Phil Hoppes
Forum Replies Created
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No I have no experience with this drive. The cost is hard to beat, $200 for 750Gb vs $1100 for a 1Tb SSD. My largest concern is the power dissipation. From the specifications it dissipates an average of 2.4W with 1.2W idle. I would guess, given that it’s location is right next to the back of the laptop, that the heat should be dissipated without much issue. My expectation is that my battery life will be limited from what it was previously, but I rarely use my MBP on battery only and when I do I never exceed an hours use at any one time so I don’t expect this to be an issue. I almost never need the optical drive. I’m going to spring the $40 and get the kit that converts the internal optical drive to an external USB drive. For the very few times I need it (like rebuilding the drive) that will work fine. I’ve yet to ever run into a circumstance where I “HAD” to have a DVD drive to either read or write something that could not be done with a Flash drive. Personally I’d like to see Apple drop them completely as I think they’ve become a worthless feature.
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Yes you are right the Dell Precision. Maybe the newer models are better. The previous one had LOTS of problems.
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[Chris Harlan] “One of the attractive features on those are the beefy mobile Nvidia cards.”
That is my biggest grip with my current MBP. It is a fantastic piece of hardware and no kidding, probably the best Windows 7 machine you can run with bootcamp, but the AMD graphics are limiting. The Mercury engine in PP does not work and one of the apps I have from the Foundry, Mari, won’t even install unless you have an NVidia card. Good luck with Dell and/or HP. My experience with both has been less than stellar. The Dell workstation Dimension laptops have real thermal issues. A friend got one and it routinely shuts down due to overheating. HP is not much better and people gripe about Apple prices?? HP is crazy with what they want, that is why I like the MBP for both Win and OSX. Apple really designs their hardware very well. At the moment I hate schlepping around an external HD. I’m strongly considering getting one of the MacSales kits to swap out the optical drive and put in a second internal HD for data. Either SSD or one of the Seagate Hybrid HD’s. You can get 750Gb for just over $200. That would be sweet!!! I currently run NTFS from OSX from Paragon This works great so my data drive can be formatted NTFS but I can Read/Write from OSX too so no need to create separate partitions.
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I just upgraded my MPB (Oct 2011 version) to 16Gb using the upgrade from MacSales. This upgrade use to cost well over $1000.00. It is now price just over $300 with shipping so it was a deal for me.
The upgrade was a snap. Just unscrew the screws on the back, pop off the bottom, pop out the old sims and put in the new ones, replace the back and I was good to go.
On performance, you must understand why I wanted and needed it. I do mostly 3D work with “some” video editing. This Mac is running Bootcamp with Win7 on a 350Gb partition and OS 10.6.8 on the other partition. The hard drive is an Apple 500GB SSD. I spend 90% of my time in Win7 and about 10% on the OSX side. For video editing, I use PP on the Windows side and FCPX on the Mac side. Before adding the ram, running Win7, it was very common for me to have my machine sitting with about 1Gb free (8Gb total at the time) so that any new process would start paging to disk. I use network rendering for all of my 3D apps (Maya, Modo, Nuke, Vue and After Effects) I use Deadline as a network render manager. I have found that 1Gb/thread is just about the lower limit for efficiency with 2Gb/thread the most you would ever need. My laptop, when rendering before the upgrade would perform about 10% to 20% less than what I would have expected given the CPU speed and comparing it to the other nodes on my network. After the upgrade, it performs about what I would expect. My other nodes are my main workstation, which is a 3.3Ghz i7 980 Extreme (Hex Core/12 threads) with 24Gb Ram and a 2x 2.4Ghz Xeon 5645 (24 threads total) with 24Gb RAM. My workstyle is usually to have lots of applications open so I can bounce back and fourth between applications. It is not uncommon for me to have PremierPro, Nuke, AfterEffects and Maya all open at the same time and to be going from one application to the next and so fourth. You can’t work like this and only have 8gb of RAM. It just does not work.
So…. if you are only a one application at a time working kind of person and you don’t do a lot of network rendering, you probably don’t need any more memory than the 8Gb that comes standard. If you like to work in a resource pig mode like me, there is NEVER enough RAM….. 😉
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[Andrew Richards] “Even if we allow that your figuring of the Mac Pro R&D budget is in the ballpark, there is a lot more cost involved in R&D than salaries. There is prototyping, materials, etc. Regardless, there is no way there are 175 engineers dedicated to the Mac Pro. Or probably any Mac for that matter.
