Apple Saying Goodbye to Intel Processors

NVIDIA drivers made by NVIDIA are available up to macOS High Sierra 10.13.6. So if you're on High Sierra 10.13.6 or lower, you can run any NVIDIA GPU, lol provided you download and install the NVIDIA driver from here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/results/162473/

The EVGA GTX 680 Firmware can be modified to run GTX 770 and 780 GPUs. It's a bit of hacking involved, however, if you ever need to do a mild upgrade, let me know and I'll try to help you. Personally, I gave up on Macs a while back because they are very expensive and just not worth the hassle. Currently, I got a Threadripper 1950X 16 core with 128GB RAM, a bunch of SSDs, and a RADEON VII 16GB GPU. Looking to upgrade soon to a 32 core Threadripper 3970X with an RTX 2080Ti GPU. I know the 3090 was just launched, but I got the 2080 months ago... it is what it is, too much to do, too little time. The time spend here on the forum is actually R&R for me.

Yes, the card I purchased was the PC version of the EVGA 680 and then I flashed their Mac-compatible firmware on it, was pretty easy. Not sure a single gen bump would be worth it at this point, particularly not in a 10 year old computer. The 680 runs WoT and everything else I play just fine.
 
Yes, the card I purchased was the PC version of the EVGA 680 and then I flashed their Mac-compatible firmware on it, was pretty easy. Not sure a single gen bump would be worth it at this point, particularly not in a 10 year old computer. The 680 runs WoT and everything else I play just fine.

Well, the GTX 770 is basically the GTX 680 rebranded. That was an interesting move on NVIDIAs part back then. The only upgrade worth considering might be the GTX 780. That is actually faster than the 680. However, if it does everything you need, there is no reason to look for something else. Unfortunately, the new Mac Pro is so expensive for what it is, that you would have to be a pro user with very specific macOS needs (e.g. you must really like Final Cut X or you're a macOS/iOS developer) to buy one. Don't get me wrong, the build quality is amazing, and so is that of the old all-aluminum Mac Pro that you have. The old Mac Pros were priced more down to earth when compared to these new ones. I don't think that a moderately equipped Mac Pro is worth the price of a Hyundai Sonata. I have one that's 14 years old and one that's 11 years old and they still run, but I don't use them much anymore. Got them both used and upgraded them. Even to this day, nothing you buy in the PC realm will match the build quality of those all-aluminum cases.
 
The old Mac Pros were priced more down to earth when compared to these new ones. I don't think that a moderately equipped Mac Pro is worth the price of a Hyundai Sonata.
I was goofing around on the Apple website the other day (looking for a new Macbook Air for my daughter) and as I drifted about I started playing with the configuration screen for the Pro. If you click on every available maximum option the final price was nearly $55,000 IIRC (with no display).

But then again back in the early 90s (?) when I worked for this company where they were rendering fabrics and stuff onto virtual automobile interiors I know they bought more than a few SPARCstations at what were then eye-popping prices. So I guess it's all relative.
 
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I was goofing around on the Apple website the other day (looking for a new Macbook Air for my daughter) and as I drifted around I started playing with the configuration screen for the Pro. If you click on every available maximum option the final price was nearly $55,000 IIRC.

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I used to shop at B&H Photo a lot back in the day. Honestly, if I needed a Mac for work I would buy an iMac 27" 5K with 1TB SSD, 16GB GPU, and the 10 core Intel i9 CPU and 8GB of RAM. I will then upgrade it to 64GB or 128GB of my own choosing. All in all it would cost around $4000~$4200 + tax to have a fully working Mac workstation. Now, here is where you hit the brakes. If you need to do rendering work or anything CPU/GPU intensive, you will burn through this iMac in no time. Their thermals are still terrible. So the only way to bridge the gap is to build a Threadripper workstation running Linux and do all the rendering and heavy compiling work there.

Anyway, there is something to be said about the convenience and portability of MacBooks. They are a heck of a lot easier to lug around and work with, especially in school, airports, while traveling, and for work.

The only annoyance is when you have to fix them and you're out of warranty. They are glued and riveted together like there is no tomorrow.
 
But I'll bet you the Macintosh would render those interiors in a tiny fraction of the time of those old Unix boxes. The girl who did the work sometimes had to let them run for tens of hours at a time.
 
But I'll bet you the Macintosh would render those interiors in a tiny fraction of the time of those old Unix boxes.

Unix is about as dead as it gets, as Linux took over.

No, it won't. The 32 Core Threadripper 3970X obliterates anything Intel has to offer, but that's not even their fastest CPU. Then there is the Threadipper 3990X with 64 Cores. Good GPUs are priced reasonably. You can USE A Radeon VII 16GB HMB2 for rendering or you can go with multiple RTX 2080 Ti cards, or an RTX Titan with 24GB GDDR6X, or the upcoming RTX 3090 (it's been paper launched). The sky is the limit when it comes to hardware choices. Nothing Apple offers can compete with this kind of horsepower. You can believe that. And Apple knows it. I doubt they will come out with another Mac Pro after this one. They know their market really well, and the money is inexpensive fashion accessories and consumer appliances. Would you rather sell workstations in the hundreds or high margin mobile devices in the millions? Apple has already answered this question. That's why macOS will be merged with iOS in the future. Other than old school folks like me, and gamers and pros, no one will want these lumbering huge computers on their desks, Mac, or PC.

