
Ask HN: Buy new Apple hardware given none was announced at WWDC? - jason_slack
I was planning on buying a Mac Pro and hoping for a new model to be announced today at WWDC. It has been about 18 months since it was refreshed.<p>No hardware at all was announced.<p>Now, I don&#x27;t know if buying a new machine is a good idea or if they are going to do a refresh in the near future.
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musesum
Bought a MBP in May of 2015. AMD GPU means no CUDA. Two months ago, the screen
went black. Lost a few days. Same thing happened to a friend with same model.
Still have a MBP Retina from 2012. That model has a Nvidia chip, so probably
as fast or faster for ML. Also, there is a recall on the 2015 display that
flickers. Have put off requesting a fix on mine. Am hoping that after the new
MBP comes out with a (rumored) Nvidia chip, that Apple will replaced my flawed
AMD version. If Apple comes out with another AMD GPU, then will abandon Apple
for something better.

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chmaynard
A major new high-end MacBook product announcement should have happened at WWDC
2016. It seems that Tim Cook has decided that only software announcements are
appropriate at WWDC.

Steve Jobs had a better sense of timing when he introduced the first iPad at
WWDC in 2010. Apple missed an opportunity to bring down the house at WWDC
2016. Apple execs need to recognize that Apple developers, the audience at
WWDC, badly need and want improvements to the high-end MacBook products.

The old saying at Apple was that "software sells systems". Apple Hardware
Engineering is still a world-class organization and is directly responsible
for most of Apple's revenue. Why not play up this strength at WWDC?

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benologist
[http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro](http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro)

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jason_slack
The only one that is "buy now" is the MacBook and it seems only because it was
the most recent updated. This isn't totally useful for decision making.

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ramenmeal
Is based on the average refresh cycle for those product lines. Given how Apple
is usually pretty scheduled in their updates, it works pretty well usually.

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jseliger
If you NEED it, buy it now. If you can wait, wait.

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jason_slack
I have a retina 15 inch MacBook Pro with 16gb of RAM and also an iMac that is
dedicated for work.

I was hoping to get more into AI and OpenCV with c++.

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lhl
If you're looking to do primarily CUDA/OpenCV work you'd be crazy to not build
your own PC/drop in a new Pascal card. $450 will get you a GTX 1070 that
should easily do 7 TFLOPs of SP (w a slight overclock), and for $600-700 a GTX
1080 that could push 9+ TFLOPs.

As far as price/performance, a high end Mac is only worthwhile if you have
very specific software requirements (mostly, if you use Mac-only media
production software).

~~~
jason_slack
Any help on a board that supports multiple cards and lots of RAM?

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inlineint
How much RAM do you need?

I can recommend SuperMicro boards but it's just a guess because it's better to
know what exactly do you want.

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petecooper
>No hardware at all was announced.

No hardware was announced _yet_. There have been occasions in the past that
speed bumps and minor changes (i.e., not worthy of announcements) just appear
in the web store without fanfare.

