Yes, because he does not have an assembly factory. He is just a modder. And it is a trashcan. And parts he used are probably not built to be put inside a trashcan. It is cheaper and he has a compact computer. Maybe it is good enough for him, and he can carry it around easily?
When thinking about the merits of the mod, there aren't any. You can get mini computer cases for cheap, and they would work much, much better than his trashcan. So what we're left with is the "look a trashcan looks like the Mac Pro" joke with a more literal application, which is, as I said, kind of funny. Though who's to say a trash can isn't well designed?
Edit Since the link switched to the original forum post with more pictures: I must say the project was quite impressive and the end result is cool, though I still stand by my original point.
They have some custom pcb motherboard in there, a simple mini-itx one would have to pass through that central column and the ram would be sticking out on the same side.
It's now obvious you are taking this build way too literally. If he wanted a Mac Pro he would have bought one. This build is not cost saving if you figure in the labor to invent every element in the complete unit. He did it as a novelty and an homage. No it not as well build as the real thing.
To be quite honest, I think the new mac pro's design is on the ugly side from an internal standpoint. There are existing standards for things like small form factor graphics interface, like MXM, that seem like they would work much better than apple's variant which requires a rather frail looking connector between the graphics cards and the I/O card. Though I imagine one of the problems there is that it would be much harder for Apple to keep people from purchasing a third-party video card two years down the road when the current boards start getting long in the tooth.
The interesting thing about the Pro is the heat management & power in such a small form factor. I have yet to see a Pro IRL, but reports indicate that it is very quiet for such a powerful machine.
The last tower machine I had years ago was loud and doubled as a room heater in winter. I still see video cards being made that require their own heat sink and fan. Then add all the other standard fans: power supply, CPU (+ heat sink), one or two on the case. You have these huge empty, inefficient boxes.
I really hope Apple brings their heat management knowledge to their other lines.
Why compare a box you had a few years ago to the new Mac Pro? Today you can put amazing performance in mini itx or micro atx cases.[1] Granted Apples custom design still offers some space savings but also zero upgradability. Of course those small standard cases aren't made for xeon CPUs and Dual GPUs, but most people that buy/need powerful workstations do not really care about the size of the thing.
I get things are better now. I type this on a 2013 Macbook Air. This is my main, personal dev machine. I understand the levels of improvement we have achieved.
But Apple has a truly novel design with the new Pro. Even the machine in your link has 1 CPU fan, 1 GPU fan and a power supply fan. And it's still quite empty and not that small. No one except Apple is even trying.
Depends what you mean by upgradability, my main dev and gaming rig is watercooled. It is so silent the only noise detectable is the spindle HDDs.
I can slam in another PCIe SSD RAID next year and hopefully get rid of those too.
The Mac Pro of course can't slam in a PCIe RAID, you have only thunderbolt, which isn't as fast as a 16 lane. You have no ability to choose graphics cards made by third parties, my box just has reference design ones, with ek blocks on them for the cooling. Of course this means changing the graphics card takes 1 hour, then letting it "leak test" in the bathroom for a night. I would still say it's upgradable, but clearly I've traded ease for silence and performance (you can generally get very reliable over clocks with such cooling).
This is why people complain it isn't upgradable. You can't easily put in anything you want, it has to go external, which is fine for some, but abhorrent for others. The options of what you can upgrade are entirely a single vendor lock-in. Some people dislike that. These people (such as myself) like to have a free market of competition and innovation on every component available.
Being able to replace the PSU, GPGPU, 5.25" drives and 3.5" drives is upgradable. Expansion will have to be entirely done through external PCIe chassis, and TB2 is NOT as fast as PCIe3. It's such an inelegant solution and very half-assed.
I don't just want an engineering marvel on my desk. I want it to be pragmatic and easy to expand. Using the excuse that most machines are going the other way is not viable – this is a professional machine, and every professional has different standards.
I think you hit the nail on the head. This is a professional machine, and the professionals it is aimed and, that are going to be buying this machine, are not interested in upgradability in the sense you talking about.
Find a good price/performance ratio, buy and use machine for 2-3 years, sell and buy a new one. The fact that this machine houses all the components you want to upgrade inside of it (CPU,GPU,RAM,PSU) and all the components you want to keep outside (NAS/RAID primarily), makes this prospect that much better, less waste.
Not to mention the usually excellent value retention on Apple hardware makes this a pretty darn good investment. Again, if you are in the target market that is.
Video cards require their own heat sinks and fans because the average video card these days uses more power at peak than a CPU. However, video cards these days also tend to have the same sorts of power throttling that most cpu fans have these days, so tower boxes are a lot more quiet than they were a few years back. Also, there are a lot of different case sizes even in the area of "tower"s, with many of the higher end ones being very quiet even at full power. Also, for super-quiet computing, there are companies that make fanless power supplies now, or for those really concerned about silence, there are water cooling setups that use their big radiator, and a large, slow fan, to quietly cool the gpus and cpu in a modern system.
