• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Mac Hardware and Software |OT| - All things Macintosh

I wish I could use a two-finger swipe gesture over the PIP window to move it to different corners instead of having to drag it manually.

I mean how did they not think of that? Shame I can't set up a set of BTT gestures to do it since A) the PIP window doesn't have a physical presence that BTT can latch onto when the mouse is hovering over it and B) I don't think there's any key combos you can use to move the window itself.

Do you not have three finger drag set up?
 

The Real Abed

Perma-Junior
Do you not have three finger drag set up?
I use three fingers for other gestures. Not going to limit myself by duplicating something I can already do with clicking. I just want to be able to flick the PIP window into a corner easily. (Or at least have clickable areas on the edges that will move it.) You can't even just "throw" it into another corner. It has to move at least half the screen in order to snap. Just let me flick!

Also push for other video apps and other websites to implement PIP support into their players. The only reason YouTube even works with it is because of an undocumented secondary menu that exposes the normal HTML5 video controls. But they hide it behind YouTube's custom menu. It could literally be removed at any point by YouTube and I would be pissed off.
 

Ambitious

Member
Oh, I sure would love to install the update, but after opening the lid my MBP's screen stayed black even after closing/opening it a few times and pressing some buttons, so my only option is to forcefully shutting down and then proceed to fucking guess whatever stuff I had opened when I last used it. So thanks, Apple.

edit: It actually stays on when I close the lid. The screen turns off, but the fans don't.

edit 2: Yeah, whatever. I shut it down. It just works! Piece of shit.
 

giga

Member
http://espressoapp.com

so-beautiful.gif
 

r1chard

Member
Took delivery of a new MacBook Pro. Avoid the Mochi brand adapters. The multiport adapter I got (HDMI/USB-A and power passthrough) has issues on every single port (HDMI blinks, USB-A doesn't operate correctly through suspend and the power passthrough introduces noise audible over the audio out socket).
 

Anion

Member
Is there noticeable difference between the standard 2.9ghz i5 vs the 3.3ghz i7 on the 13"? I was configuring one and was wondering if it was worth it. Anyone research this or experience the difference?
 

firehawk12

Subete no aware
Is there noticeable difference between the standard 2.9ghz i5 vs the 3.3ghz i7 on the 13"? I was configuring one and was wondering if it was worth it. Anyone research this or experience the difference?
I didn't pull the trigger, but everything I've seen seems to suggest that on dual core mobile chips, there isn't a significant increase in power that comes from i5 vs i7 that would warrant the extra cost.
 

Deku Tree

Member
Is there noticeable difference between the standard 2.9ghz i5 vs the 3.3ghz i7 on the 13"? I was configuring one and was wondering if it was worth it. Anyone research this or experience the difference?

I just ordered a 13" with TB and I did this research. And everyone I asked told me NO, the processor bumps are extremely marginal and you will only notice a very small difference if you are doing a lot of work that requires a lot of heavy lifting. Otherwise you will notice NO difference.
 
I'm not 100% familiar with AMD cards but what differences can I expect between the 450 and the 460?

I use the Adobe suite (After Effects and so forth) so I know there wouldn't be a CUDA bump anyway so I'm trying to figure out if it's even worth it for the graphics card
 

Fuchsdh

Member
I'm not 100% familiar with AMD cards but what differences can I expect between the 450 and the 460?

I use the Adobe suite (After Effects and so forth) so I know there wouldn't be a CUDA bump anyway so I'm trying to figure out if it's even worth it for the graphics card

Media Encoder can still be GPU-accelerated with OpenCL and Metal, so you should still see benefits from the better card. Looking at Geekbench the 460 is up to 70% faster in OpenCL benchmarks.
 

giga

Member
Wonder if a pro iMac means 91w chips and non mobile graphics. Not sure how that can work in the current thermal envelope unless they're updating the design. I'd be happy with a return to the G4 design, with the big bottom base.
 

Deku Tree

Member
Wonder if a pro iMac means 95w chips and non mobile graphics. Not sure how that can work in the current thermal envelope unless they're updating the design. I'd be happy with a return to the G4 design, with the big bottom base.

