A lot of the negative comments wrt cost are versions of this: what a ripoff, you can get better components for way less money in some other PC and/or if you build your own.
That's nice but it's not Apple's market. Apple's market is not other PCs, and it's not build your own.
This criticism of Apple has been around ever since Apple has been around (1970s). While the criticism has basically stayed the same since then, Apple has not stayed the same, they have grown. Their products have improved. Their market share has grown and it continues to grow.
Some people pay more money for a Benz, and other people say Hey that's a ripoff, I can buy a Toyota that gets me to work and back, just like your expensive Benz, for half the price! What a ripoff!
Apple is not in the business of making inexpensive PCs (and accepting all of the tradeoffs therein). The trends show that more and more people are willing to spend their money on Apple products.
They are clearly doing something right.
If you are enraged by their success, perhaps you are not their target market. And that is ok.
Some of the harshest criticisms of Apple have been coming from diehard fans in Apple's market niche, such as Marco Arment. See: the Touch Bar, the keyboards: https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-pro
The worst part about this, is Apple will throw their hands up in the air and say "See? The PC Business is dying. We need to double down on making Macbooks more like iPads and focus on the iPhone business" Rather than realising it's because their new Macbook computer lineup is a burning dumpster fire that is almost universally reviled.
This. Diehard fan - at least previously, but times are a changing.
Let alone the OS feeling less polished, the removal of time remaining on battery and other user hostile changes, the touch bar being poorly thought out net loss (e.g. the fact that you can’t adjust the brightness so in low light typing, it messes with your eyes), I’ve had to warranty 3 MacBook pros in the past year. I’d never had to warranty an apple product before.
I don’t want another iPad or iPhone. I want a laptop that just works and I’m willing to pay for it. Please somebody deliver that, since apple isn’t chasing it anymore.
You need to get out if your bubble. The only complaint I’ve geard from literally hundreds of actual users about the new MBPs is they don’t like the shallow key travel on the new keyboards.
I do, but I’ve always preferred less travel.
Outside of the moaning online bubble (like HN) the MBP is a raging success.
Leaving for what though? I have mostly the same sentiment as you, but find just about everything else on the market has some level of design insanity that provokes frustration with use. It's literally out of the pot, into the fire....
I have owned every single 15" MBP since they started using intel. Each one was better then the last - they were great - best laptops you can buy. This most recent one is the first one that is worse then the previous one.
Longer key travel is helpful for almost everyone (for accuracy, speed, comfort, and avoiding injury). Ideal is probably at least 1.5mm before actuation, and at least 1mm after actuation. Maybe more. No recent laptop keyboard comes anywhere close to a truly fast and accurate keyboard, because the space constraints are simply too tight to fit in a mechanism optimized for ergonomics. All the best keyswitches are from <1990. They had many small moving parts and were very expensive to produce relative to cheaper alternatives like rubber domes.
(Laptop keyboards also don’t have the space to properly raise the keycap tops on keys in further rows, because they don’t have space for it; this makes reaching for the top 2 rows of the keyboard noticeably slower and less comfortable)
The best keyswitches actuate about halfway through the stroke, have a distinct drop in force at the actuation point, and have a significant mechanical bounce to them on the upstroke, launching your fingers up toward the next keypress. My all-time favorites are Alps “plate spring” switches used on certain Japanese IBM computers and some IBM luggables in the late 1980s (I can type about 20–30 wpm faster on these than on any laptop keyboard). You can also get this effect (with a very different overall feel) from Topre switches (still produced), or from IBM beam spring keyboards (from the 1970s). Some other keyboard enthusiasts have different preferences, e.g. for simple springs with no additional tactile mechanism (“linear switches”) optionally with a clicker or buzzer to give audio feedback of key actuation. Such switches are slower to type on than a snappier alternative, but some people prefer the feeling.
Nobody should be hitting any type of keys “way too hard”. You want to use just enough force to actuate the key and not push the key hard all the way through the bottom of the stroke. This is much easier to judge when the switch has relatively dramatic tactile feedback and a lot of post-actuation travel which ramps up in resistance toward the bottom.
What you’re describing are literally the most horrible keyboards I have the displeasure to use.
