His ‘nerd credentialing’ is about your suggestion that he should read some ‘history books’. He doesn’t have to. He lived it.
Plain English works ?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Waiting for modular Mac Pro 2019
- Thread starter Zarniwoop
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
His ‘nerd credentialing’ is about your suggestion that he should read some ‘history books’. He doesn’t have to. He lived it.
Plain English works ?
I think Fuchsdh’s point is that MS Windows is no longer the dominant OS, and he is not entirely incorrect. If you only look at traditional desktop/laptop computers, Windows’ dominance is undisputed, but if you look at the entire computing landscape, it no longer is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
According to Gartner, as sourced by the wikipedia entry above, total 2015 device sales were as follows:
Device shipments, 2015
Android 54.16%
iOS/macOS 12.37%
Windows 11.79%
Other 21.66%
I assume the largest share of the other 21.66% would be Linux servers and Chromebooks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
According to Gartner, as sourced by the wikipedia entry above, total 2015 device sales were as follows:
Device shipments, 2015
Android 54.16%
iOS/macOS 12.37%
Windows 11.79%
Other 21.66%
I assume the largest share of the other 21.66% would be Linux servers and Chromebooks?
In the context of Apple, and shipping a Thunderbolt-less Mac Pro, that's irrelevant. Apple won't ship a Mac Pro without Thunderbolt regardless of customer input so that does not matter.
That's like debating if Apple should ship a machine with Windows pre-loaded. You can debate all you want but it doesn't matter because they won't.
[doublepost=1524505426][/doublepost]
I think you both are mistaken. Going through their line, I didn't see any with Thunderbolt 3 or an add in, although I focus on the higher end Xeon ones when I was going through. Google only found references to Thunderbolt 3 for the Z laptop line.
"HP Z4 Workstation"
"Front: 1 headset; 4 USB 3.1 (1 charging); 2 USB 3.1 Type-C™
Rear: 6 USB 3.1 Gen 1; 2 RJ-45 (1 GbE); 1 audio line out; 1 audio line in; 1 PS/2 mouse port; 1 PS/2 keyboard port; 1 serial port (optional)"
The confusion here may be that Z4 is the desktop, G4 is the laptop.
Last edited:
On the site, HP offers only USB c add in card. Dell offers TB3. The HP representative I had spoken to, offered a TB3 card instead of the USB c one. Not sure why they aren’t offering it as an option on their site though.
MBs with TB 3 cards are an option, as is one from ASUS that has an inbuilt TB3 port. All are intel based though. Not sure about AMD.
They are ubiquitous on laptops of the past year or so.
With intel opening up on TB3, expect to see wider adoption, even if the ports are limited to one or two.
When you look at the graphs for computer OSs, Microsoft is at almost 82% .
If you include smartphones, tablets, calculators and coffee makers ; they all have an OS, but are not computers .
Sure, but we also can assume Apple isn't going to do it with a daisy chaining cable, and they will continue not to care if someone on the MacRumors forum still thinks that's ok. Which is how ASUS and HP and others do it.
(Watch as I end up being wrong and Apple comes up with the "sweet solution" of a cable coming out and going back in the back and for some reason it took them two years to do that.)
I disagree. They are computers, just not in the traditional form factor. I think the distinction is really whether or not third-party software can be used on it.
Phones and tablets are multi-purpose devices, like desktops/laptops. The user interface is the only distinction.
A coffeemaker won't let you install another application and re-purpose it.
I admit the distinction is not black-and-white, though, as Chromebooks are essentially single-purpose devices, too, but as an internet device it is certainly more multi-purpose in nature.
The view that only desktops/laptops/servers are real computers is a bit outdated, I think.
They are computers, they would just fall into the embedded computer category, tho smart phones and tablets are doing more and more general purpose computing tasks.
Really, 90% of what people do is web browsing, social networking, email, video streaming, and audio streaming, tablets and smartphones do this just fine, so tossing them into "Computers" fits for 90% of end users tasks. That's just the changing landscape of computing, and you have to take into account the use typical case of the entire world.
