Mac Pro is the only tower and the only computer with swappable components, not to mention the only professional quality desktop in Apple's lineup. It's got a pretty important place, and I think there's a very real chance that eliminating it could cause OS X and iOS developers to leave the ecosystem; who really wants to develop large projects on a laptop or a dinky iMac?
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Apple 'Questioning' the Future of its Mac Pro Line?
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Mac Pro is the only tower and the only computer with swappable components, not to mention the only professional quality desktop in Apple's lineup. It's got a pretty important place, and I think there's a very real chance that eliminating it could cause OS X and iOS developers to leave the ecosystem; who really wants to develop large projects on a laptop or a dinky iMac?
Yes. Developers mostly use the Mac Pro for developing - even for consumer products like the iPhone.
Killing The Mac Pro A Serious Mistake
Ars Technica says "Dire Consequences" and quite frankly I agree.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...tm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
Ars Technica says "Dire Consequences" and quite frankly I agree.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...tm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
Me too. I'm now considering a MacBook Pro. Thing is I need to know where my current, (ageing but still stable), Mac Pro stands in comparison.
I don't mean in meaningless benchmarks either. I mean in real world use. Does anybody know if there is a site where I can compare?
Failing that can anybody with a MacBook Pro tell me how long their hardware takes to convert a particular film to iPhone format for example? That sort of thing.
Bring back the Cube!
What a better tribute to Steve than a Cube! Remember the NeXT cube and the G4 Cube...haha...
"Mac Cube"
1) Ivy-Bridge with dual 8-core cpu support
2) Thunderbolt-enabled / USB 3.0 (takes care of expandability)
3) Up to 64GB of RAM
4) 1 Slot for a good video card
5) Dead quiet
6) 7.7" x 7.7" x 7.7"
I could see myself replacing my Mac Pro with this machine.
What a better tribute to Steve than a Cube! Remember the NeXT cube and the G4 Cube...haha...
"Mac Cube"
1) Ivy-Bridge with dual 8-core cpu support
2) Thunderbolt-enabled / USB 3.0 (takes care of expandability)
3) Up to 64GB of RAM
4) 1 Slot for a good video card
5) Dead quiet
6) 7.7" x 7.7" x 7.7"
I could see myself replacing my Mac Pro with this machine.
I've read that the high-end i7 iMac is actually faster than the Mac Pro for most tasks. The highly parallel tasks like 3D rendering, compiling, video encoding/decoding is far faster on the Mac Pro today, however.
Again, this is because the Mac Pro line has not been updated with the latest processors (which have been delayed).
Yep, worth considering then? Thing is I'd have to go to the extra expense of having the thunderbolt remote enclosure. Not exactly cheap right now.
How does all of that have anything to do with Apple "being a serious computer company". All they sell are computers, even if you discount the Mac Pro.
And what does the iMac or a laptop change for development exactly ? It's not like Xcode is some kind of ressource beast.
Heh. You've never actually worked with Xcode to create something bigger than "hello world". Have you?
XCode 4 is an enormous resource beast. I have to quit and relaunch XCode all the time to keep my 12GB RAM Mac Pro from swapping. I compile a project in ~20 seconds on my Early-2008 Mac Pro. A colleague of mine compiles the same project in ~3 seconds on his Mid-2010 Mac Pro.
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Yes, worth considering. That's a good point about the added expense incurred by adding thunderbolt components. The reality is there is not a perfect option, unfortunately, just undesirable tradeoffs. It is was it is, not matter how much you rack your brain.
Actually, yes. I did. On my MBA. Ask Firestarter too, I think he even has an app on the app store made with his MBA also.
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Guys, Xcode does not use many ressources. It's a glorified text editor. I full rebuild a 4k line project right now in about 10 seconds on my MBA. Also, you hardly ever do full rebuilds anyhow (unless you flat out don't understand linking and object files work).
You don't need a Mac Pro for Xcode.
A 4K line project is very small relative to most commercial grade products. The context here was talking about the prosumer market.
If your XCode needs 12 GBs of RAM just to run then there's either a serious problem with your copy or with XCode in general. I program on an old alu macbook all the time without issues (although not in XCode since I work in Java development). Building obviously require some CPU time but RAM isn't (and shouldn't be) an issue. My machine has 4 GB of RAM and IntelliJ Idea, which is a more advanced IDE than XCode IMHO, runs fine. The largest project I work on has just shy of 300,000 LOC and works without a hitch. If I have classes more than a few thousand LOC (which I do with some Scala test files in a homegrown project) then static analysis takes a while but I never see any swapping. Classes that big are an anomaly in programming anyway.
