oh and also the new SSD drives in them dont support S.M.A.R.T. reporting because they are on a completely different internal bus, the new ones use NVMe and the SMART drivers dont know how to access that for the built in SSDs yet. In Disk Utility it will just say that smart is not supported even though Ive looked at the ioreg output for the devices and there is a new SMART over NVMe tag that says it is supported. I imagine they will eventually get around to updating the OS to support getting that info from the drive. I was pissed about that as I like the SMART utilities that show me the wear leveling count and failed bits and such on the SSDs and I cant currently use that on this machine. The API is there to get the data, but its currently undocumented which means nobody who wants to sell through the app store can talk to it. I expect third party people will start to release things that can very soon.
[quote=341614:@Sam Rowlands]So far I’m not seeing this, I’ve filed 5 bug reports already. Only one has been responded to with an engineer saying this should never happen… But it does.
The app that we released this year is currently dead on High Sierra due to bugs in OpenGL, hopefully I can get it working in Metal soon.[/quote]
Well, it is beta software at this time, so bugs are expected.
As for OpenGL I fear that is dead in the water on Mac. Which in my opinion is a pity (I like cross-platform), but it’s not Apple’s baby or responsibility, and Apple is consolidating graphics across macOS and iOS with Metal. Microsoft is doing something similar.
I agree this is a pity.
[quote=341556:@Beatrix Willius]I’m kind of old fashioned and find the MacBook Pros much overpriced.
Therefore I have a custom-built hackintosh as main development machine. I use an Apple keyboard without numpad because my arms are a bit shorter. And a Wacom tablet. One monitor, Dell 27 inch something. The computer doesn’t travel. But that’s a good thing because it’s not attractive to thieves.
As additional testing and reading machine I’ve got a MacBook Air. Got a new one recently because I wanted to have one with the old USB ports and mag save cable. For reading this cable is a life saver. For this computer I only need a finger mouse for reading.[/quote]
How does mackintosh work with Apple developer Subscriptions and such where they bind the UUID’s of the machines ? I have been wondering about that for long time, is it safe to put Mackintoshes on the developer profiles ? And I guess same question applies for App store ?
I did build hackingtosh a long long time ago at first before the Intel macs came since Apple was unwilling to deploy the first Intel developer kits to Iceland.
Most of my programs are for Windows, and for the occasional request for a program that needs to work on OS X, the Mac Mini seems to work just fine. I ran into issues with speed, and once I increased the RAM to the maximum amount then the programs seemed to work well. The price was nice at around $600-$700.
I use two Macs. When in my home office:
2009 Mac Pro with 6-core 3.2Ghz Xeon, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and multiple TB of hard drives
Samsung 4K LCD
Kinesys Freestyle 2 split keyboard
Generic USB wired mouse
When remote:
2013 MacBook Air 1,3Ghz i5, 8GB RAM
These have worked great for years and continue to work great. In fact I accidentally sent the Air flying down the stairs the other day and it suffered no ill effects.
I’m waiting to see the new Mac Pro that hopefully shows up next year to compare with the upcoming iMac Pro to see which might be an eventual replacement for my Mac Pro.
I use a 2015 MBP 16GB Ram, 512SSD, 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7
I’m no Mac expert and only got used to working on a Mac just before my MBP purchase so still getting used to everything.
I run Windows 10, 8.1 and 7 in Virtualbox and a couple flavors of Linux
I have been very happy with my setup and it allows me to work at home using external monitor, keyboard and mouse or take the MBP on the go with me.
Concur, just pissed as it took me a very long time to get OpenGL to do what I wanted it to do. Now my app is dead.
I am using a rMBP 15" with 16gig RAM and 1TB SSD. When I am at the office I have an external 30" 1080p Dell monitor. I do most of my work not in the office. Does it work well with Xojo. YES!! When in the office I use the external monitor for documentation and whatever I am listening to (youtube, vimeo, plex, whatever).
I generally have open when programing:
- Atom (editor)
- Xojo IDE
- SourceTree (or GitTower)
- iTerm (with several windows open)
- SQLiteManager
- PostgreSQL Admin tool
- VMware Fusion
- Chrome
- Firefox (with the forums open in it)
- Safari
- Pixelmator
- Affinity Photo
- whatever app I am listening to (youtube, vimeo, plex, VLC, etc)
- plus whatever app I am working on…
I’m another one using a 2012 rMBP with 16GB, but upgraded to 1TB drive. I use a Thunderbolt (1st generation) dock to add external drives (Time Machine and other), scanner, wired ethernet, etc plus I drive dual 27" 2560x1440 monitors. I use an Apple Trackpad but a Matias bluetooth keyboard due to its keypad and ability to pair to 4 devices.
Considering new MBP’s still can’t get past 16GB memory, I just can’t justify the cost of a new machine. Newer SSD drives and TB3 are significantly faster but still not enough to justify the difference. And since I run docked with external keyboard, the Touch Bar would be useless most of the time.