The girl who did the work sometimes had to let them run for tens of hours at a time.

I don't know who you are referring to.
 
You're missing part of what I posted. I was referring to the old SPARCstations we had back in the early 90s, not anything today.

And the person I referenced ran that department in the corporation I was at. "Girl" was probably a poor choice of words, I only used it because she was younger than I was.
 
You're missing part of what I posted. I was referring to the old SPARCstations we had back in the early 90s, not anything today.

And the person I referenced ran that department in the corporation I was at. "Girl" was probably a poor choice of words, I only used it because she was younger than I was.

I understand what you're saying, however, the 90s where different. Around 1997 AMD came up with x86-64, however, we didn't see it materialize until around 2003~2004.

SPARCstations were commercial tools and hardware like has always been and will always be very expensive. I have LSI RAID controllers with physical license keys that I use in my workstations for SSD cached RAID 50 arrays and my two servers. I paid a pretty penny for them, however, I still get firmware updates and have been super reliable. Where things differ now is the amount of computing power that we have access to without having to pay through the roof.

The Mac Pro can't be compared to what those SPARCstations were. The Mac Pro is not really a commercial enterprise-level product. It slots somewhere in between. So far, based on what I've read, support for Apple's Pro line of products has been terrible. At the enterprise level support has to be top-notch, 24/7. That's why there are SLAs in place amongst other things.

Watch the video below and see what happened to this poor guy and his iMac Pro. Now imagine simple problems like these at the enterprise level.



and

 
I understand what you're saying, however, the 90s where different. Around 1997 AMD came up with x86-64, however, we didn't see it materialize until around 2003~2004.

SPARCstations were commercial tools and hardware like has always been and will always be very expensive. I have LSI RAID controllers with physical license keys that I use in my workstations for SSD cached RAID 50 arrays and my two servers. I paid a pretty penny for them, however, I still get firmware updates and have been super reliable. Where things differ now is the amount of computing power that we have access to without having to pay through the roof.

The Mac Pro can't be compared to what those SPARCstations were. The Mac Pro is not really a commercial enterprise-level product. It slots somewhere in between. So far, based on what I've read, support for Apple's Pro line of products has been terrible. At the enterprise level support has to be top-notch, 24/7. That's why there are SLAs in place amongst other things.

Watch the video below and see what happened to this poor guy and his iMac Pro. Now imagine simple problems like these at the enterprise level.



and



This is accurate. The Mac Pro's were always far too expensive for what was in the box. The box itself (chassis), its ease of access, ease of maintenance...etc definitely had value, but it in no way justified the price tag of the system. You could buy identical spec Workstation hardware from HP or DELL for a fraction of the price, it just didn't come in the fancy aluminum case.

There were some "more exotic" systems available that commanded a higher price tag, like anything from SGI for example. But you weren't getting PC workstation hardware at that point, so parallels could not be drawn and the same goes for those old UltraSPARC's.

I cut my teeth in Unix on DEC Alpha workstations back in the mid 1990's when I was shuffled off to the local university to do computer stuff in grade 9 as there was nothing available at the high school level that met my skillset. These were really neat boxes and that Alpha hardware was extremely unique at the time. I remember the massive Trinitron grayscale monitors vividly. I have no idea what the school paid for those systems but I imagine it was obscene. Of course Digital was eventually bought up by Compaq who continued to use Alpha for a while before it eventually ceased to exist.

Macs of that vintage, when they were using Motorola, were at least somewhat unique. Once the transition to x86 commodity hardware happened though, you were soon paying for more of a name and fancy chassis than what was under the hood.

Funny you mention those LSI cards. I retired a server last year (Lenovo ThinkServer) that was running a RAID6 array on an LSI caching card and I ended up repurposing it as a video surveillance box to replace the aging PVR. One of the things I did during that process was update the firmware, as there was an even newer version available than what was on it, which had been updated previously at some point. This was impressive given the age of the system. I had to install that license key when I first commissioned that server so that I was able to use additional RAID levels like RAID6.
 
I don't think nvidia attempt to buy ARM to shaft everyone else as a monopoly. ARM would lose a lot of its customers if they try that right away. What I see is they are likely attempting to build a massive parallel project for cloud (i.e. 2000 core chip) for low end workload. Since arm license per core charge it make sense to not worry about this cost in the future. If competitor wants to enter this space they will likely pay a massive royalty that nvidia can pay itself, so it has the advantage.

If low end workload on the cloud goes to ARM with this kind of chips, Xeon's high price days would be over. Imagine nvidia owns both GPU and Mellanox and then get a hit CPU for data center.....
 
