Maintaining customers is what's in it for them. Y'know, they just updated my iPad 3rd generation, which isn't much newer. Generally speaking if they support customers long-term, that is what keeps customers, especially professionals, encouraged to continue investing in Apple and paying that premium price tag, when HP or Dell offer workstations that are far more powerful these days. I'll stick with Apple as long as I can rely on them to stick with me, too.
Having a programmer spend a few days to incorporate these NVMe drivers into their firmware would probably be a very minimal investment for Apple to give a gesture to those of us who dropped $3k, $4k, $5k on their top-end machine, and want to keep it relevant. I'm much more encouraged to buy a nMP if they treat us right by not cutting us off from the future in machines that aren't even 10 years old yet.
It seems to be doctrine nowadays that beyond 2 or 3 years you're not supposed to be able to expect jack out of companies regarding hardware. But there's no reason that a computer shouldn't be a 10- or 20-year investment nowadays, now that they're powerful enough and expandable to last that long. What's the point of building a machine like the Mac Pro, with this level of expandability, if you're not going to make the most minimal effort to keep it compatible with third-party boards?
One of the best lessons you'll ever learn about business, son, is that treating customers right is how you make money, because customers who you treat right tell 10, 20, 30 of their friends. Me personally, I'm someone who all my family and friends come to, to ask me, "What should I buy?" I like to say, "Apple, because they update their products a lot longer than anyone else. You buy an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you'll still be getting OS updates 4 or 5 years from now that makes it run better and have more features."
That's an illogical statement. Tiamo's hacking has nothing to do with whether a 2009 Mac Pro's logic board can technically boot from an NVMe SSD. Intel lists its 750 SSD, which is based on NVMe, as only being compatible with Z97 and X99 based logic boards, so it's entirely possible that the chipset on these older Mac Pros simply cannot talk to NVMe, no matter what Apple does to the UEFI BIOS. However I'd like it if they came out and said so, rather than just leaving us in the dust with no support, and I've written to Apple to request that they issue said update.
I've read about some PC folks who have successfully patched older UEFIs and added the driver modules from newer Z97 boards. UEFI is a fairly modular thing, and Apple does use standard Intel chipsets under the hood, albeit with their own "headless" UEFI implementation. They should still be able to toss in these easily available NVMe drivers though.
I hear you. Well, I guess time will tell. If not, I guess we can look forward to some cheap used nMPs showing up on eBay when they release the Skylake variant with NVMe.
I think that in a way, from a sales perspective, nMP is kind of brilliant, because the user just unplugs all the cables, gets the new one, plugs in all the cables, and boom upgrade done. Don't have to swap out PCI boards and hard drives.
Still I just hate Apple going back on its principles… remember the iMac add with Jeff Goldblum, where he talks about the lack of cables? Now we have more cables than ever, with nMP. Ironic.
Yeah, I'm tempted to just buy one of those, and be done with it. I bought an 850 PRO but haven't opened it yet because I realized for an extra hundred bucks I could double my speed. I guess it wouldn't make that much of a difference for most things, but I figure since I'm doing it, why not get the best possible thing available at the time? I can put the 850 PRO into my 2012 MacBook Pro.
