OS X Yosemite: Do you Like the Look?

andrewjoy · 29 Oct 2014, 20:30

Muirium wrote: ↑Mac Mini? Those were getting good for a while, but the new models are turds. Don't expect to be able to hook up anything good to them.

They work just fine as servers i use one as the main OD running pretty much everything with a thunderbolt raid attached to it , it run rings arround the old xserv have another one as a replicator for the OD , and when i move the second com's cab i will put another in there ( prob just an old one as a backup). I wish they did one with dual nic then i could use them for a firewall as well

is it possible to connect 2 dual link dvi displays to a mini ?

Muirium · 29 Oct 2014, 20:47

Good question. I haven't touched any of the ones with Thunderbolt so I've no idea. Have heard some bitching about Apple's dual-link DVI adapter though.

You're right about the mini overall. Just don't mistake them for a comfortable desktop computer! The just replaced generation had quad core CPU options and were meant to be the strongest yet, compared to other Macs. But Apple pushed the line back down in capability, and price, this month.

jacobolus · 29 Oct 2014, 21:00

Muirium wrote: ↑Right now, Apple's basically got one supreme desktop model (the 5K Retina iMac) and a bunch of losers I wouldn't recommend to anyone. The Mac Pro included.

On the flipside, the retina iMac is pretty much the best general-purpose PC you can buy from any company at any price, by a wide margin.

The real problem for the Mac Pro, or any other modular computer, is that display buses just don’t have enough available bandwidth. I think this problem will hopefully be solved within another year or two, but for the immediate present there’s no other obvious solution. Apple doesn’t have sufficient control over the standards for display buses or sufficient control over third-party display hardware to make any external display >4k work seamlessly yet (and nor does any other PC OEM).

I don’t think it’s fair to characterize the Mac Pro as a “loser”: it offers a feature-set that doesn’t make sense for consumer-level use, but error-correcting RAM and workstation-class GPUs provide real benefits to certain groups. Consumer-level hardware has gotten good enough these days though that pro-level parts are needed by smaller and smaller niches.

Compgeke · 29 Oct 2014, 22:18

I see the problem with the Mac Pro being the lack of expandability. The video cards themselves really should be easily upgradable yet they aren't. There's also the lack of internal storage (would a couple of 3.5" SATA bays been too hard to add?). If I'm buying a workstation system I'm probably working with fairly large files and as such having the ability to easily add 2+ TB without using external devices is really nice to have. Even my laptop is designed to hold two hard drives.

andrewjoy · 29 Oct 2014, 22:45

I agree compgeke, i have always said apple need to do a mid tower

Hypersphere · 29 Oct 2014, 23:22

andrewjoy wrote: ↑I agree compgeke, i have always said apple need to do a mid tower

Yes, it would be nice to see something in between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro.

I have a 2012 Mac Pro at work, and it is a joy to open the case to install components, although not such a joy to move around.

At home, I have a new 2013 Mac Pro. I upgraded the RAM, but I would not want to do any other upgrades on this machine. However, with Thunderbolt, I think that the expansion on the new Mac Pro could be done with external boxes for PCIe and other devices. This would be a modular approach, which has some advantages over putting everything into a single tower.

Compgeke · 29 Oct 2014, 23:27

andrewjoy wrote: ↑I agree compgeke, i have always said apple need to do a mid tower

Well they did...in the 90s.

jacobolus · 29 Oct 2014, 23:27

Have you seen how small the Mac Pro is? You can get that plus some external multiple-hard-drive bay, and it will still take up much less space than a standard PC case.

Why is it so fundamentally important that it be one single unit?

Findecanor · 29 Oct 2014, 23:50

Compgeke wrote: ↑Mac Pro [...] There's also the lack of internal storage (would a couple of 3.5" SATA bays been too hard to add?).

3.5" SATA drives would need to be cooled with air flowing over them, and that wouldn't work with the unified thermal core.
I think it is actually OK for them to use a SSD sticks with an interface that is faster than SATA, but I don't think it is OK of them to restrict it to just one SSD, and it is definitely not OK of them to use an Apple-proprietary interface, which they do.

Muirium · 29 Oct 2014, 23:56

Ah, the legendary xMac. Some of us have been pining for that mid-tower for years. The new Mac Pro essentially killed that idea forever!

Just the other day I successfully got Yosemite working on an ancient (2006) original Mac Pro I got for free when they were chucking them out from Edinburgh University. Apple abandoned these machines a few years ago; although this one was running Linux, with an old gamer graphics card for compute work, I'm told. Anyway, now the hacking is done, this is the first current Mac desktop I've had in ages. And all those hard drive bays are definitely a plus. I've nothing against the design of the new Mac Pros, but whoever they are for is no overlap with me. I prize the ability to stash away a lot of stuff in a pretty case, rather than expose it all with a nest of wires.

