Quick Takes: The Comfort of Apple's Ecosystem, Using a 2009 Mac Pro in 2018, and More

[ccsicecoke]

Holding onto 2013 Mac Pro and 2010 Mac mini running OS X 10.6 and 10.9

Not planning to upgrade to anything new with horrible flatty UI.

 

[44267547]

I'm still using my 10 year old iMac. Last week I've replaced the original 1Tb hard disk (Still working!!) for an ssd and I am pretty amazed about how it performs! It was my best buy ever!!

Your post is a testament to Apples durability and longevity with their hardware. There is a reason why I also have Apple devices that work and operate long past their life expectancy.

 

[bevel]

As an iPhone X owner for the last 4 months, I can honestly say that Face ID sucks. Completely. It's super slow and super fragile compared to Touch ID. It fails several times each day. It's much slower than touch ID. It's inconvenient having to line up your phone and angle your face - it feels like you have to take a selfie each time you want to pay for something.

Imagine if Face ID was replaced with Touch ID. Imagine how marketable it would be to just touch your phone to unlock it!

Let's hope Apple have big plans to improve this - it's a really crappy experience compared to what came before!

 

[kazmac]

Very cool that a 9 year old Mac Pro can be upgraded to be a capable machine in 2018. I always enjoy reading those kinds of threads here.

 

[fairuz]

Very cool that a 9 year old Mac Pro can be upgraded to be a capable machine in 2018. I always enjoy reading those kinds of threads here.

Even without upgrades, a high end Mac Pro 4,1 is already suitable for most people's needs. Part of it is that CPUs haven't progressed that much since 2009, and neither has RAM (RAM is more expensive per byte now than it was in 2012!). The Moore's Law party died last decade. But the upgrades are so cheap and easy that they're always performed.

 

[B4U]

And my late 2009 iMac is still rocking solid like another day walking in the park.
Of course, running Yosemite on it is not the same as running Snow Leopard.

 

[Wags]

I am still rocking my late 2008 MBP...and the only upgrade is a SSD drive....so there!

Still rocking my 2007 MBP15 first gen Intel Core 2.0 with 2g ram, 256 vram.
Replaceable battery, ram, easily assessable case and great keyboard.
But think and heavy so I should be embarrassed. Lol. Tim Cook’s Apple won’t allow machines lasting this long.

 

[jgdeschamps]

​

Ummm ok until you have to interact with someone who doesn't own or have access to Apple hardware.

1997 wants you back ASAP 😀

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I had a Mac Pro, but everyone kept on throwing their trash in it. It finally died when someone threw their 1/4 coffee container in there.

One of the worst computer designs of all time. If it were a car--it would be the Pontiac Aztec!

I'm not sure if that's the correct auto analogy. The Aztec was quite possibly the ugliest automobile of the decade. The Mac Pro was a nice enough looking machine, and decently powerful in the CPU department. Whether it was a suitable upgrade from the cheese grater MP, that's up for debate. The fact that they still ship with the same, now-very-old, proprietary GPUs inside is by far the biggest performance shortcoming. Had Apple engineered it with an MXM GPU slot, the product may have been more successful since you could get one with a modern GPU.

 

[LordVic]

Your post is a testament to Apples durability and longevity with their hardware. There is a reason why I also have Apple devices that work and operate long past their life expectancy.

My concern going forward is what will the lengevity of the devices be now that they're all soldered together.

one of the reasons these older mac's keep going and going and going is because most of the people using them have swapped out parts that became bottlenecks as tech advanced. SSD's replace hadr drives. Some cases new CPU's. New GPU's. etc. How many 2009 Mac Pros are out there in these scenarios completely stock?

The new devices cannot have these parts swapped. in 10 years time whatever replaces the current SSD based storage might be 1000x faster yet again, BUT, because of the current solder job, impossible to replace.

We wont know for sure, but until we see 10 years from now, we can only speculate. I do not think current Mac's are going to have the same life that the ones we're talking about have due to these limitations and I believe Apple did that on purpose hoping that people replace their computers more consistently and more frequently, than holding on for 10 yeears and upgrading parts that Apple doesn't profit from

 

[Razzerman]

Couldn't agree more, Lord Vic.

I picked my two 2009 mac pro's literally out of a skip, and with some research here, upgraded and revived them.

Both are performing like absolute troopers, and I dread the day when they expire 🙁

But until then, let the good times roll 🙂

Razzerman

 

[Chambers McMac]

That's what I use. 500 gb ssd home drive and x3 2tb drives in the bays.

 

[kohlson]

The Mac Pro article was, for me, meh. Essentially, a 4,1 is redirected from recycling, and receives dual RX 580s. Slow, small, HDD. 12GB RAM, and relatively slow CPUs. He needs to do a little homework on Westmere CPUs (like X5690). The real news is that modern GPUs still work in a 9 year-old system. But I don't think this is a configuration anyone would have, Surely after spending $1K plus for the GPUs, you'd spend another $300 on RAM and CPUs, and *that* would be more competitive.

 

[masotime]

<snip>

Typo was corrected....

 

[JosephAW]

My Mac Pro 1,1 is working fine and has plenty of life left in it. It's soon to be commissioned to run Quark 6 for our non-profit.
If there are more people out there who want to give me a free 2009 Mac Pro I'll pay the shipping. Thanks.

