Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

I'm not likely to buy any Apple pro hardware, but I do watch the kit that they've been releasing over the years and like many others it's hard not to be concerned.. they seem to have seen just how much money they can make selling iPads and iPhones and seems like they're content to wash their hands of the pro market.

When was the last time the Mac Pro even got a worthy refresh? When was the last time they even released a truly new and interesting product? Worrying times.

I'm curious to know in what regard their Xserve and Xsan stuff was held by the pro market - was it pretty popular / liked (despite clearly not selling well) or was it actually pretty universally despised? I know we had some Xserve and Xsan stuff in our place but it didn't stay in production for long - no idea why, as it was before my time and the kit was on the way out of the door as I started!

The xserve must have sold well because the old powerPC ones are available everywhere used, off lease, IT boneyards, etc.

The last mac pro refresh was 2009. Apple recommends the mini (Complete with OSX lion cub server yay! edition!) as an xserve replacement.

I'm trying to get my PC hackintoshed; if I can't get it to work, I will probably buy a secondhand mini (2011) or pro (2009). Or a new PC. 2011 was the last mini that could run OSX 10.6. I want a faster mac because I like aperture, but the images from my new camera bring the mac air to it's knees. I like my PC more than either mini or pro, so here's hoping...

Funny how I want a mac desktop now that they are dead/dying. Maybe a G5 powermac. I guess it's like being a hipster except in reverse...

FCPX is still supported on 10.6.8. You can buy snow leopard again from Apple. Maybe they realized the errors of their ways? http://www.tonymacx86.com/303-mac-os-x- ... 19-99.html

The Mac minis with OS-X server are kinda cool in one respect, you can jam them up behind other servers in the rack and hide them easily and nobody notices them and you can remote desktop/VNC into them.


R.

no professional does like the consolidation bastardization of iOS & Mac OS. jobs's romantic plan was that the iAppliances would drive sales in a way to protect/enhance the professional line without circling the drain every now and then, but i guess we have to wait and see, 2013 is (supposed to be) the year of the mac.

looking at their hardware line, everything that comes with a built-in screen (iMac included) could (potentially) turn iOSesque. home products meant for home use and most of apple's customers now come from the iPeriod and on, touchscreens and tight integration, all fine and dandy. the professional line is where the question remains.

i don't worry about mac pro* refresh cycles though. if there's nothing decent to write about, we better wait until it's ready. i know of a lot of post places, a bunch of fellow artists that tried the all-by-myself-desktop-jockey solution, and a number of art-schools that employ xserve/xsan solutions. all of them are still in use but otherwise unaware of apple's exact sales figures.


save your passion for better things, get what you can afford and let someone else worry about specs+buttons syb. current projects got me working on a dozen 2009 & three 2008 MPs daily, they still are rocksteady machines. the last of the G5s (PCIe) were also decent battle-weary rockers. for a hackintosh, neko used to have a thread here documenting his journey and iirc he was happy with it.

woo boy, did we hijack chc's introduction thread or what? welcome aboard chc, i read in another thread that you maintain/update browsers for older macs, thanks heaps for that :)

[*: there's a myth (that turned into hysteria lately) that the pros update their machines every time a new spec is published. a professional machine is not meant to be recycled every 12 months and no professional gives 2 funks about the latest cpu/gpu that will cut him 2.3 seconds of realistic work hours. but i guess we have to redefine professional, cause it ain't the kids on youtube that benchmark new vs old models by boot times & launching a trillion of apps at login, nor a few self-proclaimed photo/video-graphers that launch blogs/sites with a few pics, a trillion of graphs/specs and a ton of boo-hoo the new nvidia is out for the pc, the mac is left behind .]

I apologise to the OP as this has gone way off topic But it's an interesting discussion!

I've always wanted a sort of Mac Pro 'junior'. I've never been able to justify a full on Mac Pro, and to be honest don't need that much horse power. Would like something half the size of the Mac Pro, with the same level of upgrade options (memory / gpu / hdd), but just single CPU and without the room for PCI-e HBA's and so forth. The Mac Mini is too weak for me as an occasional gamer, the iMac is enormously expensive because of the (admittedly very nice) display and the Mac Pro is out of date and expensive. I want something I guess between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro but something tells me it'll NEVER happen and a Hackintosh is the only way to achieve it!

Get a mini. Trust me, the new ones are stupid-fast. I bought a 2011 but wound up giving it to my parents because I didn't use it much. The radeon card is perfect for an "occasional gamer".

