Looking longingly at my now obsolete Airport Extreme. It still works much better than the newer one.
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Apple Obsoletes 2010 Mac Pro, Time Capsule (4th Gen) and AirPort Extreme (5th Gen)
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and I just bought a 2010 Mac Pro a month ago to replace my 2009 Mac Pro that the high sierra install bricked...
You can do it but a high sierra install on my 2009 Mac Pro bricked it
How can an OS installation brick your hardware? Did something overheat and burn out or did you mean the firmware update went pearshaped?
I thought about replacing my 2010 Mac Pro... and then, I thought about it. There's seriously nothing that Apple has made since then that could replace it. I spent a few hundred bucks on a new graphics card, some more RAM and new processors. That should give me another couple years of use, and at that point, hopefully there will be more compelling options.
That Mac Pro is one of the fastest Macs today in terms of CPU. If you install the x5670 in it, it's topped only by the newer high-end Mac Pros (not the low-end ones) and the latest top-of-the-line iMac.
And in all other departments, it's slower when stock but faster with upgrades. For example, with GPU, RX580 or GTX 1060 or better beats all other Macs. And you can install 128GiB RAM...
And in all other departments, it's slower when stock but faster with upgrades. For example, with GPU, RX580 or GTX 1060 or better beats all other Macs. And you can install 128GiB RAM...
What a positive remark! Thank you!
You're going for the all new MacPro in 2019?
[doublepost=1510159175][/doublepost]
But your signature is stating: 2008 Mac Pro recently retired
What a positive remark! Thank you!
You're going for the all new MacPro in 2019?
[doublepost=1510159175][/doublepost]
But your signature is stating: 2008 Mac Pro recently retired
It all depends on who they do it and if there is any sort of upgrade path with the unit! Which is what I think most if not all of the MP owners will be doing. I skipped the trash can.
2008 Mac Pro (aka 3,1) is a different story. The update to 4,1 was huge for some reason. That, and the main reason I retired mine is the motherboard had failed in some ways.But your signature is stating: 2008 Mac Pro recently retired
You need to upgrade from 4,1 to 5,1 Firmware. After that, you're able to install everything which came past El Capitain.
Also, you may then use better (relatively, Socket matters) XEON Processors and higher RAM Speeds (from 1066 to 1333).
Th thing is, that, according to many web blogs, there is no hardware change in MacPRO 2009 and MacPro 2010...but late 2010 have the 5,1 Firmware, and 2009 is not allowed to update. But there is a tool available to do that. It worked fine for me (obviously).
I used this webpage....but it is in german. You may find other solutions in english on the web if you want to give it a try. But no garantuee.
Yea, that's the guidance I've gotten on other forums as well... 2-3 years.
It used to be longer than that, but that sounds kind of reasonable. The problem is that Apple now often sells products that are generations old when new at reduced prices, so I don't think you can count on that any longer. A great example was Apple selling iPads new that were already obsolete due to the low amount of RAM for the current OS.
That said, as slowly as things have been advancing on the Mac front... *maybe* it will go longer if they don't introduce some crazy new requirement.
I've considered going this route. But, you already have to kind of 'hack' the firmware, and I wonder how long it will be until you can't update the OS any further. And, software trends, security issues, etc. tend to (especially with subscription becoming predominant) force you to the latest OS rather quickly.
Ironic. I bought a quad-core 2010 off of eBay very inexpensively, and swapped the CPU tray with a 6 core 3.33 GHz version. It might be the sweet spot for me - I'm not a power user, so a 12 core, while fun, isn't needed. It has 16 GB RAM, a 500 GB Samsung 850 SSD that I installed, and the stock 5770. Quiet, quick, still upgradable if needed (I may swap a modern GPU in - 580 or 1060 level.)
Runs perfectly, and I expect it will run that way for a LONG time.
Runs perfectly, and I expect it will run that way for a LONG time.
Less likely with regard to the Mac 5,1. It has a 64bit EFI so no hacking required to run the latest OS. The only fly in the ointment might come if Apple releases a macOS update that requires a processor newer than the 5,1 can support, much as El Capitan proved to be the terminus for the Mac 1,1 and 2,1. That doesn't look likely any time soon and given that the MacPro can easily update its graphics card or wireless card, other gotchas that stop MacBooks in their tracks also don't apply.
