chasm

cecil4444 said:

Is it “safe” to install this on a separate partition of your main SSD? Or is it advised that we keep it on a completely separate drive? 

"Safe" is a very relative term, but I'd strongly suggest not. We have seen (a while ago now, but it happened) a bug in a beta that wiped your Home folder, and bugs that made encrypted drives unrecoverable (both "minor" technical errors from a programming perspective, but with huge consequences).

On the extremely unlikely chance that a "wipe the drive" type bug made it into a beta, having it on a separate partition wouldn't protect you. So much better to have an entirely-separate physical drive with a bootable system on it for testing Mojave if you only have one machine; of course the best practice is to confine Mojave to an entirely separate hardware machine (so it's useful that it supports a number of older models going back a significant way).

VinceR said:

I hate what is mistakenly called a "Pro" keyboard. The keyboard is absolute junk for fast touch typists, especially in a quiet room or library.

I hesitate to say "you're doing it wrong," but this is the exact opposite of my experience, and I am a fast touch typist and journalist/writer for a living, so to say I use the keyboard a lot would be a wild understatement. I own a 2012 MBP and had to resort to buying a silicon key cover to get the noise of my typing down to acceptable levels in my quiet office from the built-in "chicklet" keyboard (the silicon key cover also has other advantages too, like keeping the keys clean). At home, in fact, I generally use the Magic Keyboard (again with a key cover) rather than the built-in keyboard.

I also get to use a 13" MBP fairly often these days at one of my gigs, and find there to be no need for the key protection/noise dampening. My hands are constantly a millimetre or two above the keys, so I don't do the "strike" technique that I see a lot of, um, "veteran typists" use. I prefer the larger keys of the MB/MBP 2017 keyboard, and for me this is VERY quiet and provides greater typing accuracy than most of the external BT keyboards I use (for example on my iPad). You want a noisy keyboard, try the Logitech K480 (even though I love it in a weird way).

Maybe I'm the one doing it wrong, but for me the result is quieter typing with greater accuracy on the 2017 MB or MBP built-in keyboards.

SpamSandwich said:

A guy whose last name is "Waydo" worked at Waymo? You just can't make this stuff up!

This "guy" isn't a guy, according to the story.

Slight correction: Apple Music does not have 50M subscribers. They have more than 40M paid subscribers, and somewhere between 6M-10M people currently on the free three-month trial. Given their historic conversion rate, a good guess would be currently 44M paid/6M on the trial.

My (hopefully wrong and undoubtedly unpopular) opinion: Apple is giving this next Mac Pro a serious rethink and design job because it's going to be the last one they ever make. For all the entitled blather (and occasional "gets it" poster) seen in this thread, the fact of the matter is that nealry every other product Apple sells, sells a quantum order of magnitude better than this, or any future, Mac Pro.

There simply aren't enough people in the market for a top-spec Mac for Apple to justify making one, and hasn't been for at least the last 20 years. This new one is a last hurrah which I think will be very expandable (as long as the current chip families/graphics card standards hold out) because Apple hopes you'll get six to eight years out of it and then realise that the iMac Pro from 2017 would have met 95 percent of the pro market's actual needs if you'd actually bought one instead of pimping out your cheese grater.

Just take a look at what's selling well for Apple these days: phones and tablets (which serve the needs of 95 percent of its customers), and services. I haven't seen anything to suggest that's going to change anytime in the foreseeable future. The Mac line overall is just barely worth the effort invested in selling it, at around 4M a quarter on average -- it's peanuts (albeit high-margin peanuts) to a company that is where Apple is now, and there is literally nothing the company could do to bring Mac numbers up to where even the iPad sells.

Do I expect Apple will stop making the Mac? No, but the models that do the least well will, sooner or later, go on the chopping block -- just like the Xserve et al did -- and the Mac Pro has (according to Phil Schiller, who would know) sold in the "low single digits" since long before the 2013 model came out. That's the reality.