[csmuk]

Or you can buy an HP Z820. OSX is pretty much moot for workstation grade machines. The software is all cross platform.

And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.

And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.

[Fomite]

While most software is cross-platform, I've found OSX to be a vastly more pleasant scientific computing environment than Windows 7.

[csmuk]

Until you have to compile something major...

Then both OSX and Windows are awful.

[Fomite]

I have yet to find an OS, including a wide range of the *nixes, where 'compile something major' doesn't fill me with dread.

[sentenza]

But compiling something major are just the baby steps. What if you have to run something over a distributed cluster? Or if it relies on dozens of libraries that were written for *nixes, without consideration for the quirks of Apple? What if you want to run part of your stuff "facing the outside world"? What if your machine (and code) must run for weeks?

I've only ever administered scientific clusters in linux, but from what I've heared from people that work as admins in "we use Apple" groups (and scarce they are), it must be absolute hell.

[Fomite]

One of the major strengths of the Mac is that they play fairly well with *nix systems. I don't know anyone who uses Macs for clusters - but Macs make really marvelous client machines for clusters.

For "outward facing" code, the Mac Pro really isn't a server, and using any workstation as a server is pretty fail. As far as uptime in weeks, my (old style) Mac Pro would be surprised to learn that it can't run for weeks at a time, given it has in the past, hammering simulations the whole time.

The point is that they're excellent client machines. You can rig up code on your Mac in R, Python, etc. and then hand it over to the cluster fairly effortlessly, at least in my experience compared to Windows.

I can only speak for myself, but at my most recent position, when we replaced my Dell with a Mac, my productivity shot up.

[sentenza]

What you say makes sense. Now that I think of it, most of the pain that has been described to me can be attributed to the misguided notion of a professor that _everything_ must run on apple machines.

What was also notable is that most of the problems seemed to appear on the admin side of things (running the "mac servers"), while for the users, meaning the scientists programming and crunching on the machines, everything worked just fine. That of course added to the admin's frustration, as nobody could understand why they were complaining about the perfectly fine Apple-centric setup.

So Mac for the scientist and Linux for the server might quite likely produce happyness for everyone.

[yapcguy]

Yep, the new Mac Pro is going to be a pain for IT support to move to another desk or office with all its bits hanging off it.

That is, of course, if the new Mac Pro ever makes it into the enterprise given Apple's track record in that area. I always what happened to the IT manager who convinced their boss to invest heavily in a few XServes... :-)

[coldtea]

>That is, of course, if the new Mac Pro ever makes it into the enterprise given Apple's track record in that area.

Track record? You mean the inroads they've been making for like 5 years with the iPhone and the iPad?

That said, Mac Pro is not for the enterprise. It's for big calculations: video, 3D, pro audio, scientific computing, etc.

It's not for running Lotus Domino and accessing some VB internal app.

[csmuk]

This. See my comments for another bad XServe experience.

[coldtea]

>Or you can buy an HP Z820. OSX is pretty much moot for workstation grade machines. The software is all cross platform.

Depends on the software you use. For scientific computing, maybe.

For other tasks a Mac Pro would be used, no. Logic Pro, for example, is not cross platform. Neither is Final Cut Pro. And even if I depend on something like Adobe CC, most multimedia pros prefer to use it on the Mac, because of other benefits of using OS X.

>And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.

Or just a cable and a NAS.

But that's the outside, which is a given that you'd need multiple disks. Ever seen a video pro using just the internal HDs on his Desktop machine? Each project usally takes a whole disk by itself. Nobody uses the internal disks for 4K work.

>And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.

Sure it was, as were several other units from the 1-2 million sold of the same MBP production run.

Now lets see how many unreliables you'd get from 1-2 million different self-built PCs.

That's the comparison that matters.

[csmuk]

Pro Tools. I've used Logic Pro: it's horridly unreliable. I no longer have a DAW in favour of a Triton as it's all I need personally but my experience with Logic was awful.

Adobe After Effects + Adobe Premiere Pro. The guys I know who use it do it on Windows because OSX is a moving target from hell. You get reliable iSCSI support on Windows and better SAN performance. Plus it's easier to get 10Gbit ethernet cards to your SAN when you have some real PCI express slots available.

They don't use internal disks but some of us do for storing virtual machines in my case.

See my other comments about how my Mac experience has gone. Also look at Apple forums. Nothing but bitching from people about endless stupid problems.

Microsoft get a bad rep for beta testing their products on the customers but if you've used iWork on an iPad recently you'll see what I mean.

Not pleased. People need to look at these problems pragmatically and stop defending something which has descended into the same hell as everything else.

[modfodder]

Post Production Engineer/Technical Director here, built several million dollar facilities in NYC, worked lots of commercials and a few docs here and there (latest one airing on ESPN 30for30).

Very few high end pros use Adobe Premiere Pro as it's all the worst parts of Avid and FCP without the good sh!t, although the tiny one man shops seem to love it.

Any shop that is busy uses tons of firewire drives and big ass SANs, internal drives are mostly for the OS and occasionally often used assets.

Apple isn't perfect, their QC has definitely faltered as they've grown, but in Post it's a shit ton better than Windows, even facilities that aren't using FCP prefer Avid and After Effects/Photoshop for Mac. Windows is bigger in the 3D world, Linux is popular for color grading and compositing software.

Hell is a Post Facility relying on Windows. I used to know a few, never liked working for them, always seemed to cut corners if it saved a few bucks. That's fine if you're cutting web videos or local spots, but not when you're cutting Fortune 500 national brand campaigns.

As far as looking at these problems pragmatically, you can't rely on an OS that's going to crap the bed because the editors spent their down time trolling shady websites.

[jshen]

What software are you talking about? The software I need requires unix. I can run VM's in windows, but I find OS X a much better experience.

[csmuk]

The OS really doesn't matter is the point. Big apps: after effects, mathematica etc - that sort of workstation stuff doesn't make a difference.

Virtualization is fine for non desktop apps. That's exactly what I do.

[jshen]

It matters to me for various small reasons, and I'm willing to pay a premium for that.