As a person of exceedingly wordy nature, I don’t often fold what could (or maybe should) have been two separate blog posts into a single post, but this made a lot more sense to me as a single post. I’ve been wanting to write about the experience of setting up MILVAX, my Mac mini, again, and I have also been wanting to write about some of Apple’s newest hardware. It occurred to me in a lot of ways that the mini I am using to write this right now is a dry run for more expensive Macintosh hardware. Before buying the mini, I had been pretty seriously considered buying a MacBook Air or Pro as the successor or companion to my ThinkPad T400 and although the iMacs have gotten more closed in their designs over the years, they have also gotten more durable as Intel releases lower power designs and as Apple moves toward solid state storage and reducing the overall number of moving components inside the machine.
As such, I wanted to take a few moments to write about the Macintosh platform as it stands today. I have been using my Mac mini for various tasks for a few weeks now and while it’s a very competent computer, I couldn’t quite feel at home in Mac OS X. Theorizing that it was just that I never really moved into the install and then I upgraded it and then I had it put away for several months, I decided to wipe it and start over with Mac OS X 10.9, which I am pleased to say runs very well on the mini. Apple also made the new Mac Pro official recently, which has been of big interest to me because it promises to deliver a whole lot of computing and graphics horsepower in a very small amount of space. In that way, and the focus on external devices and network connectivity, it actually matches up with my current operational theory very well. (put everything on TECT except for apps.) So, I’ll start with the Mac mini and then talk a little bit about the Mac Pro.
The Mac mini is great. it’s a stationary computer that drives two monitors, has good compute performance, a respectable RAM ceiling for its age, and has enough connectivity, all within the electric footprint of a laptop. The mini is a piece of hardware that I can leave on for weeks on end without noticing it, on the electric bill, in my room, or even when it’s running Folding@Home or dutifully downloading media content, or whatever. In a lot of ways, the mini is great and I have been looking for years for an equivalent system from a PC OEM. There are USFF business desktops, but those are often pretty huge and some of them cost a bomb and come with crappy bits anyway. In years previous, there were systems like the Dell Studio Hybrid desktop and the Zino HD. I could simply install Windows on the mini, or even buy a new mini just for Windows, but I think that would prove a point about me in the opposite direction of how I’d personally like it to go down.
I personally like to think that I’m a very cross-platform person. I have a Windows desktop at work, a Mac desktop at home, I run a linux server and I even have a laptop that runs linux. Unfortunately, that’s only if you count a few of my machines. At home, my server, laptop, second laptop, third laptop, and two tablets are all Windows computers. My Mac is a Mac, but I also never touch the linux laptop and my involvement with the linux server is that I installed some web applications on it in 2009 and I type some maintenance commands every once in a while. With that in mind, when it came to my attention that I was no longer really using my laptops like laptops, and that they were all somewhat slow for some of the things I wanted to be doing anyway, it made sense to buy a desktop as my next machine and for that desktop to be a Windows computer. The real wildcard is Apple’s beautiful and impressive hardware. This summer at its Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple’s hardware product guy Phil Schiller showed pictures and video of the new Mac Pro. In October, iMacs based on the Intel Haswell platform shipped and made that system look even more attractive as well, from a hardware standpoint.
The Mac Pro is a beautiful computer. In my circles, the Mac mini often gets compared to the Sun Sparcstations or NeXTstation. If that’s the case, then the new Mac Pro is absolutely the 21st century’s NeXT Cube or Silicon Graphics Octane. This is an incredibly powerful machine, but it’s pretty clearly meant to be part of a larger ecosystem, and you’re supposed to build that ecosystem outside of the box, under a desk or in an adjacent rack unit, or hidden away in a datacenter. (The previous Mac Pro which was large enough to house much of an ecosystem, but still often required lots of outboard peripherals.) Apple showed more at its special event this past week. For a base price of $2,999 the new Mac Pro will have a 3.7GHz quad core processor, 12 gigabytes of memory, 256GB of PCI Express based solid state storage, and a pair of 2GB AMD GPUs called the “FirePro D300.”
I think my comparison to the high end UNIX workstations of the late ‘90s and early 2000s continues to stand, and I think Apple has proven my point. Today, you buy a Mac Pro not because it’s just a few bucks more than your chosen iMac configuration (in fact, while the Mac Pro stands at almost the same price as the top end iMac configuration, it is a thousand dollars more than my particular iMac config, just based on what I’ve personally decided would be important in a Mac.) In order for a Mac Pro to make sense, you do sort of need to be sure you’ll be able to use its computing horsepower. I think more than anything, that means that the six Thunderbolt ports or the pair of high end workstation GPUs. Unfortunately, I just can’t say that about myself. I’m told the GPUs will probably clock themselves down to the point of not making an electricity impact, but it would also border on painful to have a machine with two so powerful GPUs that aren’t optimized for the only task I want to do that actually mandates having GPUs: gaming. I believe that they’d help my photography related tasks, but I don’t believe that that’s enough to make me move to the Mac Pro compared to some of the other systems I have been looking at.
The iMac is interesting because Apple’s most recent configuration really does look like one of the most durable computers they’ve built in a long time. The base speed contains an i7-4570R and Intel’s new IRIS Pro graphics, which promises to make a system that will be physically reliable and relevant, performance-wise, for several years to come. As somebody who will almost completely inevitably install Windows on the hardware immediately, I also feel like it is relevant to think about the system in terms of how easily that’ll be done. Let’s be honest with ourselves here and say that the iMac will probably run directly from a Windows 8 or 8.1 image with no problems. The Mac Pro will be a poor experience on Windows.
My honest question is what’s keeping the rest of the PC industry from making hardware this compelling. The iMac has Intel’s best integrated graphics offering onboard and pairs it with the best display in the industry, and both the iMac and the Mac Pro feature a whole lot of the fatest storage you can now get in computers that cost less than $10,000. And the sad part is that Apple now offers this storage in everything except for the Mac mini and one MacBook Pro model they did not update.
As a result of all of this, I consider it to be really unfortunate that while I’m adept at using both Windows and Mac OS X, Windows is really where my applications and workflow are. I could complete all of my work on a Mac, and I’ll even say that Office 2011 is very nice, and I could even play my most important games on a Mac, but in the years since I purchased my ThinkPad T400, I have adopted several Windows-centric habits and some of my data is in Windows-centric file formats. I’ll continue to use the Mac mini to see if I could break myself of some of my habits, but my guess is that when I’m ready to jump on a new desktop, it won’t be a Mac, not for another cycle.