“I was simply trying to apply some credence to what MacPro sales probably are and what it takes to support them. Personally, I’d be very surprised if Apple breaks 200K Units/Yr. And, no.. I don’t think it takes near 175 people to support, again I was ballparking some numbers based upon my work in the PC industry. For Apple sans chip development, making test boards, etc. is peanuts compared to salary. Doing IC development is HUGH in expense. That is what I use to do. You need to drop about 5 to 10 million in just software to get a small group of designers going and then proto and development cost are through the roof. MacPro’s don’t require that. Apple uses Intel Chip sets and off the shelf IC’s. I would agree with you that I’d be floored if they used more that 20-30 people tops that could be considered “dedicated” MacPro R&D and Support staff.
That being said, I think its a lot of poppycock that some think Apple “Needs” to support the high end workstation market for some status or another ridiculous reason. Apple is a public corporation. Tim Cook’s job is to maximize shareholder value. Some products are produced as they are strategic and enable significant sales of other products. When I made uControllers my company use to sell development systems too. They were marginally profitable but they were necessary to sell the uControllers, thus they had strategic value. One could make an argument that MacPro’s and ProApps were symbiotic and sales of one fostered sales of the other and in the days of FCP6 and FCP7 that was most certainly true. Now, with i7 Quad core iMacs and FCPX I personally believe that the symbiotic relationship to a MacPro is darn near non-existent. There is an ever decreasing number of very high end pro users that require a box with slots and an every growing number of high end pro users that are finding they don’t need it or won’t for very long. I just believe personally that the curve that plots the market demand for such hardware is a curve that is pointing down. The synergy that once existed between other companion products within the Apple line is no longer there.
All that being said, they may spin it one last time. Hell, look at FCP Server. They flailed with that for years, finally released it and then killed it. A new MacPro may be around the corner but I for one certainly would not bet my business on it. If I truly needed a box with slots, I look else where or, if I really wanted to stay on a Mac platform, then I’d look to see how I could get my work done on products that have an upward development curve, not one with one foot in the grave.
That’s just MHO.
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Not to burst anyone’s bubble too big but try to keep a perspective of what the high end workstation market (ie MacPro, et.al.) is to the total overall market. Just a quick Google and one can get some rough back-of-the-envelope numbers without paying a gazillion dollars to Gartner.
From the (Gartner link we see the Q4 PC Worldwide shipments at around 92million give or take. From this report we see the Q3 unit workstation volume was around 1Million units. That translates that workstations hold a whopping 1% unit market share and the overall yearly trend has been down not up. For the sake of argument let’s assume that it at least stays flat.While Apple is making substantial gains overall in the US market and the global world market, coming from a less than 5% market share years back to now around 11%, in the workstation market they are a footnote. Linux and Windows machines dominate the workstation market and while I don’t have access to the numbers I would be very surprised if Apple had even close to 0.5% market share. This would translate to around 200K MacPro Units a year. Just looking at the Apple web site a base QuadCore is $2500 and a base 12Core is $5000. Split the difference and say the ASP of all MacPro’s is $3500. At 200K units that’s around 700M annual. Thats a big number ….. until you compare it to Apples total annual revenue of 108B. Then you see it is less than 1%. Apple currently runs around 3% R&D as a percentage of sales last time I looked. Assuming this works across the board that would translate to about 21M/yr for the MacPro group. Figure an average engineering salary around 120K/yr that roughly translates to about 175 people to support MacPro’s. My first guess is this sounds actually pretty high to me having worked in the PC industry for over 20 years but lets use that number.
The real question Tim Cook and the rest of Apple management are asking themselves I’m sure is what is the opportunity cost of having those 175 engineers working on MacPro’s where we could have them working on iPad’s, iTV’s or some other new product. When you look at just what has been done for Apple revenue because of iPad sales alone it does not take rocket science to see that there may be better product opportunities to be spending your precious R&D dollars.
I’d like nothing better than to see a new MacPro and MacPro line but the reality is, it serves a niche market that has seen continuous decline. Apple’s specific market share in that market is insignificant. Apple’s popular consumer desktop models get more and more powerful every year and are rapidly approaching the point that for a large portion (NOT ALL mind you) of the MacPro users a top end iMac will more than do the job they need. As reported in many journals, the profit margins on MacPros for Apple is not that great so….. I don’t believe it really is a question of if MacPro’s will be dropped, simply a matter of when.
Just my 2cents.
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If it is a new one I’m sure it will be just as innovative as the last 2 or 3 releases….. cheese grater box, updated MB to support a newer CPU, probably add Tbolt, maybe sataIII but don’t count on it, No USB3, No B-Ray for sure, maybe Nvidia card support but it will still have crappy driver support and will all cost 2x to 3x what an equivalent Win box. I’m a original apple fan boy but their MacPro line has become a joke of huge proportions.
Ho Hum…. nothing new…. move along.
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[Shane Ross] “THEY need to change…not us.”
Good luck with that. How about standing on the beach and asking the tide not to come in?
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Apple are bad people.”
Dude… seriously…. you need to go get some help. Move on with your life and go find some joy. It’s a tool. A frigging screwdriver.
Sheesh….