For example: the IBM Model M is one of the single worst typing experiences imo. The only way to type on that thing is use about 5x the force I normally do.
No wonder our industry is plagued by RSI - it lionizes horrible things like this due to misguided nostalgia.
The IBM Model M is a great typing keyboard after you get used to it, but you are right that it is on the stiffer side. The previous Model F keyboards took about 10 grams less to actuate, and are widely preferred. I find even those a bit stiffer than my taste. Neither of those keyboards has my preferred feedback or force curve, though I don't mind typing on them. The biggest objection I've ever heard to either is the noise.
In any event, actuation force is an orthogonal concern to travel distance, tactile feedback, post-actuation force curve, upstroke bounce, keycap shape, etc.
Relatively fewer people typing on a such IBM keyboards got RSI compared to other keyboards, because the extreme tactile snap makes it very obviously unnecessary to type with much force more than barely required to actuate them.
But the cause of RSI is largely down to posture and typing style more than keyswitch design, though the latter can contribute (the worst are cheap rubber dome boards from the 90s-2000s, which often force a hard smashing typing style). We would have much less RSI if computer users kept their wrists straighter, pulled the keyboard closer, tilted it parallel to their forearms, and stopped slouching as much.
Could not disagree more. The touchbar & Touch ID alone make it better (and I prefer they keyboard too, which imo is the best laptop keyboard I’ve used in my 26 years of using them).
Could it have a slightly better power/price ratio? Yes. But it’s so much better than my pervious model MBP it’s rediculous (previous was two releases behind but one physical revision).
May I ask what kind of work you do where you're meeting hundreds of actual MBP users? I am part of a big digital nomad community and the new MBP has received tons of criticism, and I believe rightfully so.
Well, I'm part of the "digital nomad community" as well, and don't have many complaints, nor have heard tens of other people I know with one complaining, except for: the lack of convenience with the reduced port types.
I don't mind the shallow key travel, but the unreliability annoys me no end. In 2018, we shouldn't have to deal with keys that stick because a minute quantum of dust worked its way into the mechanism.
These problems are quite common, to the point that if you go to an Apple Store and tell one of the “geniuses” that you have missing (or doubled) key actuations, they’ll knowingly sigh and start filling out the paperwork to send your laptop off for a keyboard replacement. Obviously “quite common” is not the same as “at least one person in every office will run into this”.
The problem is not whether your environment is pristine. The mechanism is just unreliable. Some people end up with keys not working after a few weeks of limited and careful use. My guess is that the tiny parts relatively easily get into some kind of subtle misalignment.
The basic design is sound enough. I think with another few generations of engineering tweaks they can get these keyboards working as expected. In the mean time it’s pretty frustrating though.
I had two sticky keys after about a year, and I'm not particularly dirty. They do even officially recommended you buy compressed air for cleaning, which I've never heard of before this keyboard.
Oh, well, that makes sense. I thought you meant something more serious.
I’ve seen issues like that with literally every laptop or regular pc keyboard since the 80s. Regular maintenance of a computer (any one) includes gentle cleaning of debris like that.
You see, the problem is most of those who complain are the old time Mac users. Old as in when Apple was dying, and we were still buying Apple, until Steve Jobs came back and until Apple made iPod and later iPhone.
Most of these MBP users are what I call new users, they are new to the Apple ecosystem. Mainly pulled in by the iPhone hollow effect. That is why Mac as a segment is still doing so well, there are lot of new users coming in, especially from China.
The sales data doesn't tell how angry some of these old Apple users are. If it wasn't a friend of someone within the Apple executive circle told them how they were planning to leave the Mac ecosystem because the current Mac Pro didn't work, they will never have known they had a problem.
It took 2 years for Apple to release a new product after they knew its has problem. Once Steve Jobs knew how many people hated the Apple Mouse, they had news and Interview saying they knew people didn't like it, and they are working on it.
The new Apple now, it is coming up to 5 years and Mac Pro hasn't seen a update.
While the PC business isn’t dying, sales are certainly in decline, and have been since 2012 or so. A 5% decline for Apple isn’t astonishing in context.
