
The Mac Pro and Apple's Slide - ProAm
https://lexic.co/barfblog/the-mac-pro-and-apple-s-slide
======
mullingitover
> "Steve Jobs was an engineer"

I read the Jobs biography cover to cover, and I'm going to stop you right
there, no. The guy who couldn't engineer an Atari game and ripped off his
friend's work instead is not an engineer, and the idea that he had any kind of
empathy for anyone is frankly hilarious.

He had good taste, and he was a tyrant. In most cases these traits amount to
mediocrity. Jobs was in the right place at the right time, in any other
situation he'd have been a middle manager at best.

~~~
chongli
_the idea that he had any kind of empathy for anyone is frankly hilarious_

As a counterpoint, he was a good neighbour [1]. The guy had some serious
issues with the way he treated people, and he may have had a personality
disorder, but it's a bit extreme to think he had no empathy for any other
human being.

[1]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/steve-j...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/steve-
jobs-was-my-neighbor/246327/)

 _Edit: whoops! This was the wrong link. Here is the article I had in mind (it
's been years since I read it and apparently there are multiple neighbour
stories about Jobs):_

[https://patch.com/california/paloalto/my-neighbor-steve-
jobs](https://patch.com/california/paloalto/my-neighbor-steve-jobs)

~~~
throwlaplace
that article doesn't say anything about him being a good neighbor? all it says
is that he kept a simple home. what kind of weird deification is it that
there's an article about a guy walking around jobs house (occasionally seeing
jobs himself) _and_ in your mind that constitutes being a good neighbor.

~~~
mirimir
Being a "good neighbor", in much of the US, means that their house and yard
are tasteful and well maintained. And that they don't have loud parties.

~~~
throwlaplace
Op was trying to exhibit jobs' empathy. Does maintaining your yard demonstrate
empathy?

~~~
mirimir
Sure. Empathy for your property value.

At one point, I lived across the street from a guy whose "front yard" was
basically a loading dock. He was not considered a good neighbor, except by the
guy down the street. Whose property included a house that apparently hadn't
been painted or roofed for maybe a century. And who spent much of his time
drinking beer, sitting on his porch. Often with the other guy.

They hosted great parties, though. One time, they had a live band, with a
sound system on a trailer. Too many iffy bikers, though. Fights, and
occasional gunfire.

------
OldGuyInTheClub
I scoffed at Apples for years before getting a 2012 Macbook Pro for the Retina
display. I'm still using it 7+ years later whereas the highly rated Vaios and
Thinkpads I had before conked out in less than 3 years each. The Unix
underlying macOS has been rock solid and I can run whatever I need to. I much
prefer Android to iOS though.

I'm worried by what I hear even from full-on Apple aficionados about the new
notebooks and Catalina, which I am resisting. I have to use Windows 10 at work
and I don't like it nearly as much. Someday this MBP will need replacing and I
feel like I am caught with no good option other than dealing with Windows-
whatever or paying a huge Apple premium for hardware that may not be worth it.

(I have tried several flavors of Linux desktops and have been frustrated by
all of them)

~~~
pram
FWIW I have the new 16 inch MBP and I like it a lot more than my 2015 rMBP.
Touch ID is a thing you won't want to live without once you've had it on a
laptop ;P

~~~
andrewksl
I'll second this. They fixed everything that was wrong with the previous
generation, and it's hardware I'd actually recommend now.

Catalina, on the other hand...

~~~
OldGuyInTheClub
This is reassuring. I hope that by the time I need to replace that Catalina or
its successor will be stable. I keep an eye on refurbished 2015 MBPs because
my friends who have them rave about them and don't want to give them up.

BTW, I am still relatively new to HN. This article/thread is marked as
'flagged' for some reason and I have to access it through my own "Comments"
link. Can anyone explain why? It seems on-topic. I have not submitted anything
yet and am trying to understand the ground rules.