If you read the article then they updated the chips today, and they appear to be completely reworking the design so that it will be modular and easily upgradable in the future.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Well by 2018 I might be interested in a new Pro. I still hope it's a more svelte version than the tower I've got.

Wonder if a pro iMac means 91w chips and non mobile graphics. Not sure how that can work in the current thermal envelope unless they're updating the design. I'd be happy with a return to the G4 design, with the big bottom base.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. What if they just went back to the pre-2012 iMac frame for the "iMac Pro"? Would add a lot more space for heat dissipation (although if we're talking something like putting the lower-class Xeons in an a non-mobile GPU, I'm not sure.)

The iMacs basically have two shortfalls for a pro machine—lack of ECC RAM and the mobile GPUs. Switching a SKU to a Xeon solves the first (and could potentially come with more cores to boot), but the Z1s are pretty anemic when it comes to graphics too, packing a Quadro card that's less than half as powerful as a M295X. It's possible it can perform a lot longer at peak efficiency and quieter too since it's in a much larger case, but there still seems to be pretty big hurdles to anything close to a high-end desktop GPU in such a case.
 

Anion

Member
I didn't pull the trigger, but everything I've seen seems to suggest that on dual core mobile chips, there isn't a significant increase in power that comes from i5 vs i7 that would warrant the extra cost.

I just ordered a 13" with TB and I did this research. And everyone I asked told me NO, the processor bumps are extremely marginal and you will only notice a very small difference if you are doing a lot of work that requires a lot of heavy lifting. Otherwise you will notice NO difference.

Ah thanks guys, I was going to wait for version 2.0 or something of the new MacBook pro, but I cant hold off any longer lol. I think I'll be more than satisfied with the 13" with portability haha
 
I think the Marco route is best for most people. 13" MacBook escape + desktop.

I think the 13" might be a little too small for me. Plus I need to squeeze out some performance from it for at least a year (Freelancing graphics and such).

In my brief research I'm thinking the 2013 Retina Macbook Pros might be what I should be looking at in terms of price/performance.

Haswell processors are still pretty good
Added 802.11 wifi
Thunderbolt 2 for speed
Maintains the Nvidia card for After Effects.

Am I missing something that could deter me?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/15-Apple-Re...615337?hash=item4b14915269:g:f6gAAOSwA29Y3HfI

Cause something like this doesn't seem too bad to me. Includes a 1TB harddrive too.

Edit;

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-MacBo...387273?hash=item2a7ec3cb89:g:Bz0AAOSww3tY458V

or this one, slight spec decrease but still fairly cheap
 
While I'm happy (and shocked) Apple finally broke their silence and laid bare their mistake that is the current Mac Pro, it doesn't feel like a strong refutation of the idea that Apple doesn't understand what pros want and doesn't really care. It feels more like a reactionary "oh shit" to the growing amount of negativity by influential pro users.

I still don't understand how their thought process led them to designing the trash can. Did they do no market research? Did they just talk to some people at Pixar and design a product around what they needed? Or was this ultimately a purpose-built PR answer to "Apple can't innovate anymore" without really thinking whether it was a good idea?
 
They built hardware to take advantage of many parallel GPU and GPGPU tasks. They created software technology to make writing such software easier.

The task people ended up creating stuff that while it leveraged GPUs, didn't parallelize nearly enough to make the architecture choices made for the Mac Pro good ones and the physical design apparently precludes doing anything else.
 
They built hardware to take advantage of many parallel GPU and GPGPU tasks. They created software technology to make writing such software easier.

The task people ended up creating stuff that while it leveraged GPUs, didn't parallelize nearly enough to make the architecture choices made for the Mac Pro good ones and the physical design apparently precludes doing anything else.

This would have been somewhat okay had they made their pro software take advantage of this. For instance if they had enabled audio effects to be offloaded to the GPUs in Logic Pro. But in reality the pros that could utilize this tech were few. The design of the trash can is clever because they have great hardware designers, but it was a solution to a problem most of us weren't asking to be solved.
 

Meh3D

Member
Well by 2018 I might be interested in a new Pro. I still hope it's a more svelte version than the tower I've got.


