This has to be the year all Pros get a quad core and a good GPU right?

[Poki]

Why would anyone spend so much money and put a mid range card in an EGPU. You can already spec 580s in mac anyway? Surely if your going to go for an EGPU you would buy a high end card not a mid range? Which is why they are niche i cant see a single reason any average user would buy an eGPU for a mac.

I was talking from a creatives point of view, CC generally - premier, after effects, lightroom etc Cuda works best and if the 580 is the best you can get on the iMac except the pro then a 1080TI would make sense but obviously the drivers are poor... anyway 1080TIs start at around £700 in the uk, if you want a Vega 64 graphics card then £649 is where they start.

So if your serious which you have to be to buy an external graphics card then I would say these are your go to, otherwise whats the point.

Also the only current supported eGPU boxes that I can find available is the

Sonnet Technologies GPU 650W which is £489 even the cheapest being the power colour devil box is £370.

Which ever way you look at it £1000-1300 is going to be the cost to get a decent GPU with the box then you take a 20% hit.

Stupid IMO.

That's the situation if you get an eGPU for a desktop. For a notebook, things are mighty different. You can get some eGPUs with a GTX1060 / RX580 class GPU for reasonable prices. These enclosures often include multiple USB ports, the do charge your MacBook and sometimes, they even include a hard drive bay or an Ethernet port. This means that, for somewhere between €500 - €700, you're getting a docking station that connects with just a single cable to charge your MacBook Pro, while adding all the accessories, storage drives and screens you want, and also provides you with enough GPU performance for most gaming needs and for some GPU accelerated workflows. You don't necessarily need a 1080 Ti to benefit from these things.

 

[tomscott1988]

That's the situation if you get an eGPU for a desktop. For a notebook, things are mighty different. You can get some eGPUs with a GTX1060 / RX580 class GPU for reasonable prices. These enclosures often include multiple USB ports, the do charge your MacBook and sometimes, they even include a hard drive bay or an Ethernet port. This means that, for somewhere between €500 - €700, you're getting a docking station that connects with just a single cable to charge your MacBook Pro, while adding all the accessories, storage drives and screens you want, and also provides you with enough GPU performance for most gaming needs and for some GPU accelerated workflows. You don't necessarily need a 1080 Ti to benefit from these things.

Your missing the point. £700 is a good chunk toward another product. If you buying this specifically for gaming the mac is the wrong platform and the bootcamp drivers are rubbish. They would do what any sane person would do and for 2-300 more build a dedicated gaming rig which will perform far better with better drivers.

If your want the best of both worlds why buy a mid range, the 580 is a decent card but its not worth £700 over say a 560 in a 15" macbook pro... especially when your loosing 20% with TB3, its probably not far off the difference between the two in the first place. The only products you can use eGPUs are 2016 products and above anything with TB3 "NATIVELY" or approved by Apple.

So that leaves you with the 2017 iMac, 2017 iMac Pro and 2016-17 Macbook pro line.

Im sorry but unless you are absolutely dedicated and have more money than sense, anyone is going to look at another product entirely, which most people with serious needs have. Many pros have moved over the whole line up is a joke and there are band aids everywhere.

The under 15" macbook pro line is a complete sham, the high end 13 is £2400 with a dual core i7 16gbs 512 ssd and a integrated graphics card... £2400 what exactly are you getting for your money there? You can literally get the same spec for £1450 from Dell and guess what you could add your eGPU for less than just the macbook itself. Mind blown.

The 15" is £200 more and you get dedicated graphics a quad 16gbs and 512gb ssd. Standard. Even so the Dell XPS 15 is £1000 less for the same spec... Again you could add a high end and an eGPU for those prices. Oh and you get a 1060 with the dell...

The 13"s are so expensive and they arent fast and are by no means close to a pro product at all. The i7 12" macbook comes within 10% of a apples highest pre built macbook pro that how not pro it is. So for a 13" with a mid range card you would be happy to spend £3100... absolutely bonkers.

So honestly who is the market for these?

Very Very few its stupidly niche and a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

The new Intel Vega chipsets, i really cant understand why this hasn't happend before. It should be inbuilt with integrated graphics so you can choose between the two for power consumption.

The other big fat elephant in the room is that the AMD cards are only any good with Apple software and guess what apart from two products they are out of the game, FCP and Logic. Adobe CC is where it is, its an industry standard and NVIDIA cards are where its at.

