Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable. An iFixit Op-ed.

[Mark Bein]

I don’t see how it would hurt you either.
RAM is cheap these days – limiting factor is how much CPU/chipset can handle, this is a laptop after all.
Max out RAM at a reasonable price, have battery replaced when necessary, change SSD at will.
What’s the big difference?

[Richard Herd]

[Andrew Richards] “populated by people who have no interest in servicing their own laptop”

My hand is raised. I am he who couldn’t care more…er, less…whatever. I care very little about fixing my own laptop, car, refrigerator, guitar, amp, shoes, buttons on shirts. I care very much when someone needs me to fix their film and video.

[Chris Harlan]

[Jeremy Garchow] “What I don’t understand is that people say they “upgraded this CPU or that mobo” on a PC, and I am wondering did they actually do the work, or does that mean they send it in to where they bought, or back to the manufacturer for an upgrade?”

Usually that means that they did the work.

[Jeremy Garchow] “It seems that while the PC side seems to praise the “tinker” aspect of it, I am trying to get a sense of just how much tinkering really happens and how often, and does that really equate to cost savings, or perhaps more importantly performance gains in relation to those costs.
“

There really is a whole tinkering culture on the PC side that has no serious analog in the Mac world. Once upon a time cost-saving might have been involved, but when desktop computers hit near-comodity status, it was seldom cheeper to build instead of buy. Now much of it is optimization or personalization. Gamers, particularly, customize and hot-rod out their machines. As more expensive desktops and workstations become a niche again, I think you’ll see cost-related tinkering again, as people work to squeeze more life out of their sizzle cores.

[Frank Gothmann]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I am trying to look at all of this practically.

It seems that while the PC side seems to praise the “tinker” aspect of it, I am trying to get a sense of just how much tinkering really happens and how often, and does that really equate to cost savings, or perhaps more importantly performance gains in relation to those costs.”

Sometimes tinkering doesn’t make sense, sometimes it does – bigtime. First thing is that replacing this parts isn’t difficult. It’s dead easy, for anybody. As is building a PC from scratch. Once people loss the fear and just dive in it’s simple. I’ve swapped tons of stuff around and I never managed to break anything and, probably more important, I never had a case where things didn’t work together. Compatibility of components really isn’t an issue (just the usual one on one, right socket for the right cpu etc. but that’s just normal planning before you buy)

Here is an example where tinkering saved me a lot:
We connect to our San via 10GB Ethernet. Machine is all selft built, running Linux. When we built it it was serving out to four clients via 10GB and others via regular 1GB. We put in two 10GB nics which have 2 ports each (that’t the max as we don’t use optical but regular cat6a), ie. four ports with direct connection to the clients.
Earlier this year we needed fast access for two additional clients. Now… there was no more space for another 10GB nic because all slots were occupied. A 10GB Ethernet router still costs around 10.000 dollars.
So, we simply swapped the mainboard with more PCI slots. Added a faster CPU (we went with a really basic AMD consumer grade cpu at the beginning), power supply. Total cost of the upgrade: 600 dollars, with one more slot still empty in case we need to add yet another two clients.

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“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Herb Sevush]

[Chris Harlan] “Gamers, particularly, customize and hot-rod out their machines. As more expensive desktops and workstations become a niche again, I think you’ll see cost-related tinkering again, as people work to squeeze more life out of their sizzle cores.”

The biggest customization area now are hackintoshes. College kids are building $650 OSX machines – this is seen as both a challenge and a way to save money. The Videoguys DIY build lists lay out the parts to build super fast i7 PC editing machines for anywhere from 1500 to 2500. This is not something I’m interested in doing, but the PC side of things has always had a hot rod mentality as part of the culture.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Andrew Richards]

[Jeremy Garchow] “There’s a bet here, and that bet is on solid state (and retina).”

