Why? I don't begrudge you your preferences -- you're obviously entitled to wish for whatever you want -- but I am curious about what payoff you perceive from a slimmer iMac? It sits on a desk, with the user facing the display. What is the advantage of it being paper thin over it being even several inches thick?
These types of folks will want to have multiple displays, everything in one flexible box, not a bunch smaller boxes and cables all of the place. A Mac Pro is a workstation style desktop computer, and that means 2 sockets, multiple PCIe slots and at least internal hard drive bays. They want to be able to put >10 TB in the box, or at least have 128 GB of RAM, or two GPUs, or 40+ CPU cores, or an Optane card, or a Xeon Phi card, or a 10-port USB card, etc
Maybe I'm atypical, but I'm a Mac Pro user and I don't want most of those things.
I find external drives much easier to manage than internal. As long as there is sufficient bandwidth on an external bus to insure the drive array doesn't saturate it, I prefer the ability to upgrade individual parts of the system independently. If a new chassis comes along that improves some aspect of the storage side of things, I can upgrade it without affecting the computer. Similarly, if I want to replace the computer, the storage system can stay the way it is. Plus, as was the case when a drive failed recently, I can swap out the RAID with a backup unit and keep working while engineering replaces the faulty drive, rather than having to take the whole system off line to replace it.
Having various components in individual chassis also means I never have to think about the power supply in the computer. I don't have to worry about over-taxing it, or whether the system has enough auxiliary power connectors for the devices I want to use.
This approach also reduces the overall noise level. Rather than having one massive cooling system making more racket than a vacuum cleaner, I have three tiny fans each only making a tiny bit of noise. Our current system is quieter than the previous one (a 2009 aluminum tower).
The only part of the nMP experience that was a bit of a hassle was the one PCIe peripheral we could not replace with a Thunderbolt or USB alternative. If the supplier had offered a stand-alone Thunderbolt version we would have bought that instead. Now that it's in an external enclosure, we essentially have that and don't have to deal with swapping it out if any other part of the system changes.
Most people consider it perfectly reasonable to prefer separating computer and display. To me it doesn't seem any different to also split out storage and other peripherals. Overall, I prefer the approach of optimizing each part of the system for its intended task.
If a jet flies overhead, or a vacuum cleaner is switched on nearby, of the Sun emits a particularly powerful CMI will the resulting RFI and/or X-rays flip bits in the non-ECC memory in undetectable ways? Yes! So, without ECC, not particularly useful for many critical tasks (like running a local database, accounting or source control system --even with backups), but should be great for creative work, prototyping workloads for the cloud and running multiple VMs to keep untrusted self-updating apps (like Handbrake) isolated.
Comments
Why? I don't begrudge you your preferences -- you're obviously entitled to wish for whatever you want -- but I am curious about what payoff you perceive from a slimmer iMac? It sits on a desk, with the user facing the display. What is the advantage of it being paper thin over it being even several inches thick?
Maybe I'm atypical, but I'm a Mac Pro user and I don't want most of those things.
I find external drives much easier to manage than internal. As long as there is sufficient bandwidth on an external bus to insure the drive array doesn't saturate it, I prefer the ability to upgrade individual parts of the system independently. If a new chassis comes along that improves some aspect of the storage side of things, I can upgrade it without affecting the computer. Similarly, if I want to replace the computer, the storage system can stay the way it is. Plus, as was the case when a drive failed recently, I can swap out the RAID with a backup unit and keep working while engineering replaces the faulty drive, rather than having to take the whole system off line to replace it.
Having various components in individual chassis also means I never have to think about the power supply in the computer. I don't have to worry about over-taxing it, or whether the system has enough auxiliary power connectors for the devices I want to use.
This approach also reduces the overall noise level. Rather than having one massive cooling system making more racket than a vacuum cleaner, I have three tiny fans each only making a tiny bit of noise. Our current system is quieter than the previous one (a 2009 aluminum tower).
The only part of the nMP experience that was a bit of a hassle was the one PCIe peripheral we could not replace with a Thunderbolt or USB alternative. If the supplier had offered a stand-alone Thunderbolt version we would have bought that instead. Now that it's in an external enclosure, we essentially have that and don't have to deal with swapping it out if any other part of the system changes.
Most people consider it perfectly reasonable to prefer separating computer and display. To me it doesn't seem any different to also split out storage and other peripherals. Overall, I prefer the approach of optimizing each part of the system for its intended task.