Well, OTOH the Mac Pro does have use replacable CPU, HD and memory for what is worth. It got a 8/10 user-servisability score at iFixit, which is very good for a device of this size and design.
And it can also use thunderbolt based GPUs. But if your work justifies a $3K dual-GPU machine, would you really go about replacing graphics cards 2-3 years down the road, instead of just buying the latest model? It would have new-everything, and it would be a tax deductible busines expense after all.
A connector like MXM isn't enough to handle the sort of bandwidth those cards need to move. They need PCI-e and multiple DisplayPort channels as the ports are not on the video cards, but instead on the back panel.
So modder gets close to fit/finish with his hands and then its not good enough cause the "insides"... which you can't see BTW is the real good stuff is. Design can be just for design sake and not for technical or mechanical superiority.
The fallacy-pointing was just an explanation of why the poster above may be wrong. But if you look closely, there is a paragraph above the one with the fallacies. And, lo and behold, that paragraph contains arguments which are not of the "argument from fallacy" type.
Please review them, prove them wrong, and then we'll speak.
Well, 'beautiful' is to a certain extent a subjective quality. 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful is X' can be interpreted as 'What makes a Mac Pro beautiful to me is X', and that's not really a statement that you can argue against.
But even so, the fallacies are either stretched or completely inapplicable. Both the 'no true scotsman' and 'special pleading' fallacies involve constantly shifting goalposts, but we've only ever seen Jormundir say that internal design is part of what makes the new Mac Pro beautiful. Where are the shifting goalposts?
Like, I don't think that the fact that it's not beautiful on the inside is relevant to the fact that it's a cool as hell mod; I think it's completely irrelevant. But throwing fallacies at the statement is just weird. I don't get how they apply at all.
Fallacies are irrelevant because there's no reasoning going on here -- the person you're responding to is making a subjective opinion statement, not a formal (or even informal) argument about aesthetics. Their statement doesn't even have a warrant or grounds, so to attack it with a fallacy is nonsensical.
I disagree. It's not as nice as the real Mac Pro, but what this modder made, even inside, is really impressive and quite cool looking. I'm impressed, anyway.
I don't know. He did a really good job on the outside. His job replicating the look of the grill on the bottom was a great touch.
But inside, it was just a bog-standard Mini-ITX, standard graphics card, etc. Before I clicked on the link I was hoping to see something more unique.
Two of the neatest things about the new Mac Pro are it's size and silence. This mod is bigger (not surprising), but why not go further? If the enclosure was bigger you could have simulated the triangle layout of the Mac Pro and put something interesting down the middle.
Or you could work to make the machine quieter with some elaborate heat-pipe or water-cooling setup. I have a feeling the small graphics and CPU fans in that metal case make a fair amount of noise.
I guess I was expecting something much more exotic, maybe using a small single board computer (Beagle Bone or Raspberry Pi) or something else strange.
It looks nice considering the constraints of using normal PC hardware. Apple went back to the drawing board with the Mac Pro, I guess I'm a bit disappointed by this being 'just' a round case.
Nobody sees the inside so its kind of like they did it to justify the price. In my opinion the Mac Pro/All Macs would be a lot more interesting if I knew I could install any OS I want on it without a performance loss and it was officially allowed by Apple.
As far as I know, various Unix versions, as well as Win7, will run just fine. No artificial performance penalties, and Apple is currently doing precisely NOTHING to disallow installation of alternate OSes. This has been the case for years.
Except getting macbook to boot anything else than OSX or Windows requires bunch of stuff that I can only describe as 'hacks'. At least it was like so couple years ago (http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12037.html) and I haven't heard that things would be different today.
Running Linux installed by this method on a (2008) Mac right now. Have done the same on recent (2012, 2013) models, too.
Macs have been using EFI boot for a few years, so the problem most have probably faced is trying to boot in BIOS emulation mode (which I've found to be iffy on pretty much every EFI motherboard I've come across).
I did, a few months ago. Booted both Fedora 19 and 20 Beta on a 2012 13" rMBP. Worked decently well, especially with how the version of Gnome included in F20 knows how to properly deal with high DPI displays.
I've had good luck booting Fedora (at least 19 and 20, and I think 18) on Macs.
Other distros don't seem to work with Apple's EFI implementation. To boot other distros, I've had good luck with the refind[1] bootloader. Granted, I have only been booting live USBs, not installing on the internal drive.
