csmuk

No. The PC is a modular standardised architecture. There are no COTS components that would fit in such a case. This is by design. Apple forked their own design.

Pro Tools. I've used Logic Pro: it's horridly unreliable. I no longer have a DAW in favour of a Triton as it's all I need personally but my experience with Logic was awful.

Adobe After Effects + Adobe Premiere Pro. The guys I know who use it do it on Windows because OSX is a moving target from hell. You get reliable iSCSI support on Windows and better SAN performance. Plus it's easier to get 10Gbit ethernet cards to your SAN when you have some real PCI express slots available.

They don't use internal disks but some of us do for storing virtual machines in my case.

See my other comments about how my Mac experience has gone. Also look at Apple forums. Nothing but bitching from people about endless stupid problems.

Microsoft get a bad rep for beta testing their products on the customers but if you've used iWork on an iPad recently you'll see what I mean.

Not pleased. People need to look at these problems pragmatically and stop defending something which has descended into the same hell as everything else.

Do it. I still use a T400 every day and have a T61 as a fallback. There's nothing like them out there.

Long post. This should cover it. Family of 5 history of Apple and Lenovo/IBM kit:

2010 MacBook Pro (DEAD 2011 - caught fire after water spillage next to it - WTF). 2006 MacBook Pro (DEAD 2008 - logic board failure). 2007 MacBook (DEAD 2010 - logic board failure). 2006 Intel iMac (DEAD 2008 - backlight). 2007 Mac Mini (sold 2009 - worked fine at the time).

2005 IBM T43 (ALIVE - sister's daily driver). 2006 Lenovo T61 (ALIVE - backup machine - stopped using it in 2012). 2007 Lenovo T400 (ALIVE - bought 2012 second hand. My daily driver). 2008 Lenovo X200 (ALIVE - mail server because it's cheap to run).

All of the above have lived a HARD life.

The only Apple kit I have that is still alive is a 2008 iPod Nano that barely works (to be expected here). Two iPad 2's (one barely manages 2 hours on battery - replacing that will be fun!) and a brand new iPad Mini Retina.

Apple kit stinks from my experience.

I don't want to hear the favourite defence of "anecdote" to this post. Once probability. Twice coincidence. Thrice certainty.

The shipped BIOS is a little rough as well.

The T61 which is where my main experience lies has hardware whitelists for WiFi cards and restricts the internal SATA port to basic SATA speeds rather than SATA2 speeds which the chipset supports.

There are many hacked BIOSes (I use Middleton's BIOS) out there which fix this though.

This. I worked for a company that had lots (3000+) T60's and they were all Core2 units.

The X60 that they advertise does not.

However, you can disconnect the hardware pretty easy. I've done this on my T400. Took about 5 mins with a Swiss army knife screwdriver (all you need to service a ThinkPad!).

I'm not sure it should be allowable.

WiFi firmware can in theory allow passive monitoring and forwarding of data. This is because the WiFi card is a small self-contained embedded system.

The CPU microcode (and arguably architecture) is more difficult to modify but it's possible that the microcode for an AES round opcode could be intentionally flawed. Enough press is around not to have to explain this.

USB is the one I find interesting. Anything (webcam/keyboard/mouse) could arbitrarily register itself as an HID device and inject data into your OS.

The whole systems architecture is a mess.

I'm not suggesting we go back to discrete wire-wrapped PDP11's but something needs to be done by putting security and privacy first. That means starting again as where we are isn't good.

T60p was far superior build to any MacBook ever made. My old T61 which is virtually identical had the living crap beaten out of it 10 hours a day for 5 years solid and it still works fine today. It had a new battery and a new fan and that was it.

Well worth the investment.

The OS really doesn't matter is the point. Big apps: after effects, mathematica etc - that sort of workstation stuff doesn't make a difference.

Virtualization is fine for non desktop apps. That's exactly what I do.

Until you have to compile something major...

Then both OSX and Windows are awful.

All computers are trade offs but when you start trading sensible things for appearance then it's just idiocy.

It's the Ugg boot of computers. Looks pretty and keeps your feet warm but you can't get it wet and it isn't waterproof, they fuck up your feet and fall to bits.

I'd rather have a pair of Berghaus explorers, warm and dry feet and for them to still be on one piece after a 20 mile hike (HP Z820).

Don't really care about the OS - you can get where you need to with virtualization.

