MacOS is what keeps me on Apple for now, but this box is not the answer everyone is looking for.
People just want an affordable desktop that you can easily expand over time. At $6000 just for the starting model, in my head I'm already planning to move back to Windows. The only major thing I might miss is iCloud. The cheese grater lineup is still the best incarnation of the Mac Pro overall.
People don't want to be forced to buy an integrated screen, nor do they want a headless laptop, and not everyone can live with a laptop alone. In other words, I don't want a semi-powerful machine trapped in amber or a larger version of an iPhone / iPad.
I just have to figure out a good replacement for iCloud and its related apps.
> People just want an affordable desktop that you can easily expand over time.
Who wants that? You can tell what people want based on what’s selling in the market. Most people want a laptop. Most of the rest want a Word/Excel machine. A small minority want an expandable desktop.
The same people who are into hackintoshes and used, older Mac pros on eBay. Neither community would be as large if Apple would just build a lower end desktop. Why not just update the old Mac Pro and call Mac Pro classic?
The solution I settled on was a Mac Mini to serve as my interface and run desktop applications, and a big hefty expandable Threadripper box running Linux that I SSH into to do all heavy lifting (and that I can put away in a closet). A NAS holds most files.
I've been really happy with the Mac Mini for this role, and the Threadripper box provides more power than I could reasonably get from any Mac.
I don't want an overpriced, glued shut Mac Mini. I don't have issues with physical space. I've tried the Thunderbolt / USB3 chaining solution when I had a iMac. I didn't like it. I want a reasonably price Mac desktop like the ones from years ago, but that's not going to happen.
This is going to make my transition back to Windows much easier. Maybe the people at Apple have failed to realized that Windows has gotten a lot better under Nadella?
There's the Windows Subsystem for Linux as well: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about Not to mention stuff like docker also made working on Windows less of an issue and I think Ubuntu will be shipping on Windows by default in the future.
For me the sticking points on Windows that prevent me from considering it for more than gaming are 1) advertising to me within the OS, 2) frequent, aggressive restarts for updates, even when actively using the computer and 3) the higher quality productivity app ecosystem on the Mac. The first two signal a big lack of respect for their users, imo. I know you can tweak it, but they make it unnecessarily hard, and I think I’ve seen updates reverting my choices. Apple has also done some of #2, but not nearly to the same extent.
Also, the Mac Mini isn’t glued shut, first thing I did when I got it after verifying that it booted was to swap in 32 gigs of aftermarket RAM.
I’ve been using windows 10 as a gaming machine all this time and I haven’t noticed advertising. The restarts were annoying for my windows box acting as my video security server, but for personal machines you can easily schedule updates and restarts to when you’re asleep so I’m not seeing that as a real issue either.
You are right about the higher quality software on the Mac. I will miss that but I’m not sure how long it’ll last given Apple’s hardware direction. You can already see it with the rise of electron based apps
It’s a pain upgrading the mini compared to a bigger box. You run into all kinds of annoyances. Also I want to upgrade storage as well and not just the ram.
What you save by not upgrading Apple’s egregiously priced flash memory, you can put towards a much larger NAS :-) With 10GbE becoming available, you can get pretty great performance from 6-8 spinning disks, with gobs of space.
I could never really use a remote system as well as a local one - the various kinds of file syncing or mounting (samba, SSHfs, expandrive) have their problems or only work 99% of the time.
Yeah, I mostly use emacs, which is pretty terminal friendly, or ssh-piped Jupyter, which I love and hate. I used to try to make those remote mounting solutions work.
One thing you can do is run a Linux VM locally with VMWare’s shared folder stuff (annoying to get working but solid once working). Develop using your local IDE, test locally on your VM, and then check in/check out on the heavy weight machine once you have something ready to run something big. Depends on what you’re doing, though. For machine learning, Jupyter is niceish.
People just want an affordable desktop that you can easily expand over time. At $6000 just for the starting model, in my head I'm already planning to move back to Windows. The only major thing I might miss is iCloud. The cheese grater lineup is still the best incarnation of the Mac Pro overall.
People don't want to be forced to buy an integrated screen, nor do they want a headless laptop, and not everyone can live with a laptop alone. In other words, I don't want a semi-powerful machine trapped in amber or a larger version of an iPhone / iPad.
I just have to figure out a good replacement for iCloud and its related apps.