I don’t disagree that the new Mac mini is a beast, for sure. But the new Mac Pro slays it. I’m talking about current models. Of course the new Mac Pro is ridiculously expensive. It’s for video pros, and perhaps audio pros.
The answer is no because it would be pointless. Any internal ssd will be faster than an external, that’s a given, don’t need to test it. The internal being faster isn’t cutting edge, it’s just got a faster connector!
I’m ditching out here as this is becoming nonsense.
For anyone looking a cheap(er) current iMac, John Lewis have the 2017 base 17in model for £1200 with two years warranty.
For anyone that wants to argue the toss about Apple and the tech, knock yourself out.
:-)
@steveb the nonsense is your unwillingness to explore this further. Your loss. Not all internal SSDs are equal. And not all external SSDs are equal, nor are transfer protocols etc etc. So your comment, “any internal ssd will be faster than an external”, is,ahem, bullshit! You clearly have no idea. You need to be prepared to do the tests yourself if you’re not prepared to listen to someone who knows.
Oh yeah, “faster connector” – wtf? All internal connectors are faster than external? NO.
Did I hit a nerve?
:-)
Did I?
Totally. I’m distraught that my hollow hatred of Apple was reduced so quickly and succinctly by your concise dissection of my beliefs.
Think I’ll get a Chromebook instead.
My 5.1 is getting on now but still pretty fast, even by today’s standards. It was purchased to handle large photographic files and occasional video etc, but most of the time it is barely ticking over. Sometimes I use it to render sequences from Maya, however that can be incredibly time consuming and better sent to a rendering farm. Ironically, the only app that runs slow as a dog and produces spinning ball is RW.
The new Mac Pro should be out in a few months but there is just no way I am going to spend £5K or more on a computer. For 99% of freelancers the price makes them untenable, though I’m sure they’ll be popular in a few years as used options. In the meanwhile, most will switch to the mini. Anybody buying a trashcan 6.1 right now is mad.
Most of the new Mac Pros will go to movie studios and that sort of thing, where they’ll be dealing with projects that require massive processing power and any saved time easily pays the cost of the machine. The iMac is not something I’m really considering, though I have one from 2007 that still runs.
1 Like
Be a dick if you like. Chromebook yourself stupid! I’m more about presenting the facts, if the collateral damage is a “dissection of your beliefs”, so be it!
Yet another crushing blow. Please stop, I can’t take anymore.
2 Likes
Absolutely. RW runs like shit on anything! Mac Pros will go to pro media studios. For sure, too expensive for most “normal” people. New Mac mini is a great option. So is the iMac. I think the iMac is better bang for the buck than the iMac Pro.
Runs fine on my 2010 iMac.
RW’s performance has more to do with the stacks you use than the machine, within reason, IMO.
I’ve tested that, honestly. I have. I did it. Myself.
Some applications require serious realtime horsepower, particularly pro audio. So it’s one thing to wait for something to render, vs needing it to be processed in realtime. Therefore we like serious CPU spec for audio (even though we can render, to some extent). New iMacs are pretty damn good for this, but the Mac Pro sure would be nice!
The iMac Pro is a fairly senseless machine from what I can tell. The last time I checked iMacs had displays with a P3 colour space that is not good for my work. Hopefully they no longer suffer from the heat issues that used to cause burn marks.
I have a hard time making a case for anything other than my current computer right now. The nagging concern is the thought of being left without a viable alternative for a good 10 days if something major went wrong, since Apple are not fast for delivering custom builds and most of these machines are hard to upgrade yourself. There is another problem…
Last year my daughter’s new MBP had a logic board failure after 3 months, then a few months later just about everything else went wrong. In the first year she was basically without a properly working computer for about 3 months, despite lots of calls and trips to Apple before it was finally replaced under warranty. That’s really not good on a machine that cost that much.
Cutting edge service that is, you just don’t understand it.
Depends on your application for sure. Good luck with colour management I say – now there’s a black art! And no burn marks here :)
Years ago iMacs were getting too hot and the drives were failing quite early. Sometimes it got worse when they were replaced by drives that ran too hot and physically burned the display.
I’ve done quite a lot of colour management related work. The room I am sitting in was painted with Munsell N8 grey paint.
i know i’m just resuscitating a trolled-to-death thread already, but i thought it was worth mentioning…
i’m in a very similar situation. i have three 2010 machines. two of which are very nice mac pros: my daily use development machine and my build server. there are precious few available options from apple with similar performance for < $3K – and what there is doesn’t thrill me. my needs are rather more industrial and less aesthetic than what’s available today.
so here’s my current plan and why:
-
to replace my build server i’m going to get a used mac mini. it needs to be fast-ish, but if i see a good deal on a recent one with at least 16GB of RAM, I’ll bite.
