I do think the Mac has been on a death spiral for nearly a decade and has less than a decade left.
Macs have been selling reasonably well. I'd still buy a 2015 MBP over anything else out there. I haven't used the touch bar MBP, so can't say if it's better or worse. As for iMacs, never saw the appeal really, unless you were doing a kiosk type system, as minis pre 2014 did a much better job filling that niche.
tablets aren't selling very fast. I bought my second one just recently, after 5 years. The old one still works fine for most things, except Apple stopped issuing iOS upgrades. What that means is that my app library will slowly become incompatible with the rest of my ecosystem, but it will work for a large number of things I use it for just fine until the battery dies. That means that tablets last about as long as MBPs. For what it's worth, I still have a 2006 being used daily, and my 2009 died after a little over 5 years. A friend of mine still uses his same model 2009 every day. When you don't need to replace your laptop or desktop every 1-3 years like a Dell, well, I suspect your sales numbers won't be quite as growth oriented.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, the 2TB NVME drive alone would sell like hotcakes for $900....
Unless you build a hack and drop an nVidia 1080 or two into it. They did just release OSX drivers - haven't used the new ones myself though. If you know of a better GPU, I'm all ears. As for capture boards, you have to be kidding.
I'd rather run Windows 10 without Antivirus.
I bet you'd like a root canal performed with a manual drill in a 3rd world country without running water also?
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.
You absolutely can try to be anything in life. To succeed and "be" is a different thing. You can try, however, and should aspire to whatever you think you want to be. To get a child to aspire to things is the thing. If you tell them they will get it for nothing, well, then you've failed as a parent.
The whole point of targeted advertising is to deliver ads that the recipient is actually interested in. That is pretty much the opposite of "spamming". The reality of social media is that it is ad supported, and if you are going to be seeing ads anyway, targeted ads are better than the alternative.
The whole point of targeted advertising is to deliver ads to a "receptive" audience. It has absolutely nothing to do with things you're interested in. It's can we close a sale with this person. Teens feeling isolated and left out will be much more eager for our "Hi, mY name iS alexandria, Me just cum across your facebook page and think we common interests have. Cum visit me at https://xxx.pay.me.ru/"
I use outlook as my RSS reader
You admit that? on /.? Geek card please.
Agile is a manifesto, nothing but good ideas, nothing to argue with really.
I'd disagree. It's a bunch of idealistic mostly empty statements. "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." Really? Does it? I'd say some of the best architectures, requirements and designs emerged from individuals or pairs, working together, for starters. Some of the others are wishes or even fantasy.
Agile as practiced is an excuse. Terrible idea to give management an excuse to just 'fake it'.
I'm not sure Agile is even that good. That would mean you could pin something down on it.
TBH, this is another "Trump is evil" post
Nah, nothing of the sort. I see no use of polarizing terms, even.
This is why 1/2 of America doesn't take the whiny left seriously any more. The left has no ideas left, and all they have is "RACIST, SEXIST, MISOGYNY" chants and rioting.
I think this is why more than 1/2 of america strongly dislikes Trump (and his blind supporters) Being divisive and using polarizing terms and assigning imaginary actions to those not marching to the cliff with you does not make for a conversation starter. You might want to check your meds.
This whole exercise presumes that he is the one in possession of the Truth and that all others are idiots.
He only needs to be in possession of the truth that this particular idea is bad. Agile, for instance.
Then you're talking about moderate fiscal conservatives. That viewpoint IMNSHO needs to be front and center with all the extremists on both sides being relegated back to their little niches.
If you're relying on the underlying system to be secure, you're doing security wrong.
I'm relying on the underlying system not to be a porous system designed to run as root. Putting a wet paper bag around the barn doesn't keep the horses in nor the rustlers out.
BTW, hackintoshes are rock stable if you purchase reliable hardware. The upgrades can be a bit tricky at times, but run time is measured in months. I've built and played with 4 at this point. They do have to run Intel CPUs, true. That is a detrimental aspect given that OSX's current requirements are actually better fulfilled by Ryzen's architecture, at least on paper.
Hell of a puzzle, that is. I might just have to go digging into the iMac next.
I haven't found one yet, I'll keep an eye out.