Plenty of Apple diehards have complaints about the iMac Pro, and Apple's market share has not 'continued to grow' as the original poster claimed. It's hovered between 3-8% of the PC market for many years.
So where are these "plenty of Mac die hards"? All of the reviews I've seen from the well known Apple bloggers and podcasters have been quite positive about it. It's not like any of them hold back criticizing Apple or Macs in general.
That's a single company, having a 3-8% of a huge market with hundreds of players and built-it-yourself options.
And that 3-8% market is an 70-90% of the high end expensive market, and commands 90% of the profits -- more profits than the next 3-4 players combined.
Which isn't to say that the Mac business is as good as it could be—surely it isn't, and they have several models they need to address with updates. I don't really like the Touch Bar. But the Mac is doing fine.
It's important to note that Apple had 13 weeks in the quarter that they just reported on, while, in the year-before quarter, they had 14 weeks. This is a difference of just over 7%. That means that Apple sold more Macs per day (and generated more revenue per day) this year than in the year-ago quarter.
Can you compare that to other PC manufacturers? Otherwise it's a meaningless number-we know desktop sales, esp at the super high end, are down overall.
I was just trying to give some context beyond a single quarter. The highly-criticized devices have been out for a long time and have been good sellers. They've clearly got some work to do overall, though. I just don't think the Mac is in some historically-unique bad spot (not saying you said that), which one would surely think if they just went by blog posts.
I agree, they're in a bit of a drought with respect to what their core consumers wants.
I'm still using my 2010 15" MPB (i5 duo core). When I was browsing for a computer at the time it was a product I could see myself using for a decade. I hope that turns out to be true--it works great for what I need to do. Their recent updates have made me shrug and think, "meh, I can wait." If I'm going to shell out $2k+ for a new computer it better be damn near perfect.
Not true. Apple sold 5.112M Macs units in 13 weeks recently and 5.374M Macs in 14 weeks a year ago. That is 0.393M/week recently vs. 0.384M/week a year ago.
Mac sales are down 5% in Q1 2018, after being up 25% in Q4 2017. Its hardly a convinceable narrative that market share is steadily decreasing, because it isn't (incidentally, Apple moved up the ranks to #4 PC maker because the whole PC market took a dive).
Some of the harshest criticisms of Apple have been coming from diehard fans in Apple's market niche
My first Mac was an LC475 upgraded with a real '040 to run MATLAB, back in oh, '94 I think. Also had a second-hand SE30 to run Word 5.1 (still the best version). Next up was a Power Mac 7600 when I needed more grunt to run FORTRAN code. Amazing machine, the price/performance was incredible. It was faster than a DEC Alpha 3000 at a fraction of the price! A few more both desktop and laptop between then and now. So I think I count as a long-term Mac user and loyal customer.
My current machines are a 2008 MBP and a 2014 Mac Mini. Apple simply haven't given me any compelling reason to upgrade, in fact have pushed me to offload my compute needs to Azure. Now that I have made that leap, I'm actually not particularly interested in a real Mac Pro anymore, I just don't need it. I can't be alone, and this will bite Apple in the ass at some point.
Who's buying the current MBP then? Not professional users, just people looking to flash the brand. Which is fine, but the fashion crowd is fickle. Apple has chosen to court them rather than 20+ year customers. And that's OK too, it's their business to run as they see fit. But a third thing that is fine is for people to post their opinions of it...
Perhaps your definition of professional is too narrow. I'm a professional writer (and hobbyist coder). I used a MacBook Air for four years before upgrading to a MacBook Pro.
My reasons for upgrading to a MacBook Pro were: (i) the better screen (which matters when you're looking at it eight hours a day), (ii) improved performance compared to the Air or the MacBook, (iii) the ability to drive a couple of high-definition external screens, and (iv) all the above on on a portable device that runs MacOS. Number iv is probably the most important reason: I prefer MacOS.
If you construe "professional" as someone with high CPU and GPU processing demands, then perhaps I don't count. But that's a tiny market: most professionals who choose a MacBook choose it for the same reasons I did.
Number iv is probably the most important reason: I prefer MacOS.