The iMacs basically have two shortfalls for a pro machine—lack of ECC RAM and the mobile GPUs. Switching a SKU to a Xeon solves the first (and could potentially come with more cores to boot), but the Z1s are pretty anemic when it comes to graphics too, packing a Quadro card that's less than half as powerful as a M295X. It's possible it can perform a lot longer at peak efficiency and quieter too since it's in a much larger case, but there still seems to be pretty big hurdles to anything close to a high-end desktop GPU in such a case.

Why? I'm curious as to why you believe that in regards to ECC ram. I don't agree. This is such a general wide assessment without any constraints to use.
 

Meh3D

Member
I think the 13" might be a little too small for me. Plus I need to squeeze out some performance from it for at least a year (Freelancing graphics and such).

In my brief research I'm thinking the 2013 Retina Macbook Pros might be what I should be looking at in terms of price/performance.

Haswell processors are still pretty good
Added 802.11 wifi
Thunderbolt 2 for speed
Maintains the Nvidia card for After Effects.

Am I missing something that could deter me?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/15-Apple-Re...615337?hash=item4b14915269:g:f6gAAOSwA29Y3HfI

Cause something like this doesn't seem too bad to me. Includes a 1TB harddrive too.

Edit;

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-MacBo...387273?hash=item2a7ec3cb89:g:Bz0AAOSww3tY458V

or this one, slight spec decrease but still fairly cheap


Why specifically Nvidia and After Effects? What version of After Effects are you using?
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Why? I'm curious as to why you believe that in regards to ECC ram. I don't agree. This is such a general wide assessment without any constraints to use.

What, that pros benefit from ECC RAM? I don't see how that's very contentious. I don't like corruption in my long video renders, and if you're doing any sort of networked render or computation not having ECC RAM can make the whole thing fail. Likewise, I prefer having a reduced chance of system crashes or kernel panics.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Sort of on topic of the next Mac Pro, I kind of wish they went back to their early 2000s lucite look. They have clearly mastered anodized aluminum, but it's not like they can do anything else with it. The tube Mac Pro's color-of-the-room finish was the boldest they've been with their designs in years.

I've got a couple MDD G4s next to me, and they still look surprisingly fresh and modern, and despite being plastic don't feel cheap at all. Plus, they had handles that didn't dig into your hands.
 

Water

Member
They built hardware to take advantage of many parallel GPU and GPGPU tasks. They created software technology to make writing such software easier.

The task people ended up creating stuff that while it leveraged GPUs, didn't parallelize nearly enough to make the architecture choices made for the Mac Pro good ones and the physical design apparently precludes doing anything else.

A good GPU-centric machine should have options for a lot of GPU power, and it should get frequent refreshes since the GPU market moves so fast with substantial performance and feature improvements. To make those frequent refreshes possible, the system design should have enough slack that it doesn't have to be redone from the ground up every time the next gen of GPUs happens to have 30 watts higher TDP. User upgradability wouldn't have hurt either.

Apple failed all of that. Even at launch their top end GPU was weak (compare to GTX 780/Ti/Titan, all of which launched before the Mac Pro). They painted themselves into a corner with a design that surely made it quite difficult to update the machine, and then failed to offer even sporadic updates.

Dual slow GPU design is bad compared to if you can have the same performance in a single faster GPU. Harder to utilize, surely more expensive and limiting in terms of what models can be offered.

They also failed on software support side. Didn't even bother to make it possible to use both GPUs for rendering, which the exact same machine could do if booted into Windows. Typical for Apple to not give a shit about GPU driver functionality, but when you build a special GPU-centered machine, that might have been the time to make an exception.
 
Oooo, which one?

The new Touch Bar? They are quiet and light. But they are so pricey..

Nah. Late 2013 Retina 15". Didn't want to spend over a grand and the specs are pretty similar to the 2016...but $2,000 less.

Oddly enough, late 2013 was when I had to sell my 2010 15inch with "high res" matte display because I was broke and fresh out of college and had to pay my credit card. Felt like I lost a child lol
 

Fuchsdh

Member
The new Nvidia Titan Xp will support the Mac.

Nvidia announces new Titan Xp GPU along with upcoming beta Pascal drivers for the Mac

Drivers will evidently support all Pascal-based GPUs and 9to5 Mac is claiming eGPU support also.

