PC Users Switching to Apple Silicon

[Aoligei]

I don’t disagree with any of this but my word, imagine using Internet Explorer in 2020.

it really isn’t as bad as people thought of. I am working as IT at major banks. All our front line applications are IE based.

It really take lots of time and money to make any small changes. For corporations as larges as big 5 banks in Canada, business continuity is top 1. Any changes could impact business operations, so it takes lots of time and money to ensure everything runs smoothly.

I will give you example, adding one features on existing application, takes at least half years to prepare, other half years to implementing, other few months to do small batch trials at branch, then company wise release.

It is simply takes very long time and cost boat load of money to make changes. This is why corporations sticks with IE. This is also why major corporations using Microsoft Windows. Because Microsoft values backward compatibility.

 

[raknor]

I don't find that hard to believe. Ive seen YouTube videos of similar setups. Crazy fast.

How about you link to said videos that show BMW27 rendered with Cycles CPU in 12 seconds?

 

[KShopper]

What would hold back thin margin business is the starting price points of Macs and other Apple products.

Laptops selling at $1,000 or more, desktops selling at $700 or more and smartphones selling at $400 or more will be a hard sell for organizations whose IT budget allocates less than those price points per user.

In my organization we give our rank & file are assigned 30 month postpaid plans with $8.31/month fees with "free" Android smartphone with 32GB storage. Desktop or laptop is less than $700.

Our managers are assigned $400 iPhones and $1,000 laptops but must be compatible with decade old server software.

I'm sure larger companies could deploy Macs to all users but Apple products are generally expensive.

Depending on how effectively the business is managed, the dramatically lower technical support costs and increased productivity provided by the Mac platform vs. Windows might sway some companies. Re: https://www.extremetech.com/computi...ployees-outperform-windows-users-in-every-way

 

[ArPe]

How about you link to said videos that show BMW27 rendered with Cycles CPU in 12 seconds?

Must be bad counting. A 3090 renders the scene in around 20 seconds and that’s the fastest on record.

 

[iFan]

Why would large Windows business install base to convert? The whole reason business stick with Windows is backward compatibility. I can’t see how business would benefit from switching to M1 based Mac.

Give a example: my company still primary based on internet explorer. All our internal Applications are still based on Internet Explorer. I fail to see why suddenly business wants to rewrite all their application to ARM based Mac and spend billions of dollars to purchase M1 based Mac when existing PC works well for then,.

This really is industry specific. At AT&T we had bought tens of thousands of iPads back in 2012 and were writing dozens of internal-use apps for employees.

IBM signed their business deal with Apple and purchased 100K+ Macs for employees. Salesforce, similar.

Big Tech like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc are predominantly Mac-based. Visit one of their campuses and try to find the lonely PC's. I remember when Groupon was in growth mode 10 years ago and every time they hired a new employee they'd buy a new 15" MBP for them. Thousands per week.

Watching the SpaceX/Nasa launch recently and the launchpad techs were using iPads for their mission critical work using web-based apps they developed.

The business world is definitely changing for many industries, with Macs being more and more accepted. What you've written is absolutely true for certain industries like banking, but not true where the real growth/profit is. I'd imagine some businesses, like you've described, will never switch. Apple, however, will argue that 100% of Fortune 100 businesses use some form of Apple products

 

[Solomani]

I occasionally check out the /Mac Reddit threads. Holy cow, the threads are packed with PC users who are supposedly switching. Most are into video production and photo editing. (Don't know why they were using PCs for that anyway, but whatever.) My favorite anecdote is by a user whose new 8 core MacBook Air blew by the maxed out workstation PC he built. He could not believe smooth 8K raw playback on the Mac. Something his workstation could not achieve.

Don't know if Apple silicon will entice the large Windows business installed base to convert. Probably don't need all that horsepower for spreadsheets, word processing, billing software, etc.

If enough of their favorite productivity/workhorse apps can be migrated natively to Apple Silicon relatively quickly..... then sure, I could see why they have a compelling reason to switch.

 

[vinegarshots]

I find that hard to believe. Blender BMW renders in 3 minutes on my iMac Pro. The 16’ MacBook Pro 8 core takes 4:15. This is CPU based of course.

What CPU is in this custom built PC?

Looks like you are using the GPU since you mentioned Nvidia Optix.. I just tested the Radeon ProRender engine instead of Cycles with the Vega 56 in my iMac Pro and BMW sample project took 17 seconds! A 5700XT eGPU does it in 14 seconds. Doesn‘t look like it’s going to be that hard for a Mac to match or beat your PC.

You can’t use Prorender instead of cycles to benchmark... they are two different rendering engines and aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison. I had the Vega56 in my iMac Pro too, and trust me, it is slow as hell in comparison to a nvidia 3080 ?

edit: see here https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6wujxk About 2.5 minutes Cycles render for BMW on Vega56. And that was when OpenCL was still supported for Mac in Blender, which it no longer is...

 

[jeanlain]

The entire Adobe Suite runs like garbage on Macs in comparison to PCs

You mean on similar hardware? Because if you're comparing PCs with beefier CPUs, then the difference is expected.
I keep hearing that Premiere runs much better on Windows, but the few direct comparisons I've seen (on the same Mac) showed that it wasn't the case.