Yes, me too, so I find myself in a weird no-mans-land - I don't want to switch to another platform, and I don't want to buy anything in the recent line-up. I will be forced to when my Mini becomes unsupported for OS updates, then I will spend as little as I can to get back in the game, because they have already pushed me into the mindset and workflow of offloading the heavy lifting. But offer me a machine as radical my old 7600 was relative to what I had previously and relative to the rest of the market, and I'll jump at it.
Nobody cares if you are happy with your old model; maybe there just isn't any reason for you to upgrade at all.
But for people that want a new laptop, the MBP is the best machine available by many metrics, especially the screen - it's finally bright enough I can work outside on a sunny day.
I don't see how former fans can't be haters and in either case it's unreasonable. PC's became good enough for most common tasks years ago and a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. The technology is not quite ready to go the next step, like for example worthwhile VR.
You didn't even explain what you want from Apple. Is it about performance or some groundbreaking new feature?
I bought an MBP last year, because I needed a new computer and I still think the Macs are the best for my needs, in both software and hardware. And I am most definitely a professional user.
Do I wish it had a few more ports and a quieter keyboard? Yes!
Did that ever seriously threaten my purchase? No!
I don't think anybody who wants to just show off the logo is going to buy an MBP over a straight MB, which is lighter and (IMO) better looking.
But is that even "a thing" with computers in 2018?
I don't know where you are but in the UK there is a TV ad suggesting a MBP is the ideal machine for parent to buy a first-year undergrad.
The prioritization of thinness above everything else - when there is already the Macbook Air for that market segment - is a further example. I'll buy a brand new MBP as soon as there is a compelling reason to replace my 10 year old one. That just hasn't happened yet.
> I'll buy a brand new MBP as soon as there is a compelling reason to replace my 10 year old one. That just hasn't happened yet.
If you're satisfied with the performance of a Core 2 Duo, still able to get fresh batteries, too old for your eyes to benefit from a Retina display, and don't want to shave off 25-40% of the weight, then why do you expect that there ever could be a compelling reason to replace your current MBP? If you don't want anything more from your computer, then how is anyone supposed to entice you with a computer that does more?
My work machine is a 2017 MBP; previously a 2013 one, and before that 2008 or so. For my usecase (programmer), it’s so much better than the 2008 one it’s not even funny, and also substantially better than the 2013 one (in particular, the SSD is much faster, and the battery holds up better for me). I’m a professional user. I’m not really seeing the problem (for my usecase).
Edit: Also, I know people love to complain about how thin it’s gotten, but as someone who has to drag it to meetings a lot, I kind of appreciate the thinness (along with the one-port connection when I get it back to the desk).
As someone who just did a PC build along these lines, and has an 18-core iMac Pro arriving this week, I can also say that this simply isn’t true. It’s more expensive than a hand build, but the Apple Tax is the lowest it has ever been. $14k for a 4tb hardware raid0, hardware crypto pci flash, 128GB ECC ram, 18 core Xeon, 5k wide gamut display, and 64gb Vega is not bad when the equivalent hand build is well over $10k (and it comes in an ugly box, even if you get the nicest ugly box available on the market).
The Apple Tax used to be pushing 100%. Now it’s somewhere around 15-20%. It’s amazing. It’s the reason I got the iMac Pro, despite having a booting Hackintosh OS on very close to the same hardware. It’s just not that much of a premium anymore.
PS: anyone want to buy a PC? it’s in a really nice case and has lots of ram.
I don't think very many people think their products have improved. I still buy Apple but am increasingly frustrated by their design choices in the last few years.
I think both you and the home-builders are correct. One interesting question for home-builders to answer then is this one, why haven't mainstream PC makers build competitive systems for a much smaller price to consumers?
Sounds great, but I still have trouble with the idea of a $10,000 machine that is permanently married to one monitor and unexpandable. If I'm spending that much on a computer I want PCI slots. Especially now that it's common to keep a desktop for 5+ years.
I agree, and I'm eager to see what we get in the rumored "new Mac Pro tower" that is supposed to be announced some time this year.