If I can't get my hack working... The macpro 2006 are available for $400-$500 right now. About the same as a 2011 mini and about the same geekbench score, too. Fu's right. Unless your doing something crazy (4k video editing, the latest shooting game, etc) you don't need the latest and greatest to measure with a stopwatch down to 1/100 seconds. I would like to have my aperture library on the local disk as well rather than on an airport. It uses the intel 5000x chipset, the 2008 uses the 5400x chipset. 2009 uses core i7 (nehalem) with the memory controller on the CPU.

The powermac G5 machines are also very nice but what is the latest aperture that can run on a powerPC ?? the latest itunes?? (I know this will work with ios6 even... itunes 10.6.3). They just aren't supported much any more.. they are also supposedly noisy.

** viewtopic.php?f=9&t=16727238 chicaneuk, feel free to continue this discussion over there

I have a Mac Pro 2006 that the previous owner upgraded to 2007 Mac Pro2,1+ specs (thanks!). 3Ghz 8-core for the 2.1 part; a Bluray burner in the second optical slot and Apple Radeon 5870 for the "+" part.

It's a rock-solid system. Out of curiosity I recently setup a dualboot/bootcamp install of Win7 64-bit on it and it runs Win7 stuff so much better that I can hardly find a reason use the 3GHz c2d Dell-made-for-windows box kept here for work-related win-centric stuff. I'm considering either VMware Fusion or Parallels to as a means to fulfill my occasional Win/linux needs in the form of no-need-to-reboot VMs.

If there's a catch, first generation Mac Pros (2006/1,1, 2007/2,1 and 2008/3,1) use fully-buffered DDR2 DIMMs. Apple-approved FB-DIMMs with the right specs and Apple's approved heat sinks still command premium prices . I recently picked up some non-apple DDR2-5300F FB-DIMMs with standard flat-side JEDEC heat sinks (in the form six 2GB DIMMs for $24 -inexpensive enough not to hurt my feelings if they didn't work). These have been running 24/7 for several weeks without problem, so I have some equally inexpensive 4GB FB-DIMMs of the same brand/series inbound for further testing. For now I'm using one of the SMC fan control tools to increase air flow across the non-apple DIMMs to ensure adequate cooling with the flat-sided JEDEC heat-sinks. That's been keeping the reported temps of the third-party memory at or below what the OEM memory reported before the change. If the 4GB stuff works as well I could add the apple-approved heat sinks and still be at only a fraction of the cost of apple-approved memory, but I don't really notice the fan noise with all the other stuff running in here.

The other potential catch for the first generation Mac Pros (2006 and 2007 models) is they were dropped from OS X 10.8. If you gotta have 10.8, it isn't hard to find out how to run it on the '06 and '07 MPs - you'll just have a very on-spec 10.8 hackintosh.

Is that neko's old box? He has/had an identical setup (2006 upgraded to 2x x5365, blue ray drive, hd 5870...) I think he already had plenty of ram tho

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=16722392

is this one of the utilities that's bundled w/ the developer tools rec?

AFAIK third-party utilities, and there are a couple of variants out there. smcfancontrol seems to be the most often mentioned in the Mac Pro section of the MacRumors forums http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol

A set of the third-party 4GB FB-DIMMs arrived since my last post and they've been up and running w/o problem for a couple of hours. Been doing some stress testing - under a heavy load they're running at 60C - which is about 10C higher than an existing set of equally-stressed 4GB FB-DIMMs with Apple's approved finned heat sinks. If they continue to do ok I'll probably consider picking up some the Apple-original 512MB DIMMs as heat sink donors. That would still leave lots of room for a good deal, managed to get the pair of 4GB third-party FB-DIMMs (8GB total) for about the same price as pair of 1GB FB-DIMMs from one of the major Mac supply houses .

Oh, I don't mind, and ta for the kind word

I've been looking at 2011 Mac Minis for the Radeon GPU, and 2008-2009 Mac Pros. Reason is two-fold - my 2.4GHz Penryn Macbook has been acting very flaky about it's mini-DVI port (or whatever half-assed "standard" they used for that year alone), and it drags when converting video pulled down from the TiVo for archiving.

The Core i5/i7 Minis should be great performance- and power-wise, but they cost as much as an MPro 2008. And the MP's have the potential to add a lot more cores, memory, and gfx. (I haven't tried reflashing gfx cards for a Mac since the Cube, that could be a pricey upgrade.)