Well, considering the fact that Apple made a program called "Bootcamp" which simplifies the process of installing Windows on your machine, I'd say other OSes are officially allowed by Apple.
In fact, I have Win7, OS 10.9, and Arch Linux on this computer (early 2013 MBP Retina)
The IT guy in my building claims "MBP's are the best Windows laptops on the market." I'm probably not in a position to say whether or not it's true, but it seems to be at least a defensible position.
If/when I get one, I'm going to run it without the shiny exterior as much as possible. That thing is too shiny and I much prefer the aesthetic of PC boards and parts on a Pro machine. (Then again I run my Windows tower with the sides off too, though that's because I was too lazy to hook up the power button and front USB ports.)
It has a sensor that disallows running it with the case off. Disabling the sensor would void the warranty. Not saying nobody will do it, because I'm quite certain someone will (or already has?).
But you'll probably have to actually spring for your _own_ MacPro to mod the sensor.
Thermal design might rely on a laminar air flow inside the cylinder and taking the case off could result in increased tempatures. Of course we will only know if someone tries it and reports the measured temperatures.
This one is interesting, I'm on the fence about it though. I have a Hackintosh (i5 3470k,16gb,2X GTX660TI SLI) inside of a G5 case. The interesting thing about the older Mac Pro is they did not really change the design for so many years and you can pickup a empty G5 case for $70-100 on ebay. Only slight modifications are needed to make it work with PC components.
Seeing as I was using the exact same boards for my 6 rack cluster...It's a little concerning to see pic 12, in what looks like to be a disassembled PSU on the underside of the board. Other than that...I think this build is actually pretty cool.
Speaking from experience, these boards are awesome, and smallest ones I've ever used (other than a mac mini/or rPI)!
Is it still the case that updates from Apple will randomly break a Hackintosh? It used to be the case a few years ago. Has it gotten easier to update a Hackintosh these days?
No, you still have to refuse all OS updates. The OS update process costs you a few hours, spent carefully reading whatever the OSX hackers have to say about it.
Depending on your hardware there could be a standard process, but it almost always requires a bit of command line work, clicking cancel at the right time, and withstanding the temptation of clicking reboot when the installer asks you to.
That said, I've used OSX on non-Apple hardware for two years as my main development/entertainment machine. Upgrading wasn't desireable anyway because newer versions of OSX stopped supporting multi-monitors after 10.6.7 I believe. It really was great to be able to use OSX on my desktop.
Finally when staying on 10.6.7 really started to give problems, I decided to try Ubuntu again. I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu now actually is very usable as a workstation for development. It's got all window manager features 10.6.7 had, good terminal emulators, editors, and the important browsers, what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)
There's no blurry text problem -- Mac has a "respect the font design" look, Windows has a "crude text" problem, and Linux is somewhere in between.
That said, a retina display totally changes everything. No "blurry" and no-crude. Just as reading a finely printed book. You wont want to go back to a low DPI monitor after a week of using a retina.
As for using Ubuntu for development inside OS X, that's actually the best of both worlds. You have a stable desktop system, and you can have arbitrary development environments for every job (assuming you use a VM), that are just like the target environment (assuming you deploy on Linux).
I'd also suggest trying Vagrant, if you don't use it already.
>Finally when staying on 10.6.7 really started to give problems, I decided to try Ubuntu again. I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu now actually is very usable as a workstation for development. It's got all window manager features 10.6.7 had, good terminal emulators, editors, and the important browsers, what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)
Photoshop, Office, proper multimedia capabilities (DAWs, NLEs), full support for all my laptops features, and never ever having to tinker to get some basic device working.
This. I've been lurking on the hackintosh forums[1] and it really isn't very hard. I'm about to jump into the hack world. The decision process was pretty difficult, but I think I've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's. I recorded the hardest decisions in my blog[2]. Since I needed RAID 5, it took a while to feel comfortable, but now I do and I'm about to purchase the hardware.
You can't use Software Update to install OS updates (you can update everything else through there though). It's fairly easy to install the updates via USB as long as you have your configuration and drivers backed up though.
That's good to know, might have to give that a shot next time. I've actively avoided doing it that way up until now since it's the standard recommendation not to. I just upgraded mine to 10.9.1 today from 10.8.5, by booting from a Unibeast USB stick - worked flawlessly.
Randomly, but seldomly. I use a hackintosh for my day-to-day work, and so far I only had one update where I needed to roll back until new patches were available. 10.9.0 to 10.9.1 went completely smooth for example.
FWIW, I haven't had any update issues for years. If you have hardware setup that was easy to install on, then you'll have a hardware setup that is easy to update. If you had to do anything special after the basic install, you'll probably have to do the same thing after each update.
I always found it a little sad how much Apple has discouraged people from building Hackintoshes particularly when you consider the early days of Apple.
