Apple's latest Mac Pro continues to cause problems for professional users

12346

Comments

  • Reply 101 of 134
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by appleempl View Post

     

     I think the best, most stable OS's were pre OS X, I particularly liked OS 8.6 which I worked on in the 90s. The last best OS was Snow Leopard which I still user on a Mac Mini for TV box, but I'm biased because that was my last project worked on over there. I actually do use Yosemite on a 2011 MacBook Pro, but it's dog slow and crashes a lot. Apple's OS's didn't used to obsolete 4 year old hardware. 


     

    I agree. I still have an old iMac running OS 8.6, amazingly stable and fast. OS 9 was where the rot really started. Awful. I assumed it was to make the unfinished OSX look good.

     

    I have Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite installed on my Mac but spend most of my time in Snow Leopard. I am forced to Mavericks/Yosemite (I prefer Mavericks) to use XCode and other software that has ludicrously restrictive OS requirements.

     

    Particularly bad is the latest, ever shifting formats of the iWork apps. How insane that Pages 5.5.1 will not run on anything other than Yosemite and iOS 8!?  For heavens sake it is a Word Processor. Pages '09 that preceded it did vastly more and runs on everything from OSX 10.6.8 up. An unholy mess and I can not understand how they were ever released, the bugs and damage they did to files was immediately apparent just on opening old files.

     

    The problem is in my opinion, using the people who create the software to test their own work. Always a failure! I doubt many at Apple actually use iWork, preferring MS Office instead.

  • Reply 102 of 134
    This is the antithesis of Apples business strategy "I and others have reported this to Apple, yet they are quiet on the issue," if there is a problem say nothing. If someone writes an article they don't like and per Apple policy they NEVER comment, they simply get Pro-Apple Bloggers and Journalists to bash said creator the offending article. Happens time and again. I love their products but hate their ethics.
  • Reply 103 of 134
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    rubaiyat wrote: »
    appleempl wrote: »
     
     I think the best, most stable OS's were pre OS X, I particularly liked OS 8.6 which I worked on in the 90s. The last best OS was Snow Leopard which I still user on a Mac Mini for TV box, but I'm biased because that was my last project worked on over there. I actually do use Yosemite on a 2011 MacBook Pro, but it's dog slow and crashes a lot. Apple's OS's didn't used to obsolete 4 year old hardware. 

    I agree. I still have an old iMac running OS 8.6, amazingly stable and fast. OS 9 was where the rot really started. Awful. I assumed it was to make the unfinished OSX look good.

    The old operating systems were nowhere near as stable as OS X. They didn't even have protected memory. Don't you remember the bomb messages?

    1000

    When a program went down, it very often meant the whole system went down. Crashes would freeze up the display redraw so windows would trail when dragged around. Whenever you installed a system extension you'd have to reboot. OS X changed this with dynamically loading/unloading kernel extensions. You could break your whole system by moving things in the system folder without a password. You'd have to reboot to get fonts to show up.

    Pre-OS X was a terrible experience.
    rubaiyat wrote: »
    I have Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite installed on my Mac but spend most of my time in Snow Leopard. I am forced to Mavericks/Yosemite (I prefer Mavericks) to use XCode and other software that has ludicrously restrictive OS requirements.

    Their software updates are overly restrictive. They like to push people to upgrade to the latest software. It limits the amount of support they have to do. XCode with Swift won't run on anything before Mavericks and they'll start restricting to iOS 8 authoring in the App Store early next year, which will push all iOS developers to Mavericks at least.

    It's a good process as long as they make the latest software better than the older versions. They don't always do that. Updates are always going to divide people. Yosemite gets good reviews overall as did iOS 7/8 but there will always be people who have a different preference or have a different experience:

    http://www.engadget.com/products/apple/os-x/yosemite/

    There are Mac Pro users who will be perfectly happy with their new machine too, the Blackmagic setup looks like this:


    [VIDEO]


    When a bug crops up, it inevitably leads to people saying how everything is falling apart and things were better in the old days, kids used to respect their elders etc. Things don't go backwards though, changes that are made are purposeful and they have to be followed through. OpenCL was made to unlock the huge processing power of GPUs but they were never designed for computation. The groups that make the hardware, the drivers, OpenCL, OpenGL, the OS and the 3rd party software are all different. They should have matured by now to the point that glitches don't happen in the same way they don't for CPU processing.