On the desktop? Windows. My servers still live in Ubuntu land.
Can't do it. No Windows. Ever. I happen to know how the internals of that OS work. It's insecure by design and cannot be fixed.
The Windows 10 "spying" fears are way overblown
1) are they sending info to MS? Yes. 2) can I stop it? No. Then it's not overblown. I want exactly 0 data going to MS. They have no right to anything I'm doing, including whether I'm running their OS.
And, while Windows isn't as bad as it once was, I would posit that OS X (neigh, Mac OS) isn't as good as it once was.
Win 7 was workable, maybe finally better than XP. Win10 is a non-starter for me. The shove it down your throat trust me, you're going to like this update is why.
I agree 10.6 was the last really good rock stable version of OSX. 10.10.5 was getting there, and 10.12 seems allright, but there's quirks in it since the introduction of GCD. I understand why Apple migrated the OS to running on top of GCD, but it certainly hasn't been smooth. Once the last kinks are worked out, it's possible that GCD will leapfrog all other monolithic OSes (CPUs are not really getting much faster single-threaded but they sure are adding more threads and cores) The OSes seem to be tick-tocking on feature adds, performance fix releases. Even numbers are better. So I have 10.10, about to be 10.12, and then I'll wait for 10.14....
You might want to watch those seeds. I've found exactly 0 in the several things I've taken apart.
His first 100 shows or so were ok. They had life. Then he sold out. Watch some of the first 100 or so and note how afterwards he's just a bought fan boy with no opinion: everything's great, love's everything, wasn't that awesome? Geez, sounds like someone else that's being front and centered in the media these days.
I was thinking that I won't be able to retire the way things are....Unexpected, previously undesirable and sometimes unforeseeable things happen in life: wives...
I think I see your problem....
When I first learned of the feature several years ago, back when I was a full-time Ubuntu user, I wanted to get it working on my laptop.
OK, what are you running now? I've been looking for a reasonably supported non systemd infested distro? Yeah, I really don't like systemd at all, it's launchd gone monolithically windows, not that launchd is all that great either. I'm really not looking at spending time on my OS anymore.
It's important for the Apple fanbois (which you're clearly not BTW) to remember, though, without PC users willing to tough-out being on the bleeding edge, there would be no matured and perfected technologies for Apple to adopt and convince the fanbois they had invented.
Yeah, I recall the supposed GPU switching tech, it was in earlier versions of macs too. It pretty much sucked, and if you go back far enough even required rebooting. I don't recall having to reboot or relogin on a mac though, but it's been a long time. Apple did get the smooth switching done first, I thought, or at least what I experienced. :)
Honestly, the 2012s are pretty decent boxes, even today. Not top of the line, but you're not paying those prices either.
That's what I told him, but he doesn't like the idea of a used computer. At least, that was his excuse... a month before he bought an open-box 2014 rMBP. His objections were validated in the end, though; the headphone jack was busted.
well - if you're buying open box, that would imply you still have AC. I would never buy a laptop without it.
What's interesting is that laptop makes no mention of the integrated Iris graphics. Are non mac laptops still bound by discrete graphics, or have they also included auto-switching to the integrated Iris graphics to save power when convenient?
Mac actually came late to the game with that feature. It's been a standard on the PC side for nearly a decade by now and I recall having it working (for nVidia at least) under Linux at least 7 years ago. The power LED switches between blue and orange to indicate which GPU is being used. Interesting that they don't mention that anywhere in the promotional materials; I picked up that info from the user manual.
It wasn't the hard shift, but the seamless switching as necessitated by the GPUs. That's a pretty slick piece of hardware. And yes, IIRC, that was hardware driven. It's in the 2014+.
I will admit that the m.2 SSD in my MacBook Pro is just as fast as the m.2 RAID in the PC, but that comes down to component choice; to meet a price point, faster SSDs just weren't in the cards. I'm tempted to throw a bout of 960 PROs in there and see where that goes, I know the one in my Ryzen build hits multiple GB/sec reads and writes. A striped pair of them would likely be mindblowing.