------
dienciebsiwbsi
It is a little weird to see the Mac Pro described as so ludicrously high-end
that the plebs can't understand it. I would describe it as a mid-range
workstation. More than I need for sure, but if you want to talk about Serious
Power for Serious People it's got nothing on the high-end Dells or HPs.

~~~
berbec
A loaded Mac pro has 2 AMD GPUs, 28 cores, 8TB of nvme disk and 1.5TB of ram
for $52K.

I went to dell and got 3TB of ram, 56-cores (two of the mac's 28-core cpus),
40TB of SAS HDDs with 8TB of nvme SSDs and triple Nvidia GV100 for $170k+.

------
beering
I'm sympathetic to the feeling in this blog post, but not the specific
examples. It's not about cost-cutting, because Tim Cook's supply-chain
wrangling has resulted in us getting nicer stuff while Apple pays less. In
fact, I don't think Apple hardware has ever been as high-end in terms of
technology and components. But high-end != good design.

Anyways, producing nice-looking stuff that doesn't work all that well has long
been in the Apple DNA, I think. Anybody remember the circular Apple mouse? And
who actually enjoyed using a Magic Mouse over, say, a Logitech mx518?

~~~
scarface74
Apple’s mobile chips are definitely “high end” and have been about 2-3 years
ahead of the rest of the industry lately.

------
steve19
> It's arguably the best workstation money can buy, with a forward-looking
> architecture that should satisfy any professional in need of massive
> performance

This seems like nonsense. It may be the best looking workstation, but money
can buy more powerful workstations with high end Nvidia GPUs.

~~~
pupdogg
If you ever get a chance to venture out of the Mac galaxy, you will find the
HP-Z8 galaxy a lot more interesting!

On a serious note: does anyone know which CAD platform Apple uses to design
their products? ie products like Solidworks, Catia, ProE etc? I’d love to hear
more about how their most powerful workstation in the world helps them design
the next iteration on itself?

------
FPGAhacker
Steve Jobs the engineer. That made me laugh.

------
sircastor
I think this guys got it wrong. Apple's last half-dozen years of design
interation are (IMO) the fault of Jony Ive, And his relentless dedication to
how the product looks rather than how useful it is.

Apple likes making a particular kind of computer for a particular kind of user
(the iPad) and the Mac has really suffered under the ethos of "The computer
for the rest of us" taken to the extreme.

------
pier25
> _But it doesn 't signify a new direction for Apple. It's the exception that
> proves the rule._

I hope the article is wrong on that and the 16'' MBP and the Mac Pro are
actually a new direction for Apple.

~~~
_coveredInBees
I don't know. I'm a recent Mac user (couldn't hold out any longer for an
updated Surface Book) and the author makes some good points. My $4K 16" MBP is
nice enough, but definitely doesn't "feel" like a $4K machine. Worse, Catalina
has not been a great experience for me. I've had 3 reboots due to Kernel panic
in the last few weeks and just today I had to hard reboot because Finder
completely lost the plot and crashed hard when it couldn't connect to a mapped
network drive from work (I was on my home network).

My previous Dell laptop + Windows 10 was more stable than my current MBP,
which is quite concerning to me. I do like a lot of things about OSX but just
as with Apple hardware, their focus on OSX and shipping a refined OS seems to
be slipping.

~~~
pier25
I've been using macOS daily since 2007 and the past 5-6 years the QA of macOS
has not been great. Apple ends up fixing most problems but it's never a good
idea to use a recently released major version. I'd suggest you to go back to
Mojave if you can.

~~~
_coveredInBees
Yeah, unfortunately this shipped with Catalina. Might go down that path if
things don't improve.

------
jarjoura
What makes the OP think Tim Cook had any real say in any of the design of the
MBP? If anything, Tim probably lets the hardware leadership make the
decisions.

I think the Watch and Apple's shift to privacy are Tim's contributions to the
world.

~~~
paulcole
Also how did soldering the RAM in place “save them a few bucks on parts.”?

~~~
soneil
My understanding of the soldered RAM is that it allows them to use LPDDR. It's
not about thin, it's not about spending two cents on a socket, it's a genuine
engineering trade-off as part of their near-obsessive take on power
management.

Interesting that he starts off claiming that Apple sweat the details instead
of trying to blind you with numbers - and then proceeds to completely miss
such details.

------
scarface74
_There 's been a noticeable decline in Apple quality under Tim Cook's
leadership_

I’m the last person to defend the MacBook keyboards for the last 3 years, but
let’s put the MacBook in perspective. The entire Mac line is only 10% of
Apple’s revenue and some of those are desktops.

The iPad that was around before Jobs passed were really just big iPhones.
There were hardly any affordances for the larger screen. The iPad didn’t come
into its own until around 2015.

