
Retro Review: 2009 Mac Pro in 2018 - bluedino
https://www.imore.com/retro-review-2009-mac-pro-2018
======
bane
I'm actually surprised at how much more I liked the last gen Macbook Pro than
the new Touch Bar one. Almost everything from the larger touch pad to the new
keyboard just _feels_ worse and harder to use. The Touch Bar is useless
garbage and all my worries about dongleopolis becoming my life have become
true. Just yesterday I had to find adapters for a thumb drive and an HDMI
cable -- which was absolutely infuriating.

I used to bring my rMBP everywhere with me for photography because I could
easily just jam the SDcard in and transfer all my photos. Nope, need an
adapter now.

Typing physically hurts on the new ultrashort throw keys.

The trackpad has moments where it just doesn't seem to want to work correctly
for certain complex movements like drag and drop. I'm months in with this
stupid thing and I still can't get it to reliable draw a box around a bunch of
icons and drag and drop. Plus the fake _click_ for presses feels just enough
disconnected to make the whole process terrible.

I also get all kinds of external monitor flickering and resyncing issues, and
I'm 3 different dongles in trying to get that stop.

If I could have kept my old rMBP for another lease period (they're work
issued) I would have. I really really actively dislike this thing.

~~~
gumby
> The Touch Bar is useless garbage

I hate it too but you and I are not the customers for it: it's people who look
down at the keyboard when they type (so looking down to see what the buttons
do is not an inconvenience). Those folks seem to love it, and it helps upgrade
people to MBPs. I think they were hoping developers would embrace it so that
it would sell more machines. Hah.

(Honestly apart from booting into BIOS I doubt I've ever pressed an "Fn" key
in my life (Emacs, baby!) so would be fine with a piece of tape over it to
suppress spurious finger detection -- hmm, I should try this. The thumbpress
is nice but now they have the watch-unlocking working pretty reliably it
doesn't matter as much to me).

~~~
bane
I actually think it's there literally for the Apple store experience. It seems
cool and responsive in the store and it it's only after some time with it you
realize what a gimmick it is.

~~~
gumby
FWIW my kid, a number crunching touch typist, thought it was a gimmick and
recently told me that he was "forced to admit I really like it".

So maybe Apple knew what they were doing. Maybe.

------
nbzklr
So he plugs two modern GPUs into the PCIE slots and calls that

> Truly a testament to the engineering that went into designing the 2009 Mac
> Pro.

I'm sorry but you can upgrade any computer from 2009 in exactly the same way.
That's the beauty of using standards you know?

~~~
PascLeRasc
Not really for prebuilts, most Dell or Asus systems will just have one PCIe
slot, and if they have two they won't support Crossfire, not to mention they
probably won't have enough 6-pin connectors.

------
dictum
It's disheartening how, while that generation of Macs from late 2000s to early
2010s is holding up (and perform quite well) as long as they don't suffer
significant physical damage, models from the past few years are so limited in
upgradability/mod-ability, they'll have the same paperweight fate of mobile
devices.

~~~
bratsche
Absolutely. I have a 5k iMac and I love everything about it except I made the
mistake of getting the 512GB SSD and I already need more space. But I'm
fucking stuck with it. So now every few weeks I have to go hunting for things
to clean off of my disk.

~~~
mehrdada
If you have an iMac, not the iMac Pro, you can increase storage quite
straightforwardly by adding a SATA SSD (or replacing the PCI-e blade SSD, but
that's much more costly). [I think you may need to buy a proprietary cable too
if it's not shipping with an HDD/"Fusion Drive", but that wouldn't be too
hard.]

The machine is much easier to work on than it seems at first. You just need
some good double-sided tape to put it back together.

~~~
HillaryBriss
> by adding a SATA SSD (or replacingthe PCI-e blade SSD, but that's much more
> costly)

I think that's all true. Also note that the external SATA SSD is going to be
much slower (500 GB/s) than the internal (1700 GB/s or even higher).

This is one place the drawback of the Apple branded, unibody iMac strategy
reveals itself. In a more roomy, user-friendly, conventional box case with
standard parts, the consumer has a much more reasonably priced way to increase
storage capacity without sacrificing speed or paying two times as much per GB.

~~~
mehrdada
Fast M.2 SSDs (e.g. Samsung PRO series) are almost as expensive as Apple's
proprietary SSD that you can find on the market. It's a fair point that one
cannot opt for cheaper M.2 SSDs and has to either settle for the very high end
or cheap SATA.

