Catalina was a dumpster fire, and being kind the entire release was at least 50% beta quality. Big Sur has given me no real problems though.
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MP 7,1 Apple has lost the plot on the pro market
- Thread starter brofkand
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In macOS Monterey, Airplay goes up to 4k@60htz. So thats a nice upgrade.
With Monterey you can now do triple 4k@60hz displays on a M1 Mac Mini!! (3rd display via 4k resolution AirPlay) : MacOSBeta (reddit.com)
I am not having any problems with Catalina on my 5,1. If anything, its better than mojave although I am a bit nervous about the way the bootdrive is automatically partitioned. ... when and if dosdude gets monterey running for these macs ill give that a try on the spare mac pro. But catalina is solid for me...
Apologies for any confusion, I made my sig nearly a decade ago and have just left it alone. It's mostly ironic, in the sense that I was complaining about Apple neglecting the Mac Pro back in early 2012, with absolutely no idea of just how much longer it would take to see another Cheesegrater (essentially a decade).
My 5,1's ended on Mojave and are over in my ancient hardware collection along with the ][, ][+, //e, Amiga, NeXT hardware, some SGI's, old Suns, etc (computers I enjoyed very much for various reasons and had emotional resonance for me). The 5,1 was my 3rd favorite computer of all time (#1 being: Apple ][ when I was 7 years old, #2 being NeXT cube).
Shorter version: I have only experienced Catalina on Mac Pro 7,1 with which it shipped, and had no possibility to "downgrade" to any prior release, because the drivers did not exist. My experience with Catalina was essentially "flip a coin" in the sense that this release worked alright, the next .point release was a disaster, then it worked okay again but introduced some other weird issue, etc. It was a very unstable OS version throughout its entire lifecycle. I have experienced none of these issues with Big Sur, everything has just worked for me, which I'm happy about.
Cheers!
They had no idea what 'pro' is anymore (or don't care). Clearly is simply a smarmy marketing mechanism to up-sell to more expensive products in most cases, eg: a 'pro' iPhone, really? a 'pro' tablet, really (complete with dreadful and certainly 'not pro' iOS).
Having said this, the pro towers have been genuinely excellent and long-lived in my experience. My studio includes both a 2010 mac pro 5,1 and a 2019 mac pro 7,1. The only real issue is the outrageous prices for elements of this, eg: the MPX modules with underperforming GPUs in comparison to (say) Nvidia. 4 times the price for half the performance. 'Pro' means 'pro' money as far as can see.
Yes. And he’s wrong about that being for everyone. It’s a great vision for general computing, not power-users and gamers. Apple never served gamers. They used to serve power-users.
Jobs didn’t understand it... but you don’t either, because you’re inventing a category of people to demonize for Jobs’ mistake: people who don’t need it but think they do!
Of course, why didn’t we realize power-users are myths!!?? People who buy 4x4s only ever buy them for psychological reasons! It couldn’t possibly be for utility!
/s
You don’t live where there’s much snow, do you? 4WD/AWD is very useful.
Where do you experience this? There are trucknuts around my area but the bigger problem is all the cargo trucks. The semis, blasting downhill because they want to build up inertia for the next uphill stretch.
If you can afford to do that. I’m desperate to get out of the urban sprawl hell, but I cannot afford to buy rural or even suburban property. Where I am is probably considered by most people to be suburban, but it’s really just more urban nonsense. The noise especially.
Usually when I travel South and more around cities. Louisville, Kentucky and St. Louis, Missouri are especially bad.
edit: I realize I said daily, which was an exaggeration
I'm not inventing anything, nor demonising anything. While 4WDs are useful - I own one myself, a proper one with a ladder chassis, live axles, and dual range gearboxes, the simple fact is that one of the major reasons people buy 4WDs, or in computing cases, sloboxes, is because they want the *freedom* to have the future capability to go offroad, or add expansions cards, even if they never do those things.
Simply having those options is a profound psychological comfort to people, which may not be rational, may not be practical, but as has been quite comprehensively demonstrated, people are not the rational, or practical, personal-maximisers that economists fantasise about.
And that's the point - the products you buy should produce a feeling of comfort that they are the right product, they should produce a feeling of security that they will grow and adapt to your needs.
