Good to know New Macs

[MIDI Life Crisis]

The thing about the cheese graters is the heat. Oh my god, the heat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKvURliwsfY

[HCMarkus]

The thing about the cheese graters is the heat. Oh my god, the heat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKvURliwsfY

Nothin' compared to my G5 Quad. OK, I guess it is a cheesgrater, too, but it could have been sold as a space heater.

My studio MP sits in its own air conditioned machine closet, cool and quiet, along with the hard drives, router, printer, and UPS. The only thing it heats up are the grooves, baby.

[Shooshie]

The thing about the cheese graters is the heat. Oh my god, the heat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKvURliwsfY

My giant MacPro tower runs very cool. I never hear the fan. The only time I started hearing things was when I let it go about a year without vacuuming, apparently. (I don't know how long it went) A layer of dust about 1 inch thick blanketed everything inside it. Once I vacuumed that out, the fan noise stopped.

This has been the most amazing Mac design ever. I'm so sad to see it go, though with luck I may be able to use mine for years longer.

Shooshie

[rickorick]

When it's cold here I don't mind the heat, I start turning on the tube gear!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

It's a verifiable fact that when I moved to the trash can my electric bill dropped by about $50/month.

[mikehalloran]

It's a verifiable fact that when I moved to the trash can my electric bill dropped by about $50/month.

more than that for me when I went from my G5 to my iMac. Yosemite improved the energy savings as did replacing the drive with an SSD.

I gave my G5 to a Santa Cruz based guitar makes to run in his unseated office.

[mikehalloran]

The prices - even on refurbished - are still breathtaking.

What does that mean? They are more expensive than iMacss and Windows machines but a lot less than the UNIX stations designed to handle the same tasks.

But come on Mike, there's no doubt that multiprocessor machines have gone up in price relatively speaking. I think the problem for many (including, i must admit, me) is that our comparative basis is founded on a longing for what is now looking like a golden era of MacPros (the Silver Towers), at least for audio. I have a 12x 3.46GHz. I've owned the box since 2009 (!!!), upgraded CPUs and storage myself and I still can feel no limits on it CPU wise. I've owned and modded computers since 1983, Macs since 1989 and I don't remember any time during that period where the value proposition was so good as it was in the era just pre-trashcan.

The focus has moved on - video is the new audio, Apple is now king - and, if we're just about music and audio, we're now expected to pay for gear that lets us play in a game we have little participatory interest in. Otherwise you settle for prosumer computers - or maybe high end laptops. New normal (already a hoary old phrase, that).

Yes, these are designed to be high end video workstations. In that context, they are bargains.

Does audio only really need a 12 core nMP or what is likely to be the new 16 core? Maybe, I don't know. Hasn't come up for me.

When I look at an update for me, I'm looking at the 6 core. That may change next year when I'm ready to buy. As I get more into VIs, I may decide to get some iron capable of the heavy lifting.

I have no interest in a 5.1 or upgraded 4.1. I've retired my PCI hardware and have moved on.

[jloeb]

Does audio only really need a 12 core nMP or what is likely to be the new 16 core? Maybe, I don't know. Hasn't come up for me.

When I look at an update for me, I'm looking at the 6 core. That may change next year when I'm ready to buy. As I get more into VIs, I may decide to get some iron capable of the heavy lifting.

That's the thing: if you really load up that mixer with fx/vis, then you love more parallelism like the ocean loves the shore.

When it's time to move on, sure, I'll move on. But for the same musical punch, that looks to be 'spensive.

[HCMarkus]

It's a verifiable fact that when I moved to the trash can my electric bill dropped by about $50/month.

Since installing solar, my electric bill has dropped, too. Right off the face of the earth.

The great thing about this forum is it makes us informed users. Everyone makes his choice, but our sharing of info helps each make the best choice given his/her particular situation. I appreciate everyone's input!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

If I owned my dwelling it would have been solar long ago. Good for you! HKM!!

[dewdman42]

The reality is that we have hit a physical limit on what they can do with CPU's. There are rumors about next gen CPU technology, quantum computing, etc..but those are a long ways off. The truth is we are likely to get stuck with very little increase in CPU crunching power for quite a while into the future from here. The amount of money it will take to improve it more will be very large and there are much more economical ways to improve computing and get people to buy new computers for other reasons. So they will focus on that.

I think we will see the elimination of platter Hard disk drives. They will go the way of the floppy disk. You all see this already. That trend will continue. For the actual motherboard, we will see improvements in the way data is shoveled around...better buss architectures, faster bus speeds, faster communication of data from here to there, etc. Some people will try to use multi-CPU setups to get more cpu, but for the vast majority of consumers, this is overkill, they don't need that, so it will not become mainstream.

Also we will see a LOT of memory added to machines. 128GB, 256GB and up from there. The next way to make everything run faster is to cache anything and everything you possibly can. So instead of computing things on the fly, you compute all possible permutations and cache it all in memory, load it from SSD, etc..in other words the approach to writing faster software will be to use techniques which in the past would have required storage and communication speeds that were not available. As more storage and faster shoveling of data around becomes possible, then completely different approaches will be taken to optimize computing rather then relying on every increasing CPU speeds to crunch it through.

DP 9.1 is a prime example of that with next gen pre gen. That would not have been possible a decade ago due to storage requirements. Now storage is getting cheap enough to do it. But people will do stuff like that more and more...as the amount of data that can be stored in fast access memory will go up..and the speed of moving that data around without burdening the CPU. That's where the industry is going to focus their attention in the next decade in my opinion.

So all that being said... I have a 12x3.33 tower mac and its as fast as anything I can imagine. Its going to be outdated eventually, but not by CPU, but rather by new motherboards that can take a terabyte of ram and move data across busses at blinding speeds...and as the software takes advantage of that, it will no longer be performance competitive. For now though..I personally think those are the value sweet spot...the trash can macs don't bring enough to make up for the price difference.

ps - if they make a MBP with a touch screen I'm buying one!

[BobK]

From last November:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/ ... -a-failure

I'm one of those old-school users who likes the tower form-factor. I'd I don't know what I'll do when my 2009 Mac Pro bites the dust, but for now it's doing what I need it to do.

All the major apps I use (DP, Sibelius, Pro Tools) are cross-platform, so Windows is an option...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Same here. PCs are definitely an option.

[mikehalloran]

I think we will see the elimination of platter Hard disk drives.

Except for archival storage. They haven't cracked that nut yet. Otherwise, I agree.

I am updating my Time Capsules to 6T HHDs as AppleCare runs out. Otherwise, it's SSDs only going forward.

If I owned my dwelling it would have been solar long ago. Good for you! HKM!!

Agreed. I'm fighting the battle on the home front. She does not want to do it in pieces, rewire, insulation, AC, Solar etc. Instead, she wants to do it all at once and things just keep coming up. This means that none of it has been done.

PCs are definitely an option.

It's going to have to be something better than Win10 before I can face Windows again. I was ok with NT and XP on my work computers from 1996–2009. I even did tech support at my companies. Once I started working at home and started using my Macs again in 2007, it wasn't long before making the transition. The second my company ditched Lotus Notes, I found very little use for my PC and don't fire it up even once a year. I could see using that IBM tablet if I had to, I suppose.

[bayswater]

It's going to have to be something better than Win10 before I can face Windows again.

What's the problem with Windows 10? I have no experience with it, but haven't heard of any significant issues, at least no more than other versions.