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

[paulcons]

Very interesting in using the old cheesegrater towers. I too followed that path, first 2 SSDs on a PCI card as an array, then a GTX 980 in a 2010 5,1 native machine. Only thing I am very unhappy about is the bit about 10.13, APFS and running from a boot SSD array. They SAID I can do it, but lied and have NOT addressed the issue at all. I continue to run Sierra.

One thing caught my eye, regarding running win10 on such a machine. The article said something about installing it "so it doesn't appear to be a "boot camp version" so he can update the GPU drivers." Is this specific to the AMD GPUs and the fact the fruit builds said drivers into the underlying OS? I DID play around with a win10 Bootcamp thing, and while it was working fine, I was able to install whatever the latest nVidia drivers were for my GTX 980. Did run some kinda game focused graphics benchmarks, it seemed that setup ran faster than the Mac side for one game (WoW) and very competitively for win boxes with roughly equivalent CPU/GPU combos. Unfortunately, I tried to install some LogiTech mouse drivers and somehow that whole system got borked to the point where I could kinda boot it, but none of the diagnostic or repair utilities it would run got it to fully boot. BUT am curious about the "installing win10 without it thinking it's a Bootcamp version." Anyone got a link to where I can find how to go about that?

 

[Altis]

Yup, the past few updates to macOS have run terribly slow on spinning hard disks. I bet if you replaced the internal drive with SSD, it would feel like a brand new machine again.

I already have one. It was running okay until a fairly recent update. I suspect it could be the patch for those Intel vulnerabilities that did it as I've heard they affect performance.

 

[MacSince1985]

With Mac sales a sliver of Apple revenue I wish they would spin-off the division like they did with Claris, now Filemaker. Either that or license a partner to design and sell modern DIY upgrade logic boards for older MPs. Back when Apple did license Mac OS the 3rd party's Macs were often better than Apple's own machines. I owned a couple of them. I had a UMax clone tower that was great.

I've had a couple of PowerComputing clones that were really fast for the time. Apple should allow clones again. Even if they limit the license to Machines without a built-in monitor to protect their laptop and iMac lines.

 

[fairuz]

With Mac sales a sliver of Apple revenue I wish they would spin-off the division like they did with Claris, now Filemaker. Either that or license a partner to design and sell modern DIY upgrade logic boards for older MPs. Back when Apple did license Mac OS the 3rd party's Macs were often better than Apple's own machines. I owned a couple of them. I had a UMax clone tower that was great.

My concern is they wouldn't put any direction into the Macs if they did that. As much as people complain, I actually like that Apple brings iOS and macOS closer together. Sure, they've screwed up iWork, but for the most part it's resulted in nicer PC-phone integration and even better macOS-specific features. Once they unify the dev environments, we'll get way more apps made for macOS, vs right now where you _need_ an iPhone to run many programs.

Mac Pro hardware has been out of date since 2009. I refuse to believe they're incapable of updating it. I don't know why they don't.
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Yup, the past few updates to macOS have run terribly slow on spinning hard disks. I bet if you replaced the internal drive with SSD, it would feel like a brand new machine again.

It started with Mavericks. I remember updating my machine to Mavericks and thinking "wtfffff." But no problem on SSD. It's like they decided to throw in tons of random disk seeks.

 

[star-affinity]

I upgraded to a GTX 970 and was able to run a 4K monitor and get some benefit from the big increase in VRAM for photo apps and Adobe CS. However, when I ran graphics benchmarks for the system, the numbers were barely better than the original Radeon.

That's interesting because at least for gaming I in many cases see a big difference on my MacPro5,1 – Radeon 5870 vs GTX 970.

The GTX 970 also required me to swap out the graphics cards every time Apple updated the OS because the driver would be out of date. I had to put in the old card to run the old non-4K monitor in order to download the new Nvidia driver, then put the new card back in, reboot, and connect to the 4K monitor. That gets old fast.

There's one relatively easy way to avoid all that by enabling ”Remote Management” on the Mac Pro before doing the OS update, then you can do the Nvidia driver update (remote controlling the Mac Pro) from another computer over the network. That's how I do it, but it of course requires that you have another computer around…

 

[Chupa Chupa]

My concern is they wouldn't put any direction into the Macs if they did that.

On which part? Allowing a 3rd party to sell licensed logic boards for older MPs or spinning off all-together? As far as the first part goes, Apple doesn't really have a Mac in the high end hobbyist market. It's literally not putting any direction there.

As far as spinning off, that doesn't mean a partnership wouldn't exist. Consider Pepsi and Yum! Brands. All these years after the spinoff Yum! still sells Pepsi products. And the famous Claris spinoff -- still great Mac support for Filemaker even when other companies abandoned Mac altogether.