The iPad is pushing more into the "Pro" realm with some of the apps, and we've seen Apple respond to that with the iPad Pro.
For those of us that are really "Pro" users, we find it hard to fathom not having a Tower with PCI-E slots, it just doen't fit our use case, but a lot of that is generational, people have been producing goods and services on portables forever, and as long as you are making money with your computer, you are a "Pro" users.
People are making money with iPhones and iPads, that's just the changing landscape of the "Pro" user. I wouldn't think the iPhone Pro is far off, but really we need XCode for the iOS before it could be called a full "Pro" OS.
My espresso machine runs Linux - it even has a serial port hidden behind a little flap.
I've seen a lot of sketch artists happily use an iPad Pro as a secondary device, but I don't know any pros who use one as their primary. The iPad Pro as a pro device seems generally to be some sort of fever dream, I don't know anyone who has adopted one as their only device for pro work. It's basically treated as a cheap (and good) Cintiq, where real work is still transferred back to the Mac for real Photoshop.
With the iPad Pro not landing with pros, I think you're really jumping ahead of where we are. There are a lot of reasons iOS isn't considered a pro OS beyond Xcode.
And on PCI-E slots... is it generational? A lot of the cutting edge work needs GPUs, or multiple GPUs, and Apple just doesn't exist in that space. If I need a four GPU system for machine learning... where do I get that? I could use external GPUs, but four GPUs might be starting to push what's reasonable. And I also need to change out the GPUs to keep up, which the current Mac Pro fails at.
It's not an old-people-stuck-in-the-mud thing. I know a lot of people who are not... old... who are having to switch to PCs so they can get their GPUs back.
I mean, even if you're coming out of high school or college and you want to play with machine learning or VR, or even some more intense video editing, the iPad Pro is nowhere. It doesn't do high end graphics. It doesn't do high end CPU work. There are no mid or high end video editors. You can't even plug the iPad into an external display.
For pro workflows, the iPad Pro is nowhere and the MacBook Pro is still the introductory machine.
How much of that is the typical use case, even for a "Pro" users. I think you want to define "Pro" with a very narrow interpretation. Apple doesn't offer me what I need anymore for some of my work, and I've switched to Linux as my utility OS, yet I still find it a lot easier to use OS X as my build env for most of my work.
Do I think Apple is missing the mark with the Mac Pro, yes, and OS X doesn't have API's from some of the stuff I need to do with my Tower. I just don't think Apple should be trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the desktop form factor, it is tried and true, but that wasn't the point I was trying to address.
The point I was trying to get across was it's a changing landscape, most people are doing most of there computing on handhelds.
Does it fit every use case, no, but lets see you put your Mac Pro or ATX PC in your pocket with 8 hrs of battery life.
Already we are seeing remote rendering farms, things will move more and more to the cloud. Most people just won't need high power CPU's and GPU's with tons of ram and storage.
Even for gaming, I played around with VirtualGL and Quake III on my Nokia 770. Basically it renders everything on the server, and you run a remote X session, then it compresses the rendered frames to JPEG, sends them over the network, and displays them in you X session.
It worked great, and that was 13 years ago.
I could see, one day, game rendering farms sending compressed images direct to smart tv's with simple input devices. No need to buy the game, download it, buy a CPU and graphics card capable of running it. All that happens on the remote server, all you local terminal does is decompress and display the images, and direct the user input.
We have cameras that upload to the cloud, you can edit in the cloud. Maybe there are even some musical interments that can upload t the cloud. Is this stuff ready for prime time, likely not for many high end photo, video, and audio work, bit that's just matter of bandwidth, really, and bandwidth gets faster everyday.
There are some UI problems to overcome with the iOS when it comes to doing a lot of "Pro" work, however doesn't the iPad Pro support a Keyboard, couldn't support any HID device?
Apple is just going where the most users are, we can't really blame them for that, but lets not pretend that this can't pay dividends down the road, that people that make money with iPad's and iPhones are not "Pro" users, and they are not using "Computers".