Now I just need a better damn display. The Radeon 7850 I've put in it ought to be able to handle 4k. But the only standalone screen I've got is a washed out old 20" Dell at one resolution below 1080p, and with piss poor colour gamut. Yosemite looks quite opaque on it!

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 00:02

does it have a 32bit EFI ? IF so how did you hack that? i would love to get it going on my 2006 macbook , but then again intel graphics .....

Muirium · 30 Oct 2014, 00:09

Yup, 32 bit EFI, but 64 bit processors. Here's the hack I used to work around it:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1740775

But you're quite right about your MacBook's graphics. My old Mac Pro can take modern graphics cards, which it really needed as the previous one in it wasn't recognised by Yosemite and so I got OS X's thoroughly janky fallback software render mode. If you've ever tried to make a Hackintosh you'll likely know what I'm talking about! The desktop is barely usable like that. So I wouldn't advise trying on your old MacBook unless by some miracle others report it's better.

I'm still chuffed my Radeon works without any further hacking required. I originally got that card for a Sandy Bridge Hackintosh that went nowhere, and wound up as a gift to a friend who games on it to this day.

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 00:55

hmm i think my x61s has a better GPU than my macbook , may try that as a hackintosh, then again i jsut got arch how i like it well i need to install some decent fonts for when i use x but still

and i know about laggy mac UIs i have used apple remote desktop

EDIT

how does 10.10 run on the macpro ?

I was just wondering as although i do have a 09 MBP from work i would still love an early 08 for myself and you get can them with a decent nvidia GPU , if this hack works for them that could be a good upgrade from the 06 macbook as i think the early 08 MBP is the best screen as they went glossy screen crazy after that

Muirium · 30 Oct 2014, 11:42

The Mac Pro runs Yosemite just great. I'm going to put an SSD in it, as the system's worthwhile again now. Quad 2.6 GHz Xeons and 13 gigs of RAM is enough hardware to last 8 years and still feel fairly current, apparently!

But this all depends on the GPU. I upgraded it with a sibling of the card that's in the modern Mac Pro (and similar to the PS 4 and Xbox, which makes me smile as an old ATI fan back in the day). Yosemite doesn't exactly tax a card, but it must support it.

Don't think laggy with an unsupported card. Think unusable. All sorts of things don't render at all, so you can't see what's going on. When I first got the Mac Pro up on Yosemite, I shrugged and thought "oh well", then I found I couldn't bloody shutdown as things weren't drawing and I couldn't tell what was going on. Had to pull the power cable eventually. After some cursing, I popped in the Radeon, expecting trouble and perhaps even needing to install Windows so I could firmware flash it. You can imagine my surprise when everything was transformed without an ounce of effort!

So far the only stumble I've found is Facetime. Won't sign in on that machine for some reason. But iCloud works fine otherwise, including Safari's stored passwords in iCloud Keychain: which is often a no-go on Hackintoshes. This one is an authentic Mac, so such things are much easier.

Do your research and see if anyone's got Yosemite working on the specific GPU you mentioned in the MacBook Pro. If it works well, you could pick up a bargain as most people would consider those Macs obsolete now. Always nice to wring a little extra out of them; while plunking away on a keyboard decades older still!

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 12:42

the card the early 2008 MBP has is supported and it will support 10.10 out of the box so that's good but it also means they hold there value. you can also get them with a high res 1920 x 1200 display and 512mb of vram but they ones with 512 of v ram are very expensive

most of the good ones are in the US

i guess i will keep waiting

Muirium · 30 Oct 2014, 12:51

Wait and save up for a retina model instead. Trust me, those screens are the biggest upgrade in graphics I've ever seen. That's why I'm so iffy about the old Mac Pro: now I need a monitor that's not a box of shite!

Coincidentally, I was running prices for a friend the other day, who needs to replace a 2007 plastic MacBook and wanted to know the prices for the UK vs. US. (Always good to know when going to America.) Here's what I sent him:

: Screen Shot 2014-10-28 at 01.12.55 pm.png (216.47 KiB) Viewed 4035 times

The 13" Retina MacBook Pro is my pick for best value in laptop Macs. And conveniently, Apple UK is overpricing them less than usual.

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 13:02

i love looking for monitors.[

I would say first off that LED is way overrated i prefer CCFL but its getting harder to find nowdays and LED is getting better.As you know i also prefer matte screens, something from dell or HP would be quite good. 16:10 if you can but 10:9 screens are way cheaper.

that said this is a lovely screen,

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =MO-023-HO

i am tempted to upgrade to it and get rid of my older 27 inch and 24 inch and stay with this

Muirium · 30 Oct 2014, 13:16

Clicks on 4k monitors on the sidebar… ooh, some of these aren't four figures!