Very true. Give it a few years, and it'll be stuck without support. I'm only doing it cause it's cheap enough that I don't mind. You can often find great deals on old Mac Pros (<$100), and I recently did, so I'm gonna throw in a few hundred $ upgrading it (upgrades are also cheap) and have something really darn fast for the time being.
Thanks for the info. If I go this route, I'll be sure to look for that model (and some good articles). I know Mike Wuerthele (now AppleInsider) did some pretty in-depth ones, which got me thinking.
I've got the technical chops to deal with it too, as long as it doesn't get too out of hand. A friend has been encouraging me to build a Hackintosh, but while I'm capable, it sounds like a bit more work each update than I'd like.
Yes, I should more seriously consider it. It would help me buy the time until we know for sure if Apple is still in the game.
I've experimented with building low-end Hackintoshes and have never had good experiences with them. Always had to make so many compromises that I didn't consider it being worth. But it could be that I didn't have the exact right kind of motherboard, etc.
Yea, I'm just not sure I could have one for my main machine. If you pick the right parts, I guess it's fairly straight forward. But, then at each update, you have to proceed with caution or wait until someone has solved the resulting troubles. He seems to spend 1/2 day or so at each update, which he obviously minimizes to the important ones.
He's got a heck of a machine for the price, though... but I'm guessing one could do similar by updating a used 'cheese grater.'
it really is dependent on what hardware you use. ive built a bunch at this point for people, ive had ones where I had to throw in the towel as it was simply never going to work right after weeks of work. Ive had others however that work about as well as a real Mac. I did one with an Intel DQ77MK which was quite possibly the easiest hackintosh ever and has been perfectly stable with updates since. pick the right parts and its incredibly easy. choose poorly and...
Sounds about right. The big issue with Cheese Graters is you're stuck with Xeon CPUs (or a select few old i7s, but meh). So you can outperform more expensive Hackintoshes with multiprocessing tasks, but if you need single-core performance, you might as well be using a MacBook Pro.
its actually pretty easy to do a dual-cpu hackintosh as well, ive been using one about six years as a server, with x5670s. ive wanted to do a dual E5 but ive heard they are a lot more work.
Yea, my friend has one of each... an overclocked, maxed out i7 based one (I think liquid cooled), and we also ran a server for years based on Xeons (running Mac OS X Server). He was doing SSD long before it became popular, so we had one heck of a fast server, especially for the time (mid-2000s).
(When I switched from that server to high-end professional hosting, my site actually took a bit of a speed hit, lol. But, now it's insanely more stable and robust. And, I'm not spending entire weekends fixing stuff or trying to thwart attacks/hacks, etc.)
Haha, totally been there. I've got Dell PowerEdge servers at home (with consumer-grade SSDs even though they say not to use them) that are amazingly fast and Heroku servers for a separate job. The Heroku servers cost the same to run monthly and are way slower, but man, it's nice not having to deal with problems.
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I recently did this, in English
The entire procedure took less than 10 minutes. Outlined in this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/firmware-tool-for-4-1-to-5-1-upgrade.1752143/ In following this, there seem to be a few things that will prevent this 5,1 conversion from happening, so best to understand it carefully before proceeding. But it worked very easily for me, because:
- I had a stock GT120 installed
- I wasn't starting from an OS with SIP enabled (though the instruction give the terminal commands for disabling this.
- I had both the netkas utility and the Apple 5,1 firmware on my desktop
Note that when you're done, the first screen of "About this Mac" will still say Early 2009) but the Model Identifier in the Hardware Overview says 5,1.
I have successfully (but unfortunately ...) upgraded to 10.13. The boot drive was a Sandisk 480GB duct taped into the second optical bay.
I think the about this Mac dialog is defined by a plist file during installation. The system profiler would be polling the machines efi when run so it would be pulling that value from a different place. Either way there's tools you can use to customize. I did that one with an imac that I put an E3 into and it kept recognizing it as an i7 in about this Mac.