- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
We asked professionals if they wanted Apple’s desktop, and they all said no.
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The MacBook Pro is the best laptop I’ve ever owned. It is extremely powerful, hugely energy-efficient, and the mechanical keyboard is finally really nice.
Since the MBP entirely scratches my business itch, the only desktop I’d buy is a gaming rig, which the Mac Pro certainly is not.
Edit: butterfly keyboard not mechanical keyboard, sorry!
Mechanical keyboard?
I guess not mechanical keyboard… maybe I meant butterfly keyboard.
“Butterfly” was the design introduced with the touchbar MacBook pro. They’ve gone back to the scissor switches they were using before (with some modifications).
I don’t think you meant that. The butterfly keyboards were pretty much univerally hated and Apple doesn’t use them anymore.
Macs just have a pretty good scissor switch keyboard.
Yes sorry!
Switched from a shitty dell to my Macbook pro laptop when I transitioned to the RHEL side of the house in my company.
Been using it ever since and I will never go back. But yea… I have no idea what the hell i’d ever want a Mac Pro for.
Any Apple is the worst laptop you can buy and will be basically useless in short order considering they’re completely unupgradeable and irreparable.
Blows my mind that so many people still buy Apple’s garbage. They crap in your mouth and then their consumers just keep showing up to beg for more.
Apple hasn’t been for professionals, for like a decade now.
MacBooks are super popular in a variety of professional fields. They are still the go-to machines for photography and video editing. They are popular in software development for providing a good UNIX environment out of the box while also being very solidly built machines.
The more my software engineering career matures, the more I see my peers using MacBooks.
Windows still absolutely dominates government and enterprise, but the idea that professionals don’t use Macs is pretty nonsensical. It’s the kind of thing I believed when I was 20 and working in tech support, back when I still thought it was cool to call Apple users “sheep”.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There’s no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they’re writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don’t make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
I thought this too until every Windows patch started turning my computer into an ad machine.
WSLn is nice but using a Windows 11 machine is starting to suck big time.
This. Good enterprises offer both options. I think people are starting to realize that its best to let people pick the tool that works best for them in this circumstance. Also, equivalent Dells (I have mainly worked at Dell shops lately) are actually more expensive than a MacBook Pro.
Another thing is that enterprise tools lock down Macs a lot less in my experience. This usually pushes people in the direction of Mac when you don’t have to go through an approval process to install an app or package you want to test.
Unix doesn’t matter if you still have to run a VM to run docker. The command line is a lot better than Windows at least.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There’s no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they’re writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don’t make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
Disagree.
All the software companies i work with has switched to MacBook Pros as their mainline professional laptop of choice in the past decade.
It’s literally a better product for most of developer work and much easier to support.
In fact, I’m confident that MX MacBook Pros have cannibalized a good chunk of Mac Pro sales because they are just that good.
Well, I’ve worked for the government (as contractor), corporations, and small businesses, I could count a few times I’ve seen people using Apple Mac Pro devices on one hand (more often seeing Macbook Pro rather, but very rarely for development) and more time than I can count on either Linux or Windows workstation computers.
We use Linux desktop often, because most of our servers are running on Linux so it helps to have version conformity when matching up with server’s versioning and we occasionally use Windows for Visual Studio, proprietary software and so forth. But there are a few times where we get discounts for buying software for Linux rather than Windows.
Employees in my office switched from Apple Macbook Pro to Windows/Linux based laptops like Framework Laptop, because Macbook Pro often time lacked GPU that you would find on Linux and Windows workstation. Apple is going off on it’s own little world with their own Metal API/GPU and it doesn’t reflect the reality in real world emerging technologies. For instance, there are some computational challenges that in my office, we make use of Vulkan Compute so that we can purchase both Nvidia GPU and AMD GPU to generate real-time data, had we used Metal API and Apple’s products, it would’ve been cheaper to purchase cloud compute servers. (We wanted to ensure each developer can test the given Vulkan code on their own desktop/workstation.)
My experience has been all GPU-intensive workflows have been pushed to the cloud. It works a lot better for CI/CD purposes as well, and most of the larger datasets are too practically large for your laptop, it ends up being prohibitively slow to download datasets from databases to your own laptop and then train on your local machine.
I could be biased since most of my network is in the startup scene in SV, where hardware cost is generally the LAST thing most companies worry about. I haven’t seen a non-mac software company that’s not a 5000+ dinosaur person company.
I guess it depends on circumstances, for an example, I would develop GUI Toolkit that utilizes Vulkan Compute for computing various indicators and trading analysis on the front-end that takes in billions of candlesticks for second by second tradings. Having a real-time feedback by adjusting the indicator algorithm is very handy to have in a trading software.
Every developer I know uses Linux
What? I’m a software engineer (a so-called “professional”) at a major corporation and we get the choice between Windows and Mac. Every single person I know in the company has chosen Mac.
If given the choice between the plague and cholera I might choose cholera, yes. OSX is a proper Unix (even if buried under layers of Apple), OTOH nowadays there’s perfectly functional WSL so… tough choice.
Anyhow programmers aren’t Apple’s traditional professional users, their home turf is mid-range graphics workstations, they famously got big on PageMaker, even invented the term desktop publishing. Then, Photoshop. Making glossy magazines as opposed to word processing which quickly became an IBM PC domain or actual graphics where you’d get an SGI workstation and studios that started out on Houdini, Maya etc. now use Linux.
That workstation mid-end got squeezed out by Moore’s law and Adobe or ZBrush isn’t going to save them because Microsoft exists.
Meanwhile, they pin-point focussed on the “ohhh, shiny” target group over the last decades.
Too bad the Reddit migration attracted trolls like this.