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 13:19

yes but they are ether 2 displays glued together or can only do 30htz and are not IPS

Muirium · 30 Oct 2014, 13:33

Yep. A little research shows IPS is out the window, and the manufacturers are often coy about refresh rate. Sigh.

Hypersphere · 30 Oct 2014, 14:47

It will be quite a while before I can upgrade my monitors.

like the Dell U2711 and U2410. Although I would love to have Retina displays, the legacy resolutions are fine for my current needs, but mainly I need the multiple inputs that are available on these models. Each of my workstations has three monitors (27-inch in the center flanked by two 24-inch), and each monitor needs to take inputs from three computers. These old Dells have five connections each for monitors: 2 dual-link DVI, Displayport, HDMI, and VGA. Unfortunately, the newer monitors are deleting ports that I need.

If you run across Retina, 4k or 5k monitors with a plethora of ports, please let me know!

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 15:55

the dell U2711 is a solid screen , that one is still CCFL if i am correct

2560 x 1440 ?

Khers · 30 Oct 2014, 15:57

I hate Yosemite at the moment.

The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, a lot of the programs that I use are not Yosemite compatible atm, not too bad since most of them are being released in the near future. Worse is the fact that ever since installing Yosemite my computer freaks out a couple of times a day. Often triggered by exposé, it starts to flicker madly between the normal screen and some weird colorful square-pattern. I'm just glad I'm not epileptic... Sometimes the screen just freeze completely with the square pattern. The only thing I can do to get it back to normal is a reboot. Just did my fifth today.

I wonder if this is Apple's, not so discreet, way of telling me to upgrade.

Anybody else experiencing something similar and/or know a solution?

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 16:02

i am on an 09 MBP and its faster on 10.10, next i am going to upgrade the OD server and its backup fingers crossed . need to get an SSD for this tho i cannot bare to use a spinning disk much longer.

is OS X server a licence per physical machine or once you have the upgrade you can go nuts ?

Muirium · 30 Oct 2014, 16:14

@Khers: all the cool kids (Mac and iOS App Store Developers) reckon Apple is nuts for backwards compatibility. It really hurts them when they aren't allowed to refuse a user just because their hardware is incapable of running the same class of game or app.

http://www.allenpike.com/2014/the-ipad-zombie/

So I doubt Apple's showing you glitches on purpose. Do that to a nerd and he'll buy from your competitors!

@Andy: I believe Apple has a website…

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 16:20

they do and i checked it , once you have it you can go nuts YAY! wish me luck upgrading the domain controllers

lucky for me i turned cashing on so i don't have to download it again

I think apple are quite good with backwards compatibility when you think my white macbook came with tiger and can happily run lion thats a good innings. that would be like a PC shipping with NT4 and being able to run vista

( although to be fair i would rather leave it on NT4

)

it is one of the arguments of mac vs pc the build quality of the mac is usually very good and it will last you way longer. IF you want a pc of the build quality of a mac you have to start looking at lenovo and then you are looking at a very similar price once you exclude the cheap sell in argos laptops they make.

EDIT

In a prefect world all laptops would be but like tanks still have mechanical keyswitches have socketed CPUs and run LINUX

Muirium · 30 Oct 2014, 16:30

Correction: they'd have Topre or compact beamspring keyboards and they'd run OpenSTEP.

Khers · 30 Oct 2014, 16:32

Muirium wrote: ↑@Khers: all the cool kids (Mac and iOS App Store Developers) reckon Apple is nuts for backwards compatibility. It really hurts them when they aren't allowed to refuse a user just because their hardware is incapable of running the same class of game or app.

http://www.allenpike.com/2014/the-ipad-zombie/

So I doubt Apple's showing you glitches on purpose. Do that to a nerd and he'll buy from your competitors!

I'm not serious

, just that these issues started approximately when the retina iMac was released. And they are only showing on my '11 iMac, neither on my '10 Air nor '08 mini. Will downgrade the iMac to 10.9 when I have the opportunity. Until then I'll have to live through constant reboots.

andrewjoy · 30 Oct 2014, 16:37

Muirium wrote: ↑Correction: they'd have Topre or compact beamspring keyboards and they'd run OpenSTEP.

But excluding gaming ML are the best of the cherry switch imo

jacobolus · 30 Oct 2014, 19:01

OpenSTEP? Bleh.

How about some kind of latter-day BeOS, but with real corporate resources behind it .