 

[anubis1980]

I'm an IT Security Specialist in a large company, and for us to move over to apple would be impossible. Nice idea though, but I guess so many companies are so invested in their pc infrastructure that to convert would be a huge expense , and tbh for what our users use their pcs for, they work fine.

 

[vinegarshots]

You mean on similar hardware? Because if you're comparing PCs with beefier CPUs, then the difference is expected.
I keep hearing that Premiere runs much better on Windows, but the few direct comparisons I've seen (on the same Mac) showed that it wasn't the case.

In After Effects, with projects that use Plugins that lean on OpenGL, it takes at least twice as long to render on my iMac Pro than my old PC with comparable specs. Adobe Acrobat on the iMac is borderline unusable and is insanely laggy when scrolling through pages. Audition on the iMac is laggy when scrolling the play head through a track on the iMac. Premiere Pro becomes almost unusably laggy on the iMac if you expand the timeline work area to fill more than half the screen....

 

[jeanlain]

Yeah, aside from the poor state of openGL on macOS, it does look like Adobe apps have issue with UI responsiveness. They use some cross-platform frameworks (Adobe air?) that somehow perform better on Windows, rather than the recommended appkit framework on macOS. Hence the UI inconsistencies (odd dialogue boxes and such) and lag. There's no reason why a pdf should not scroll smoothly on a machine that's been built in the last decade. The macOS version of Acrobat it clearly poorly written, and Adobe should be ashamed of their work.

EDIT: I'm trying Acrobat right now on my relatively slow MacBook air, and scrolling appears to be quite a bit better than what I remember. Heh, maybe Adobe has optimised a thing or two.

 

[Quackington]

it really isn’t as bad as people thought of. I am working as IT at major banks. All our front line applications are IE based.

It really take lots of time and money to make any small changes. For corporations as larges as big 5 banks in Canada, business continuity is top 1. Any changes could impact business operations, so it takes lots of time and money to ensure everything runs smoothly.

I will give you example, adding one features on existing application, takes at least half years to prepare, other half years to implementing, other few months to do small batch trials at branch, then company wise release.

It is simply takes very long time and cost boat load of money to make changes. This is why corporations sticks with IE. This is also why major corporations using Microsoft Windows. Because Microsoft values backward compatibility.

I’m not surprised. If anything went wrong with system changes at a bank...it’s could be really bad. I think we’ve had a big mishap or two like that in the UK, over the past few years.

 

[raknor]

You can’t use Prorender instead of cycles to benchmark... they are two different rendering engines and aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison. I had the Vega56 in my iMac Pro too, and trust me, it is slow as hell in comparison to a nvidia 3080 ?

Provide evidence that a 3080 can render BMW in 12 seconds using cycles or ****!

 

[vinegarshots]

Provide evidence that a 3080 can render BMW in 12 seconds using cycles or ****!

Sure. Here it is running on the 3080, no settings changed at all, in Cycles:

BMW Blender Benchmark Cycles, Nvidia 3080

And here is a video I recorded so you can see the real-time Cycles viewport with the Optix denoiser (you get a totally clean image in the viewport about a second and a half...):
Blender Cycles viewport with Optix

I wanted nothing more than to keep that iMac Pro, because I much prefer MacOS to Windows. But the PC absolutely decimates the Mac in Blender , and I use Blender quite a bit for my work.

 

[vinegarshots]

EDIT: I'm trying Acrobat right now on my relatively slow MacBook air, and scrolling appears to be quite a bit better than what I remember. Heh, maybe Adobe has optimised a thing or two.

It seems to get worse with higher resolutions on the Mac... so the 5K display on the iMac seemed to be one of the things that choked a lot of the Adobe software

 

[raknor]

Sure. Here it is running on the 3080, no settings changed at all, in Cycles:

BMW Blender Benchmark Cycles, Nvidia 3080

I also don't see how using Pro Render (which enables metal rendering) Vs Cycles (Optix backend) on Nvidia is any different. You do have it set in preferences if you are showing Cycles Optix optimizations with viewports. The only way you will get 12 seconds is using Optix.

Accelerating Cycles using NVIDIA RTX — Blender Developers Blog

Over the past few months, NVIDIA worked closely with Blender Institute to deliver a frequent user request: adding hardware-accelerated ray tracing to Cycles.

code.blender.org

Using both GPU's optimized rendering engines the AMD Vega 56 does it in 17 seconds and the 3080 takes 12 seconds. The Vega 56 is also not the fastest card you can get on Macs. The Mac Pro comes with better options.

I wanted nothing more than to keep that iMac Pro, because I much prefer MacOS to Windows. But the PC absolutely decimates the Mac in Blender , and I use Blender quite a bit for my work.