    Some things take longer than others. It took Apple 3 years to implement OpenGL 4. There have been driver bugs years ago that shipped with new machines that weren't fixed for months. For someone relying on these machines to put their job on hold for months while it's fixed is not feasible but this is not something exclusive to Apple.

    The following thread has a lot of conflicting details about it working for hours but then showing minor glitches - a 90 minute export can have 162,000 frames to process and the glitch can be one line in one 4K frame to be a problem:

    http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=19703

    The same glitches showing up in Adobe Premiere are talked about in the following 13-page thread, which has been going since March:

    https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1422947?start=0&tstart=0

    A few people say that getting a new logic board or GPU replacements sorted it, someone mentioned that AMD had said to them it was down to moving from OpenCL 1.2 to 2.0 but 2.0 was only properly released last month. Someone mentioned in one of the threads about an Apple engineer sampling the GPU when the glitch happened; if end users could do that easily and be able to send it directly to Apple, they'd be able to get more data.

    Maybe they should setup a local support instead of their radar bug reporter. Someone on the forum mentioned they used to issue bug reports in software directly. They can use iTunes logins and then just have a messaging panel where you submit a problem e.g AppleCare Chat. It would be like one-to-one but through messages. They'd have front-line staff who direct queries to the right place so people asking basic questions can just get a tutorial link. People with more complex issues can send system details right through the software without uploading to a browser. They'd even be able to let a support agent see their screen to show them what was happening in real-time and run advanced sampling. This can be an API to allow people from other companies to use but would have to be heavily restricted so that malware or phishing companies couldn't use it maliciously (e.g restrict screen viewing to certified support people). If they reply when you are away from your computer, you'd get a notification.

    People submitting queries would get Apple support pages first the way that the new Spotlight can get web results. So a user would put in the support box something like 'How do I reset my iPhone?' It would then reply with relevant articles, which they can refer to in future. If the replies didn't help, they can ask for more help. That kind of thing would help cut down Genius Bar appointments and overall make customers feel like they're not on their own.
  • Reply 104 of 134
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    raptoroo7 wrote: »
    This is the antithesis of Apples business strategy "I and others have reported this to Apple, yet they are quiet on the issue," if there is a problem say nothing. If someone writes an article they don't like and per Apple policy they NEVER comment, they simply get Pro-Apple Bloggers and Journalists to bash said creator the offending article. Happens time and again. I love their products but hate their ethics.

    It's understandable when you think about being on the receiving end of it. Customers make up ridiculous things to make their complaint seem more important. One of the reviews of Yosemite has statements about things crashing every 15 minutes because they didn't like it, iOS 7 users were going on about motion sickness to try and get iOS 6 back, people use their caps lock to emphasise things. If support staff had to engage with every person and every issue from millions of customers, they'd never be able to get any work done. Being publicly silent doesn't necessarily mean they're doing nothing. If they haven't fixed something then what could they say other than 'we haven't fixed it'. Some problems can take a while to fix if they are between different companies, none of which know where the problem is. Is it Apple's hardware, software, AMD's hardware, software, BlackMagic's software? Until they can reliably track down the root cause, they can't say what the problem is nor when it can be fixed.
  • Reply 105 of 134
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post

    Crashes would freeze up the display redraw so windows would trail when dragged around.

     

    And yet that was SOP for Windows at the time… <img class=" src="http://forums-files.appleinsider.com/images/smilies//lol.gif" />

  • Reply 106 of 134
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post





    It's understandable when you think about being on the receiving end of it. Customers make up ridiculous things to make their complaint seem more important. One of the reviews of Yosemite has statements about things crashing every 15 minutes because they didn't like it, iOS 7 users were going on about motion sickness to try and get iOS 6 back, people use their caps lock to emphasise things. If support staff had to engage with every person and every issue from millions of customers, they'd never be able to get any work done. Being publicly silent doesn't necessarily mean they're doing nothing. If they haven't fixed something then what could they say other than 'we haven't fixed it'. Some problems can take a while to fix if they are between different companies, none of which know where the problem is. Is it Apple's hardware, software, AMD's hardware, software, BlackMagic's software? Until they can reliably track down the root cause, they can't say what the problem is nor when it can be fixed.

     

    Or simply they are doing nothing, intend to do nothing and simply are not going to admit they created the problems and have left their customers to sort out the mess on their own.