I’ve been all SSD for boot since early 2010 and now I can’t stand to boot from a spinning disk. I have one bone-stock Mac mini with an HDD I use for testing odds and ends (it is my Mountain Lion sandbox for now), and the lag from its 5400 RPM HDD boot drive is excruciating when I’m used to SSDs on all my other rigs.

[Jeremy Garchow] “Can photo/video Pros and not Business Sector Pros bang on these computers, and will they be able to survive?”

It has always been best-practice to segregate boot and media storage, now the performance characteristics of that segregation are more profound. HDDs will remain the $/GB kings for a while, but as media storage goes, not a whole lot of HDD capacity ever fit inside a laptop anyway.

[Jeremy Garchow] “If you look around, the entire computer industry loves solid state, it’s just so damn expensive when you start getting in to massive quantities at a speed that’s conducive to being “Pro” suitable.”

It is expensive in terms of capacity, but SSD speed is well beyond anything an HDD can deliver in every performance category. You need an array of HDDs to match the performance of a single SATA III SSD. 500 MBps is typical for single SSDs now. Can’t get that with any single HDD, even the 10K and 15K RPM enterprise SAS units.

If I’m spec’ing out a system today for video work, the only thing I’m using HDDs for is big data. Anything small like the OS, project files, and caches would go on an SSD. Sure would be nice if Apple would let us store FCPX renders somewhere other than the Projects folder…

Best,
Andy

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks, Frank.

[Frank Gothmann] “Machine is all selft built, running Linux. “

I think you can stop right there. 😉

I am not interested in building my machines, although I know I would enjoy it.

I am talking about buying ,say, an HP z820. I want to “upgrade the motherboard”, do I call HP and have them send a new one or does it not work like that?

More broadly, I am trying to take a litmus test as to how much user upgradability is truly useful today in machines that you buy from a vendor, not a bunch of parts you assemble yourself.

We typically get 3 maybe 4 years out of machines.

On a side note, what are you sing to mange your SAN, metaSAN or something?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks, Andrew, you are eloquently reinforcing what I was trying to say.

Jeremy

[Oliver Peters]

[Jeremy Garchow] “If I decided to go CS6, I could probably put a Quadro 4000 in both MacPros and get maybe another year, but it won’t make the job go any faster.”

I’ve done that comparison and the 4000 is only marginally better when you actually do most of the things you really do in editing. And it crashed more with some effects. So the 5870 is actually just fine.

In the past when I’ve worked with clients who had made the move from FCP/G5 to CS/HP (with an Axio system), the ancilliary things you end up doing in the OS during the normal course of the day that you take for granted, start to really get to you in Windows. At least it did for us. In the end, we both hated doing some of the things in Windows – and the amount of real-time effects we had hoped to achieve wasn’t really better – that he ended up going back to FCP and buying a newer MP.

I don’t fall into the “PC is cheaper” camp. In fact, when I’ve done apples-to-apples comparisons (pun intended), the Apple product was actually cheaper. Figure a mobile workstation laptop versus a MBP or an 8-core Z800 versus an 8-core MP – and add in things like FW800 – and all of a sudden the comparable PC product is significantly more expensive. The advantage, though, is that you can finder cheaper (non-qualified) configurations in the PC world, which makes the price comparison lower and artificially in favor of PCs.

Ultimately you have to look at what it is that you do. Straight-forward editing, basic motion graphics and color correction? Then current machines still have plenty of life. Heavy-duty AE, Nuke, 3D work? Then you need a performance fire-breather.

Just as with the discussions over X, the reality is that most users are simply continuing with 7. So, for me, no real interest (or need) in moving out of the Apple ecosystem just yet.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Oliver Peters] “In the past when I’ve worked with clients who had made the move from FCP/G5 to CS/HP (with an Axio system), the ancilliary things you end up doing in the OS during the normal course of the day that you take for granted, start to really get to you in Windows. At least it did for us. In the end, we both hated doing some of the things in Windows – and the amount of real-time effects we had hoped to achieve wasn’t really better “

This is the intangible that I have the most trouble putting down on virtual paper.