I think what it would mean is a company focused on the niche Mac really is now for Apple. Mac revenue isn't much for Apple, even services are more and "other" is catching up with it. But for a solo company where Mac is the star we might see a renassaince because for a small company Mac's 5% Apple revenue is a lot of money still. And the engineers there wouldn't be overshadowed by more important Apple projects.

 

[laurim]

On which part? Allowing a 3rd party to sell licensed logic boards for older MPs or spinning off all-together? As far as the first part goes, Apple doesn't really have a Mac in the high end hobbyist market. It's literally not putting any direction there.

As far as spinning off, that doesn't mean a partnership wouldn't exist. Consider Pepsi and Yum! Brands. All these years after the spinoff Yum! still sells Pepsi products. And the famous Claris spinoff -- still great Mac support for Filemaker even when other companies abandoned Mac altogether.

I think what it would mean is a company focused on the niche Mac really is now for Apple. Mac revenue isn't much for Apple, even services are more and "other" is catching up with it. But for a solo company where Mac is the star we might see a renassaince because for a small company Mac's 5% Apple revenue is a lot of money still. And the engineers there wouldn't be overshadowed by more important Apple projects.

I agree. A company called MotionVFX (in Poland, no less!) makes excellent software add ons for Apple Motion and Final Cut. It's a shame that Apple neglects Motion so much because with a few function additions (e.g., expressions) it could really be a contender against After Effects. I juggle using both Motion and AE because of this but I would happily be only Motion if Apple would add a few more features and the plug-in manufacturers took it serious enough to port their plug-ins. Looking at you, Trapcode!

 

[sdwaltz]

The Retro review is an extremely sad read knowing that nothing coming out of Cupertino will ever be of that high build quality again. Apple is a bag of you-know-what now. Every machine, every product, every bit of software. We all knew that when Jobs died things would never be the same, but we had faith that since he hand selected Cook and Ive to supersede him and look after everything, things just might turn out. Here we are so many product launches later and you can see how these idiots have just cut corner after corner, pushing untested update after update, thinner and thinner to save money on aluminum and ensure overheating, notch after notch after butterfly keyboards and cheap faulty displays, churning out cheap garbage Walmart style trash with a premium price tag. Ugggh. It's just sickening.

While I agree that the company ain't what it used to be, it's not that deep.

Apple is easily still the best consumer tech company out there and it's not even close.

 

[fairuz]

On which part? Allowing a 3rd party to sell licensed logic boards for older MPs or spinning off all-together? As far as the first part goes, Apple doesn't really have a Mac in the high end hobbyist market. It's literally not putting any direction there.

As far as spinning off, that doesn't mean a partnership wouldn't exist. Consider Pepsi and Yum! Brands. All these years after the spinoff Yum! still sells Pepsi products. And the famous Claris spinoff -- still great Mac support for Filemaker even when other companies abandoned Mac altogether.

I think what it would mean is a company focused on the niche Mac really is now for Apple. Mac revenue isn't much for Apple, even services are more and "other" is catching up with it. But for a solo company where Mac is the star we might see a renassaince because for a small company Mac's 5% Apple revenue is a lot of money still. And the engineers there wouldn't be overshadowed by more important Apple projects.

The second part, spinning off. With merely a partnership in place, the hardware manufacturer will start imposing their will. This results in all kinds of problems like what you see in Windows: software trying to milk & spy on you (cause MSFT has to make money somehow), crazy legacy support, weak standards for peripherals, and lack of hardware-software integration.

Of course there are also great benefits like being able to buy exactly the hardware I want (no Apple monopoly), but eh... hardware barely improves YoY these days, and it's fast enough anyway. If I wanted to make that trade, I'd just go to Windows. What you're describing is really that.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

The second part, spinning off. With merely a partnership in place, the hardware manufacturer will start imposing their will. This results in all kinds of problems like what you see in Windows: software trying to milk & spy on you (cause MSFT has to make money somehow), crazy legacy support, weak standards for peripherals, and lack of hardware-software integration.

Of course there are also great benefits like being able to buy exactly the hardware I want (no Apple monopoly), but eh... hardware barely improves YoY these days, and it's fast enough anyway. If I wanted to make that trade, I'd just go to Windows. What you're describing is really that.

Huh? Apple already imposes it’s will/limitations on s/w makers. Not sure how that would change under a spin-off or licensing scheme. Really wasn’t an issue last time Apple licensing Mac OS. Clones were better, not worse than Apple’s models. The problem with Windows has always PC standards are broad with multiple h/w vendors.