-
i’m not going to replace my desktop machine immediately. i’d like to have real apple hardware, but i honestly detest every single device inside of the apple store right now. but i’m also hoping that maybe they’ve finally got the message about these keyboards and maybe, just maybe, they’ll have new MacBooks out in 12 months or so. so – i just need to hold on until then. here’s my plan…
-
hackintosh - this is an experiment, obviously very unreliable, but might be fun (i enjoy tinkering with broken electronics – it’s just the sort of nerd i am). and as a bonus, it might be scorching fast if i can get the thing to work. i’m currently awaiting delivery of various bits and bobs to build an i9 screamer. amazingly the entire rig cost me $1200. if the experiment goes down in flames and isn’t really useful or requires too much futzing, then my kids have a new game machine for christmas.
-
2015 macbook - if i tire of the hackintosh before a new macbook keyboard is released then i’ll go for a 2015 macbook. they still have an ok keyboard, prices are not too bad all considering, and if i can find the top-end model it should be plenty fast.
-
Where to get it:
-
I have a local computer junk shop that occasionally gets Apple gear in stock and likes to dump it (they’re primarily PC guys) – so I’ve twice scored amazing deals there. i’m definitely looking at their stock every couple days scanning mac minis. i don’t think i’ll see the 2015 2015 there – that seems outside of their bread-and-butter.
-
I bought one of my Mac Pros from http://macsales.com – their prices are very reasonable and they’ve been selling upgrade gear since forever so they’re very trustworthy and reliable for warrantees.
As for hackintosh stuff I’ve been looking through https://www.tonymacx86.com for tips what to buy and just picking up the gear on amazon. Everything was direct from amazon except for the processor which seems to be coming from another vendor, but still with standard intel warrantee. except for the speed, this rig is nothing fancy – no water cooling, flashy lights, or milled aluminum cases. just 32GB of crazy fast memory, an insanely fast 1TB m.2 drive, and a 5GHz 9th gen 8 core i9 processor that has seriously drool-worthy benchmarks. if i can get the thing to run xcode even a little bit, it’ll blow the doors off of anything sub $5K with an apple logo on it. it should be a super fun project.
P.S. Don’t worry – Stacks and all of my plugins will always be compiled on real apple hardware. That’s why it’s nice to have a safe and boring build server running a nice and safe version of Xcode and macOS.
1 Like
I’ve just bought a 2017 27" iMac myself and have just upgraded the internal SSD plus replaced the HD with a 1TB 2.5" SSD. You would think it would scream along with a SSD that reads at over 1800 MB/s and it does… Until you use Rapidweaver and it feels like I’m wading through treacle. Maybe RW9 will be faster…
I built a Hackintosh once, about 15 years ago I guess, maybe a bit less. It actually worked OK, for about a week, then started to creek. I binned it.
A few months back I priced an iMac spec’d as I’d like it: £2500. No way and I dropping that on a machine is is essentially a consumable unit nowadays. I don’t care how cutting edge the insides of an iMac is (it’s not at all but don’t say that too loud) I don’t mind paying a premium for Apple products, but I’m not going to bend over and take one for the Apple team.
The 2010 machine, which has been rock solid since I got it, and is piss easy to pull apart, gets ripped apart every year, cleaned, maybe upgraded a bit, then rebuilt. That’s how a machine should be. It still have plenty of life in the hardware, but I know it’s only a matter of time til the software kills it. Which is a shocking state of affairs: That people support a company that kills good machines with software updates, just to force users to replace.
The 2010 cost me £750 to buy, and I guess about another £500 in upgrades since new, so 1250, over nine years: GREAT VALUE.
I can swallow £1200 for the new machine, I’ll wait til it’s out of warranty then pull the screen and hopefully get at least five years out of it. I suspect there will be a way to replace the screen without bonding it back in, thinking maybe some G-clamps ;-) so at least once that’s done, getting into it will be a lot easier.
Other than Macs (and a couple of Airports) I don’t use Apple hardware. I did once use an iPhone, but nearly died laughing at how shite it was in comparison to the marketing, so gave it to one of the kids and went back to proper phones. IMO the iPhone killed the Mac line. Apple got greedy and realised that can actually shaft their customers and lie to them over and over again, and they still come back for more.
It’s not the machine, it’s not really RW, or Stacks, it’s the stacks. RW just doesn’t have the grunt to run a lot of modern stacks. It’s taken me a long time to realise this, and accept that it’s not going to change. I did side-side comparisons with my upgrades SSD 2010 iMac and a brand new 2019 with twice as much ram and a factory fitted SSD. Almost no performance difference with RW.