We saw this same thing with the mass migration from the desktop to the laptop, did some users still need the desktop, yes, but Apple was making a lot more money with laptops.
In a way, I think Apple is missing the mark, in that they have the cash to throw at the Mac brand, and there is still a lot more money to be made there, however I think Apple thinks it will continue to be a shrinking market as compared to iOS devices.
Can we really argue with the cash numbers?
You can't say that the iPad Pro is killing it with pros, and then justify that by saying you mean it using a wider definition of pro users. The iPad Pro doesn't make people pros who buy it just because Pro is in the name.
I don't think the landscape is changing that dramatically. Laptops have been slowly eating away at the Mac Pro, but that's been going on for a while, and the MacBook Pro still can't reach a lot of pro industries.
If I can't do the things on my iPad that I do on my Mac Pro, then it's not like putting my Mac Pro in my pocket.
That's like saying everyone should drive matchbox cars because they're enough like real cars except they can fit in your pocket.
But what iPad software works with those remote rendering farms? Even if that software existed, how do I plug in my external display? How do I plug in my devices? No one is doing 3D artistry on a tablet alone.
I can play Donkey Kong on my Nintendo Switch but that doesn't make my Nintendo Switch a replacement for my Mac Pro.
This is all great but you're pivoting now to some theoretical future, not where we are today, which is the topic.
Coulda woulda shoulda but it doesn't.
Nintendo sells a lot of Nintendo Switches but that doesn't make it a replacement for a Mac Pro.
I think you still missing the overall point, you equate your use case as the only pro use case, we can't really have an honest discussion until you relent.
I'm pretty excited for it, the last version has been a rock star for me and I hope that I get a similar lifespan (4/5 years) out of the next one.
I do hope that the Intel security flaws will have been addressed in hardware by then though, I don't like the idea of buying something that needs bits to patch hardware.
I do hope that the Intel security flaws will have been addressed in hardware by then though, I don't like the idea of buying something that needs bits to patch hardware.
I'm not sure you've even provided a example use case yourself, just a bunch of future use cases that could possibly happen someday (but not now.) I think the only use case for the iPad Pro that was actually mentioned was when I said I know some artists drawing on it, but they still take their drawings back to a Mac for final work.
There are people replacing their Mac Pros with other devices, but I don't know any pros who've moved onto the iPad Pro as a primary device. That's not just me. I don't know of anyone. I haven't. No one I know has. No one here has, at least that I've seen. And you haven't either.
Where are all these pros that are using an iPad Pro as their main thing?
Well: by your definition, I guess that makes me a "Pro", since crypto-mining profits on my old Z87 Windows machine are currently: ~$4.50/day (less the cost of the electricity).
Most likely every smart device that you've ever bought has software bits patching hardware "errata".
One of the first that I was involved with was with a 1977-era VAX-11/780. Extremely rarely, but definitely real, there would be a fatal kernel exception due to a page fault in non-paged memory. (An impossible occurence.)
The software patch was simply to retry the access, and if it worked dismiss the exception and continue execution.
The hardware was broken (in some very rare situations), but the software patch eliminated the problem.
Perhaps it would be clearer is we used “power user” instead if “professionals”. It is misconception that all professionals needs lots of compute power and that the degree og prefessionalism or even earning scales with the compute power used.
There are certain tasks that just is more efficient on iPad Pro + pencil compared to a Mac. A professional will always use the tool that is most suitable for the job.
I would argue that any 'portable' OS has approximately 10% of the capability of any 'desktop' OS .
And that's best case scenario ; the average might be at about 3-4% , once you take into account the limitations of the hardware, interface and manual input options .
The distinction between a computer and a smartphone/tablet is their respective potential - the latter are hitting the ceiling before you even get started .
Just because an entire industry was built around that approach, doesn't make it a progressive one , or equal to more sophisticated solutions .
iOS , Andoid and such have their use, no doubt about that .
And they are fine for many applications, and can satisfy many users, maybe even the proverbial 90% .
In terms of computing, they are however the most primitive approach since the dawn of the personal computer .