------
chx
> Recently, I noticed that although the eGPUs allowed for my MacBook Pro to
> have access to a full fledged GPU, the performance was nowhere near that of
> a GPU that is housed on a regular PCIe slot.

Doubtful. Benchmarks show the difference to desktop even when using only
16Gbps Thunderbolt (TB3 using PCIe 3.0 x2 or TB2 using PCIe 2.0 x4) to drive
an external display is below 20%. [https://www.notebookcheck.net/eGPU-Two-PCI-
e-lanes-no-proble...](https://www.notebookcheck.net/eGPU-Two-PCI-e-lanes-no-
problem.266658.0.html) [https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-
thunderbo...](https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-
thunderbolt-3-egpu-internal-display-test/)

And, while in the Mac world there might be little choice, in the PC world I
would not recommend anything older than Sandy Bridge. Sandy Bridge, on the
other hand, both in laptops like the ThinkPad T420 and X220 (which still have
the best keyboard on any laptop) and off lease HP/Dell workstations sporting
high frequency Xeons are an astonishing price/value bargain (the cheapest E3
1270 workstations with motherboard, CPU, cooler, chassis and PSU are about the
same cost as the roughly equivalent i5 7400 CPU alone). Yes, the wattage has
dropped significantly but the IPC only grew by 20% from Sandy Bridge to Kaby
Lake
[https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_v...](https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review/4)

~~~
paulmd
> Sandy Bridge, on the other hand, both in laptops like the ThinkPad T420 and
> X220 (which still have the best keyboard on any laptop) and off lease
> HP/Dell workstations sporting high frequency Xeons are an astonishing
> price/value bargain (the cheapest E3 1270 workstations with motherboard,
> CPU, cooler, chassis and PSU are about the same cost as the roughly
> equivalent i5 7400 CPU alone). Yes, the wattage has dropped significantly
> but the IPC only grew by 20% from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake

The older laptops are fine if you are looking for something you can plug in
and work on, and have fairly minimal requirements for a GPU. The newer laptops
are much better for those who want to compute on the go, without being
tethered to a wall plug, and have made huge strides in graphics
capabilities/efficiency.

This is compounded by old/failing batteries and the fact that it's nigh-
impossible to source high-quality aftermarket replacements. Most of the
aftermarket batteries on eBay/Amazon will have cells start to die or drift out
of balance within a month or less. Really the only option seems to be to buy
the OEM part... but even from someone like Amazon it could be contaminated by
commingling. There is a widely-acknowledged gap in the market here that some
startup could exploit.

Going from a W510 with Nehalem and non-switchable discrete (circa-2006) Tesla
uarch graphics, to a modern ultrabook or workstation laptop with a Kaby Lake
and switchable Optimus graphics (or a reasonably capable iGPU) is like triple
the battery life, and unlocks a whole world of applications that simply won't
run without DX11 support. And if you want discrete graphics, Pascal alone is
pretty much a game-changer.

There is finally a reasonable enough feature-increment to consider an upgrade
from the old Sandy Bridge/Nehalem stuff.

