friedmud

cylinders over the past few years for our workstation needs.

When the new Mac Pro was announced - we knew that the configuration we would want (28 core, ~128GB of RAM) would be more expensive than the $7k we've been paying.  We estimated anywhere from $15k to $20k.  It turns out that $15k is the number.

In the interim, we looked into switching over to Linux workstations with 32-core threadrippers.  We bought 10 machines like that for about $6k and gave them to our developers who felt like they wanted to switch to Linux.  It hasn't been pretty.  2 of the boxes have had hardware problems... and all have had significant downtime because of "Linux issues" (and these people are Linux experts... but, to this day, software upgrades on Linux STILL have a decent chance of breaking your system).

Now the new threadrippers are coming out... and the 64-core ones will be out soon enough.  Those look _super_ enticing... but we're not going to do it.  It's simply not worth the cost in lost productivity.  It only takes losing 50 (yes, really) hours to make up the $8k difference between these machines.  That's for machines that we know we will use for at least 5 years... so, anything more than 10 hours a year of downtime would make the Linux boxes more expensive (we almost never have problems with our cylinders and I expect it to be the same for these new Mac Pros).

Therefore: we just put in our upgrade request... we're going to (in phases over a couple of years) buy ~40 of these new boxes at $15k.  Yes, they are expensive... but for what we do they are simply the best option.

EDIT: And... all new hires will be receiving the $15k machines as well...

I have a lot of automations to tie everything together... based on occupancy, sunrise / sunset, etc.

Once you get it all setup... it's awesome.

BUT - there is a big thing missing from the Homekit ecosystem: a cheap speaker to put in each room.

And because of that... I highly recommend "cribbing" your Homekit setup by making sure that all of your stuff is compatible with at least one other home automation system: Google or Alexa.

I went with Google - and I love it.  I have a Home or Home-Mini in every room (and a Home Hub in my bedroom for my alarm clock).  I worked hard to make sure all the same things are setup the same way in both Homekit and Google Home... so that no matter if you're talking to Siri on your iPhone, Apple TV, Macbook, Mac, iPad or if you're talking to any of the Google Homes... everything is the same (as much as possible).

My fiance loves the system.  She talks to the Google homes all day (NPR (Sunday morning baroque!) is playing on one right now because she said "Hey Google play NPR").  She uses the Home app on her iPhone and she uses the switches on the wall.  She VERY rarely uses Siri (It's just not worth it when Google is so responsive and better understands).

One of my favorite things is how I have the Hue motion sensors setup with the Caseta driven lights in hallways and on stairs.  Awesome to have the lights automatically go on and off.  I also have different automations setup during the day vs at night... so that the lights only come on very dimly at night (the perfect night-light).

Overall... it takes a lot of work to get a setup like this going.  I spent many days changing out all the light-switches alone.  But once you have it all working... it just fades into the background.  We're so used to it now that it feels weird when we stay at our families places that don't have any automation.  I always find myself walking up the stairs in the dark and wondering why the lights don't come on automatically :-)

EDIT: One more important thing.  I have labeled (with a label maker) every switch in the house so that guests / etc. can know what their names are so they can talk to Google to modify them.  I also have a laminated list of things to say to Google that we keep in the Guest room.  The guests learn pretty quickly to say "Hey Google turn off the lights" at night when their in bed (and note: that unlike Siri... Google actually knows what room it's in and turns off JUST the lights in that room with that command!).