patrick.net

Yeah, I had a 2008 MBP as my daily driver until it died after being left in my car overnight (I suspect the Santa Cruz humidity killed it).
Had a PBG4 from 2002-2006, too, that was pretty decent too.

Still have the 24" DisplayPort Cinema Display (typing on it now via Windows), which is equivalent to Thunderbolt. I'll be using this display with my next machine.

I can get the base 15" MBP for $1600 thanks to a 20% discount on pro stuff. It's got 256GB of superfast SM-951 flash. Thing is, no graphics card.

That's a lot of compromise for portability that I have zero need for. I'm not the one to go sit at Starbucks or whatever.

The big question now is how hard Apple is going to crack down on hackintoshes. Nobody knows, sigh. 10.10.4 ought to be good enough regardless, but it'd kinda suck to be stuck there.

OK, this is genuinely humorous -- the read benchmarks on the SM-951 in RAID are so fast they overflowed ATTO's code:

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-sm951-m-2-ssd-raid-review-over-4gbs-and-300k-iops-a-consumer-option/2/

SM-951 is the single most significant PC-space advance since the nvidia TNT2, LOL

(in best Ogre voice): NERDS!!

Why not this:?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-117-402

This is sooo over-powerful unless you're running a data center.

Bellingham Bill says

Been running Windows 10 for a month, not as bad as 7 or 8 but OS X is still streets ahead

This is a meaningless statement. Windows 95 to Windows 10 are operating systems. OS X is not an operating system. It does not operate the system. It does not do memory management, disk I/O, process management, CPU allocation, or anything else that an operating system does. To compare it to an actual operating system is like comparing a cardboard cut-out of a picture of an automobile to an actual automobile.

What you mean to say, most likely as this is what most people outside engineering mean, is that you strongly prefer OS X to the desktop shell of Windows 10.

For a better understanding of what Windows, OS X, Android and iOS are, please see this thread.

Heraclitusstudent says

This is sooo over-powerful unless you're running a data center.

kinda need to balance threads vs. clockspeed, sorta a 70-30 split towards the latter.

Also, since Apple hasn't released any 6-core Macs, Hackintoshes have some issues with them.

4/8 Core/Thread @ 3.6GHz is probably the best I can do for my stuff, though I think 2/4 @ 3.8Ghz i3 for half the cost is also going to be good enough.

Cache sizes are also a consideration I guess.

Dan8267 says

Windows 95 to Windows 10 are operating systems. OS X is not an operating system

No, all are 'platforms' in your parlance. This is clear if you know that the internals under 95 and 10 are totally different, the 9x/Me series having one operating system, NT/Win2k/XP/Vista having another, blending off to 7/8/10 now with a third OS.

I agree OS X is not an OS, there is an OS underneath called XNU, but that's an implementation detail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

you strongly prefer OS X to the desktop shell of Windows 10.

No, it goes deeper than that, e.g. Windows 10 has been doing a good job updating itself over the net, something Windows 9x couldn't do at all and OS X got good at ~5 years ago.

Dan8267 says

Bellingham Bill says

Been running Windows 10 for a month, not as bad as 7 or 8 but OS X is still streets ahead

This is a meaningless statement. Windows 95 to Windows 10 are operating systems. OS X is not an operating system. It does not operate the system. It does not do memory management, disk I/O, process management, CPU allocation, or anything else that an operating system does. To compare it to an actual operating system is like comparing a cardboard cut-out of a picture of an automobile to an actual automobile.

Who cares what it's called, and all that technical mumbo jumbo. As a layman I only care for one thing...Does the damn thing work?

Bellingham Bill says

No, all are 'platforms' in your parlance.

It's not my parlance. It's industry standard terms. It's a fact thing, not an opinion thing.

Bellingham Bill says

I agree OS X is not an OS, there is an OS underneath called XNU, but that's an implementation detail.