~~~
chx
You can use ExpressCard to connect an external GPU. [https://egpu.io/external-
gpu-buyers-guide-2018/#expresscard2...](https://egpu.io/external-gpu-buyers-
guide-2018/#expresscard2-interface)

~~~
paulmd
Even Thunderbolt speeds can bottleneck a GPU. The effects are particularly
severe on minimum framerates/frame-times, as opposed to averages.

[https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/External-
Graphi...](https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/External-Graphics-
over-Thunderbolt-3-using-AKiTiO-Node/Performance-Testing)

That's PCIe 3.0x4 speeds. In comparison, ExpressCard is either PCIe 1.1x1
speed or PCIe 2.0x1 speed. That means they have 1/16th of the throughput on
older models, or 1/8th on Sandy Bridge.

It's a cute way to get GSync monitor support in a laptop (this was not
included in _mobile_ until Pascal - yet another reason to upgrade), or to
sidestep lack of support for DX11/DX12, but the performance is not fantastic
(although surely better than a circa-2006 uarch).

Given the size and price of the eGPU solution you are practically better off
doing a compact mITX build in something like the Dan SFX-A4 or Silverstone
RVZ01. You get desktop GPUs and desktop processors (TDP is still king of
performance, and laptop CPUs are very TDP-limited). The only thing you lose is
the integrated display, which you can't really use with an eGPU anyway, since
sending back a display stream chokes the link for bandwidth even harder (the
link I provided is measured by an external display). So yeah, either get a new
laptop or get a new (small) desktop, I don't find the eGPU option all _that_
compelling. Nehalem and Sandy Bridge are still _tolerable_ , that doesn't make
them _ideal_.

------
quinnftw
I run a 2010 MacBook pro which I have upgraded the RAM and swapped out the
disk for an SSD (luckily 2010 was pre motherboard soldering nonsense). It
still runs like a champ 8 years later.

------
lanius
Impressive! My main gaming rig is a custom build from 2011 with an i7 2600k.
Besides upgrading the GPU once, it's still going strong.

------
xbkingx
This is probably a testament more to Apple not having enough time to sprinkle
in their proprietary magic dust following the transition to Intel x86 CPUs.
Giving Apple credit seems a bit misplaced if he had to jump through hoops just
to install a few basic hardware upgrades and the most recent OS to work. It's
a testament to how good the x58 (or the Xeon version (5520?)) chipset was,
which spans Macs and PCs. My x58 PC lasted me ~7 years in grad school and the
only reason I upgraded was opportunity/boredom.

There was a ton of headroom with those 36 PCIE lanes and the longevity of
those systems probably contributed to the relative stagnation of PC consumer
hardware pre-Threadripper rumors. Intel even said (sometime around 2009) that
they were predicting 50 core CPUs by ~2015, but then released nothing but
4-core and special edition 6 and 8 core CPUs. They didn't need to push things
further because these early Core i supporting chipsets met the needs of most
PC users.

------
bluedino
He doesn’t even upgrade the CPU or the old SSD, he just adds a pair of AMD
video cards.

I’d like to see how an old Pro with those upgrades compares to a trashcan pro,
as well as a cost comparison.

------
leoedin
My home laptop is a 2011 Asus ultrabook. I've upgraded to an SSD and installed
more RAM, and it works fine. In fact, it's more than fine - the CPU benchmarks
are only ~10% less than the 2016 XPS13 I'm using at work. I have to put up
with a relatively poor monitor and the occasional spinning fan, but otherwise
it works fine.

I'm vaguely considering upgrading for a 5 year old Lenovo with a higher
resolution screen. PCs really haven't changed much recently!

------
julianh95
Great review! We have a 2011 Macbook Pro that I have since upgraded from an
HDD to SSD and installed 16gb of RAM and I must say its still alive and well.

------
scarface74
The Mac lineup is just in sad shape right now -- except for the iMacs.

The MacBook Air is overpriced and has worse specs than a mid range Windows PC.

The MacBook is under-powered and only has one port.

The MacBook Pro line forces most people to have a hodge podge of dongles and
has an unreliable keyboard.

The Mac Mini hasn't been updated in 4 years.

The Mac Pro is just sad.

The iMacs are great computers, and I will probably end up dropping $3K on a
pretty beefy 27 inch iMac by the end of the year, but I understand an all-in-
one isn't everyone's cup of tea.

------
endemic
I think the moral of this story is that Apple's hardware was _too_ good 10
years ago -- you could upgrade it almost indefinitely. The soldered components
these days definitely make more sense to drive new sales.

~~~
rocky1138
I tried to install Linux on a Mac Pro that looked like the one in the article.
It turns out that it didn't support booting from USB. I didn't have any blank
CDs nor a CD burner (does anyone?) so I gave up and it sat in a corner.

------
gambiting
I still use a 2009 MacBook Pro daily - it only had the HDD swapped for a 128GB
SSD few years ago, but it still runs perfectly fine and is quick enough for
daily use/web browsing/programming.

~~~
dddw
I use a 2009 macbook (not pro) daily running High Sierra, indeed fine for
normal basic browsing and enterntainment consumption

~~~
pacmaannn
I'm in the same boat. My daily driver is a 2008 Macbook that I added another
2gb of ram and a SSD to - works great! I highly recommend opening it up and
cleaning out the fan if you haven't, that made a huge difference in how often
the fan spins up.

------
mmel
I use a 2009 iMac daily. I've upgraded it to 8GB ram & a 1TB SSD and it works
great.

~~~
bwldrbst
My in-laws have a 2009 iMac that's still going strong. Last year I replaced
the HD with an SSD (nervously using suction cups to get the screen off while
my F-i-L watches over my shoulder...)

My wife's 2011 MBP also gained a new lease on life with an SSD.

