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by snuxoll 3174 days ago
Apple lost a lot of the creative market with the trashcan Mac Pro. If I was doing heavy video editing or other work that demanded a high-end workstation I would immediately look at HP or Dell because I don't want to buy hardware that's obsolete out of the gate with no internal expansion support, or at least no STANDARD internal expansion support (proprietary GPU and SSD connections are stupid, why do you do this Apple).

On the other hand, outside of ML it's not like many software developers need to upgrade to a new GPU every (other) year and current processor trends show very little performance uplift between generations to upgrade - once Apple finally gets 32GB of memory in the MBP most developers will be set for many years.
2 comments
pier25 3174 days ago
> Apple lost a lot of the creative market with the trashcan Mac Pro

Exactly.

I wrote this last year criticising the current state of Mac hardware.

https://medium.com/@Pier/the-problem-of-osx-hardware-in-2016...

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WalterSear 3174 days ago
If you are a developer who needs lots of machine power. there are few reasons not to work in the cloud, these days.
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nikanj 3174 days ago
1) Latency 2) Developing custom hardware that needs to be attached to dev box 3) No rage when the wifi at the airport sucks 4) etc

Even though you don't need lots of power, there's plenty of solid and valid reasons why others might.

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WalterSear 3174 days ago
Exactly: a few reasons.

Moreover

1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.

https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...

2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.

3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.

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kpxxx 3173 days ago
> Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase

Did you walk out of a 1980s time warp or something? The workstation in this case carries 1TB of storage and weighs 3.5 lbs. (And it still has wifi in case you need that).

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skinnymuch 3173 days ago
Latency is still annoying. I prefer VMs still.

Regarding your number 3. For a lot of this, we are talking about devices like the MacBook Pro line. Not huge workstations.

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