     

    Personally on the Apple Pages forum we "made up" the well over 100 removed features and innumerable bugs. We also "made up" that Pages 5 opened previous version files, basically trashed a lot of the formatting and then automatically overwrote the file without warning the users. In fact there were so many things we "made up" it is hard to know where to begin.

  • Reply 107 of 134
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post



    The old operating systems were nowhere near as stable as OS X. They didn't even have protected memory. Don't you remember the bomb messages?

     

    You are not telling me anything I don't know, as I said I still have an iMac running OS 8.6. It hardly* ever bombs, but yes when it does that usually requires a restart. 

     

    No you did not have to restart to have fonts show up.

     

    btw I have older versions of Quark XPress, Photoshop, Illustrator and other design software including ATM on that iMac. The fact that it so rarely bombs suggests to me faulty ROMs in the prior model Macs, which used to fall over all the time. Frankly I did not absolutely mind the bombing because the old system was so much better with handling fonts and several other elementary tasks that are a pain in OSX.

     

    * Maybe a few times a year. OSX locks up and has other problems more often.

  • Reply 108 of 134
    frank777frank777 Posts: 5,839member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Mr Beans View Post



    After working for Apple for nearly 10 years isolating and resolving issues like this, all I can say is - "do not buy a first generation build of a new product or major design refresh V1.0". That said, one needs to put things into perspective. Out of the 100.000's of Mac Pros sold "Only a few dozen complaints have surfaced in the wild"...



    ...Will go for the 2015 model. Will it be perfect - no, but it certainly won't be like a water-cooled G5...

     

    Yep. I bought a Yikes G4 back in the day and saw it upgraded to the Sawtooth motherboard before I barely had a chance to break it in.

     

    Early adoption has a downside, and given that this issue only affects a very small minority of users, it doesn't really worry me.

     

    The 2015 version should be amazing, with Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 ports, Skylake processors (and new RAM right?)

    Also, the 5K Thunderbolt display should be about ready for mass production by mid-year.

     

    I think we'll see the new Pro setup at WWDC this year, giving the original Pro an 18-month shelf life, which isn't bad.

  • Reply 109 of 134

    To be clear - if you look around the forums - there are  many more  pro Adobe Premiere and Speedgrade pro users having similar issues. And almost all of them have it when you choose hardware graphic acceleration.

     

    (Less so for FCP X as maybe its just not in use much in more pro or production oriented environs...i'm just stating a fact - not an opinion on X.)

     

    I also have to say Apple has been overly fair in listening and responding with new parts. All our issues are not gone but we are very close.

     

    It is humbling to watch a senior Apple tech put a Mac pro on the bench and take it apart...the box is SO dense inside...( why that small a form factor i have no idea.).  

     

    So at the end of the day the performance is stunning and ya we have had issues.

  • Reply 110 of 134
    melgross wrote: »
    Yeah, I noticed that their software mostly seems to be involved with this issue. But is it the only software? Strange that booting into Windows solves the problem. It is looking more like a software issue. I wonder if the software is locking the cards into a high activity state that causes overheating. According to the article, the problem is either tied to the 700 cards, or mostly so. If the newest Yosemite update helps solve the issue, then something in software looks to be happening. I wonder why it's taking so long though, if it's just softepware.

    I'd also like to know if it's JUST their software. I've never had these problems with my older Mac Pro's. I was so looking forward to getting a new one soon.

    I had a fully functional first-gen PS3 before a firmware update bricked the unit's Blu-Ray drive. The issue was that firmware update spun the disc faster, causing the drive to overheat and fail after about 5-10 minutes. I rigged external fans (intake and exhaust), and it allowed a movie disc to play for maybe 20-30 minutes, but it would still fail.

    The issue is that the firmware update pushed the drives to the limit of their specs, and some drives would fail. However, it was never enough (unlike the Xbox RRoD) to force Sony to do a recall or extend the warranty. Victims had to pay out of pocket.
  • Reply 111 of 134
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    rubaiyat wrote: »

    You are looking at this through your one good "Apple" eye?

    I have personally had 6 Macs with major problems, two had to eventually be recalled, and that did not count the many I had in studios which plagued us with all sorts of minor issues. That does not make me pick on Apple at all, just I can not let the Apple exceptionalism pass.

    I have had much fewer PCs so not such a large sample, not without problems, but they were cheaply and quickly fixed, so didn't fester.