You must not be talking about tech professionals, because the MBP is THE workstation in this field. Even developers at MSFT use them primarily.
Maybe try music production professionals, a lot of them tend to use Macs
They’d want a Mac Studio. In fact, that product was designed specifically for music production professionals and outperforms the Pro.
The only people the Pro targets are those who want expansion capabilities, and the latest version is hamstrung in this regard.
So I was confused at first, until I realized the headline said “Mac Pro”, not “Macbook Pro”.
Plenty of professionals use MacBooks, Mac Minis, and even Mac Studios.
The question is, who wants the new Mac Pro? The vast majority of professionals are better suited by a laptop, or can get all the same work done with a Mac Studio.
I dont really think that music production is performance limited though
For projects with a huge number of tracks, VSTs, etc, you can push hardware to the limit quicker than you might think.
Oh it definitely can be. For example if you have hundreds of microphones recording at once with a high resolution recording studio sample rate - that can easily be several gigabytes per second of audio.
I would think this would probably be more useful for people involved with video production or animation than music production, which could likely be accomplished on a MacBook.
Just because they use them don’t mean they need them. Apple just owns mindshare and “artists” tend to flock to pretty shit instead of shit that works or is cost-effective. In many people’s mind, more money = mo betta and you can’t spend more money than a MacBook Pro with an actually useable amount of storage.
I mean, it’s just a really bad value compared to the rest of the lineup. It’s basically a Mac Studio in a larger case and a PCIe breakout board bolted on. That’s it. But for twice the price of the Mac Studio and 10 times it size.
The only unique features is has are PCIe and SATA ports. So unless you really need a ton of local storage or a ton of GPU-power, there’s no reason to buy it.
If you need a ton of local storage, it would be cheaper to buy a NAS and some 20TB drives for it than to upgrade from a Studio to a Mac Pro. Especially with a 10-gig Ethernet connection.
I’m really not sure about the speed. Your setup is limited by thunderbolt, I’m not sure how exactly the SATA ports are hooked up in the Pro, maybe there could be an advantage?
But that’s really a niche scenario for like 5 people. A proper server would be a better solution in that case.
If I recall correctly, you cannot even put GPUs in there, right? Only other pci peripherals, or did this change?
That was my understanding. I suppose the other things that would use the PCIe slots is tasks requiring churning through massive datasets, maybe ingesting media like raw audio and video feeds, maybe science/research. Things where just getting the data in and out of the computer is more limiting than the actual processing of the data.
I think that’s a pretty tiny market, but Apple wants to keep it going as much to say they have one of the most powerful desktop computers available as the actual economics.
correct, no GPUs
I’m pretty sure it’s technically possible to install a GPU, but realistically there are no drivers and none of the GPU vendors are likely willing to write drivers.
The market for those drivers is really small - almost nobody would buy them.
It’s a hilariously giant and empty case. Especially now that it’s entirely unupgradeable.
iOS doesn’t work with any of the software I use on a daily basis. Linux doesn’t either for that matter.
What software do you use on a daily basis? Wine and tools like it allow you to run most software for windows on linux.
It’s medical software.
At least Linux has Wine. Also, I’m sure there is software out there for Linux users
I mean, Mac also has wine.
Idiots with too much money.
Developer/Devops here. I’ve been using MacBook pro going on probably 13 years now professionally. Being that Linux isn’t supported by the enterprise at work and the other option is windows, it’s really a no brainer.
I suspect they’re talking about the desktop computer
But the larger issue among the professionals I spoke to, and one that will likely take many more product cycles for Apple to truly fix, is one of trust. Apple, the business behemoth that it is, still has a reputation to build in the enterprise space. In order to become a go-to purchase for studios, Apple doesn’t just need to make the Mac Pro more competitive on price — it needs to reestablish itself as a brand that industries can rely on for years to come. And it needs to make some amends.
This, basically. Is it going to sell in huge numbers? No. But canceling it would be bad for the brand.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) 3•1 year ago
It’s an absurd product. It’s a Mac Studio gingerly placed into a behemoth of a case that, itself, costs $3k, And for what? Can’t upgrade the memory or storage. Can’t add dGPUs. All you get is more ports and the ability to add internal PCI cards, both of which could be accomplished with the Studio with far cheaper external solutions. And it’s gigantic and weighs a ton.
Who is this for? Idiots?
Who is this for? Idiots?
Apple consumers. So, yes. The same people who pay $1,000 for a $10 monitor stand or $700 for a set of $10 wheels.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) 2•1 year ago
this isn’t a consumer-level product. it’s marketed at professionals and starts at $6k.
Believe it or not, professionals are also consumers.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) 1•1 year ago
not when you’re differentiating between “consumers” and “professionals” with regard to product classes, and in this context we’re discussing a product specifically targeted at professionals, not consumers.
if you want to play word games, this isn’t the place or time.
It’s definitely not targeting professionals. The “Pro” name is just marketing nonsense they slap on every product in their lineup.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) 3•1 year ago
everything in the marketing for the product is clearly targeted at creative professionals.
Yes, the marketing targets professionals. The products do not.
Weird place to cut when the next line is “they don’t need them because the laptops are too powerful”.
The Mac Pro is for AV professionals— That’s the market they are hitting. Mac Pro is one of the best and believe it or not most cost-effective platform for mastering Dolby Atmos Cinema content, for example.
If you want to run CI/CD pipelines at a large scale you literally have no other choice, despite Apple doing everything thing in their power to sabotage any form professional multi machine deployment with Mac OS.
I think there are still a few graphic designers in their 50’s that have never given up their obsession with macs. I knew a couple people still using OS8 or 9 until almost 2010.
The “3d rendering” part is pretty hilarious though. Macs have always had a negative reputation in that field.