What they should not do, is provoke a sensation of anxiety that they're good enough for now, but who knows what happens next week, when the next security update also radically changes a feature into one you don't like using, or in six months time, you're going to have to throw the whole thing out, because the graphics card in it is an order of magnitude behind the cutting edge, but you can only get the new graphics card by buying a computer that costs 5x as much as the card on its own, even if you don't need anything else updated.
Apple is a profoundly inhuman company, with a paternalistic "we know what you need, better than you" attitude, which is a completely predictable outcome, given it's run by people who, as Gibson observed, have become profoundly inhuman by virtue of their wealth.
Jobs was wrong, both because he failed to take into account the psychological needs of users to have the option of capability, even if they weren't going to use it, but also on the most simple aspect - that he failed to understand (actualy he probably understood it quite well, but he was also a compulsive liar when it came to product narratives) that former agrarian workers didn't all go into offices where they didn't need trucks, they went into constructing the industrial and urban worlds, where trucks were just as important as they were before.
MORE people NEED trucks now (for both practical, and psychological reasons), than did in the agrarian days. Jobs' truck statement is one for the bonehead pantheon, right there with "none should need more than 640k or RAM".
I’d like to be pedantic and point out that Austrian Economists don’t have that illu
That’s on the buyer. If one doesn’t assess their needs before making a purchase then that’s their own
Making a box with slots is somehow more human than making all in ones? Perhaps Apple’s wealth is a product of their assessment that they can make better solutions than what people ask for. Maybe they’re more human in understanding what people want rather than what they ask for.
Ha, no. They’re in offices and buying trucks because it makes them feel less emasculated. Agrarian workers have great difficulty affording new trucks , often resorting to trucks decades old. Blue collar folk simply cannot afford $40k vehicles of any kind.
Unless you’re a ranch owner or the owner of a construction company then it’s not likely you own a new truck.
Purely psychological reasons I would say. In the same way I constantly hear women buy SUVs because “I like to sit up high!”
I believe it’s a mistake to not separate psychological wants from needs. Wanting a truck because you won’t feel like a man in a Toyota is not a need, it’s a shortcoming.
People need trucks less than in the agrarian days, that’s a fact. Leaving only psychological wants to explain the sales of trucks.
If a box with slots makes you feel better about yourself, go for it. But recognize that it’s a want, not a need. (There are those that do need them, let’s not forget)
I feel for you man. Only thing I can suggest is if you really feel that way, make it a goal to get to where you want to be. I did that. It took me 5 years to get out, and just recently I finally did. I love it. But it might not be for everyone. If can swing it, get in your car and travel to some of the places you might think are interesting. Go on maps for a while, look for places that look interesting, jump around in Zillow, see what might work.
Then again, it's all quite moot if youre stuck in a gig in one spot. A lot more places are allowing for remote work, and at least in the area that I'm in, everyplace is looking for workers not to far away.
Anyway, by making it a goal, you start to break down the parts you need to achieve the goal into bite size pieces, and you might just get to where you want to be.
Best of luck!
I dont fully agree with the above. I thought it was insightful in showing a progression in the technology. That said, it was maybe TOO good an analogy because his expectation was that few would want or need a truck, but the reality has proven that more people want a truck than regular sedans.
As such, I'd use that "too good" of an analogy to point out that Apple isnt following Steve's analogy. Turns out a huge number of people want to use trucks, so pivot and make more trucks/enthusiast boxes with expansion.
In the past he proved not only could he be wrong in where the market was going, but pivot and correct quickly. He thought everyone was going to want a DVD player to make movies, and turns out everyone wanted to rip and burn music. He confessed he was wrong, and quickly got the company on the mix/burn campaign.
This is the big sticking point, finding work. Maybe it’s my neck of the woods, but good paying jobs are difficult to find, and where they are someone is clinging to it with both hands.
If you’re looking for good gigs in Rural America, then agriculture (agritech) and medical is your best bet. Otherwise it’s a lot of blue collar work and that is pretty backbreaking a lot of the time.