At the end of the day, ye the adobe products arent written or optimized well, but you can get a machine that gets around this issue and build something specifically for what you are doing. This never used to be the case apple made the exact product creative pros needed now they dont and havent since the 2012 Mac Pro. There is a reason they are panicking real pros are leaving by the boat load.

Even in 2010-12 the pros were stupidly slow in terms of updates and the tech was old, the standard configs... 3gbs ram when it could max at 128gbs... it was just cheap so it was hard to swallow then.

The agency I work for used to use mac pros and they moved to dell workstations because guess what you could buy them! The 2013 mac pro wasnt of use, PCI cards were needed and TB is not a replacement. So at the end of the day im not surprised Adobe arent that bothered about the mac, it only has 10% market share and shrinking and many pros have had no choice but to move on.

So basically what im saying is you can spend £700 on the eGPU and it wont make a difference. I bought a RX 580 for my Mac Pro and lightroom, premier, after effects etc etc no difference what so ever. LOL

So this just makes the whole point moot.

You could say oh well you dont get the mac, well the newest macs are the least reliable with ports that make life harder, there is no up gradable components so unless you BTO its a disposable product.

You dont get the polish, fair.

You dont get Mac OS, but again the last 3 iterations have been full of bugs, super slow and really not polished at all. The other moot point is all software is multiplatform now, you just download and its exactly the same.

Windows is actually not bad, I prefer mac OS but at the end of the day im not going to use Mac OS because I like it if the hardware doesnt fit my needs.

So ye there you go, its a really sad time to be a mac fan. Been using macs for 20 years and have had to move on because apple refuses to offer what many of us need.

I go round and round in circles looking at the product line but all of them are compromised in some way. Be it throttling, incompatibility for the price, reliability, having to spend more money on external Raids or a eGPU when it should be in the box under the desk!

Hate to say it but for any intensive work the mac isnt the go to anymore. Even the iMac pro... its AMD graphics doesnt solve the problem. The price to performance densest make sence and apple had left all its software alternatives in the cold. People dont take the tech seriously anymore, metal for example.

I took my lightroom library to try out with the new iMac pro and got it all booted and the develop module was laggy as, using 50mp raw files it felt no faster in actual use than my 2010 mac pro. It was faster to import and export but the actual performance was poor.

Simply because of that 5k display everytime you make an adjustment it has to redraw 15mp. It took 3-4 seconds to render a sharp image when zoomed to 100%. Editing 500 images that would add an hour to your workload that if you only zoom in once per image.

The funny thing was the apple tech was blown away with how poor the performance was.

Just no acceptable for a 5k machine.

#FEDUP.

 

[Poki]

Your missing the point. £700 is a good chunk toward another product. If you buying this specifically for gaming the mac is the wrong platform and the bootcamp drivers are rubbish. They would do what any sane person would do and for 2-300 more build a dedicated gaming rig which will perform far better with better drivers.

If your want the best of both worlds why buy a mid range, the 580 is a decent card but its not worth £700 over say a 560 in a 15" macbook pro... especially when your loosing 20% with TB3, its probably not far off the difference between the two in the first place. The only products you can use eGPUs are 2016 products and above anything with TB3 "NATIVELY" or approved by Apple.

So that leaves you with the 2017 iMac, 2017 iMac Pro and 2016-17 Macbook pro line.

Im sorry but unless you are absolutely dedicated and have more money than sense, anyone is going to look at another product entirely, which most people with serious needs have. Many pros have moved over the whole line up is a joke and there are band aids everywhere.

The under 15" macbook pro line is a complete sham, the high end 13 is £2400 with a dual core i7 16gbs 512 ssd and a integrated graphics card... £2400 what exactly are you getting for your money there? You can literally get the same spec for £1450 from Dell and guess what you could add your eGPU for less than just the macbook itself. Mind blown.

The 15" is £200 more and you get dedicated graphics a quad 16gbs and 512gb ssd. Standard. Even so the Dell XPS 15 is £1000 less for the same spec... Again you could add a high end and an eGPU for those prices. Oh and you get a 1060 with the dell...

The 13"s are so expensive and they arent fast and are by no means close to a pro product at all. The i7 12" macbook comes within 10% of a apples highest pre built macbook pro that how not pro it is. So for a 13" with a mid range card you would be happy to spend £3100... absolutely bonkers.

So honestly who is the market for these?

Very Very few its stupidly niche and a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

The new Intel Vega chipsets, i really cant understand why this hasn't happend before. It should be inbuilt with integrated graphics so you can choose between the two for power consumption.

