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Installing linux

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brucehoult:
I agree that there is nothing special in the cheap HPs and Dells in a retail store and you can easily beat them on quality yourself, and maybe even on price.

Apple is a different matter though. They actually do care about things such as acoustic design and reliability (with a few prominent failures) and are not any more expensive than the other big name brands when you compare machines with comparable components -- they simply do not play in the cheap low quality end of the market.

I personally haven't bought an Apple desktop for over a decade, but that's because they put components in them that are targeted at graphics and video professionals that I, as a programmer, don't get any benefit from.

In late 2009 I built an i7 860 (Nehalem) quad core box and Hackintoshed it. Apple had an iMac with the same CPU just a month or so later, but as it necessarily included a (lovely) screen, it cost far more. Screens are one of the things I buy and then use for a decade -- and at that stage I already had an Apple 30" 2560x1600 screen that was well depreciated.

In July 2014 I built an i7 4790K (Haswell) which I also Hackintoshed. I could have reused most of the parts, but in fact I found a local buyer for the old machine. Again, Apple came out with a 27" iMac with the same CPU in October that year.

Same again in late 2017. I built a machine with an 18 core i9 7980XE in November. Apple again announced an iMac with an 18-Core Xeon W-2191B at the end of December for an eye-watering $7400 base price in the US (mine was about $4500 fully loaded with 64 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD, and that was in Russia with 30% import duty and 20% VAT).

My current home office work machine is a 32 core ThreadRipper that I built in April. Apple announced a 29 core Xeon W Mac Pro in June but I think hasn't yet shipped it. I haven't Hackintoshed my Threadripper because I'm doing more work directly with Ubuntu these days, and my 2011 17" i7 MacBook Pro does everything I need MacOS for.

I want to be clear that in each of these cases I think Apple's prices were entirely justified by the hardware they sold you. It's just that I didn't want to buy all of that hardware, every time. And I was more than happy with an ugly traditional PC box under my desk instead of everything built into a monitor on my desk.

brucehoult:
As for quality...

Last month I visited my parents in New Zealand. Among other things, my father (who will be 80 in January) complained that about 600 photos had gone missing from his iPhoto (now Photos) library. I took a look at his 2018 MacBook Pro (touchbar) and established that the photos in question were from between May and December 2009.

I looked at his TimeMachine backups (he actually had backups!) and found that the photos in question were already missing in the oldest snapshot, in January 2011.

I took the old 2001 model PowerBook G3 400 MHz "Pismo" off the shelf. It started up no problem. The last photo in its iPhoto database was the same as the last photo still present in Photos before the gap. Aha!

I took the 2009 Core 2 Duo 17" MacBook Pro off the shelf. Sadly, it went *bong* and the screen showed the Apple logo but it did not boot. I think that's why Dad replaced it with the current machine. I turned it off and back on, holding the T key and sure enough it came up in FireWire Target Disk Mode. I found a firewire 400 cable in a box and connected the 2009 Intel machine to the 2001 PowerPC G3 machine. Boom! The disk mounted fine. Sadly, the same photos were missing from its iPhoto database.

My suspicion is that the missing photos (by date range and camera DSC* id) may simply have been on a memory card that was never uploaded to the computer. But I don't know :-(

The 2009 machine didn't boot. But it looks as if there's not much wrong with it. I could mount and browse the disk fine from the 2001 machine using FireWire. And the screen and KB and trackpad worked. Maybe reinstalling the OS would revive it.

Impressive I think that the 2001 machine is still absolutely fine. It's just ... you know ... 400 MHz. And worse with a Rage128 mobile GPU. I myself have a 1998 266 MHz G3 PowerBook that also still works perfectly. It's just even slower (and FX9200...). And hard to connect to these days except by ethernet (build it) or WIFI (I have a very slow PCMCIA card pluged into it). At least these machines run OS X so you can ssh etc.

gnif:

--- Quote from: brucehoult on November 07, 2019, 05:20:19 am ---My current home office work machine is a 32 core ThreadRipper that I built in April. Apple announced a 29 core Xeon W Mac Pro in June but I think hasn't yet shipped it. I haven't Hackintoshed my Threadripper because I'm doing more work directly with Ubuntu these days, and my 2011 17" i7 MacBook Pro does everything I need MacOS for.

