ElCapitan

tht said:

ElCapitan said:

tht said:

ElCapitan said:

cat52 said:

I'm a software dev and push my machines fairly hard and have to say the 2018 Mini is pretty much perfect in every way.  It's powerful, quiet, small, and cheap.  And I 100x prefer using macOS over Linux on the desktop.

So for those thinking Apple is dead, supposedly in Silicon Valley even, I just have to roll my eyes.

For lengthy Xcode compiles (or something else in a VM) the mini is far from quiet. The fan noise gets pretty annoying over time when you listen to it for hours on end. 

Also, the graphics performance makes it completely unsuitable to test anything 3D graphics for real. You can verify that it is working on Intel graphics, but you cannot test real performance that end users may want. 

I don't think you know what pushing a mini hard for dev actually means. 

I'm curious if you have ever looked at buying Mac minis, networking them, and doing compile jobs this way?

The tradeoff with getting a Mac Pro would be interesting because at some amount of dollars for a single user, spending the extra money for a single box would be better. Then again, you can get 6 6-core Mac minis for $6k. That's 36 cores to play with. 

I have looked at it, but when making cross platform apps they also need to compile for the other platforms which are often done in virtual machines, which does not work with that distributed build approach. 

We have replaced some of the 6/12 core/threads minis with trashcans refitted with close to new 12/24 core/threads Xeon cpus and they both do the job faster, are virtually silent and have graphics performance that is quite a few notches up from the minis (although quite mediocre when it really comes to it).  These machines also run virtual machines pretty well. 

Can you distribute the compiles on a VM per networked machine basis? Ie, instead of using all the machines to compile an app for one platform, have each machine compile for different platforms concurrently?

Seems like your computational needs aren't that far away from needing to get some racks and a server room if your compute jobs are lasting on order hours. The longest thing I do are video transcodes on my 2013 iMac 27. 10 videos can go all night. A 2018 Mac mini would do my H.265 transcodes 10x faster, but I don't do it enough to really need to change anything.

Xcode (re)builds the project with about 1.5 million lines of code in about 9 minutes on the trashcans. The Mini used 16 or so.  Visual studio needs 2.5 hours for the Win version.

Xcode has a tendency to randomly rebuild the entire project, when xcodebuild (command line) would do an incremental build. But it can also go the other way.  

elijahg said:

ElCapitan said:

elijahg said:

ElCapitan said:

The rewrite to Metal for cross platform developers is non trivial because the Metal libraries only work with Objective-C or Swift, neither of which are used (if at all) outside dedicated macOS or iOS development. (Yes, IBM has done some work on server side Swift).

In addition, apart from the VR announcement at WWDC 2018, Apple has gone completely silent on the subject. 

Loss of OpenGL, and the lack of a replacement that can work cross platform, will rob the macOS users of a large number of software titles once OpenGL is gone from the platform (macOS 10.16 speculative). 

... but it may end up deprecated. 

It IS deprecated as of macOS 10.14.

If they announce an ARM Mac, there is not a snowball's chance in hell they will have OpenGL support on their own GPUs. (...or use anyone else's GPU for that sake).

Oh I didn't realise it was deprecated already. That's complete madness. As you say above if they remove it then a huge numbers of programs will just stop working. Totally crazy with no foresight to (or ignorance of) the consequences.

It is going to be massacre.

Here are a few 3D content type titles I happen to use: Blender - have said they are not going to port to Metal. DAZ Studio - I can't see they will write a Metal version given the already half hearted macOS support they currently have.  Substance Painter - maybe, but perhaps just maybe given they now are owned by Adobe. Talking about Adobe; don't get me started.

I know of a single person macOS developer for Cheetah 3D who has a really hard struggle porting his application to Metal.

The SecondLife/OpenSim viewers where the developer has not even started on a Metal rewrite for a renderer that is completely proprietary, complex and tuned for dynamic content which Metal does not work particularly good at, as it gains the speed from optimized content known at compile time. The SecondLife/OpenSim content is thrown at the renderer in realtime by users and it not really optimized for anything at all so Metal will struggle (most likely more than OpenGL does is the estimation). 

elijahg said:

ElCapitan said:

The rewrite to Metal for cross platform developers is non trivial because the Metal libraries only work with Objective-C or Swift, neither of which are used (if at all) outside dedicated macOS or iOS development. (Yes, IBM has done some work on server side Swift).

In addition, apart from the VR announcement at WWDC 2018, Apple has gone completely silent on the subject. 

Loss of OpenGL, and the lack of a replacement that can work cross platform, will rob the macOS users of a large number of software titles once OpenGL is gone from the platform (macOS 10.16 speculative). 

... but it may end up deprecated. 

It IS deprecated as of macOS 10.14.

If they announce an ARM Mac, there is not a snowball's chance in hell they will have OpenGL support on their own GPUs. (...or use anyone else's GPU for that sake).

As painful as it is, we are replacing all Mac minis that were used as servers with HP kit running Linux. 

If these are not masks that Apple somehow magically have come up with independently of all other sources, Apple should get out of the queue of HC institutions and countries across the planet desperately clamoring for such masks on the global market.
20 million masks to Apple means some others needy in another country probably would go short of masks. (that is how brutal the global market for masks is right now)

Having the masks on hand, Apple should donate the masks to the US federal pooled resources so they can be distributed to those needing them most, and get out of the business of virtue signaling.