In the same way that a coat a paint has a car underneath it. It's a critical distinction between the paint (what you see on the screen) and the car (what actually moves under its own power).

Strategist says

Who cares what it's called, and all that technical mumbo jumbo.

In the same way the dashboard and the engine of a car are just technical mumbo jumbo. But it's mumbo jumbo that you should understand if you ever buy, drive, or pay for car maintenance. Being ignorant of a product makes your opinion of that product worthless. And in this day and age, there is no excuse for being ignorant of technology. It's a part of everyday life.

Strategist says

As a layman I only care for one thing...Does the damn thing work?

And that's why you should understand the mumbo jumbo. The extent to which a computer works depends on those things.

Dan8267 says

Strategist says

Who cares what it's called, and all that technical mumbo jumbo.

In the same way the dashboard and the engine of a car are just technical mumbo jumbo. But it's mumbo jumbo that you should understand if you ever buy, drive, or pay for car maintenance. Being ignorant of a product makes your opinion of that product worthless. And in this day and age, there is no excuse for being ignorant of technology. It's a part of everyday life.

From a user friendly point of view, only the likes of my opinion will count. Everyone cannot be a computer nerd. When I turn on a computer I expect it to turn on right away, and start doing what I expect it to do. Taking 10 minutes to boot up, constantly freezing, and having to continuously monitor for viruses is not what t's supposed to do. Figuring out everything else is for you techie geeks to figure out. I got a 100% electric car last week. Do you think I even looked under the hood? It ain't my concern.

jazz music says

Before OS X users said that Windows was not an OS but more like tits on DOS that required a lot of clock-wasting tricks, with limited success, to make DOS do things it was never designed to do.

As I explained in the other thread Windows before NT or 95 (Windows 1.0 to 3.1) were not operating systems but simply desktop shells. OS X is also not an operating system. This is not an opinion or a judgement but a cold hard fact. A fish is not a bicycle. Maybe you think that's an insult to fishes or an insult to bicycles, but it is a fact plain and simple. Opinion does not even enter into the matter.

jazz music says

OS X consistently has done the operating system/user interface so much better than Windows ever did in many users opinions.

Where the desktop GUI of OS X or the desktop GUI of Windows is better or prettier is an opinion. It does not change the fact that a desktop GUI is not an operating system. Again, this is fact, not judgement.

As to the opinion of which desktop is prettier or nicer, that's almost entirely a matter of personal preferences and prejudices.

I find it silly to have religious wars over arbitrary aesthetic issues when there are concrete aspects of software that's more important. For example, in OSes preemptive multitasking. It's like arguing over the colors of two cars or the shape of their tailfins when one car's engine is more reliable or fuel efficient.

jazz music says

How in the world can we cut and run to a third generation OS?

When Apple moved from the Apple ][ to the MAC, they did exactly that plus a new architecture. When Mozilla developed Firefox, they did essentially the same thing. Microsoft is releasing a new web browser written from scratch as a replacement for Internet Explorer. The shift from C++ to Java and .NET was just as dramatic. The shift from desktop apps to web apps even more so. Such revolutions are common in computing history, and they are a good thing.

jazz music says

A third generation OS would have to be developed for some niche technology where there is a killer application where Unix fails so spectacularly

There's already a killer app that justifies third generation operating systems: the Internet. With software being downloaded and installed over the wire, with people's personal information and content flowing through various services, there is a great need for 3GOS, to coin a term. It's long overdue.

jazz music says

and hopelessly that us taxpayers would be put on the hook for many many years of research budgets yet again

Your overestimating the time and effort to build an 3rd gen OS. Yes, it's not trivial. But it's not nearly as hard as the problem Google solved, indexing the Internet. Nor is it as difficult as building Watson, the system that won Jeopardy against two of Jeopardy's greatest champions. And quite frankly, I'm certain the engineers had to "turn down" Watson's performance because it was kicking the human's asses.

