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Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

Why do people even need Apple to produce Mac Pro? If this is for developers, they can build their own, and probably do a better job for less money: it's just a PC with components that OSX has drivers for [1].

I also don't quite get what are they going to be spending all this time on, what kind of "designing" is going into it? Picking components on NewEgg and figuring out the shape of their Apple-branded case? :)

Seriously, unlike mobile/laptops, Apple has no competitive advantage in traditional desktop computing. They don't make CPUs, chipsets, GPUs, etc. And there's no battery to fiddle with, or a case to make thinner or a keyboard to mutilate.

[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017#CustoMac_P...

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I've been doing the hackintosh thing for a few years now. It sucks. Every now and then an update completely breaks it, and it's a crapshoot of disabling different kernel extensions, picking the right nvidia driver, or finding the revision of Clover that works for whatever reason. iMessage has been finicky since ever. My bootloader fails every other reboot for no reason I can figure out. The nvivia driver won't load unless I unplug one of my three monitors while it's booting.

I make my living off of iOS development, and I don't even want to think about the amount of time I've lost over the past few years because I had to debug my machine rather than work. Apple seems to be quietly tolerating the hackintosh community, but they need to provide real options for their developers. I'm tired of this unholy monstrosity of a computer that isn't supposed to exist. I'm not going to do it forever.

Sounds like your problem is OSX, not the computer itself.

The whole point of a Hackintosh is OSX.

I would wager that about a quarter of Mac Pro sales go to developers, at most. They sell tons more to 3D and CAD designers, scientists (the old NeXT was a favorite of theirs, you might recall), even musicians (who love the "trash can" because it's portable and quiet).

P.S. I'm one of those folks like you who spent his teens and twenties building gaming rigs, and around the time I turned 30 I realized this stuff wasn't fun for me anymore. I just wanted to plunk down some money and make "the computer problem" go away. I became more interested in what I was doing with computers than monkeying around with them in the garage. Don't dismiss developers who just want to buy a box and forget about it.

I recently built a custom uber-PC for music and machine learning.

10 cores, 64GB of fast RAM, 2TB superfast SSD, a 1080Ti graphics card, and it still costs less than a trashcan Mac with a much lower spec.

I hate Windows with a passion. Given the choice I would rather stay with macOS. And I would rather just buy something than stress about whether I'm wearing enough static protection bracelets not to nuke a £1500 processor.

But when the product I need literally doesn't exist - and apparently won't exist for at least another 12 to 18 months - it was a forced decision.

Did you use ECC RAM?

1) Apple makes (or at least used to make) good hardware -- I'm typing this on a 2008 Mac Pro that is still going great for me.

2) I don't want to bother with these kinds of issues every time Apple puts out a point release:

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/macos-10-12-4-update.2171...

I don't "need" Apple to produce a Mac Pro, but I'd certainly like them to, if it's a good box.

Sorry I wasn't being clear. I did not want to imply that Hackintosh situation should remain the same, I was thinking more along the lines of Apple publishing and maintaining a list of compatible devices with guaranteed long-term OSX support and call it a day.

There are plenty of fantastic motherboards, GPUs, power supplies and quiet and good looking cases to choose from, I only need a guarantee of future OSX support.

Ah, yeah, good question: why does Apple need to be the one to produce Mac Pro? I could only speculate. Wouldn't it cut significantly into their iMac and MacBook sales if they opened things up like that?

Typically it introduces a support and development burden, product fragmentation and a weaker brand. They tried it before (I had one of the Mac clones, it was just ok).

It would eat into their sales but the other side effects are worse, and they would have to look into creating a channel for being able to make money from MacOS.

There is a reason for a number of these boutique Windows workstation manufacturers as there value add is to provide a supported product out of known good tested configurations, because for someone that just wants a machine that works it’s still some effort and Microsoft still gets money for the Windows license.

Yes, it would. Apple experiemented with this in the mid 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone it didn't really work out.

If you need a Unix system that runs adobe software you need a mac.

And lets face it building a hackintosh is 10x the risk of building a Linux desktop for very little benefit, especially if adobe pulls a valve and decide to support Linux for all of their platforms.

The problem for Apple is that they need to be in the officials of high profile professionals if they need to keep their brand as valuable as they are and that means they need to offer a high power Unix workstation with a high level of compatibility with the Linux and Java environments that exists on servers, render farms and HPC clusters. At the same time when their consumer vision is to try and kill cross platform compatibility and move away from their Unix legacy.

If apple stays on their current path there will be a day within a decade when someone goes to a science or web dev conventions and shows images of laptop uses without a single macbook in it and thats why the "pro" market matter to apple.

It's a lot like asking why people want a laptop that was "designed for Linux" rather than one that's just compatible with Linux. It's mostly a matter of vendor support—if it's the hardware vendor's responsibility to fix incompatibilities between OS $FOO and their hardware $BAR, then $BAR is going to run $FOO a lot better—especially whenever $FOO is updated—than it would if it was entirely just community support.

Hell, I would be satisfied with a short list of laptops that are known to be good with Linux, with all features working.

The Ubuntu list is so long and has so many caveats.

I've been using Dells for a long time now and haven't seen one that didn't run Linux flawlessly. Legend says one should avoid discrete GPUs.

Because when one does business it helps to stay within the law.

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