Blue collar folks, "tradies" as we call them here, buy AU$60k Ford Rangers and Toyota Hiluxes, while they're still share-housing, or living with their parents - it's a vital piece of gear, because it's their transport to the job sites, AND the toolbox. It's called finance (and tax deductibility), and they're all full to the gills on it.
The Hilux is the single biggest selling vehicle here (as the f150 is in America), and the next 2 or three slots are similar vehicles from other manufacturers for that very reason.
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It's not about assessing one's needs, it's about whether the product brings net comfort, or net anxiety into a person's life.
This idea of "needs" and "wants" economists made up is a completely arbitrary fiction, like the economist's fiction of money being created as a replacement for barter (hint, no human society in recorded or archeological history has EVER functioned on barter - money (or the function of money as an abstracted value intermediary) is the first thing people invent & agree upon when forming any sort of society).
What one calls a "want" another calls a "need", as its psychological value is key to their functional ability - see companion animals.
If the truck provides a comfort that lets a person function at their best psychologically, it's a need, regardless of the reasoning.
Yes it is. Giving people the specific solution they want, that solves the problem in the specific way they want it solved empowers them - it gives them agency in the solution to their problem.
Telling people what they need:
"we listened to your problem, and we're smarter than you so here's something you didn't ask for, but if you completely change the way you do things to the way we want it done, you'll get the specific part of the result that we fixiated upon because it justifies our solution"
...not giving them the specific things they ask for, is rich (white) saviour ego-tripping. It's the rank paternalism Apple has always had. It's like Elon Musk trying to build a submarine, when the actual cave divers knew what they needed to do the job.
Have you ever considered that a lifetime of bullying by men, in every facet of their lives, including on the road, means they feel a need for the physical security of having their engine blocks at other driver's head-height? Or, the social conditioning that convinces them they're bad drivers, means they feel a responsibility to have better visibility, so they can clearly see what's going on around them?
"I like to sit up high" = "I don't feel safe sharing the road with men."
Psychological reasons are as physiological, as physical, as temperature, air pressure, moisture etc.
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Apple have had a very ambiguous relation to the "Pro" segment through their history.
The mid-90s was all over the place, I took some baby steps towards being a part time mac developer back then, but gave up due to the very sharp turns Apple expected their developers to take every year or so ("Opendoc", looking at you).
The end of the 90´s had of course a lot consumer focus with the iMac. But there were also very much going on in the Pro area.
I would say the first decade in the 2000s was a high point for Apple in the Pro area. Power Mac and Mac Pro had an impressive line of models with yearly updates ending with the beloved workhorse 5.1. OSX was arguable the best "standard" OS out there, with many high end features and it could act both as a GUI for high end Linux as well as having very good integration with Windows. Xserve had a nine year long product line. Application like Final Cut, Aperture and Logic Pro showed that Apple certainly had ambitions to dominate the Pro segment.
The last 11 years it has been more on/off. It is easy to criticize Apple for this and much of it is certainly well deserved. However, the Pro market have also changed a lot during the last decades.
I started my carrier 30+ years ago, in a segment of applied research that depend a lot on visualization of huge amounts of data. The first years we used dumb terminals connected to off site "super computers". In the 90s this very soon changed to SGI workstations. In the late 90s we changed to Linux. The Linux boxes was for the first decade of the 2000s very capable workstation with 4 displays. However the data amount grew much faster than the computer capacity and for the last decade we have gone full circle back to "dumb Linux terminals" (HP mini desktops) displaying WMS graphics generated on off site servers. I guess something similar is true in other areas.
Maybe the "trashcan" was a result of a pretty good interpretation of trends in the "professional segment"? It only failed with the execution. As it turned out it was something inbetween, too expensive for a dumb terminal and too limited for a self contained workstation. The 2019 MacPro might be a "dinosaur" aimed for a rather small segment that still do a lot of heavy work locally on workstations.
Edit: spelling
The mid-90s was all over the place, I took some baby steps towards being a part time mac developer back then, but gave up due to the very sharp turns Apple expected their developers to take every year or so ("Opendoc", looking at you).
The end of the 90´s had of course a lot consumer focus with the iMac. But there were also very much going on in the Pro area.