Those 960s are smokin. The new PCIe SSDs in the 2016 MBPs are running 3 or 4 GB/s as well. A couple of those will flood your CPU. :)
I ended up telling him to get a used 2012 (and why) and he ended up getting nothing as he didn't want to buy used and didn't want to pay the "new" price for something that was underpowered compared to what he could have bought used.
Honestly, the 2012s are pretty decent boxes, even today. Not top of the line, but you're not paying those prices either.
THIS is the laptop.
That's definitely looking like a beast, what little I can make out of the system. Core i7 (quad I'm sure) and 970M graphics? What's interesting to me is that CPU wise, the latest 2016 MBP CPU is a neck and neck comparison, but the GPUs obviously are a clear win for the 970M, and also likely a huge battery eater. What's interesting is that laptop makes no mention of the integrated Iris graphics. Are non mac laptops still bound by discrete graphics, or have they also included auto-switching to the integrated Iris graphics to save power when convenient? Also, that laptop states it comes with dual spinning drives for the price I saw, which wasn't surprisingly high, but in line with what I expected. With bigger M.2 drive (only 1 supported?) and 1 or 2 SSDs, you can probably create a better battery life situation if you haven't already, if that's important to you.
As for heat and battery life, I dunno, both my 2011 17" and my 2014 15" retina run hot and don't last long; the 2011 claims 81% battery capacity still and it does seem to last about as long as the 2014. My wife's 2013 13" does the same, but it also has a bad RAM slot (common on that model) and a slew of other issues, so I attribute all of its problems to the faulty design and manufacturing.
A quick note - as these are older macs, and likely have been upgraded OS wise, you might wish to inspect your running processes. I had a mini just recently that shutdown due to heat sporadically. I traced it down to the upgrade process not having completed successfully due to XCode requiring registration agreement, or something like that. Once fixed, it ran cool as a cucumber again. And yes, there are Apple products with issues, like any other. The 3 year AC is vital on laptops, and I've used it for 3 of 4 of my laptops. The current 2014 is the only one that hasn't had it used. For any of your issues, I'd have immediately taken it to the apple store, where so far they've replaced 2 minis, 2 batteries, and 1 logic board, no questions asked. So yes, I too have my set of failed hardware. :) My list of other systems is far longer, and usually ends with: junked after 'n' months as unfixable.
Now that I've gotten that rant off my chest: thank you for not contributing to that.
Don't intend to - I also run a hack.... That should tell you everything you need to know.
I really just want Apple to make something that I can actually use. I greatly prefer Mac OS to Windows (I'd prefer Linux to either of those if the apps I need ran on it), but the hardware just isn't keeping up. I'm buying a machine for the long haul and I need it to not already be 2-3 years out of date when I buy it.
BTW, that hack runs a 980x, which hasn't been worth upgrading since 2010. Latest hardware just doesn't mean much in desktops anymore. Yes, I can double the performance of the desktop, it'll cost me something like $5K to do so, and run some rather interesting hardware. It doesn't seem cost effective until I need a new machine. However, I'd agree that if I'm paying top dollar, I should at least get current hardware. The minis and mac pros have not been keeping up to date.
it's something a company with Apple's resources and engineering talent could pop off on a monthly basis, which is faster than the new parts come to market on average.
Actually I read an article on the latest Intel processors, Kaby Lake?, and why they weren't in the 2016 refresh. Essentially, the MBP design was already finalized, tested, and sent to manufacturing before the processor was available. That CPU also required new supporting hardware on the logic boards. I
Last I checked, you can be an engineer, just not a practicing licensed one, i.e., PE, unless you happened to be licensed. At least that was the original intent of the PE designation. It indicated you were licensed, others were not.
Well, as listed on that page, it's 4k. Come on, man, I know you can read :)
Actually - I get a twitter page on that link.... I was slightly confused.
As for battery life, continuous integration. Tests run nearly constantly; every time I save a file, the functional test suite runs. Whenever I upload a file to one of several VMs (one for each type of server in the application cluster), another test suite runs that interacts with the site hosted on that cluster of VMs to verify that critical use-cases function correctly. The 2014 rMBP did a fine enough job keeping up, provided I didn't mind the system bogging down as the test suites ran, or artificially limiting how fast they'd run in order to avoid that (hey, we all like taking more breaks, right?) but, really, it got annoying after a time. Running that load, the rMBP could manage a couple hours of battery life, tops; seems about on par with the PC, but the PC doesn't bog down under the load. I wouldn't really say it eats batteries, considering it slightly edges out the rMBP under similar loads.