Still, the iMac Pro can be considered a good buy if you do like many Apple users and sell it after a few years for a hefty percentage of the purchase price, using the funds to offset its replacement. It's how I progressed from a PowerBook Pismo G3 -> eMac G4 -> Mac mini G4 -> two Intel Mac minis (2006 & 2011) -> Mac Pro tower, only keeping the first gen Intel Mac mini when I moved away from the platform for daily use. Because I recovered at least half the purchase price of each successive unit (again minus the first Intel mini) I was able to upgrade for more or less the same cost as a comparable PC workstation.
Conversely, good luck selling a used custom built PC for pennies on the dollar even if you used top of the line components. Even name brand, quality PC workstations don't have a healthy used market; eBay is full of 2016 era corporate machines that were $800 new, now going for $200 or less.
> I still have trouble with the idea of a $10,000 machine that is permanently married to one monitor and unexpandable. If I'm spending that much on a computer I want PCI slots.
Well lucky for you: you can add four 4K external displays in addition to the built-in 5K monitor. And you have a PCIe bus coming straight out the back which you can use to plug in GPUs, drives etc.
That being said the machine may not be right for you, but a big corporate shop is probably quite happy to have a bunch of identical machines it can swap out instead of fixing them in situ, so getting the user up and running faster.
Supposedly they learned from the "trash can" debacle and have something more cheese-grater-esque in the pipeline for later this year.
Sounds like this iMac Pro is not for either of us. I'm going the other way: I develop all my code in Emacs on a MacBook (not "Pro") and when I want to crunch, do the crunching on a cluster on my network. I don't even need the 10G ethernet the Mac Pro has, and it wouldn't be fast enough to do the crunching I need anyway. Would I benefit from a faster machine? Sure, but I don't want to carry even a macbook pro any more -- this ultraportable is so tiny I can take it anywhere.
Doubtful. They’ve been going in this direction for a long time, and their results seem to indicate that there’s a huge market of people who just don’t care much about modularity, expandability, etc.
I buy on average 50 Workstations a year for my business (FTR Dell 5800 series). Do you know how many get upgraded in their 3 year lifecycle? None. Not a single machine. I also know that others in a similar position are in the same boat. Extensibility in the Workstation market is a canard. The requirement comes from a hand full of enthusiasts at home that feel the need to have a maxed out workstation class pc for editing photos in Lightroom.
I also thought that before the iMac Pro was released, but now I'm not so sure.
Most top professionals don't actually upgrade they machines often, because you usually want new everything, and saving a few $1000's every year isn't worth the hassle.
In my mind, there are two main advantages - one is that you can save money by buying only the capacity you need with an option to increase the power later if you need it; and the other is that you can extend the lifespan of the system by upgrading it after a few years instead of buying a new one.
Both of these things don't actually get you a better workstation - they get you cost savings. If you max out the system initially, and when you need something more then replace it with a brand new one, then you get better results, though at a higher cost.
I'd say that the market of $13000 workstations is one where you've already stated that you don't care about savings that much, and you're willing to pay a premium for a better workstation.
Enthusiast home users tend to care about expandability, since they want maximum power at a limited price, and would be willing to spend some time and hassle to save, say, $2000. However, they're not the target market of the premium pre-packaged workstations; they're less likely to pay the "Apple tax" and more likely to build something with comparable power cheaper. On the other hand, companies buying $13000 workstations would rather pay $2000 extra to save time and hassle. If they had a decision "upgrade vs replace" they're going to replace anyway, so the ability to upgrade is literally worthless as they're not going to use it.
> Though I haven't mentioned it, if you look back through the various benchmark results, you'll see that the 18-core iMac Pro shows no disadvantage for single-core performance, despite running at a lower clock speed (2.3GHz/4.3GHz) than the 10-core iMac Pro (3.0GHz/4.5GHz). Often times, the price of scaling a CPU architecture to more cores is a loss of single-core performance, but no such penalty seems to exist here. The 18-core iMac Pro brings 8 more cores to the table on the high end with no loss of performance on the low end.
I remember this being an issue on the older Mac Pros; it's interesting that this isn't an issue anymore. What's the reason behind it? Better thermals? Turbo Boost?
