I hereby nominate ThatSandWyrm for Post of the Month! That had to be one of the best written analogies I've read in a very long time. Well done sir!
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iMac Pro - First Hands On Thread
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I hereby nominate ThatSandWyrm for Post of the Month! That had to be one of the best written analogies I've read in a very long time. Well done sir!
That's not exactly what I meant by modularity and I was building PCs until 2008. Yes, it was even modular where you could swap out the motherboard, cpu, memory and what have you in what your describing. What my instructor was talking about is if you wanted a faster cpu the whole module would be swap out, by that meaning the whole thing (motherboard, buses and what have you - sorry like I said I been out of the hardware side). Yeah I know that modulability is basically be like getting a new computer, but if the whole package was the size of a small cube that could be swap out and in of the computer then the looks of the computer itself would not change. Though like you stated PC manufacturers would never or have hard time go for something like that and Apple would probably faint even if it thought of being doing that.
Though with Moore's Law supposedly being reach with existing technology the only thing I see in the future is manufacturers trying to make their components smaller. So who knows what the future lies in store for computers unless they start developing nano computers. I agree with the what you said with the exception of the power supply, for even back in the days I was building computers the power supplies that were being made supplied more than enough wattage and sometimes more that would ever be utilize. I also remember getting some power supplies that were clunkers, but that is a different topic. Today's computers have become so power/fast that their usefulness goes 8 to 10 years out and even sometimes way longer than that. In my opinion that is why mobility (smartphones, tablets, etc..) is where most manufacturers concentrate, for that is where the greatest profit margins is for them. The professional computer user has to a need for these pro desktops and I like to link them into two groups of power users. I'm not talking about future tech like my instructor was saying, but what we have now and probably for the foreseeable future. I see the first group of pro users (I fall in this category) that doesn't mind a closed system and the iMac Pro I feel fits that category. The second group is the pro users who love getting the latest technology and love being able to swap in/out graphic cards, memory and even the cpu if the motherboard can support it. I used to fall in that category, but I found myself tinkering around with the computer more than actually working on it.
Years ago this viewpoint was more common back then. Chips used fairly coarse-pitch leads, we didn't have advanced surface-mount integration, clock rates and bus rates were vastly lower, RFI and shielding issues were less, etc.
People then did not envision the extreme advances in packaging technology, partially necessitated by vastly higher clock and bus rates, shielding requirements, etc.
In 1984 I soldered in upgraded RAM chips to my 128k Mac, converting it to 512k. Today changing soldered SMD components can require an advanced $14,000 "rework station": http://www.pcb-repair.com/public/uploads/product-img.jpg
Every connector or socket in a design entails additional cost and possible reliability issues. As products shrink in size, it becomes increasingly difficult and costly to provide physical access to a socketed component.
As ThatSandWyrm said there are all kinds of compatibility issues which constrain an "internally modular" design.
Most pros are pros because they have a paying job. For the majority of them, they don't want to spend non-revenue-producing time tinkering with the internals of their computer hardware. Many of those pros work at corporations and they aren't even allowed to modify their computer. The corporate service staff typically does not do "deskside" upgrades. They swap out the computer to get the pro back on line. Then IF the old computer is upgraded, this is done at a service desk, or it's just discarded, handed down to less-intensive work, or traded in on a new model.
I'm freelance and this still applies 100%. Most freelancers I know don't want to deal with computer internals.
As for the iMP, still love the machine and I'm thankful Apple produced it.
I’ve worked in a shop that didn’t follow this policy, and the result was chaos. I never knew, from day to day, whether I’d have a working PC at my desk. Or if it would be up on the bench with half of its parts cannibalized to fix some other PC that needed to work that day. I typically had to do a complete re-install of Windows every two weeks. Not counting machines I was fixing for others.
That multimedia department lost LOADS of money as a result, and never turned a profit. We were ALWAYS working overtime to compensate for equipment problems, and were still delivering late on at least half of our jobs. When I went to work for a competitor, We’d get 1-2 jobs a month from my old company to do for them, because they couldn’t get it done themselves.
Pros don’t build their own. Pros don’t tinker endlessly with their systems. Pros get their work done on time and pay whatever it takes to get a system that they can rely on to do that. Because not being late is worth far more than the price premium that you’ll pay for reliable hardware/software.
I'm sure some will think "Well, *I'm* a pro and I like to tinker and upgrade my Mac". In my experience the % of these relative to all professionals who would use an iMac Pro or Mac Pro is very small. The commonly-stated notion that pros want to tinker with and upgrade their hardware is misleading and largely incorrect. Most of them don't -- not because they are incapable but their revenue producing time is too valuable to squander on this.
For those who really like to roll their sleeves up and get down and dirty with the hardware, they can do this right now -- it's called a Hackintosh. So there is nothing preventing them from spending all the time they want building a Mac with their own components.
There are pre-researched, pre-tested "cookbook" approaches for this, so you need not start from scratch. E.g, Max Yuryev has built numerous Hackintoshes and has detailed parts lists and assembly videos.:
Yeah, been there, done that. Then I realized that I'd spent most of two months getting my Hackintosh to work, and it still had deal-breaking bugs due to flakey nVidia support.
I jumped on the iMac Pro as fast as I could once the initial reports indicated that it was actually pretty well engineered. Finally, I'm able to focus on my work again, instead of not getting paid to tweak my machine.
Each to their own: some enjoy tinkering, some enjoy an iMac Pro or a PC and some just enjoy hating