..

Watch the video below and see what happened to this poor guy and his iMac Pro. Now imagine simple problems like these at the enterprise level.



and



GREAT videos and this guy is good for sure and would trust him with future reviews.
HOWEVER with that said, your comment is just speculation saying "imagine simple problems with these at the enterprise level"
Since he is not at the enterprise level that is not a valid comment.

I do agree Apple dropped the ball on this and stuff happens at times with any company.

Last but not least he did speculate on a few things which he admits and he only dealt with one store which he also admits but he also made one major false statement, at the end of the second video he states "he had to ask for a new computer" which is clearly false as in his recorded video while he was in the store, the manager offered to give him a brand new computer right there and then.

Im not defending Apple, I would be pissed as hell. Just putting things in context of someone with a $5000 computer who wall mounts it which is not typical use. Apple failed in it QC department to properly test those parts for wall mounting.Stuff happens and this for sure was one heck of a dumb Apple Mistake.
BTW at the time the computer was only out for six months, its now 2.5 years since these videos were made, Im sure the defect was corrected by now but also sure this video will circulate for another 10 years ... *LOL*
 
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Thank you! It was bound to happen. We'll see for how long Apple will keep playing it cool. My unprofessional and totally worthless opinion ( :ROFLMAO: ) is that Apple could end up with an all AMD personal computer... err... Mac lineup in spite of their plans to build ARM-based Macs. Yes, speculating is a lot of fun when it comes to tech.
 
GREAT videos and this guy is good for sure and would trust him with future reviews.
HOWEVER with that said, your comment is just speculation saying "imagine simple problems with these at the enterprise level"
Since he is not at the enterprise level that is not a valid comment.

I do agree Apple dropped the ball on this and stuff happens at times with any company.

Last but not least he did speculate on a few things which he admits and he only dealt with one store which he also admits but he also made one major false statement, at the end of the second video he states "he had to ask for a new computer" which is clearly false as in his recorded video while he was in the store, the manager offered to give him a brand new computer right there and then.

Im not defending Apple, I would be pissed as hell. Just putting things in context of someone with a $5000 computer who wall mounts it which is not typical use. Apple failed in it QC department to properly test those parts for wall mounting.Stuff happens and this for sure was one heck of a dumb Apple Mistake.
BTW at the time the computer was only out for six months, its now 2.5 years since these videos were made, Im sure the defect was corrected by now but also sure this video will circulate for another 10 years ... *LOL*

Enterprise lease Apple stuff all the time, they usually also buy a warranty and an insurance so Apple will have to deal with it for the right price.

Still, for the same choice we can pick, MacBook Pro at work is always 13" vs Dell Precision with 15". I'd pick a Dell or Thinkpad any day.
 
Thank you! It was bound to happen. We'll see for how long Apple will keep playing it cool. My unprofessional and totally worthless opinion ( :ROFLMAO: ) is that Apple could end up with an all AMD personal computer... err... Mac lineup in spite of their plans to build ARM-based Macs. Yes, speculating is a lot of fun when it comes to tech.

I don't think that's the reason Nvidia wants ARM, they will likely keep licensing them at a good rate but steer them to design data center specific chips and integrated them with GPU and Mellanox adapters. Now that they own ARM, they can afford to build those 2000 stream ARM server chips to pair with their 2000 stream GPU that would be too expensive (arm license their processor per core instead of one time fee like ARC or MIPS). Their competitors probably cannot afford to license that many of them.
 
I ran across this thread and was kind of surprised. All the new Macbook currently being sold have the Intel Core i5 processors. Apple will be shipping ARM based chip technology at the end of the year. When they do I imagine the battery life will go way up. I also will predict that they will continue to support the Intel based computers for many years to come.

I'm kind of skeptical in regards to news from Bloomberg. Many of the articles are one sided and have a political agenda behind them. The article linked was nothing more than speculation and rumors that were flying all over various Mac forums.

Here was the real announcement from Apple:

 
The second most popular consumer OS in the world is built on a BSD-derived UNIX 03 certified kernel.

I'd hardly call it "dead".
Agreed; and server-side, my brother-in-law is a Systems Architect for a major bank here in Canada. They're not using CentOS or Debian. :) I forget now whether the systems we were talking about were on IBM or HP.

Although smaller numbers of servers are using a bona fide UNIX these days I still have the impression that most of the real backbone of our society is a UNIX of some sort, with IBM (AIX) and HP (HP-UX) being the main players. I am not sure how popular Oracle's Solaris is anymore. I also think of the number of single-use devices (firewalls, toasters) that would have an embedded BSD is significant.
 
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Apple uses everything from i3s(low end MBA) to i9s(high end MBPs) in laptops these days, not "only" i5s.

Oh yes I get that. I'm just pointing out the current apple products being sold are using Intel processors. As you know the majority of them being Intel i5. i3 and i9 are almost never used. Mine is a respectable i7.
 
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