The other big fat elephant in the room is that the AMD cards are only any good with Apple software and guess what apart from two products they are out of the game, FCP and Logic. Adobe CC is where it is, its an industry standard and NVIDIA cards are where its at.

At the end of the day, ye the adobe products arent written or optimized well, but you can get a machine that gets around this issue and build something specifically for what you are doing. This never used to be the case apple made the exact product creative pros needed now they dont and havent since the 2012 Mac Pro. There is a reason they are panicking real pros are leaving by the boat load.

Even in 2010-12 the pros were stupidly slow in terms of updates and the tech was old, the standard configs... 3gbs ram when it could max at 128gbs... it was just cheap so it was hard to swallow then.

The agency I work for used to use mac pros and they moved to dell workstations because guess what you could buy them! The 2013 mac pro wasnt of use, PCI cards were needed and TB is not a replacement. So at the end of the day im not surprised Adobe arent that bothered about the mac, it only has 10% market share and shrinking and many pros have had no choice but to move on.

So basically what im saying is you can spend £700 on the eGPU and it wont make a difference. I bought a RX 580 for my Mac Pro and lightroom, premier, after effects etc etc no difference what so ever. LOL

So this just makes the whole point moot.

You could say oh well you dont get the mac, well the newest macs are the least reliable with ports that make life harder, there is no up gradable components so unless you BTO its a disposable product.

You dont get the polish, fair.

You dont get Mac OS, but again the last 3 iterations have been full of bugs, super slow and really not polished at all. The other moot point is all software is multiplatform now, you just download and its exactly the same.

Windows is actually not bad, I prefer mac OS but at the end of the day im not going to use Mac OS because I like it if the hardware doesnt fit my needs.

So ye there you go, its a really sad time to be a mac fan. Been using macs for 20 years and have had to move on because apple refuses to offer what many of us need.

I go round and round in circles looking at the product line but all of them are compromised in some way. Be it throttling, incompatibility for the price, reliability, having to spend more money on external Raids or a eGPU when it should be in the box under the desk!

Hate to say it but for any intensive work the mac isnt the go to anymore. Even the iMac pro... its AMD graphics doesnt solve the problem. The price to performance densest make sence and apple had left all its software alternatives in the cold. People dont take the tech seriously anymore, metal for example.

I took my lightroom library to try out with the new iMac pro and got it all booted and the develop module was laggy as, using 50mp raw files it felt no faster in actual use than my 2010 mac pro. It was faster to import and export but the actual performance was poor.

Simply because of that 5k display everytime you make an adjustment it has to redraw 15mp. It took 3-4 seconds to render a sharp image when zoomed to 100%. Editing 500 images that would add an hour to your workload that if you only zoom in once per image.

The funny thing was the apple tech was blown away with how poor the performance was.

Just no acceptable for a 5k machine.

#FEDUP.

I couldn‘t disagree more. A separate gaming PC needs lots of space. Even if you build it in a mini ITX chassis, you need a monitor, a keyboard and speakers. With the MacBook Pro, you just need a tiny box to make it a very capable gaming machine. Yes, a gaming PC does perform better, but not everyone needs every game to run at ultra settings 4k HDR at 144 fps. Space is a very valuable resource nowadays. Also, a MacBook Pro + eGPU is infinitely more portable when you‘re hanging out at a friends place, playing some Starcraft or Dota, or even for the occasional lan party. Bootcamp drivers might not be great, but you can use some drivers from the community which work quite well. Let alone all the games optimized for macOS.

And you do get faster GPU acceleration for your workflow too, in a single machine, without the need to buy a €2500 iMac and make space for it to boot.

And you do know that there are ways to oütimize performance when editing, right? You don‘t need the full resolution when editing a large number of photos, you can simply use smart previews at a quarter of that.

 

[tomscott1988]

I wont argue with you, we obviously have different ideas of what performance is. Sounds like your spreading yourself thin instead of using more suitable gear.

That is with lightroom being optimized with smart previews etc

 

[Poki]

I wont argue with you, we obviously have different ideas of what performance is. Sounds like your spreading yourself thin instead of using more suitable gear.

That is with lightroom being optimized with smart previews etc

Not sure why you feel the need to attack me and my choices. I'm a professional graphic designer for many years now (professional as in: earning 90%+ of my income by doing it), and I know which amount of power I need. Why should I buy much larger, less power efficient and more expensive components just so that I don't have to optimize my workflow at all? And by the way, I'm not using Lightroom for RAW development, that software is far too slow - I'm using Capture One exclusively. Same with InDesign - I could work with production quality display settings with more powerful gear, but I don't consider this an advantage for the vast majority of design work.