This. See my comments for another bad XServe experience.

That's fine until you take your Pro back to apple and they don't have your configuration available and you have to wait 3 weeks for a replacement (this does happen a lot with non standard apple build to order devices). Even worse with an XServe I inherited: they couldn't replace it in warranty. Ended up with a supermicro 1U with debian on it in under 24 hours from buy to install.

My HP: redundant PSU, disks, next day service for all parts or replacement unit.

No competition. I can't afford the downtime.

Or you can buy an HP Z820. OSX is pretty much moot for workstation grade machines. The software is all cross platform.

And wires dangling everywhere? To get anything other than comedy storage, you're going to need a pile of lightning devices hanging off it.

And don't give me all that crap about Apple being tried and tested - last MacBook Pro I had was totally unreliable.

Upgradeable, replaceable parts, redundancy, better storage options, cheaper, doesn't accidentally get trash put in the top. And that's just the case.

I have nothing but contempt for the Mac Pro design - it's style over substance to the extreme.

No we have better ones.

You know which we can replace bits of.

Neither are my favourite language :)

And it was turning a procedural mess into an OO mess.

I wouldn't have had a job between 2003-2004 which was untangling Perl and rewriting it in C# :)

I love Reddit Secret Santa for the comedy value. So far I've seen this year people have been given:

1. A pig foetus preserved in alcohol.

2. A selection of root vegetables, petroleum jelly and gloves.

The 6502 is still used widely in industrial stuff. Back in 2001 when I was still doing electrical engineering bits, as part of a project I received some brand new custom radio rig test equipment to integrate with an automated testing rig plugged into a PC running DOS (meh). We took it to bits to get access to the documented serial port header. Inside was a pristine gold turned pin socketed 6502. It was the only chip on the board that had that privilege. It was like it was being worshipped by the engineers.

We sent the test team who built it a big "you're awesome" card.

Neat solution - really like that. Great work.

That's what the debugger is for (if you inherited it).

However, a lot of desktop applications are written that way. If you've ever dealt with Win32, you'll see nested switch statements from hell on your average project.

If you have a pure OO language like Java or C# then there's no excuse but some legacy applications built in C tend to be "switchy" because the older APIs seem to favour that form of message dispatch.

There is still no excuse as you can have decent abstraction in C or C++.

However for what is effectively a jump table, a switch statement is exactly spot on for this project.

No dictionaries are O(1). Even if they were they are pitifully slow compared to a switch. Consider chaining and the fact that you have to compute hashes.

switch is O(1) and fast as the operation is usually 2-3 deterministic time instructions:

1. Look up jump address from lookup table made by compiler.

2. Jump to it.

More people need to have written assembly to actually get this into their heads.

Exactly the same way the die connects to the pins on the package (usually fine wire). Then they cap it all.

I think it's justifiable derision on the basis the box is pretty as well.

The market side is interesting because the case depicted is probably a more relevant release. It'll see it's way into many more OEM and home built computers than the Mac Pro.

Actually I use a ThinkPad and an HP Z820.

I work in financial services sector and we serve desktop and web apps. Bar large businesses, we see a LOT of home built and OEM PCs.

I was involved in the family business OEM sector for the best part of 20 years as well from a hardware perspective. There are two types of professional: careless and obsessive. The latter build their own. The distribution I saw was about 40% OEM/home built to 60% big manufacturer.

Astute observation. We're already there.

Most people I know, including myself, are quite happy on a 6-7 year old unit.

Bar developers, graphic artists (2d,3d), video, mega-data there's sod all use for a 12 core Xeon. Don't start spewing gaming either as the Xbox one doesn't have a 12 core Xeon in it!

Two things to consider:

1. home built PC market is probably larger than the entire Mac market. I don't have any figures to back this up but based on Windows' market share and my experience, 20% of PC's I've seen over the years are home built.

2. Those "home built" PCs are also built and sold by PC shops as complete computers, not necessarily home builders. My father ran a business that built OEM white box PCs for 15 years. He sold over 200,000 units.

There is going to be some overlap. Particularly as most of the killer apps are entirely cross platform.

My current ThinkPad (T400) has the Mic, fingerprint scanner and webcam disabled physically. They're easy to get into and unplug.

Agree entirely though.

I'd rather like a physical off switch as well like the original IBM PC (the big red lever)