    Dell still sells vastly more computers than Apple and higher end models as well. That it sells them cheaply and still does so so successfully shows they are just in a different market than Apple. My view is Dell's inferior rating is over stated, as is Apple's superior rating. That does not mean I would buy a Dell over an Apple, it is also no comfort to my brother's neighbour or anyone who has a problem with their purchase.

    Between my personal Macs, the ones of my wife and daughter, and most importantly,those I bought for my company over the course of 16 years, it would be over 100. So that's a fair amount of direct experience. When you include the thousands of Macs in the NY board of education from the FI e my daughter was in kindergarten to the time she graduated high school that I was, in several ways, partly responsible for the board buying, and maintaining, I rhink I've got sufficient experience with them to have a very good overall idea of how well they perform. That educational experience also includes checking out the Dell labs in schools that also existed.

    On average, Macs are very reliable, and have far fewer problems than do Windows machines. While a Mac lab was rarely down, Dell labs were often down. I also had few Macs in my business fail, or at home. In fact, none at home ever failed, though eventually, the HDD in my wife's iMac did go, and I replaced it.

    You seem to have much worse luck than most people.
  • Reply 112 of 134
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    rubaiyat wrote: »

    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">TrueType was an Apple invention, not Microsoft's, which Apple stupidly licensed to Microsoft in exchange for an equivalent non-Postscript printer language TrueImage, that Microsoft delivered late and which never went anywhere.</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">TrueType was developed in the late 1980s and was released with System 7 in 1991.</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">Michael Spindler didn't even become CEO of Apple until 1993.</span>


    <span style="line-height:1.4em;">I remember the launch and from memory John Warnock was close to tears.</span>

    TrueType was worked on by both Microsoft and Apple. Apple approached Microsoft at the very beginning, and asked if they were interested, and they said yes.

    I never said that this had anything to do with Spindler. I said that Adobe moved from Apple because Spindler did a couple of things that resulted in Apple losing the confidence of business, and as a result, Adobe began to support Windows.

    I do t really care bout Warneke's reaction, assuming he really was that upset, though I don't remember it quite that way. Even then, type was much less of Adobe's busk ess than it had been. They realized that type was becoming a commodity, and that they couldn't hold it so tight to their chest as they had done. This was just the last straw. But it was their own fault.
  • Reply 113 of 134
    rubaiyatrubaiyat Posts: 277member



    Good to start the new year with some old school revisionism.

     

    TrueType was not worked on by Microsoft except to incorporate it into Windows. Microsoft double crossed Apple as it did most everybody else, by never delivering a usable TrueImage.

     

    John Warnock (not Warneke) was upset because, like Apple's users, he had thought he had a personal relationship with Apple, but realised his mistake. It took a while but Adobe readjusted their business model and moved on to Windows, negating one of the big reasons to stick with Macs.

     

    Apple never realised that OSes and computers had become a commodity and that it could not hold them as tight to their chest as they had done. This was just the last straw. But it was their own fault.

     

    It nearly killed Apple, as it did many Mac users and developers. Adobe chose not to go down with the Mac.

     

    Something Apple had however that Adobe did not, was users ready to sacrifice anything for Apple, no matter how adversely it affected them personally.

     

    Except for Indesign users, Adobe never got the religious mojo working for them.

  • Reply 114 of 134
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by melgross View Post





    Between my personal Macs, the ones of my wife and daughter, and most importantly,those I bought for my company over the course of 16 years, it would be over 100. So that's a fair amount of direct experience. 

     

    I personally purchased, installed and maintained well over 100 Macs in the various studios I ran, and as a VAR.

     

    Apple has almost deserted the schools market here, even where they were well established.

     

    Macs are what they are. Just spend some time chatting to users waiting in line for the Genius Bar to realise just how many problems people have with them. Perception comes into this, as Apple does an excellent job of getting their users to believe that there is basically nothing ever wrong with anything Apple delivers, therefore it must be "how the users are holding them".

     

    Rolls Royce notoriously tows broken down Rollers under cover to hide the ignominy from the general public.

     

    Good service can make up for other problems and Apple has delivered on that (mostly) for the last decade of the AppleStore. Although recently it is getting much harder to get that Genius Bar appointment as Apple directs you elsewhere.

     

    PC users go the opposite way, even though currently even cheap PCs are very reliable. PCs don't try to cram everything into tiny spaces with minimal cooling, so if anything they avoid some of the more egregious problems of Macs. 

     

    Let me make it clear, I am not against Macs, I still buy them. I just don't buy the hype. The sun does not shine out of their Thunderbolt ports.