Same thing with gaming. An external RX580 is more than powerful enough that you can actually play any game out there today in pretty nice settings, and probably continue to do so in the next few years. No reason to go all out for a 1080 Ti there.

3D Render work is the only thing where more power can actually mean the difference between waiting hours or weeks for a rendering to finish. However, for that, you can easily use networked render farms, either your own, the ones of your company, or even cloud servers.

 

[Queen6]

There is a reason they are panicking real pros are leaving by the boat load.

#FEDUP.

Absolutely, even the most ardent Apple fans I know are moving off the Mac for their professional needs. Anyone can see that Apple is not remotely interested in it's professional audience, nor has it been for an age. Apple only wants the "Pro" aspect to make it's base consumer's to feel better about their overpriced purchase's. Thing is, the fewer professional's on the platform the less inclined serious developers are going to be to waste time & money on a platform that is going nowhere in the professional realm, an act in progress...

Apple may be panicking now? Companies and independent professional's do not switch platforms without due consideration, nor are they likely to return to Apple given it's track record of lack lustre hardware solely designed to wow the base consumer with tricks & bells and permanent Beta OS. Apple has moved from a company of innovation to a company of excuses, beyond disappointing.

Mac's are nice to own, however if you rely on your hardware for a living that can only go so far. Many crossed that threshold some time ago, best described as an exodus people have just had enough of Apple and it's inability to deliver. Right now is a great time to own a PC the technology is really opening up, the Mac further diluted with each iteration...

Q-6

 

[RJ2010115]

I couldn‘t disagree more. A separate gaming PC needs lots of space. Even if you build it in a mini ITX chassis, you need a monitor, a keyboard and speakers. With the MacBook Pro, you just need a tiny box to make it a very capable gaming machine. Yes, a gaming PC does perform better, but not everyone needs every game to run at ultra settings 4k HDR at 144 fps. Space is a very valuable resource nowadays. Also, a MacBook Pro + eGPU is infinitely more portable when you‘re hanging out at a friends place, playing some Starcraft or Dota, or even for the occasional lan party. Bootcamp drivers might not be great, but you can use some drivers from the community which work quite well. Let alone all the games optimized for macOS.

And you do get faster GPU acceleration for your workflow too, in a single machine, without the need to buy a €2500 iMac and make space for it to boot.

And you do know that there are ways to oütimize performance when editing, right? You don‘t need the full resolution when editing a large number of photos, you can simply use smart previews at a quarter of that.

Egpu's on apple laptops need a separate monitor, AFAIK and as such you would need also a keyboard and mouse, as you really cant have the macbook open and looking at a monitor.

Even on Bootcamp it's a pain to use the internal monitor because of the integrated graphics causing all sorts of mayem.

 

[Poki]

Egpu's on apple laptops need a separate monitor, AFAIK and as such you would need also a keyboard and mouse, as you really cant have the macbook open and looking at a monitor.

Even on Bootcamp it's a pain to use the internal monitor because of the integrated graphics causing all sorts of mayem.

You do not need an external monitor, you just lose some bandwith when using the internal monitor due to the need to copy the draw data to the iGPU. With mid-range GPUs like the RX580, you don‘t loose too much compared to using an external monitor at gaming scenarios.

Actually, when using the dGPU in a 15“ MBP, the process of copying the draw data to the iGPU is exactly the same, only the bandwith is larger.

 

[han_del_]

The under 15" macbook pro line is a complete sham, the high end 13 is £2400 with a dual core i7 16gbs 512 ssd and a integrated graphics card... £2400 what exactly are you getting for your money there? You can literally get the same spec for £1450 from Dell and guess what you could add your eGPU for less than just the macbook itself. Mind blown.

The 13"s are so expensive and they arent fast and are by no means close to a pro product at all. The i7 12" macbook comes within 10% of a apples highest pre built macbook pro that how not pro it is...

So honestly who is the market for these?

...This never used to be the case apple made the exact product creative pros needed now they dont and havent since the 2012 Mac Pro. There is a reason they are panicking real pros are leaving by the boat load.

Even in 2010-12 the pros were stupidly slow in terms of updates and the tech was old, the standard configs... 3gbs ram when it could max at 128gbs... it was just cheap so it was hard to swallow then.
#FEDUP.