BIOS
Microkernel
Kernel
Operating System
User Interfaces
Software Platform
Virtual Machine

I hereby declared that Linus Torvalds invented Mach and BSD too, and any Unix that run on x86 platform is Linux !!!

I say buy a MBP. I don't agree that having an iPad makes it OK for your computer to be fixed to a single location. Of course I don't have an iPad and I don't think it would replace a normal computer for more than half of what I do. Yes they are harder to work on...but what do you plan to do to it? My 3 year old MBP is pretty straightforward to open up and add ram or replace a hard drive. If you spill shit on the keyboard, yes, you are in for a long repair session...

If you insist on tethering your PC to a desk, the mini isn't a bad option, really...again, I don't see a lot of need for opening up computers these days, so that aspect doesn't bother me. I have a mini, too...I like it. It's not the fastest machine in the world, but it's not often that it really matters for me.

Or why not buy the iMac that you said was good.

My days of tearing out pages from Computer Shopper and piecing together a BAMFER are behind me, so I don't share your interest in the hackintosh route. Buy the MBP and enjoy it. It's pretty nice.

swebb says

My 3 year old MBP is pretty straightforward to open up and add ram or replace a hard drive.

2012 was the end of that, actually, the 2012 retina models look like this:

https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/1hlMKPXTFf32klKi.medium

1/10 repairability.

Of course I don't have an iPad and I don't think it would replace a normal computer for more than half of what I do

it's good for email, web browsing, reading books, watching movies. Not for working at all, but I don't work outside like that.

I'll keep an eye on the Mini, if they throw in a Broadwell CPU with Iris Pro graphics and fast SM-951 SSD, it'd be a nice little box.

Probably cost more than what my own minitower build would (~$1000), and not half as future-proof -- when the Mac Pro died I pulled my 2007 Conroe box out of the closet, popped in a new SSD, and Windows 10 has made this a pretty decent machine again!

The problem with the $2000 iMac is that it becomes a $2000 paperweight when the logic board fails, which it probably will within a decade (my Mac Pro lasted 8.5 years, and the MBP exactly 7). My mom's 2006 iMac is still doing OK, but it's stuck on 10.6.8 and she has to use Chrome because FB kills the Safari on it.

I already have a decent 24" LCD display, while I'd like retina DPI, my eyes are just fuzzy enough to not really notice it all that much.

pages from Computer Shopper

Newegg has really changed things.

A couple of clicks, and that stuff is on its way.

I just built a Hackintosh. Apple doesn't build any computers with high end graphics cards (even the MacPro's are more geared towards stability over performance) so I went for it. It turned out to be kinda tricky, you have to tinker a lot, buy the right hardware, and so on. There are problems with Apple services like authenticating with iCloud, iMessage, and such. The one remaining problem I have, which I think can't be resolved, is that I can't play DRM movies in iTunes (movie rentals, etc.). Strange because I can play them in Windows, so I guess Apple has stronger DRM when running in OS X. I'm still trying to get that to work though.

Anyway, I can dual boot, so I'm no worse off than having a plain old Windows box, other than being a little restricted when buying hardware.

yeah, I don't really care about Apple's net services or DRM media, other than the AppStore . . .

all the hackintosh owners trying to get iMessages working crack me up. Use something else man and don't make Apple mad at us for a stupid service like that.

Just learned today that you need a working ethernet port on en0 (not 802.11) to access the AppStore (!)

no worse off than having a plain old Windows box

yeah, that's my thinking too. Having delayed upgrading the Conroe, even the cheap stuff out now like that list above is a great upgrade.

I have a pretty nice machine, Haswell 4790K i7 4GHz, GTX 970, 16 GB vengeance RAM, two 500gb SSDs, etc. all working great as a dual boot Hackintosh (for around $1.5k), so you don't have to compromise much, but venturing into the cutting edge will be tough. The GTX 970 is crazy powerful, it laughs at anything I throw at it.