Turbo boost, yeah. Modern Intel chips generally have a much higher clock cap if only a core or two is active. I think to an extent this should be true of the 2013 Mac Pro, too, but less so for the cheesegrater, which used much older chips.
I wonder if per-core performance is impacted if every core is being blasted. I imagine most benchmarks do single-core runs by running one process of work, and do multi-core runs by maxing out the cores and then totaling the performance. Do any benchmarks max out the cores, but only report the performance of one process of work?
>I wonder if per-core performance is impacted if every core is being blasted.
Yes.
>I imagine most benchmarks do single-core runs by running one process of work, and do multi-core runs by maxing out the cores and then totaling the performance.
Aggregate throughput, yes.
>Do any benchmarks max out the cores, but only report the performance of one process of work?
Sort of. You can get that figure by dividing the aggregate throughput by the # cores. Sometimes it is reported explicitly.
But it is an interesting point - why does the bigger chip perform better with a lower turbo clock speed? Does it dissipate heat better & so is capable of sustaining boost for longer?
Yeah the Hz race is long dead. These days it is all about avoiding cache misses. Perhaps why Intel got egg on their face with Meltdown, as that seems to have all to do with avoiding said misses.
Would love to see a “real world” benchmark involving Lightroom, Photoshop, Camera raw and Premier. I don’t think the target customer of the iMac pros would run CFD on them ;-)
I haven’t seen very much of this in my experience. Most Mac using scientists and engineers I know use a MacBook for email/webrowsig etc. but when they need some serious computation they use an external cluster (which they talk to with their Mac).
That being said I do know one such scientist with the same workflow but who remoted into a Mac Pro, not sure what they are doing now.
Most of the scientists I know do both: interactive work to prove the idea or for moderate sized data sets, and the cluster for when they have stable code and a huge amount of data. Since the capacity of a laptop has steadily increased, the relative ratios have shifted over the years.
I am from a university department with mostly high-end Mac users. But no, we do actual computation on Linux machines. Why? It's the only (reasonable) way to cram capable NVIDIA GPUs, large amounts of memory, large amounts of storage and 32/64 cores in a machine.
For me, the main use of such hardware is to allow running multiple non-lightweight VMs locally.
It would be convenient if I could run machine learning tasks locally, but that's limited to very small models (since it doesn't have an nvidia GPU and AMD hasn't yet done their homework to ensure that common software packages work), so those tasks need a remote server anyway.
I worked in bioinformatics at a Max Planck Institute during my studies, and made good use of a Mac Pro. Some of the tools we used were interactive, such as 3D-modelling. Many other tasks, such as DNA sequence searches (BLAST), just happened to involve datasets that were too large for most notebooks, but manageable with the 32GB or RAM the Mac Pro had.
We did use a compute cluster, but using it drastically reduced the turnaround time during development in my experience.
No, AMD has claimed that tensorflow works for them since 2016 IIRC, but it's not exactly correct.
The main tensorflow branch does not support AMD GPUs at all.
There's a bunch of experimental code by AMD that possibly works in certain conditions, but is neither properly supported nor widely used. For example, there's hiptensorflow which seems to be a TF port stuck on 1.0.1 (TF is now up to 1.5, with many major releases and key changes), not being actively developed (the last commit seems to be at the end of 2017) and core parts of it (ROCm) don't work in OS X (tensorflow as such runs just fine on OSX, just CPU-only, which is a major performance limitation compared to any machine with a good nvidia gpu), and thus are not that relevant for discussing Apple systems.
There are also some OpenCL port efforts, none of which are stable, up to date, and actually usable to get the expected performance improvements. All these projects are interesting, promising, difficult, and their developers deserve all the best, but calling them "Tensorflow has been supported" is an extreme exaggeration, PR vaporware.
Proper support is not there yet. I believe that there are likely ways to jury-rig some code together and run it on AMD hardware, but that's not comparable to the maturity level of these tools on nvidia (essentially, run the install, and it works). AMD still has to do their homework and fulfil their promises. They've spent far too long saying that the software support is coming soon, and now their claims have to be taken with a grain of salt. They can hope that the community will take over effective development a year or two after they do that and people in the ML scene start widely using their hardware, but not earlier. Currently, even if you have a nice AMD GPU, it's cheaper to just buy another high-end GPU from nvidia rather than spend a week of engineer-time to possibly maybe get their shoddy software to do what you need.