I come to these Mac forums only every few years when I begin thinking about buying a new notebook. Every time I have come here, I see the same arguments by fed-up pro users: Apple has gone to sh_t, their products are a joke, their specs are a bigger joke, it's all overpriced junk, the company isn't what it used to be, Windows-based systems are winning, professionals are leaving Apple in droves--basically everything is always going down the drain at Apple. Yet Apple's still here. The last time I visited these forums and read those arguments was when I got my last notebook in 2011. Apple has only grown by leaps and bounds since then.

The fact is that Apple makes excellent products for people like me: the average consumer. Are they a bit overpriced? I would say, yes. But when I have gone the cheaper route with HP and Dell notebooks I have gotten burned. One of my Windows-based notebooks got a virus and became unusable, and the other had a catastrophic motherboard failure in under two years. Did I save any money by leaving Apple? Nope. So I came back. The truth is that I've never had an Apple product die on me, at least not before the point where I had already upgraded to another Apple product.

Sometimes I will be at Best Buy or Costco and look at the comparably priced Windows laptops. I will pick them up. Turn them around. Get a feel for them. The truth is, they don't feel as well put together, as premium and solid to me as the 13" MBP I just got. Do the Windows-based notebooks often have better specs for the money? Yes. But guess what? For what I do on a notebook, I don't need those extra specs. The extra power will just go to waste. All this quad-core stuff is just crazy when you take your average (non-gaming) notebook user in mind. I got the base 13" with only 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD because I know I won't need anything more than that. I usually only open one or two applications at time. I don't leave gazillions of tabs open. I don't do memory intensive graphics work. Basically, I work using Pages and Safari. I store everything on my external drive or in the cloud. And by the time I feel like the computer is getting a little slow it'll be time to upgrade to a new one anyway. The only qualms I have are with the new keyboard, which I hear can be unreliable.

But, in general, happy Apple customer here.

 

[tomscott1988]

I come to these Mac forums only every few years when I begin thinking about buying a new notebook. Every time I have come here, I see the same arguments by fed-up pro users: Apple has gone to sh_t, their products are a joke, their specs are a bigger joke, it's all overpriced junk, the company isn't what it used to be, Windows-based systems are winning, professionals are leaving Apple in droves--basically everything is always going down the drain at Apple. Yet Apple's still here. The last time I visited these forums and read those arguments was when I got my last notebook in 2011. Apple has only grown by leaps and bounds since then.

The fact is that Apple makes excellent products for people like me: the average consumer. Are they a bit overpriced? I would say, yes. But when I have gone the cheaper route with HP and Dell notebooks I have gotten burned. One of my Windows-based notebooks got a virus and became unusable, and the other had a catastrophic motherboard failure in under two years. Did I save any money by leaving Apple? Nope. So I came back. The truth is that I've never had an Apple product die on me, at least not before the point where I had already upgraded to another Apple product.

Sometimes I will be at Best Buy or Costco and look at the comparably priced Windows laptops. I will pick them up. Turn them around. Get a feel for them. The truth is, they don't feel as well put together, as premium and solid to me as the 13" MBP I just got. Do the Windows-based notebooks often have better specs for the money? Yes. But guess what? For what I do on a notebook, I don't need those extra specs. The extra power will just go to waste. All this quad-core stuff is just crazy when you take your average (non-gaming) notebook user in mind. I got the base 13" with only 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD because I know I won't need anything more than that. I usually only open one or two applications at time. I don't leave gazillions of tabs open. I don't do memory intensive graphics work. Basically, I work using Pages and Safari. I store everything on my external drive or in the cloud. And by the time I feel like the computer is getting a little slow it'll be time to upgrade to a new one anyway. The only qualms I have are with the new keyboard, which I hear can be unreliable.

But, in general, happy Apple customer here.

Maybe for your uses but you aren’t relying on it to get your work done quickly and efficiently to then be able to spend more time with family etc.

The actual fact is that since 2011 non of the macs have changed at all apart from using more up to date technology it’s the same use case when there are plenty of avenues they could travel.

Same with software it’s got less support and Apple has stopped making their own great software.

I will probably always use a Mac with your use case I love my MacBook for casual use and love the look and feel of the OS.

But for work it’s getting more and more difficult to pay the extra and not benefit from it. I think the machines have become far less reliable too, every other day it’s keyboard issues, battery expansion and failure etc etc

My MacBook has just been in for its second display replacement in a year...

It just feels like they are stretched in many ways and the Mac just isn’t that important. I really hope they turn it around.

I suppose the argument is for me in the short term what do you do? At the end of the day work still needs to be done.