 

[east85]

I really enjoyed reading about this attempt to upgrade and make use of an older Mac. If Apple actually offers something that's truly upgradeable again with the upcoming Mac Pro I will put aside the money to buy it. I really don't want to buy a Mac that has not only soldered RAM but a soldered SSD which now seems like the status quo for their laptops.

 

[vincebio]

I bought a 2009 Mac Pro last year and upgraded it to Westmere 2 x 2.93. added 64gb ram and put 2 TB's of SSD's in the slot bays.

Im mostly using it for Audio as I'm a pro musician, but this thing is an absolute beast.
I can run between 15 and 20 instances of DIVA before it chokes.

Geek bench score was 22,100 yesterday.
For a 9 year old computer, thats insane.

 

[swm]

FCP doesn't support much "non-apple" GPUs, although they are similar (if not identical) to their apple counterparts. my 2009 Mac Pro runs 10.13.4b6, detects the radeon rx GPUs properly, but FCP seem to doesn't use them.

the cheesegrater is an excellent piece of technology. got mine for $500, with just a single ding on a hidden edge on the back, with 2x2.26 QC xeons. i upgraded to dual 6 core 5690s and have 32GB ram in it. you can easily buy an m-key to pcie card on ebay for peanuts and have real beefy PCIex4 SSDs in the x4 slots. the baseboard sata2 may sound mediocre, but it does quite well with some a 2T 7200rpm HDD paired with a 256GB x4 SSD.
the cpus are old so dirt cheap, and more or less you can say the same about the ram as well.
the on-board wifi slot can be populated for ~50USD, so you have 3x3 mimo AC wifi paired with 4.1 bluetooth - so everything works: magic accessories, handoff, continuity, call forwarding, watch unlock

paired with a dell u2715h wqhd display it is a steal of the century. the only thing i miss is brightness controls... sadly this only works with the led cinema display.

btw, gigabyte sells a quite "affordable" thunderbolt3 card - don't know if anybody tried it. kinda curious whether it works w/ macOS. TB display is a taboo for the pre-trashcan era.

 

[Porco]

If the Mac Pro is such a niche product and more and more people are using tablets and laptops, why not just give those of us who like a big expandable desktop that will last for many years what we want? It won’t hurt you Apple, and the kind of users who want that will probably be buying your tablets and laptops as well anyway... unless we’re better off deciding to (/forced to) switch to other manufacturers for everything...

Fingers crossed for the ‘modular’ Mac Pro 2018/2019.

 

[Dorthensensens]

The Mac Pro article was, for me, meh. Essentially, a 4,1 is redirected from recycling, and receives dual RX 580s. Slow, small, HDD. 12GB RAM, and relatively slow CPUs. He needs to do a little homework on Westmere CPUs (like X5690). The real news is that modern GPUs still work in a 9 year-old system. But I don't think this is a configuration anyone would have, Surely after spending $1K plus for the GPUs, you'd spend another $300 on RAM and CPUs, and *that* would be more competitive.

The author did mention the Westmere CPUs and faster memory. He had the GPUs already.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

From my own personal experience and use, when I upgraded from a flashed 4,1 cMP with the fastest Westmere CPU possible (W3690) to the base 27" 5K iMac (i5-7500), I can tell you that CPU performance was roughly the same. In some cases, the 7500 is faster, in others, the W3690 was faster. While that's a desktop CPU competing against a workstation CPU, that really tells you how powerful those old cMPs really were. They were expensive machines for their day, but look how long one could last depending on your needs.

I am really curious just what Apple will do with the new Mac Pro. With Xeons having so many cores now, I doubt it will be dual socket. Will it have multiple blade bays? Will it use standard GPUs, or at least MXM versions?

 

[bopajuice]

This is why Apple no longer makes computers upgradable. When they used to produce quality innovative computers, they were built to last, and with some user serviceable upgrades, a person could make it a worthy machine that could last many years. I still have a Clamshell notebook that's going strong. Granted it cannot do what a modern machine can do, but it has NEVER had problems or failed.

So the Note 9 is going to offer what everyone thought Apple would offer in the X. Well... I am sure Apple's version (When they get around to it) will be better but will most likely cost more, right?

For me I still love Apple products and live in the eco-system, but their buggy software, and late to the party versions of products everyone else already makes, kind of makes me want to look over the fence to see what else is there. Scary times. Hopefully my Apple Watch is accurately measuring my heart rate... I know my Gamin Fenix 3 is pretty accurate.

 

[Plutonius]

Kinda sad, that mac enthusiastic journalists have to praise 9 year old mac pros due tue the lack of current decent upgradable macs.

It's praised by many because it's such a great computer.

When my 2009 died last year, I replaced it with a 2010-2012 Mac Pro.

 

[macsrcool1234]

Kinda sad, that mac enthusiastic journalists have to praise 9 year old mac pros due tue the lack of current decent upgradable macs.

On my last visit to the Apple Store, there was no Mac mini on display. Only iPhone covers, wireless headphones and watch bands.

its almost criminal that they still sell them at all

 

[Plutonius]

For me I still love Apple products and live in the eco-system, but their buggy software

I agree and I no longer bother to upgrade to the latest MacOS / IOS.