I would say the first decade in the 2000s was a high point for Apple in the Pro area. Power Mac and Mac Pro had an impressive line of models with yearly updates ending with the beloved workhorse 5.1. OSX was arguable the best "standard" OS out there, with many high end features and it could act both as a GUI for high end Linux as well as having very good integration with Windows. Xserve had a nine year long product line. Application like Final Cut, Aperture and Logic Pro showed that Apple certainly had ambitions to dominate the Pro segment.
The last 11 years it has been more on/off. It is easy to criticize Apple for this and much of it is certainly well deserved. However, the Pro market have also changed a lot during the last decades.
I started my carrier 30+ years ago, in a segment of applied research that depend a lot on visualization of huge amounts of data. The first years we used dumb terminals connected to off site "super computers". In the 90s this very soon changed to SGI workstations. In the late 90s we changed to Linux. The Linux boxes was for the first decade of the 2000s very capable workstation with 4 displays. However the data amount grew much faster than the computer capacity and for the last decade we have gone full circle back to "dumb Linux terminals" (HP mini desktops) displaying WMS graphics generated on off site servers. I guess something similar is true in other areas.
Maybe the "trashcan" was a result of a pretty good interpretation of trends in the "professional segment"? It only failed with the execution. As it turned out it was something inbetween, too expensive for a dumb terminal and too limited for a self contained workstation. The 2019 MacPro might be a "dinosaur" aimed for a rather small segment that still do a lot of heavy work locally on workstations.
Edit: spelling
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I think they tried to create a disposable workstation there. An effort to keep people from updating internals all the time and not spending regularly on new (Apple) computers.
It do not seem so, I think.
If that was the intention they would have released upgraded versions at every given opportunity.
It didn't take off. I assume the launch was so underwhelming that they simply didn't bother. It was pretty well hidden on the web store for a few years too if memory serves.
Also, it appears in their quest for design over function they managed to create a kind of pressure cooker for GPUs.
Also, it appears in their quest for design over function they managed to create a kind of pressure cooker for GPUs.
It's the kind of thing that's built on hindsight. I'd agree that the 2000s were Apple's high point in terms of Mac hardware, and it's obvious to see why—if nothing else, having more hit products has divided Apple's attention since.
But Apple in the 2000s also had misses, like the Power Mac G4 Cube. Their pro towers had issues (speed dumped G4s, wind tunnel G4s, leaking G5s.) As mentioned earlier, even under Jobs the dedication to the Mac Pro heavily slipped. Mac OS X was rough the first couple versions, and people plain hated parts of it (the complaints about Big Sur's flat look are kind of hilarious in comparison to the fury that was debates about brushed metal!) They spent half the decade putting out new models that started out competitive and then became slower and power-inefficient than the competition. Final Cut Pro went from revolutionary to behind the technological curve remarkably quickly (many a suspenseful college coursework render I remember when you just had to hope the progress bar was lying, because you had no idea when the dang thing would be done.)
I always come back to Snow Leopard, an OS revision that has cemented itself in the Mac fan consciousness as arguably the pinnacle of OS X—and yet the thing was buggy as all hell when it launched. I remember the Apple Store filled with boxes they'd added point revision stickers to because you did not want to get stuck with 10.6.0 or .1. And half of its reputation for stability is just that it was around longer than planned because Apple had to pull resources from Lion.
We're pretty good at talking ourselves into remembering "golden ages" that didn't quite exist like we remember them.
IMO the 2019 Mac Pro is fantastic, as a machine, it's exactly what I want. The only possible issue would be upgrades - as in Apple has to supply upgrades for it to make sense over time. Basically the GPU, which so far they have done so - even if it has been a bit slow. I guess you can always use third party GPUs too as long as there are drivers.
Also, pretty awesome that you can take a base 8 core, and for a reasonable amount, source a used 28 core Xeon and drop it in, working perfectly. That's a huge imo.
Some people may complain about the price and using Xeons, but there is no machine with this type of build quality and engineering - even on the PC side, and I also love custom PCs.
Also, pretty awesome that you can take a base 8 core, and for a reasonable amount, source a used 28 core Xeon and drop it in, working perfectly. That's a huge imo.
Some people may complain about the price and using Xeons, but there is no machine with this type of build quality and engineering - even on the PC side, and I also love custom PCs.