Join the OS X Beta Seed Program and help make OS X even better. Install the latest pre-release software, try it out, and submit your feedback.
Apple opens its OS X beta program to everyone. Interesting move.
Join the OS X Beta Seed Program and help make OS X even better. Install the latest pre-release software, try it out, and submit your feedback.
Apple opens its OS X beta program to everyone. Interesting move.
Mavericks was basically a beta anyway, and still is even after two updates. Nice to see them drop the pretense and just let everyone have all the betas then, since we have basically been getting betas already (Mavericks, iOS 7).
Thom, my congratulations for your great and insightful article.
I wonder how you could manage it with just quoting one setence, and writing one and a half (because the last one is not a real setence) setences of your own.
What is the next step?
Quoting half of a setence and writing half of a sentence of your own?
i don’t know what else Thom could have said, its a public beta of mavericks, there’s nothing more that can be said.
it’s not especially about this article. But it happens with all. Just short copy pastes, and then a nearly meaningless statement.
It was not like this 5-10 years ago.
I don’t see anymore technica articles.
Often it’s less technical than news from gossip-news-papers.
Why there are no longer in-depth articles?
The world is more worried about the last phone app and the last youtube video than in creating new and amazing OSes (actually, no need for new and amazing OSes because the current ones are already amazing and complex).
In the other side, Thom always links to the Genode OS release notes that are full technical and interesting.
And for new articles, this one is pretty good (written by Thom):
http://www.osnews.com/story/27545/From_Providence_to_Lahaina_the_Jo…
I’m one of “those people” who still uses a ~1400 “gaming” tower: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3wHuh which really just means midrange PC.
Apple still doesn’t sell a product meant to compete in that segment because presumably they don’t want me or people like me as customers.
so?
I don’t just mean custom/upgradable machines, I mean the only comparable systems they sell are Mac Pro Xeon, ECC memory, Dual FirePro GPU etc. aimed at the professional space rather than the power user.
The other headless machines they sell are the Mac Mini and there is really no product in between.
And what is the difference between a pro and a power user?
Hum, probably $$$ ?
You are right. Apple chose to go after other customers. Most customers want:
1) Energy efficient. it’s not only measured by the rating of the PSU, it’s also measured by 80W for a Mac Mini vs. 300-600W for a system like yours
2) Environmentally friendly. Your system probably contains 20 times more metal, than a Mac.
3) A quiet system.
4) A system with only two cables (power and display), or even one in case of the iMac.
Those customers won’t even upgrade the RAM or hard-drive as it’s beyond their skill and interest set.
Furthermore, Apple also makes sure that there are finite number of system configurations that they have to support in the OS.
It’s the same with cards. Some cars are made to be tinkered with, while others will void your warranty. It depends what you are looking for. You can’t make a system the size of the Mac Mini, Mac Pro or MacBook Air and still have it upgrade-able. Just by using SO-DIMMS in a MacBook Air you would loose about 1/3 of the battery (and battery life) or add 1/3rd extra thickness to the base of the laptop.
exactly i think apple realised earlier on that there isn’t much to be gained from upgrades and would rather focus on smaller desktop footprint and less complexity.
The chief things people upgrade now are usually RAM and HDD, the HDD can be done through USB3/Thunderbolt or via a NAS/Server.
Although i will admit that i would love to upgrade or replace the hdd in my 2011 iMac with an SSD as the mechanical drive is pretty much the only thing holding it back.
For me a NAS does the job brilliantly, though I wish they would document OpenDirectory a bit more. There are still no OD compliant NAS products (even the ones from Apple don’t integrate with OD). LDAP works for AFP but not for Samba.
Then replace it! IFixit has guides for almost every component of your Mac.
Might not be so simple. Some iMacs have a proprietary hdd controller and matching firmware which will prevent the machine from working with drives other than those supplied by Apple.
It doesn’t have to be a custom system, just a headless system more powerful than Mac Mini. It wouldn’t need to draw any more power than a Mac Pro that contains 2 AMD FirePro’s.
If they offered a version of the Mac Pro that swapped out the Xeon, ECC RAM, and FirePro for i7, non-ECC RAM, and Radeon or GeForce GPU it would outsell other Mac Pro’s by a lot.
It’s not that they can’t do it, Apple is deliberately staying away from building a product that would more strongly compete with high end PC’s and most workstations. The reasons why they are avoiding doing this are up for debate but its not for any of the reasons I saw in the thread so far.
I’m certain that, if they did this, it would cannibalize sales of the Mac Pro, and not bring in new customers, just reduce the sales of the higher-end product. It’s sort of the chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Apple isn’t building a machine that caters to the gamer (Which is what a machine like that would primarily target) because gamers don’t buy Macs, and game developers aren’t releasing Mac versions of the hit games nearly as often as for Windows because there’s no gamers to buy them.
Of course, since developers aren’t releasing the Triple-A titles for Apple, gamers aren’t buying them, so there’s no market, and Apple isn’t going to release hardware as a result.
Just hackintosh that thing. Looking at your components it should be a breeze (as in all things working ootb).
Edited 2014-04-23 08:03 UTC
Which if you’re all about custom built rigs should be just up your alley… right?
The upside here is that Mac developers can get their hands on new features before most regular users and won’t have to pay $99 (or €99) for it. Though there probably won’t be many fundamental changes in Mavericks, it can still be helpful.
If only I could get any version of Mavericks to work on my 2006 Pro, buggers.
Bad luck, OSX does not support PPC any longer. You need a August 7, 2006 mac pro or newer as those have intel chips.
Edited 2014-04-23 11:19 UTC
The Mac Pro was never PowerPC.
I think he got it confused with the power mac
If yours is a Intel MacPro you could use this excellent tutorial to install ML or Mavericks pretty much trouble free on any old intel mac. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1325709
Thanks for the info, my brother only just offloaded it to me and I was kinda dumbfounded by the bios thing. On first look it doesn’t seem to work with Pro 1.1 and the video card I have but I’ll give it a much closer look.
There is a thread on Macrumors that shows how to do it
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1593194
There is another thread on netkas’s forum, which deals with flashing the firmware to trick it into thinking it is a Mac Pro 2,1 if you really like to tinker.
http://forum.netkas.org/index.php/topic,852.0.html