One problem one might have is Spotlight continously indexing all the small files created by caching and building but that's not really a swapping issue and Spotlight can be turned off for the relevant directories.
An editor does text editing, syntax higlighting, parsing, static analysis, and code completion. That's not really RAM intensive tasks if implemented correctly.
Welcome to the world of XCode 4 and large projects.
Well, in that case Apple should move some resources into making XCode not suck. I honestly have a hard time believing that a large company like Apple who presumably eat their own dog food in this case would create such a broken piece of software but apparently you're not alone: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2770567?start=0&tstart=0
Welcome to the world of XCode 4 and large projects.
No, seriously. You keep saying that and frankly it's not been my experience at all. My project is 4k LOC spread accross about 30 files, with multiple pngs, xml datasets, etc.. and Xcode is using all of 135 MB of RAM :
$ ps -o rss -fp 2707
RSS UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD
135856 501 2707 118 0 17Oct11 ?? 60:00.50 /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode -psn_0_1987045
So either your project is freakishly large or really, there's something damn broken about your setup.
And how does that relate to "Prosumers" or "Pros" ? Some projects have low LOC counts but are as pro as one with high LOC. And since you don't open all your files at all times, and your classes should be fairly small anyway to remain manageable (if they aren't, maybe you need to split them up into more utility classes so you promote more reuse) XCode shouldn't use much memory.
Anyway, again, a text editor does not use 12 GB of memory. Ever.
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Xcode does not suck nor does it use so much ressources. People just want to justify their overkill purchases of a Mac Pro to run a programming IDE.
Doesn't Xcode automatically know what files to build anyway based on changes if you leave it on default settings?
Xcode, like any other intelligent IDE or even the good old Make, compares the object file's last modified time and the code file's last modified time to figure out what needs rebuilding and what doesn't.
This is something like a 30 year old concept. Full rebuilds are hardly need and if you're running a full clean each time you rebuild, you don't quite understand how object files and linking work and would probably benefit from doing a little reading on the topic.
The projects I work on are generally around 100K-500K LOC with 100-500 images. When I, or my colleagues, talk about Xcode using a surprising large amount of resources, I'm referring to the "net" impact on the system and not just the Xcode process. For example the increased memory usage of the Window Server, Quick Look, Simulator, etc after running Xcode for awhile. More importantly, the amount of free memory after running Xcode (and really not much else besides Mail and some other less intensive apps) for extended periods is dramatically reduced. Quitting Xcode will help sometimes, but not a silver bullet.
I'm starting to think maybe Apple should simply license/outsource the true "Pro" lines of computers to someone else to handle since they seem to have little interest in them (I mean the Mac Pro and business servers and perhaps even a consumer tower since all Apple seems to care about are all-in-ones and thin thin notebooks and pads.) This would allow true Pro equipment to continue the Mac traditions in those areas yet relieve Apple of any stress of not making enough freaking profits from them.
I'm starting to think maybe Apple should simply license/outsource the true "Pro" lines of computers to someone else to handle since they seem to have little interest in them (I mean the Mac Pro and business servers and perhaps even a consumer tower since all Apple seems to care about are all-in-ones and thin thin notebooks and pads.) This would allow true Pro equipment to continue the Mac traditions in those areas yet relieve Apple of any stress of not making enough freaking profits from them.
An interesting proposition, to be sure, and one that I've also proposed (such as suggesting that Apple should have announced a partnership with HP and VMware to support Apple OSX server in select models of ProLiants with ESX when the XServe was killed).
However, with the castration of Final Cut Pro and other anti-profressional moves - does it really make any sense to license OSX on third party hardware.
Why run Apple OSX just to run Premiere or Avid? It makes more sense to run the Windows versions of the apps on Win7 x64 than to try to run Apple OSX and run the OSX versions of the same apps.
If Apple isn't doing top notch pro apps, why bother running Apple OSX?
We have to take some things into consideration here. The baseline mac pro is the only one that falls behind the imac really. 6 core and up is still ahead of it. The base mac pro offered very little for its price in 2009, and the cpu bump in 2010 there was virtually meaningless. They raised the clock speed by a paltry amount on the same chip design. My point being that they were cutting costs to get to that point two and a half years ago. A sandy bridge six core model should outshine all of these today. If intel had these damn things out back when they released the other sandy bridge cpus, this thread may never have existed.