Which is completely fine, if you stop looking at tablets and smartphones and their OSs as computers .
If you don't, they are the most outdated devices since square wheels .
Android also run on the linux kernel so you can add that to the number of Linux based OS.
Yaaay! So going by the 70% + Linux domination across all ‘computer’ segments, including smartphones etc... let’s all switch to Linux. Right away. I mean domination, yes? C’mon.
Last edited:
Then we'd be talking about something off topic. We know the difference between power users and pros. And we're talking about pros, not power users.
The people in this forum aren't stupid. It's not like they forgot the iPad Pro existed and are asking for a Mac Pro anyway. Whether or not Apple sells more iPad Pros than Mac Pros is irrelevant. It's like going to the hardware store asking for a chainsaw, and they go "well have you thought about a hammer we sell a lot of those." It's irrelevant.
I doubt Apple cares if the purchaser of a Mac Pro is a "pro" or a "power user". A sale is a sale.
You don't have to be a "pro" to need the horsepower (and in the case of the cmp, the other features that were stripped out) that a Mac Pro brings to the table.
I do 3d art - neither the trash can nor the iMac Pro meet my workflow requirements. If the upcoming mmp doesn't meet my workflow requirements, then (like most "pros" and "power users") I will transition away from Apple - and it won't just be computers, it will also include moving to Android for phones, and to something else for tablets. The same will happen for my extended family - they buy what I recommend.
I've not closely tracked it, but I think its safe to say that the prices of the SSDs on the 2013 Mac Pro (6,1) haven't really budged since 2013 ... while the overall SSD markets prices have fallen by easily 50% in that time.
Perhaps someone with some free time can glom the data and plot it (I won't have any such free time until July).
the MacBook isn't so "new". Same basic case design from the 2015 MB is being sold as the 2017 model. They all have the same "we painted ourselves design wise into a corner" flaw. In the quest for max weight loss and thinness you can't fit TB in. ( that plus TBv3 wasn't Apple ready in 2015, but Apple wanted to start the "Type-C" port everywhere on Macs conversion train. Apple was a major contributor to getting Thunderbolt merged in with the Type C port alt-mode specs. There is no evidence that there push of a "Type C" port future was decoupled from TB at all. The MB 2015 design has bad timing in the completeness of that push. )
Every system lager than a MacBook that has seen a major design refresh since 2015 has gotten Thunderbolt. It is highly likely the Mac Pro will be bigger.
Also when the 2015 case ages out to come back up in the industry design redesign rotation, there is indication they'll correct for the flaw. ( There is some chance they are waiting for Intel to come up with some two chip solution that allows for a smaller phys switch next to the port ). Same general correction though likely to make with next Mac Pro ; just don't make it just as small as the one with the problem.
[doublepost=1524667979][/doublepost]
SSD price for new devices haven't fallen by 50% from the manufacturers. You may find retailers dumping bloated inventory that is burning a hole in their pocket anyway, but that isn't Apple. Apple has some of the lowest inventories in the industry.
The general computer part retail industry doesn't apply to Apple. The general bargain hunting notion of just "waiting them out" because their inventory costs will start killing them, is in the vast majority of contexts a flawed inference.
The real relevancy is with comparisons of new to new at the starts of the sales lifecycle; not the end. For the last 25+ % of that lifecycle Apple's market factors are different. Folks don't want them to be different but they are.
[doublepost=1524668688][/doublepost]
Errr. How could it not be obvious? If you see it is a MacBook Pro or iMac Pro that is hooked to the eGPU .... what other connection is it going to be???? Your presumption seems to hinge on being close enough to see a eGPU box but not close enough to see what the eGPU box is hooked to? That's a big leap.
The only certified connection to an eGPU box by macOS is via Thunderbolt v3. That's it.
There isn't another reason option. "external PCI-e" while technically is a standard it pragmatically isn't standardized in deployment. Most PCI-e break out expansion boxes come with their own card and cable to managed the communication between the two boxes. Apple delivering some hard embedded card (and switch) that external vendors had to match probably won't get many takers ( if any).