I I do have one question for you. You make jokes a lot and aren't always serious, but you do carefully always give two answers, as a pro user and then as a investor in Apple the company. Do the two have to be different?
Yes.
Owning AAPL shares has been
really nice. If Apple dumped the Mac Pro, and every Mac in their whole lineup tomorrow, to focus on iOS devices, and the new Apple Dashboard for high-end cars with integrated refrigerator control, I'd get over it (as long as my stock continued going up). A pile of cash trumps some illusory belief that a company cares about me. It doesn't. The purpose of a company is to generate revenue for its' shareholders. AAPL is golden in that regard. No, wait, sorry, I meant, "Don't be Evil!" love all humanity, and help people!
I do wish they'd update the Mac Pros more often, but I am relatively sure that it will stay where it's at, on life support, for at least one more revision. From the investor perspective, I do understand. "For every 10 Mac Pros, we sell a million iOS devices!" Which is gonna get priority? Duh.
Is there anything Apple has done to OS/X that really messes with "pro" functionality? Because I'm not personally seeing it, just a lot of peeps getting their panties in a bunch over screen effects or reverse scrolling or whatev other nonsense bothers really old people who's brains are stuck in yesterday.
I really don't mind special effects, or ripping the cooler features of iOS and wedging 'em into OS/X. I like eye candy, it doesn't disturb me, for people who are truly upset about it, there are always checkboxes or apps like TinkerTool, Onyx, MacPilot, etc, etc, etc, to toggle the terminal commands for you in a GUI, and turn most of it off.
I dunno, people complain about things for different reasons. There is the whole, "My computer is so slow, everything crashes, and the new animations make my system move like it's going through quicksand!" crowd. Who seem to be experiencing genuine issues. I can't comment, since I have never experienced any of this. Everything for me was pretty much instant on Snow Leopard, it's equally instant on Lion. I experience no lag or slowdowns. For them I'd posit it's either time to buy a new computer, do a clean install of Lion so you clean out 10 years of cruft that Migration Assistant keeps wedging back into your new system, or just stay on Snow Leopard forever if that's what you feel is the penultimate azimuth of OS/X development.
I strongly suspect that the pending release of Mountain Lion is making the, "I am NOT leaving the island of Snow Leopard, EVER! It's a PERFECT SPECIAL PLACE!" crew more upset, because they thought they'd have another 2 years of security updates at least; but SL will get dropped completely the minute Mountain Lion is released, so, there went that plan. You are now on a totally unsupported OS which will never get any updates.
The ****** with reverse scroll bars, or how the UI looks is making me feel sad and empty inside crowd... I've got no answer for. While Lloyd Chambers is probably no more than 10 years older than I am, and his blog
http://www.macperformanceguide.com has a LOT of really good info about optimizing Mac Pros ... having said that, I do often get the impression that he's like a 110 year old cranky old man. FWIW I don't understand the constant bitching and whining about what to me is total nonsense, either. Just... try to get over it, and go find some real problems.
'Course, I don't use Final Cut Pro for a living. If I did, then man would I be pissed. I also don't need to look into a crystal ball and try to figure out if my department/company of 150 people can look 2-5 years into the future and figure out whether or not depending on Pro Apps that Apple will decide to kick to the curb next week, is a good idea.
The things that bother me are fundamental, basic problems with the OS, which are unresolved and go ignored, year after year, while an insane amount of effort is focused on the GUI crap.
Here's a short list, at the very top is - Apple desperately needs a real filesystem which is not held together with superglue, duct-tape and an endless collection of hacks. If not ZFS, then something else:
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=11276523#post11276523
What actually bothers me is the overall direction of Everything in the Cloud! and We Know What's Best For You! I don't want my AddressBook (soon to be Contacts), in Apple's cloud. On Lion I sync my stuff from iTunes to my iDevices, will that even be an option in Mountain Lion, or is it Everything In The Cloud, We Have Simplified by Removing Choice!
I'd like an option to create my own local cloud for my own devices. Call me paranoid, but I have a basic lack of trust with regards to any company protecting my private information. With a few exceptions, my private information isn't anybody else's business.
And my response to the protecting you from yourself/we know what's best for you, school of thought, amounts to: **** you. It's going to be a very sad day when I have to jailbreak my own computer. But when that day comes... I'll be pissed about it, but then I'll just jailbreak it and get on with my life. We already run Linux and OpenBSD on our servers, and before migrating to those we used Solaris and SunOS not OS/X. Half the apps I use on a daily basis, don't exist under Linux, and Windoze always seems like way more pain than it's worth. We life in an imperfect world. Oh well.
I am going to be setting up SSDs and using RAID on a MacPro 5,1. I've read some of your other threads and you seem to be using Lion successfully with no problems, but you mention several times that apps don't work or the GUI is broken. I am maybe not understanding what you are saying but could you please help me understand what you are talking about with RAID and Lion. What does it mean when you say the foundation and "*nix/Mach" is solid, but the GUI and "point and clicky" is f'd up? I don't really understand this, does RAID work correctly on Lion with SSD or not?
RAID and RAID on SSDs works fine in Lion. There were some initial issues with doing an INSTALL to RAID0 on 10.7.0, which seem to have been resolved. RAID cards also work fine, but that's really up to the individual manufacturers updating their drivers. What's STILL broken in 10.7.3 is Disk Utility.app.
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14229937#post14229937
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=13762878#post13762878
As of 10.7.2 it started displaying RAID volumes correctly (instead of showing a huge collection of physical disks, instead of the RAID), but it won't actually DO *anything* with the RAID its' made. Try to hit the [Verify] button. It just ... does absolutely nothing. No action is taken.
Disk Utility.app is just a graphical front-end to diskutil in shell. diskutil works just fine, and has done so since the earliest Lion betas.
What's slightly disturbing is that apparently nobody at Apple can be bothered to fix the stupid GUI for Disk Utility.app, which doesn't work with the built-in RAID functionality that Apple itself ships. I have filed bug reports, I know at least half a dozen people who have done same, but apparently Apple just doesn't give a ******. At this rate Disk Utility.app will remain broken when Mountain Lion is released.
FOCUSING *
only* on eye candy and iEVERYTHING, to the
EXCLUSION of fixing fundamental issues with the foundation/OS that all of this stuff revolved around/is built on... I'd rate that as a problem.
Later, I upgraded to 14GB. 8GB would have been sufficient in an iMac.