Most interesting. I run a similar suite, including DBs, webservices, etc. Granted, I at most run 2 VMs concurrently now, I ran as many as 6 previously. Still never ate this MBP battery in less than 6 hours unless I was running some hi-res or poorly coded game that kept running at 100fps or something standing still. Now that will eat battery, and make for an uncomfortable lap. The alienware machine did the same FWIW. And weighed over 10 pounds doing it.
This is the laptop. I'll admit, I can't really evaluate battery life as I never really use it unplugged for more than an hour or so. As one would expect, it will vary with workload and yes, I've had it nealy death after just over an hour, but I've also experienced the same with my 2014 rMBP; I've also never topped 5hr with that rMBP, but I've had that PC over 80% after an hour.
I use my laptop unplugged for at least 3 and sometimes as many as 7 hours at least once a week. Battery life is somewhat important in my use case. I'm curious how you have yours configured and what you run that you don't get at least 5 hours on battery. I have mine configured for power savings on battery, which means falling back to Intel graphics if possible.
Considering that it's pushing a much heavier GPU and higher resolution display, it really wouldn't surprise me if it didn't manage to win any awards for battery life. Lighter and faster than my rMBP, though, and I've noticed it runs a fair bit cooler as well.
It's pushing a significantly higher built in resolution than 2880x1800? (I've seen a few 3200x1800s but for all intents and purposes that is an equivalent load, 3800x2160 is generally far more expensive by the time you get comparable memory/disk hardware) What you're describing sounds impossible though - beefier GPU, higher resolutions and at least as fast as the MBP, but runs cooler and eats batteries? Something doesn't add up there.
Per the randomizing MAC comment, I was under the impression you could no longer access the real UDID from an app since iOS 9
I'm sure they do - this minute's MAC anyways. IIRC, they started randomizing MACs in iOS 9 to prevent wifi spots from tracking you as you moved about town.
When you don't need to replace your laptop or desktop every 1-3 years like a Dell, well, I suspect your sales numbers won't be quite as growth oriented.
Funny, I have a $299 Toshiba that was bought in 2010 that's still in use. Well, I don't have it, I gave it to a friend 2 years ago, but they're still using it daily. I was actually going to reply with something along the lines of "that only happens when you buy the cheaper models, but you're still ahead dollar-for-dollar and get periodic performance boosts as a bonus; when you spend as much on a PC laptop as you do on a Mac, they tend to last as long"; then, I remembered that $299 gem.
There's always exceptions. The general rule with all the company laptops I've dealt with was if you got more than 1 year out of a battery, that was a net plus. If the laptop itself didn't implode due to one of many different causes within the first 2 years, that was a win. This was primarily Dell, HP, and other lesser name brand laptops. The desktops generally lasted 2-3 years, tops, before things started going squirrelly.
But I'll still elaborate on my point: I can spend $2400 on a 15" MacBook Pro (I'm pulling this from memory of my purchase in 2015, prices may be different today) and hope it lasts me 5 years, of I can spend $300/yr on a cheap PC, only have spent $1500 after 5 years and, at the end of that 5 years, have something faster than the Mac I would have spent $2400 on. Going the PC route gives me a $900 savings every 5 years and continuous performance upgrades.
Here's the thing - I'm not looking purely at cost. I freely admit you can get a $200 laptop, saw one today, in fact, a Core2 Duo running win 10 - I'm sure it smokes, or will, as soon as you try to run some video processing through it. :) Seriously, when you compare a high res screen, fast memory and disk I/O in a package with weight and battery life, you just can't touch the mac specs for much less than a mac. In fact, I ran those comparisons for screen resolution, memory, and disks against the various offerings from Dell, Lenovo, and HP, and in only 1 instance could I match the performance specs with a cheaper machine. However, it weighed 2#s more and, being a Dell, you'd have to figure in a new battery every year and about half the stated battery runtime. If all I needed was a web browser, I'd firmly agree with you. My particular needs involve much more than that, and those requirements actually make the mac very competitive just on price. At that point it's a few trade offs: can I live with replacing the battery, shorter runtime, and almost always greater weight vs slightly reduced connectivity or extra dongles? Plus, of course, can you live with Windows and its restrictions/invasions, or the extra overhead of maintaining your own Linux/BSD installation, or deal with the pain that is OSX...