I really don't care that you bought a brand new PC and replaced a 3 year old Mac you made exaggerated claims that the iMac Pro takes 4 minutes when it take 2 mins 30 seconds using OpenCL cycles (That the base Vega 56 GPU). Your 3080 claim is faster than any other result for the 3080 with Cycles (CUDA) and BMW27 I have seen so far.. so at this point I just don't believe you that you don't have the RTX Optix enabled in the preferences (You won't need to change anything in Cycles since it will use the Optix backend with it selected in settings).

 

[KPOM]

It seems to get worse with higher resolutions on the Mac... so the 5K display on the iMac seemed to be one of the things that choked a lot of the Adobe software

My experience has been the opposite. My work PC crashes just opening PDFs on my 5K display. The M1 MacBook Air opens them with ease and has no issues running 4K videos in Safari.

 

[vinegarshots]

How do I see that from the blurry potato quality video where you only clicked render image?
I can post a video where BMW renders in 17 seconds on my iMac Pro too with the exact same steps.

Please post a better video showing the render settings showing Cycles GPU etc where the text is legible.





I really don't care that you bought a brand new PC and replaced a 3 year old Mac you made exaggerated claims that the iMac Pro takes 4 minutes when it take 2 mins 35 seconds using OpenCL cycles (That the base Vega 56 GPU). Your 3080 claim is faster than any other result for the 3080 with Cycles and BMW27 I have seen so far.. so at this point I just don't believe you. You are also comparing the latest very expensive Nvidia card to a GPU 3 years older.

?? I don’t really care if you believe me or not— it’s a fact. If you don’t like the facts, well then, that’s not my problem. Trust me, I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow when your expensive iMac Pro falls behind in performance in such a short amount of time. But don’t get pissed off at the messenger. Not my fault.

 

[MacLawyer]

This really is industry specific. At AT&T we had bought tens of thousands of iPads back in 2012 and were writing dozens of internal-use apps for employees.

IBM signed their business deal with Apple and purchased 100K+ Macs for employees. Salesforce, similar.

Big Tech like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc are predominantly Mac-based. Visit one of their campuses and try to find the lonely PC's. I remember when Groupon was in growth mode 10 years ago and every time they hired a new employee they'd buy a new 15" MBP for them. Thousands per week.

Watching the SpaceX/Nasa launch recently and the launchpad techs were using iPads for their mission critical work using web-based apps they developed.

The business world is definitely changing for many industries, with Macs being more and more accepted. What you've written is absolutely true for certain industries like banking, but not true where the real growth/profit is. I'd imagine some businesses, like you've described, will never switch. Apple, however, will argue that 100% of Fortune 100 businesses use some form of Apple products

FWIW I get a quarterly magazine from my law school. In the classroom photos it looks like 9 Macs for 1 PC.

 

[raknor]

?? I don’t really care if you believe me or not— it’s a fact. If you don’t like the facts, well then, that’s not my problem. Trust me, I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow when your expensive iMac Pro falls behind in performance in such a short amount of time. But don’t get pissed off at the messenger. Not my fault.

I don't really care the the built in card on the iMac Pro is slower than a RTX 3080 .. A Nvidia card from 3 years ago is also not going to keep up with a 3080. My problem is with your stupid conclusions! ??

I can slap a 6800XT into a eGPU chassis and get similar performance on my iMac Pro. So your entire point that you have to switch to a PC to get that performance is pretty childish.

 

[MacLawyer]

You can’t use Prorender instead of cycles to benchmark... they are two different rendering engines and aren’t an apples-to-apples comparison. I had the Vega56 in my iMac Pro too, and trust me, it is slow as hell in comparison to a nvidia 3080 ?

edit: see here https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6wujxk About 2.5 minutes Cycles render for BMW on Vega56. And that was when OpenCL was still supported for Mac in Blender, which it no longer is...

iMac Pro is 3 year old hardware.

 

[MacLawyer]

The business world is definitely changing for many industries, with Macs being more and more accepted. What you've written is absolutely true for certain industries like banking, but not true where the real growth/profit is. I'd imagine some businesses, like you've described, will never switch. Apple, however, will argue that 100% of Fortune 100 businesses use some form of Apple products

Yes, Banks absolutely will never change. My bank is still using Vista on machines that look like they come from 1998.

 

[vinegarshots]

I don't really care the the built in card on the iMac Pro is slower than a RTX 3080 .. A Nvidia card from 3 years ago is also not going to keep up with a 3080. My problem is with your stupid conclusions! ??

I can slap a 6800XT into a eGPU chassis and get similar performance on my iMac Pro. So your entire point that you have to switch to a PC to get that performance is pretty childish.

No you can’t , because as I mentioned before, OpenCL is no longer supported on Mac in Blender. Which was my original point— third party support is problematic.

 

[BootLoxes]

OpenCL is no longer supported on Mac in Blender. Which was my original point— third party support is problematic.

Yup. Nvidia is pretty much the way to go for 3D applications unfortunately which puts Macs at a disadvantage in that field. Though they still do things better in other fields.

Solution: Use both a PC and Mac and get the best of both worlds. Your wallet will slim down too making your sitting experience more level

 

[KPOM]

Yes, Banks absolutely will never change. My bank is still using Vista on machines that look like they come from 1998.

And still running COBOL code from the 1980s.