That's a cool option for the people who care. Unless the drivers are bundled in the OS though I can't imagine myself switching to a Nvidia card.

It does remind me that I'm sad Apple sort of punted the eGPU question at the roundtable. That aspect of external expansion still intrigues me but it's still too kludgy to jump in on.
 
That's a cool option for the people who care. Unless the drivers are bundled in the OS though I can't imagine myself switching to a Nvidia card.

It does remind me that I'm sad Apple sort of punted the eGPU question at the roundtable. That aspect of external expansion still intrigues me but it's still too kludgy to jump in on.

I can honestly see them eventually making an eGPU box, it's not out of the question. It will be priced more than the competition but the integration will be insane
 
Why should we trust this guy?

Which guy? Schiller? Federighi? Either?

I don't trust them based on the words, but they're pretty good words. And I have to think the Titan XP would not be getting a Mac driver if Apple didn't grease the wheel. I bet ultimately Schiller did not want to do this interview, but they felt they had to. And they did, so they've committed to this publicly, and so they will have to release some new modular Mac Pro. It may take much longer than we want, and it may not even be exactly what we want, but it's coming.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Which guy? Schiller? Federighi? Either?

I don't trust them based on the words, but they're pretty good words. And I have to think the Titan XP would not be getting a Mac driver if Apple didn't grease the wheel. I bet ultimately Schiller did not want to do this interview, but they felt they had to. And they did, so they've committed to this publicly, and so they will have to release some new modular Mac Pro. It may take much longer than we want, and it may not even be exactly what we want, but it's coming.

Sorry, wasn't clear, but I was referring to the guy reporting rumors in the second link–the Pike dude. I've never heard of him and know of no evidence he has a track record of accurate rumor-reporting.
 

japtor

Member
Sorry, wasn't clear, but I was referring to the guy reporting rumors in the second link–the Pike dude. I've never heard of him and know of no evidence he has a track record of accurate rumor-reporting.
Yeah who knows. Only thing I've seen from him before is looking through betas for new hardware stuff like board IDs and drivers and what not.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
"Pike's Universum is best known for spotting references to unreleased Macs or upcoming software versions hidden within Apple's operating systems. The blog does not have an established track record of reporting on Apple's plans based on its own inside sources, so this rumor should be treated with caution for now. "

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/06/imac-xeon-e3-64gb-ram-amd-late-october/

Danke.

Nvidia's drivers have been working great on my Mac Pro with a PC card.

Yeah, but that comes with caveats, like not being able to upgrade on my own schedule, etc. I've got a flashed 7950 in my tower, but aside from the lack of boot screens it doesn't interfere with my normal operation at all. And there's always the possibility Apple tweaks something and Nvidia is no longer allowed to offer them (or they might stop offering them for their own business reasons.)

Ultimately, it doesn't matter much, because GPU acceleration in most of Adobe's products is still a joke, and while I've heard reports that CUDA is a bit faster than OpenCL rendering it's not enough to make a difference for my work since I'm not actually reliant on CUDA for anything.

At this point with a new Mac Pro of some kind definitely coming in the future I'm happy to ride things out with my 7950. Not sure it makes any financial sense to add more upgrades to my Mac at this point (swapped the original 2.4GHz 4-core for a 3.33GHz 6-core, swapped the 5770 for the 7950, went from 8GB to 24GB RAM, and added a USB3 PCIe card and two 2.5" SSDs. Most of the upgrades were actually covered by selling my 3,1 to trade up to the 5,1, but still you're dumping money into a machine that's 6 years old at this point.)
 

The Real Abed

Perma-Junior
I just found out I'm getting a hefty tax return this year. I can finally get my laptop fixed and replace my phone.

My dad said "You're not going to get a new machine?" I told him I still want to get another 2 years out of this if I can. Unless it's going to cost more than a new machine anyway. Hopefully it won't cost too much. But it does need a new keyboard and new trackpad at the very least. If it does cost too much I'll look into alternative sources for fixing it.

You know, I still haven't even gone to a store and tried out the new force touch trackpads. I'm so afraid I won't like them. Hopefully I will though. I mean if it comes down to me having to replace the computer then I'd like to be prepared.
 
Top Bottom