Sorry, this is not just a box that you tick off. The CUDA code paths in Tensorflow have been optimized and stabilized for years. Why would anyone drop 5000-10000 Euro on a Tesla-class GPU and get a subpar experience when you can just buy NVIDIA?
AMD has a lot more work to do in this area before people will seriously consider them in GPU computing.
10 years ago was 2008 : pretty much every machine had multiple cores then, except perhaps low end laptops.
20 years ago in 1998 SMP (before we decided the word "core" sounded nice) was quite common, certainly in machines used by developers and graphics designers.
30 years ago in 1988 SMP in microcomputers was uncommon, but it was very common in minicomputers and mainframes.
Whether software has been written for SMP scaling is quite another thing. Plenty of software written today isn't.
Photoshop is heavily used by pros (i.e. people for whom time = money) and in scientific or medical imaging. It’s had SMP for a long time (I thought going back to the 90s) and has often been one of the first mainstream adopters of new things like SIMD because it’s a measurable boost for many operations.
> CFD tends to be a good real-world benchmark...If this was a car test drive, running CFD would be like showing up at the dealership with three tons of gravel on a trailer and hitching it up.
Ummm...perhaps the author has a different definition of "real-world" than I do?
Unless you’re a photo pro shooting sports or fashion with 50MP RAW images at 10 FPS then picking and correcting on a deadline. Then yes you do.
Top three consumers of CPU and IOPS on my Mac Pro or MacBook Pro: video editing and transcoding, photo triage and conversion, and Kubernetes clusters (minikube+xhyve) doing whatever.
Is anyone running production computational fluid dynamics simulations on a desktop anyway? Seems like something that would get farmed out on an HPC cluster with a couple hundred cores minimum.
Macs retain value. Buy the spec you need, use it for 2-3 years, sell for 70 percent the original value, then buy the newer version. Besides, I highly doubt Intel CPUs are going to massively improve over the next two years since they haven't for the last 5.
But put in the context of _workstation_ prices -- which I guess is what it's sort of in the category of -- check out what a Sun 2 (68010) workstation cost in 1986:
"A color 2/160 with 8Mb of memory, two 71 Mb SCSI disks and 60 Mb 1/4" SCSI tape cost $48,800 (1986 US price list)."
That's $109,766.16 in today's dollars.
Or more modest and perhaps more comparable, an HP 9000 Model 705 PA-RISC workstation (32mhz, HP-UX) in 1991 was priced around $5000. That's $9000ish in today's dollars.
People bought stuff like that back then. Low volume, prestige item, specialized market, and I guess Apple must figure they will still do that now.
Workstation class machines have always been overpriced.
Yea, you know, if I'm doing work that requires 18+ cores of CPU and gobs of RAM, I'm going to pack that beast into a rack (bet I could build a sweet epyc based system with more capability for less than $10k) and connect to it from a laptop/small desktop.
Besides, that thing is going to get hot, and Apple doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to thermal design (see: apple ///)
Arguably it's not the same Apple. I don't see a lot of continuity in approach between the company that brought us the Apple IIe and the company that makes the iPhone.
Both the company that brought the Apple //e and the company that brought the world the iPhone had Steve Jobs in charge and very much went for vertical integration.
I know. This sort of thing is the reason I'm not a mac user anymore. Remember the old PowerMac towers? Expensive, yes, but those things were made to be opened up and upgraded.
Yep, many companies don't upgrade these machines and actually dump them at the end of the warranty. Hacker news actually turned me onto going to ebay to buy used workstations as a pretty good source for inexpensive computers that have Xeons. HP or Dell give you a 3 year warranty, you don't upgrade or change parts because that fucks with warranties, then you dump them onto a reseller. Or, frequently, you actually rented it from HP or Dell for those 3 years, and they are the ones dumping computers onto resellers.
If you make 6+ figures a year off your computer, do you really care if your PC cost 5,000$ instead of 2,000$? Especially if you can write off a large part of that cost?
