10 reasons to drop Windows for Mountain Lion

Fox News ^ | July 29, 2012 | Mark Spoonauer

[PreciousLiberty]

"I almost regret informing you of the mysterious lack of Mac Pro updates, while the rest of the line has received a strong series of updates."

New Mac Pros will be out early next year. I think Intel is having trouble getting enough volume on the next-gen Xeons. Apple grew concerned about grumblings from pros who really want new machines, and actually unveiled a future plan:

Franz,

Thanks for your email. Our Pro customers like you are really important to us. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today’s event, don’t worry as we’re working on something really great for later next year. We also updated the current model today.

We’ve been continuing to update Final Cut Pro X with revolutionary pro features like industry leading multi-cam support and we just updated Aperture with incredible new image adjustment features.

We also announced a MacBook Pro with a Retina Display that is a great solution for many pros.

Tim (Cook)

From:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2012/06/12/apple-says-new-models-designs-for-imac-mac-pro-in-works-due-in-2013/

I'm looking forward to seeing the new Pros. :-)

[antiRepublicrat]

New Mac Pros will be out early next year. I think Intel is having trouble getting enough volume on the next-gen Xeons.

The volume is there. Mac Pros are still using 6-core Westmere Xeons from 2010, while the competition such as Dell has moved to the latest 8-core Sandy Bridge-EP. There's just no comparing the CPU power, bus bandwidth and memory bandwidth of the two. The Mac is even using an older Intel chipset.

For $5,600 Dell will give you a dual 2.4-3.1 GHz 8-core Xeon with 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM and a 2.5 GB professional video card. Apple will give you a dual 2.9-3.3 GHz 6-core Xeon, 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM and a 1 GB Radeon gaming card for $6,200. Professional workstations are about the horsepower and ISV certification, and Apple is sucking on both counts. And Apple can no longer even play in the league of the serious professional, offering only a mid-range gaming card and 7200 RPM SATA disk and SSD storage, while the Dell offers a 6 GB $3,000 pro card, and adds the option of 10K SAS drives, with a hardware RAID controller sporting its own dual-core PowerPC CPU and 1 GB of non-volatile cache. If you want fast storage on the Mac, you have to buy the fibre channel card and hook it up to a SAN. The Dell even has 3-year support and a Blu-ray burner included.

It's sad. A few years ago, the Mac Pro was the best workstation value on the market.

[antiRepublicrat]

Your statement that you set up VM Fusion in Boot Camp

That one of his statements actually makes sense. Fusion can run Windows from a Boot Camp partition within OS X as if it were a virtual hard drive. Some features, like snapshots, are of course not available. Fusion will also suck a Boot Camp partition into a virtual hard drive, kind of like the P2V in the enterprise VMWare systems. I so love that feature at work, "Server X is having hardware problems, it's gonna die soon! Don't worry, just P2V and chuck the hardware."

Now OS X not being full UNIX, that was a hokey statement in itself. Have you seen the list of OS X Unix software over at MacPorts?

[PreciousLiberty]

“It’s sad. A few years ago, the Mac Pro was the best workstation value on the market.”

For whatever reason (Thunderbolt?) Apple has elected to skip the Sandy Bridge Xeons and go with Ivy Bridge. I agree with you, it was bad to go so long without either an update or a price drop.

I think the video card situation will be better going forward as Apple switches to NVIDIA for this next round. I’m not sure there’s really a point in supporting the “pro” cards, as the only real difference is drivers except possibly at the very high end. We’ll see what Apple does there.

I’m hopeful that the Mac Pro refresh will include the long-rumored xMac, a “prosumer” mini-tower to sit between the iMac and the Mac Pros. That would boost Mac popularity quite a bit, IMO. With fresh thinking driving Apple forward, it seems quite possible.

[Swordmaker]

That one of his statements actually makes sense. Fusion can run Windows from a Boot Camp partition within OS X as if it were a virtual hard drive.

My quibble was he said he "set up VM Fusion in Boot Camp" which is wrong... on its face. To have VM Fusion run the Windows installation FROM Boot Camp I would not have quibbled at. VM Fusion runs on OSX and in OSX. The way he posted it, showed he did not understand at all what Boot Camp was.

[antiRepublicrat]

For whatever reason (Thunderbolt?) Apple has elected to skip the Sandy Bridge Xeons and go with Ivy Bridge.

The first iMac with Thunderbolt was Sandy Bridge, so that couldn't be a limitation. There must be another reason.

I’m not sure there’s really a point in supporting the “pro” cards, as the only real difference is drivers except possibly at the very high end.

A long time ago, they were the same cards. A quick solder and a driver could change an old GeForce to a Quadro. But these days there is quite a bit of hardware difference, and we are talking about high-end here.