Mac Hardware

[Josh Cease]

Hi John,

Curious why you wouldn’t go Fusion drive?

From some research, it seems like it moves your most used programs to the SSD part of the fusion drive keeping things running optimally / fast.

What are the main worries with it? Thanks!

[Victor Richardson]

“All I can tell you Rich is that our iMacs perform much faster and better than our 2 2013 Mac Pros. 7 Systems (not including servers) and every day the Mac Pro guys complain to me about AE having horrible render times, FCPX exporting slowly, etc. It seems that even El Capitan isn’t working great with Mac Pros.”

I have to strongly agree with John on this. The iMacs are far superior to the 2x more costly Mac Pros in almost every aspect.
We have four late 2013(bought in 2014) 2.7GHz, 12-core, Mac Pros with 64GB RAM, dual AMD D500 cards, and 2TB Fusion drives.
We also have four 27″ iMacs with 4.0GHz, 4-core i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB Fusion drives

We are a production/post house that does a lot of 4k extreme sports projects, working almost exclusively in Premiere Pro/After Effects. Every Mac Pro has serious render/export problems on complex projects. They just plain fail mid-render or export. On top of that, if there are dual monitors plugged into the trash can, we have found artifacts in the exports. Unplug one of the screens, not artifacts. We can take the exact same project files onto our iMacs and they render/export flawlessly in seemingly less time.

All four Mac Pros have died with critical parts failures, multiple times, several costing over $1k, others covered under warranty. We have had the dual AMD video cards replaced in three of them, one of those twice($546 a repair). There is an actual internal Apple recall on those video cards in systems manufactured between February 8, 2015 and April 11, 2015. They will not willingly offer this information, you have to demand it when you bring in your dead Mac Pro. We had to pay to repair two of our MP’s because they did not fall within that four month range…even though they had the exact same parts failure.

On top of that, two of our MP’s have had critical parts failures with the RAM modules. Not just the RAM memory chips, but the slot with the RAM slides into. As it turns out, there is supposedly a processor on that slot mechanism. As a result, the replacement costs $1,200.

The worst part of this, besides that the MP’s cost $8k-10k fully decked out, is that you will endure months of intermittent crashes, reboots, etc before those parts finally die outright. The lost productivity, frustration, confusion, and missed delivery schedules is insane. And Apple is not owning up to its design problems and QB issues. They are full aware , just not coming clean with their customers.

So, you can get two iMacs for the price of one Mac Pro. They work just as well at editing and after effects, and no parts failures.
And, if notice…..the Mac Pro is the only Apple product that has not had any real parts upgrades in the 4 years since it was introduced. While the iMac has been continually improved. A rep at a primary Mac reseller in Hollywood told me that, alone, should be a fairly big indication that Apple is letting the Mac Pro die on the vine. And that the company views the iMac as their future pro editing/post product, and not the Mac Pro.

Go iMac, young man!

BTW, there is this really strange and infuriating company policy at Apple where they will not give customers copies of their products service history. Sure, you get an email when turning in the machine for repair, and another billing one upon completion. But, try to get a copy after that. There is absolutely no way to do so. You cannot view repair history in your Apple Support profile, only current cases in repair. They cannot give you a copy print out at the Apple Store. And the online/phone reps cannot send you one.

I was hired after as IT Director after my company’s office manager was fired. He did not keep repair files for any of the computers. I have spent countless hours on the phone, and in person, with Apple reps trying to put together a complete history of the computers at our company. It has been one of the most frustrating things I’ve come across, They will give you minimal information on the phone, and in the shop, even though they can see the entire history on their computers. They will NOT give you a print out of such info.