Thursday, February 23, 2017 [Tweets] [Favorites]

Marco Solorio (May 2016):

But as good as that juiced up Mac Pro Tower is today, I know at some point, the time will have to come to an end, simply because Apple hasn’t built a PCIe-based system in many years now. As my article described, the alternative Mac Pro trashcan is simply not a solution for our needs, imposing too many limitations combined with a very high price tag. The Nvidia GTX 1080 might be the final nail in the coffin. I can guarantee at this point, we will have to move to a Windows-based workstation for our main edit suite and one that supports multiple PCIe slots specifically for the GTX 1080 (I’ll most likely get two 1080s that that new price-point). […] Even a Thunderbolt-connected PCIe expansion chassis to a Mac Pro trashcan wont help, due to the inherent bandwidth limits that Thunderbolt has as compared to the buss speeds of these GPU cards. And forget about stacking these cards in an expansion chassis… just not going to happen.

Via John Gruber:

This may be a small market, but it’s a lucrative one. Seems shortsighted for Apple to cede it.

Timo Hetzel:

Moving my video workflow to a modern PC could save me an estimated 4-8 hours every week. I wonder if Apple knows/cares.

Previously: Getting a New 2013 Mac Pro in 2017, How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists.

Update (2017-02-24): See also: Hacker News.

Cacti:

This has been an ongoing problem since the summer. Some have reverted back to using several 9xx cards (which have spiked in price) while others have switched platforms. Lacking any real progress on this, I would suspect many in this situation would abandon OSX permanently by the end of the year. And if you give up OSX on your desktop, the incentive to stay in that environment on your laptop, tablet, and phone go way down. This is a serious problem and the only outcomes are either a) Nvidia GPUs are supported, or b) OSX is abandoned, because the simple fact is that Nvidia GPUs are more important long-term than the entire sum of Apple’s hardware; I can replace a tablet or desktop or laptop, but I can’t replace a Pascal TITAN X.

Update (2017-02-25): See also: Reddit.

Update (2017-03-06): Owen Williams (via Jeff Johnson, Hacker News):

I’m a developer, and it seems to me Apple doesn’t pay any attention to its software or care about the hundreds of thousands of developers that have embraced the Mac as their go-to platform. […] It took me months to convince myself to do it, but I spent weeks poring over forum posts about computer specs and new hardware before realizing how far ahead the PC really is now: the NVIDIA GTX 1080 graphics card is an insane work-horse that can play any game — VR or otherwise — you can throw at it without breaking a sweat. I realized I’m so damn tired of Apple’s sheer mediocrity in both laptops and desktops, and started actually considering trying Windows again.

See also: The Talk Show.

Update (2017-03-22): Owen Williams:

After waiting eagerly for the MacBook Pro refresh, then being utterly disappointed by what Apple actually shipped — a high-end priced laptop with poor performance — I started wondering if I could go back to Windows. Gaming on Mac, which initially showed promising signs of life had started dying in 2015, since Apple hadn’t shipped any meaningful hardware bumps in years, and I was increasingly interested in Virtual Reality… but Oculus dropped support for the Mac in 2016 for the same reasons. […] It took me months to convince myself to do it, but I spent weeks poring over forum posts about computer specs and new hardware before realizing how far ahead the PC really is now: the NVIDIA GTX 1080 graphics card is an insane work-horse that can play any game — VR or otherwise — you can throw at it without breaking a sweat. […] I don’t say this lightly, but Windows is back, and Microsoft is doing a great job. Microsoft is getting better, faster at making Windows good than Apple is getting better at doing anything to OS X.

Adam:

However, in pursuit of the continual shrinking and lightening of the product line, the gap between the specs available from Apple and the major PC vendors in the workstation category has finally reached the point where even Apple loyalists are taking notice. We’ll see what Apple releases over the next few months (and years), but as I write this, compared to the MacBook Pro, portable workstations from the major PC vendors can be configured with faster processors, four times as much system AND video RAM, as well as more (and upgradeable) storage. As compared to the Mac Pro, desktop workstations from the PC vendors can be configured with more than three times the number of processor cores, sixteen times as much RAM, and double the number of (more powerful and replaceable) video cards. Compare these specs to the iMac, and the gap is even larger.

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