I did have the GPU go bad after 4 years but Apple replaced the entire motherboard free, and let me pay a nominal fee to get a new battery too. So I essentially have a MBP where the parts are only months old from a usage standpoint, but mostly 2012 technology other than my 1TB drive.
If you go looking for a 2011-2012 MBP, make sure its GPU has been replaced (which means the entire motherboard will be) because Apple’s extended program to replace those free ended Dec 31 2016. I think.
I have seen that (and other tools) and I must say I am hesitant to use them. My current way of doing things is to use the new “Pause Updates” in Windows 10 Creators Update and run the updates manually once a month (of if there are any emergencies). If I forget this, the system will run the updates automatically after 35 days.
This way I can shut down my VMs in a controlled manner (so I don’t have to run fsck on four machines and restore MySQL and PostgreSQL tables…) and also rollback the Intel 5500 HD Graphics driver that don’t play well with the JAVA machine required for PHPStorm.
This is my setup as well. I have an old Mac Mini (2012) that I upgraded with SSD and 16GB and it works pretty well. Every time I open Xojo on the Mac I shed a tear for the painfully slow Windows version that I use daily. The i5-based Mac Mini really screams and run circles around the i7 Windows machine.
I hear you and came to this conclusion as well. I must admit that I was a bit put off when leaving the Apple Store after almost two hours or chatting with the staff and trying to understand the beauty of their current line-up. To tell you the truth I think they are all brain-washed over the Apple-hype, something I haven’t experienced before. All arguments that a professional user (I’d like to call myself that) have are completely ignored and the standard answer was “we have an adopter for that for only $49”.
The way of only having (practically) non-upgradable RAM and disk options and also the crazy markup on RAM options is another factor that pushes me even further away from Apples hardware. (I’m still on an iPhone 5S so…)
My personal dream would be Apple-branded motherboards with ATX and mini-ITX form-factors that contains Apple-selected BIOS and peripherals. Built in WiFi and Bluetooth. Give me a couple of PCI-slots, a 1150 socket for a CPU and support for up to 64GB. A narrow selection of supported CPUs and graphics-cards.
That would be a true Pro machine that is not crazy expensive and over-designed.
Wow - thank you all for your response! It’s been overwhelming to read everything and see many of the same problems I am experiencing. My personal feeling is that we as professional users are left behind by moth Apple and Microsoft and that’s a shame.
Seems like the consensus (maybe not statistically correct) is that old Macs (2012-ish) is preferred and very much actively used. That’s a good indication and interesting. If a machine is double the price but lasts much longer that makes sense. I normally replace my laptop (HP or Dell) about every 18 months due to hardware issues (both my HP machines have fared much better than my Dells) or just to get rid of the Windows-Rot that happens over time when using it professionally and start over fresh.
For me, no doubt Mac OS would be the best OS. It runs all my applications I am using and also includes ruby and python that are used by many of the tools in my tool-chain that I today need to run on separate servers.
Going Linux, I would be required to run Microsoft Office and possibly Xojo in a VM. The benefit of this is that I would have a Windows environment that I can back up and quickly recover if there are issues with the machine. I have tried Ubuntu on my old HP and the hardware support is fantastic and the HiDPI support is really beautiful.
After the summer I need to do something and I’ll let you know. Once again, thank you for all your feedback!
/Mattias
@Björn: AFAIK the Hackintosh masquerades as an iMac. I wouldn’t have built it myself but got it ready to go from a guy who specializes in this type of computers. It works perfectly fine for signing apps. The only thing that doesn’t work at all is writing messages. The computer gets them fine but it can’t respond.
And yes, I now know much better why Apple’s hardware is so expensive. The difference in quality is noticeable.
I’m not sure if I would do this again. But for less than 2k I have a machine with 32 GB of RAM.
My old MacPro from 2009 run fine on 16 GB. Buying a machine now that is supposed to last 3 years with only 16 GB? No thanks.
Reading many of the above let me dream and also ask a question: I have stopped the use of any other application when I use Xojo (Firefox is the first, but other too) because I have all kinds of troubles when I forgot to do that. How can I (be alone to) get these ?
Nota: my current MacBook Pro age is 2 years and 6 months, the two previous were 3 y/o when theyve been changed. Prior to that I am unsure, but I keep a PowerBook G4 for many years (but I do not recall these kind of troubles while running it).
If this exists, I would say that I am cursed !
@Emile: it would be better to make a new topic. Anyways: how much RAM does your machine have? Sounds like the problem I had last year before I upgraded my RAM from 6 GB to 16 GB. Before I was cursing all the time that the computer was so slow. Afterward I had a nicely running computer.
Interesting… what were the signs it had gone bad?
8GB (SSD 250 GB).
The computer is slow when the SSD free value is below 30GB. Beside that, the speed is OK.
Example of “cursed”: a brand new feature works fine when I wrote it (at my local McDonalds), but back home it does no more works
After sometimes I was able to make it works everywhere / all the time