  • Reply 115 of 134
    solipsismysolipsismy Posts: 5,099member
    rubaiyat wrote: »
    Macs are what they are. Just spend some time chatting to users waiting in line for the Genius Bar to realise just how many problems people have with them.

    I can't imagine that customers with Genius Bar appointments have some issue with their Apple product they can't resolve¡ :rolleyes:
  • Reply 116 of 134

    Wasn't what I said, but what does your "lack of imagination" have to do with user's problems? :err:

     

    The massive queues are because people just want to meet a certified genius?

  • Reply 117 of 134
    I don't know about any "gates" but I do know that my brand new $9k mac pro has given me nothing but grief. There's the display problem, where my second monitor will be overlaid with some kind of weird digital static when it wakes up. To fix I turn off/on the monitor. They replaced the logic board on that one, it's no better. Then there's my tablet conflict, where the mouse lags so when I move a keyframe and release the mouse button, the computer pretends I'm still holding it for 10 or 15 seconds. Then some SIMPLE After Effects renders take a month. I mean, I dumbed down my animation to the barest of bones just to work on the camera move and the preview is taking hours. I don't even want to think about the final render.

    They are replacing my machine, which is good. But I have a bad feeling the new one will be the same. Will this be enough to put me back on a PC? IDK. But I can't work this way.
  • Reply 118 of 134
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    I don't know about any "gates" but I do know that my brand new $9k mac pro has given me nothing but grief. There's the display problem, where my second monitor will be overlaid with some kind of weird digital static when it wakes up. To fix I turn off/on the monitor. They replaced the logic board on that one, it's no better. Then there's my tablet conflict, where the mouse lags so when I move a keyframe and release the mouse button, the computer pretends I'm still holding it for 10 or 15 seconds. Then some SIMPLE After Effects renders take a month. I mean, I dumbed down my animation to the barest of bones just to work on the camera move and the preview is taking hours. I don't even want to think about the final render.

    They are replacing my machine, which is good. But I have a bad feeling the new one will be the same. Will this be enough to put me back on a PC? IDK. But I can't work this way.

    Getting the Mac Pro replaced should be the last thing to do, not the first. You can try different cables to connect to the display, if it's DVI or HDMI on the monitor, try using the HDMI port vs Thunderbolt. If the mouse is Bluetooth, it can be switched for an RF mouse if it's interfering with other wireless tech or the signal is dropping out. As for After Effects, try some of the suggestions here:

    https://forums.adobe.com/message/6398470

    Always make sure that Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously is off. One of their staff even says it's a poorly implemented feature. Another thing to look out for is that your AE version has enabled use of your GPU - they whitelist GPUs for support but if your AE version is old, it might not be supporting the GPU properly. A few people there have noticed the slow preview.
  • Reply 119 of 134

    When you get a lemon, actually it is always best to make it an Apple problem as soon as possible and not own it yourself.

     

    The longer you put up with it and pretend there is something you can do to make it better, the greater the chance you will end up living with the problems forever.

     

    Hold Apple to the quality standards they claim is the reason why you are paying a premium.

     

    Macs are just machines, the tools you use to get your work done. It doesn't matter what tool, as long as it works. Don't get attached to a dud.

  • Reply 120 of 134
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    rubaiyat wrote: »
    When you get a lemon, actually it is always best to make it an Apple problem as soon as possible and not own it yourself.

    The issues he had didn't indicate the machine was a lemon. I don't suppose it matters much to Apple if they switch the whole computer out but to get a logic board replaced when the machine isn't crashing is being a bit impulsive and it didn't fix anything. If he had a few 3rd party peripherals, it's not Apple's responsibility to ensure they all work ok, it's up to the 3rd parties. Same goes for 3rd party software. It's the most time-consuming fix to get hardware replaced because the person has to take the machine to Apple, deal with the down-time and then get it all setup again. When it comes to software issues, the first thing to do is contact the software provider. When it comes to 3rd party hardware, the first thing to do is to deal with the connections and then the hardware provider. If nothing is resolved by the 3rd parties, that's when you'd get Apple involved.

    You can't just assume for example that when you have old peripherals and old software working with an old computer that when there's incompatibilities with a new computer that the new computer is at fault. If a computer is getting kernel panics or powering off or something that clearly indicates hardware failure then of course get the computer manufacturer involved as soon as possible.
Sign In or Register to comment.