What does the figure you make from using your computer have to do with its retail value? By that measure Mark Zuckerberg's dorm-room Dell was worth billions.
Many people do work which is time sensitive: processing more per hour or turning around results faster is quite literally money in the bank.
Think of a photographer: if you charge a fixed fee any boost in productivity allows you to take on more clients. If you’re a freelancer at a public event, getting your final photos out quickly might be what decides whether someone buys from you or a competitor.
For a small business that kind of margin is often the difference between making it or failing.
in the grand scheme of things $5000 is not that much money if computer work is your livelihood. Especially considering that if you are a developer, that may be the only equipment or software you have to buy.
Even at a low rate of $100 an hour, I could make that on the side with 50 hours of work.
if your computer is your livelihood, presumably you already have work lined up for those 50 hours using your current hardware. you'd need to be able to bill an extra 50 hours due to the increased productivity from a faster machine to have this not be an impact to your finances. otherwise, it's still an extra expense you need to consider, and for a lot of people, $5k is still a non-trivial amount of money. if computer work is your livelihood, you're likely bringing in income and have regular expenses. adding an extra $5k in to that mix is not something most people will do without moderate consideration.
"I could make that on the side with 50 hours of work." if you're already working full time, fitting in another 50 hours of billable work is non-trivial, and may take months to actually do.
I had a $4000 setup in college in 1992. A Mac LCII with a //e card, 10 MB of RAM, a monitor, a LaserWriter LS and SoftPC.
But let me give you another real world example of how little $5000 is in the grand scheme of things. Last year, my after tax rate as contract to perm was a little over $50 an hour. I easily put in an extra 100 hours in a month.
I’m not going to spend $5000 on the iMac Pro because I don’t need it. But I probably will spend around $3000 on a 27 inch 5K iMac with 32GB of RAM just because that’s what I want and it should last at least 5 years just as a development machine for hobby projects and learning. What would be an extra $2000 if it were going to make me money?
There are around 700 hours in a month. Most people are already "working" (billable/salary/etc) for ~180 of those. Eat/sleep/travel/family/friends/life eats up a lot more. Fitting in a extra 100 hours of anything in a single calendar month will be extremely difficult for most people. If you have the spare time and money, I'm presuming you may be younger and not have a family that you have responsibilities towards (nothing wrong with that, and just an assumption). The majority of heads of households I know - even professionals earning decently - would indicate they have competing interests for $5-$10k on discretionary purchases.
You went from a 'low rate' of $100/hr to $50/hr in your examples?
I get it - $5k isn't a massive crippling amount of money for most western professionals. Most of those professionals would probably want the $10k pimped out version too, and that expense just isn't trivial for most individuals. Larger companies with equipment budgets and whatnot - less of an issue, for sure.
No, I'm neither young nor single. I'm in my mid 40s.
I went from $100 a month - as an independent consultant where you own your own business and the $5000 would be pre-tax to a real world example for me - Earned $80 hour as a W2 contractor where the consulting company gets a cut and pays the employer's part of the taxes. The $50 is after tax.
I'm not saying the extra 100 hours was easy. But I had to do what I had to do and I was willing to do it for the extra money. It's actually somewhat easier for a married person with a supportive spouse to put in extra hours. My one child who is in the house is in high school.
Exactly. In the US it wouldn't save money on VAT but it would be tax deductible as a business expense meaning it's really 50 hours worth of work - not 70 hours like it would be for a personal expense.
That's nice but it's not Apple's market. Apple's market is not other PCs, and it's not build your own.
This criticism of Apple has been around ever since Apple has been around (1970s). While the criticism has basically stayed the same since then, Apple has not stayed the same, they have grown. Their products have improved. Their market share has grown and it continues to grow.
Some people pay more money for a Benz, and other people say Hey that's a ripoff, I can buy a Toyota that gets me to work and back, just like your expensive Benz, for half the price! What a ripoff!
Apple is not in the business of making inexpensive PCs (and accepting all of the tradeoffs therein). The trends show that more and more people are willing to spend their money on Apple products.
They are clearly doing something right.
If you are enraged by their success, perhaps you are not their target market. And that is ok.