I don't think that's quite true. There's a lot that's not generally compatible with a lot of ATX boards (special power management stuff, drivers), but in general they haven't done a whole lot to block it off.
I think they see it as a hobyist activity that does more to encourage sales than lose them.
Well, the point is you cannot sell these. Sure, if you build one and never tell Apple you put OS X on it they won't come after you but you cannot get support for OS X running on a Hackingtosh. If you do try to sell them, thing a get even worse for you. Not that I see how they could make it work but the current status is definitely not peachy.
It was a pretty widely held belief at the time of the launch of intel macs that the choice to use an, at the time kind of moribund, EFI BIOS was a deliberate attempt to make hackintoshes difficult. And it really did keep it from happening for quite a while.
Of course, there are many other pretty good reasons to go with EFI. It's just that its fate seemed tied to that of Itanium back then.
> It was a pretty widely held belief at the time of the launch of intel macs that the choice to use an, at the time kind of moribund, EFI BIOS was a deliberate attempt to make hackintoshes difficult
Widely held by whom? The absolute simplest thing for Apple to have done at the time would've been to have kept using OpenFirmware, for maximum compatibility with existing PowerMacs (OpenFirmware boot code is written in platform-independent Forth).
This would've made building hackintoshes much harder than EFI, since EFI motherboards were quasi available at the time and clearly going to be growing in the future, whereas OpenFirmware x86 motherboards were speciality hardware that only Apple and Sun would have been producing.
The decision to use EFI is most easily understood as a compromise between retaining some of the abilities of OpenFirmware, avoidance of 30-years of unnecessary BIOS cruft, and a desire to enable people to run Windows, which EFI BIOS compatibility could enable but OpenFirmware could not.
Seriously, it's 2004-2005. You have the opportunity to define an x86-based platform from scratch. You'd like Windows compatibility as a business selling point, but you're sane so you don't want to chain yourself to a kludge like the PC BIOS in your own code base if you don't have to, because backwards compatibility isn't a concern.
So instead of a kludge like the PC BIOS, you pick that EFI mess, where one of two main sponsors is your direct competitor, who directly turned around and created an incompatible new version in UEFI (even before the EFI based Apple systems hit the market).
So now Apple has to support an EFI version no-one runs, while integrating Intel reference code targetted at newer versions to support new chipsets.
Well, it ensures job security for Apple's firmware engineers.
Well, in the perfect world I would not expect them to solve a driver issue, but something like an issue with say Safari, Finder, iMovie, etc. should not have much to do with the hardware I would think. In reality you cannot get support for anything that is not running on an Apple piece of hardware.
Which is legitimate imo. Why should they spend resources to support people not buying their hardware ? They don't make money from OSX like MS does with Windows.
FYI: Without additional tweaking, don't expect top-of-the-line Mac performance. Sure, my overclocked 6-core i7 made it over 12,000 when the highest I'd recorded before then was 9,000ish for a Mac mini i7 server, but when I ran the same parts under Windows, I hit a geekbench score of 25,000. Had I a legit Mac for the same price, I'd probably hit 20,000 easily, and in the older, cheaper designs, could have matched 25,000 for about the same price. If only Windows had a decent terminal, I'd be happy. Instead, when the Mac Pro gets DDR4 later this year, I might just switch.
I didn't like the design of the new Mac Pro initially, but
the circular design makes sense in terms of air flow. The only problems I have personally experienced with computer hardware is the failure of video chips. I had a HP laptop
that christened my dive into cooling fans, Artic paste, thermal bars, heat transfer, and frustration.
I hope we go back to putting our own computers together using only the components we desire; bought from companies
we admire--not just because they work the best, but for
altruistic reasons (employee treatment, environmental friendliness, etc).
Either because he is stupid, or because he got pressure from Apple (or fears to get trouble if the link is circulated outside of Germany). I guess Apple does pressure a lot of website owners behind the scenes... but of course the other option is more likely :-)
Seriously, under German law the forum owner has no way to forbid people to link to his site - unless they are insulting him, misattributing content, etc.
Normaly, I wouldn't post that link, but there is (as far as I could see) nothing problematic in that thread, and the content is already posted (with permission of the original author apparently) somewhere else, so the whole thing is incredibly silly.
I wondered this too, until I saw the Apple logo. That would be a trademark violation. Maybe the forum mods wanted to avoid having the forum involved if Apple went after the poster.
Without the logo, Apple's complaint would have to be based on imitation of the design - maybe weaker than trademark but I dunno about design rights in EU.
He should start selling this case and release the recipe. I am sure plenty of people wouldn't mind to buy the case from him if he makes more. Like raspberry pi cases. Anyway, beautiful idea. But will Apple patent this design?