I keep telling myself I don't need to spend the money...

^ with all those badass noisemakers in your signature you might appreciate a silent brake smj :)

for conversions and general home serving duties the mini is perfect. stack/hide/forget-able, makes no sound. i'm likely getting one to handle my librarian duties.

those old MPs will handle everything you need and then some. i've got a whole orchestra recording into one and a few of them tackling those fake 4k frames from red that every kid is mad about.

But the graphics chip in the Mac Mini is rubbish if you like to do any half decent gaming. Admittedly it'd be nice to finally just give up and move away from gaming but I do like to dabble occasionally.. and I dislike playing FPS's on consoles....

Radeon 6630, it's faster than a geforce 320.. That's what's in my mac air and it's plenty fast for me.

It's about the same price and the same performance as a 2006 mac pro. (but the performance is in different areas... the mini will be better balanced overall, but you can stick a fatty graphics card in the pro, and more disks. Be warned that if you want to put SL on a 2011 mini, you will need to do an extra hack to get the speed step working.

I want an upgrade so aperture can handle the (raw) files from the new camera. But I'd rather take photos than monkey about with the computer, if you understand where I'm coming from...

what does the mba burp for syb? ssd space or ram?

i found out that 4gb is borderline bearable for aperture . i store all of my "current" archives on a HD hanging off the AEBS, now thinking of getting a mini or find a gigabit-ethernet enclosure (that won't sound like a jet plane) to overcome the flaky usb connection.

Either ram, the cpu itself, or the network disk.. I have 2gb and 1.4ghz c2d, the base model. It's otherwise a very snappy and quick machine that does everything I need it to do. It even handles HD video from my cybershot (1440x1080p 30fps) reasonably well. My aperture library is stored on a USB g-drive connected to an AEBS. This disk works very well connected to the airport, but I had to write a vbs script on my PC to access the disk every 2 minutes to prevent it from going to sleep.

The other problem I have may be a semi-corrupted aperture library. I once-upon-a-time upgraded to 3.4 but went back to snow leopard and aperture 3.2.4. It does not downgrade nearly as gracefully as it upgrades, but it does work. I need to spend a weekend archiving and sharing shots and cleaning up the library, and then make a new one for the future.

Not to mention, as much as I love my laptop, a desktop workstation simply is far greater for working at lengths of time. And using a USB disk over wifi is also a bottleneck. With a mac mini or pro, the disk can be directly connected to the machine via firewire or sata.

The MacBook is mostly for Lightroom and Adobe CS. It was just easy to use Toast there to handle the TiVo downloads - I should look into doing the transcoding elsewhere anyway, I've got about 12 Harpertown cores that could be thrown at it...

I try not to have too many noisemakers running all the time, the MacBook sneaks by because it's small and quiet. In that respect the Mini would win, but all of these handle sleep/wake cycles just fine. Argument against the Mini is that I've got Lightroom 3 with CS5.5 on Snow Leopard, and I'm worried an upgrade in any other component would force a $$$ upgrade to CS6.

But I can tell I've become a "good American" -- a colleague suggested I could have somebody fix whatever the issue is with the video port on the MacBook as a cheaper option. And I was appalled to realize I hadn't even considered that. In my defense, I figured I'd just use the MacBook for my on-the-go laptop needs instead of plonking it on the desk most of the time - not like I was going to toss it...

Anyway the MacBook's video port has been behaving this week. (I'll have to hope typing that doesn't have repercussions!)

I'm having this idea of maybe buying one of those older nice looking Aluminum Power Mac G5 with PPCs in and run some MorphOs on it. Anyone tried that here, is it even possible? If I'm not mistaken, there have been a Mac mini with PPCs? And I have read that some use those for running the MorphOs.

Or maybe I should just get me a "new" A4000 with a 060 running at 100 MHz and do it properly. Wish I never sold mine back in the day when it still was worth a lot of money.

Ah well, just me dreaming about the old days when computers where fun.

I have to admit, I do feel kinda bad posting stuff that has nothing to do with the new member and his Indy. Sorry mate

I have A4000 and a Sam440, there are new Amiga systems for sale and I am a re-seller but i sell systems only in Australia. I've been running AmigaOS 4.1 on a 733MHz PPC for awhile.

http://acube-systems.biz/
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/

R.