Comment by asd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asd | Hacker News Reader

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> 50% of the site was black background + scrolling for me, but I think I can get the gist of it. Nice design + expansion capabilities, right?

Apple's Industrial Design group needs to get it through their skulls that folks doing REAL pro work still need traditional expansion capabilities. At the very least, pro users need to:

1) Have the ability to expand RAM

2) Have space for two video cards (ThunderBolt 3 + video card enclosures is not a desirable solution)

3) Have space for at least a couple internal hard drives

For some reason, I don't think this will ever happen because the end result would probably be bigger, noisier, and uglier than what the ID group would allow. But, man.. wouldn't it be nice to be able to purchase a base config Mac Pro 2 with one stick of RAM, shipped with integrated graphics and the user could drop in any graphics card(s) they wish?

Hackintoshes can work fine for some, but oftentimes we just want to be able to run software update without the fear that a patch will break our bread-and-butter making machines.

I wonder what OSX-specific software keeps professionals on machines that they feel are underpowered, even if it's a rather mighty Mac Pro?

All the graphics and video editing suites, AFAICT, are now also available for Windows, too. For audio editing one probably does not need two video cards.

So, what's your use case? Just curious.

I write software for iOS / Mac as my day job and it's really gotten to a point where it feels like writing C# on Windows used to feel (which is not a bad thing). The big difference is that back then I could build a powerhouse PC for $1500 and have a handful of big monitors and really feel ahead of the power curve.

I don't feel like I have the option to do that these days, and I'm pretty disappointed by it. $4,000 on a laptop is my best attempt and it's still not.. quite. there.

Apple's vendor lock-in strategy geared towards developers appear to really be bearing fruit at the moment.

They've shifted most of their hardware lineup towards consumers and is the weakest it's been for developers in a long time, but developers are still hanging around because they have to if they want to target the Apple ecosystem.

People who've been in the industry for longer than 15 years would remember the last time this happened.

Perhaps this isn't the right place for this, but I'd be interested in a broader discussion about this. What do we do about it?

Even if we see it coming a mile away, or if we wake up and look around and see it happening.. what can we do?

Go back to the web is always an option, but I don't like it. I still genuinely believe that the experience I can deliver writing software for iOS is higher quality than what I can deliver on the web.

Has anyone found a secret third option yet? :)

As an Android/iOS developer, I personally wouldn't need all of the power. However, I could see where professional video editors and the like working with multiple 4K streams and wish to stay within the familiarity of the  ecosystem would want something a bit more expandable/flexible.

> 1) Have the ability to expand RAM

The current Mac Pro and iMac do have expandable / user upgradable RAM.

> 2) Have space for two video cards (ThunderBolt 3 + video card enclosures is not a desirable solution)

It's still early days for external GPUs. I suspect they will become quite popular and maybe even the preferred solution for many people. They offer a lot of practical benefits such as interoperability between desktops and laptops.

3) Have space for at least a couple internal hard drives

IMO low cost / high storage density SSDs and affordable NAS devices pretty much solve this problem.

>It's still early days for external GPUs.

Exactly. The trashcan Mac Pro had the same idea. But if I recall correctly there were some licensing issues that prevented many manufacturers from adopting the concept, and the cost did it in.

That the idea is not commercially feasible today (as in, my client wants their project done in 2 weeks) is precisely why pros need basic expandability.

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