--- End quote ---

Ever thought of running a Hackintosh in a VM? It's pretty easy these days with QEMU. If you need decent GPU performance you can use VFIO to pass a Vega 56/64 through to the VM.


--- Quote from: brucehoult on November 07, 2019, 05:20:19 am ---My point is that money and skill *always* beats commercial offerings in PC's in every way you can afford, providing you have the skill.

--- End quote ---

I agree mostly with this statement, however you also need to factor in time and maintenance. If a HP/Dell/Whatever has a failure within it's warranty period everything is handled for you, no need to rip the machine apart and start pulling/swapping parts to diagnose what has failed. Sometimes you simply don't have the spare parts on hand to swap for testing, or your life is already simply too busy to have the free time to spend researching parts, building the machine, diagnosing any faults.

I am all for building your own PC, and I have never owned a brand name PC, but I have serviced enough of them to know they are generally well built (usually Dell are pretty decent) even if they are expensive for the parts they contain. The consumer range of HP/Compaq equipment, especially laptops, I avoid like the plague as they are some of the cheapest built junk there is, however the business range is far better, but you pay for it.


--- Quote from: brucehoult on November 07, 2019, 05:20:19 am ---I've seen HP factory servers on fire off the shoulder of Orion ... ok, slight exaggeration

--- End quote ---

Interesting, I'd love to hear the details on this as I work in this industry. That said however this is like comparing apples to oranges, the enterprise server market is completely foreign to the home computer market. Many enterprise servers are designed to be in actively cooled racks (industrial air conditioning & humidity control) due to their size constraints. Cooling considerations for a rack server must be taken into account or the lifespan of said device is likely to be very short.

OTOH, a general mass produced home PC must be designed to just work, even if they are in a room with a heater keeping grandma warm while she browses eBay smoking a cigarette filling the PC with sticky tar dust that blocks all airflow.

Regarding Apple's value... I am sorry it's just not there. And then when they do stuff like this it just reinforces it:
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/6/3/18651001/apples-mac-pro-xdr-display-monitor-stand-expensive-dongle-not-included-wwdc-2019

techman-001:

--- Quote from: gnif on November 07, 2019, 06:02:07 am ---

--- Quote from: techman-001 ---I've seen HP factory servers on fire off the shoulder of Orion ... ok, slight exaggeration

--- End quote ---

Interesting, I'd love to hear the details on this as I work in this industry. That said however this is like comparing apples to oranges, the enterprise server market is completely foreign to the home computer market. Many enterprise servers are designed to be in actively cooled racks (industrial air conditioning & humidity control) due to their size constraints. Cooling considerations for a rack server must be taken into account or the lifespan of said device is likely to be very short.

--- End quote ---

I used to be the guy repairing and configuring servers and networking gear in server cool rooms, the guy with the woolly jumper and noise canceling headphones.

There is nothing special about commercial servers, it's all just hardware engineered for a price. In fact because the server room is always filtered and air conditioned, the actual cooling performance on server gear is usually quite pedestrian in my experience.

Most commercial servers wouldn't last long on my desk because they don't have the cooling for my hot shed, even at their usual 180 dBa noise levels!

Ever bought a second hand commercial server from a server coolroom ? They're like new inside, but after 12 months in a home they're filthy, rusty and just yuk!

Simon:
what really pisses me off is that virtually every laptop ships with only one stick of RAM even though every processor now is dual channel and with integrated graphics you really need that extra channel. Often the RAM speeds are lower than those supported.

I use a HP laptop but I bought it off a guy on ebay that souped up standard machines. For less than HP would have ripped me off for he shipped a machine with full speed dual channel RAM and an SSD. Very happy with it and has been going strong since 2016. I can even do some light 3D CAD work on it for electronic design.

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