Just kidding.. :)
Of course, I need more performance than the $300 PC laptops will give me, so that's not a viable solution for me, but it does illustrate how the Mac doesn't necessarily demonstrate "better value" based on "lasting longer". For the average user, that $2400 Mac would have to last 8 years to match the value of the $300 PC; and that's generously assuming the PC is upgraded yearly like clockwork. Additionally, at some point in that 8 year cycle, the $300 PC will surpass the $2400 Mac in performance.
Just for fun, I had a 2004 Powerbook, not top end, but nice. Sold it after 5 years for over $400. It had a relatively new battery, thanks to a recall program, and generally ran great at the time. The 2006 MBP that replaced it is just now getting ready to be put out to pasture. It was limited to 10.7, but has 10.6 on it. Note that this is 11 years old, and was used for 4 straight years as a daily development machine. It was replaced by a 2009 MBP in early 2010 for heavy development purposes. That machine was used daily until t
We'll see. Honestly, of the entire Mac lineup, the Mac Mini had the most enterprise appeal (after the rack-mountable Mac servers were discontinued) simply for the ability to cram a shit-ton of them into a small space. You can easily rack-mount 6 of them in 1U so, if you wanted to run OS X on your servers, or just wanted a multitude of smaller discreet servers, you could really pack some reasonable power into a rack. That changed when they downgraded the Mini in 2014 and I do hope they reverse course.
Yes, absolutely true. 6 in 1U is a bit tight....
I'm a software developer, I run development servers in VMs....Before WSL and Bash on Windows being able to do all the things I need a UNIX-like environment for, I did miss the Mac, but that reality has changed.
Agree on dev and load types, totally not on the WSL/Bash comments, because that's not all I use in dev environments. In fact, not having to deal with anything windows has been a blessing. I have less trouble switching between various Linux/BSD installs than I do going back to Windows GUI of the day. And no, I have not run spy on you Win10. I likely never will.
The new Mac Pros might be too little too late. As long as they can still run Windows and Linux, though, there is still hope for a refreshed Mac Mini, for the above-stated reasons.
Mac Pros may or may not be interesting. It depends on what they come up with. As long as refreshed minis have minimum quad core CPUs and expandable memory to at least 32GB, they'll make awesome little boxes. They can have a "consumer" dual core version for all I care at $300. I won't buy a dual core anything until core technology leaps to be able to run 4 or more threads each at 100% core speed.
Outwardly, Apple states that they are still dedicated to the Mac, but I think that ship has sailed. We're also seeing iPad sales on the decline and there's nothing going on in iPad land; the iPhone is really what's keeping Apple afloat at this point. Yes, they're making money hand over fist, and they've got cash reserves that could pay everyone's salaries for a decade if money stopped coming in all of a sudden, I don't think Apple is going to die. But I do think the Mac has been on a death spiral for nearly a decade and has less than a decade left.
Macs have been selling reasonably well. I'd still buy a 2015 MBP over anything else out there. I haven't used the touch bar MBP, so can't say if it's better or worse. As for iMacs, never saw the appeal really, unless you were doing a kiosk type system, as minis pre 2014 did a much better job filling that niche.
tablets aren't selling very fast. I bought my second one just recently, after 5 years. The old one still works fine for most things, except Apple stopped issuing iOS upgrades. What that means is that my app library will slowly become incompatible with the rest of my ecosystem, but it will work for a large number of things I use it for just fine until the battery dies. That means that tablets last about as long as MBPs. For what it's worth, I still have a 2006 being used daily, and my 2009 died after a little over 5 years. A friend of mine still uses his same model 2009 every day. When you don't need to replace your laptop or desktop every 1-3 years like a Dell, well, I suspect your sales numbers won't be quite as growth oriented.