I push my computers. Hard.
By crushing the disk drives with large compilation jobs, I rarely get even 3 years out of a spinning hard disk or laptop. With a PC, the hardware is modular and super easy to replace. With Apple, not so much. Sketchy Apple hardware design is the reason ifixit exists.
I can engineer the cooling of my PC's to handle the loads. With Apple, you get what you get. As a company, Apple never really "got" developers. So even if Apple built their hardware to handle heavy usage, you can't service and replace parts yourself. iMac's just can't handle huge software work.
For example, my latest software project builds saturate all CPU cores at 100%, while compiling over 1 MILLION source files. This takes 3 hours.
Here I show that, for most of the 3 hours, iMac cooling systems are overwhelmed. The 4GHz base clock rate of an Intel CPU is supposed to be the absolute minimum. Well, here we see that Apple lies, in this case. This was my life for a year, using my iMac as a VM server, using VMware Fusion. BTW VMware Fusion + OS X + iMac 5k is a great combination!! I'd rather have that software stack on less-than-reliable hardware than a perfectly reliable Windows 10 box.
After a year of intermittent abuse, I came home to a dead iMac. *sigh*
I tried everything. Not a peep or beep. D-E-D DEAD. After a trip to a Mac repair store, and about $1,000, it turns out the entire motherboard was completely fried.
Since Apple hardware is weak (especially cooling) but their software is strong, I'll also put in an order for an iMac Pro. Then we'll see if that lies and dies too...
Worst case, I'll have to go back to the dev stack we used in my previous company. Apple iMac's a displays/terminals, VMware ESXi servers, dedicated iSCSI servers for the ESXi, remote monitoring and reboot and VPN's for all the things. It's gross, I know. But we have ESXi servers which have survived almost a decade.
Here's hoping I won't have to do that just yet... Fingers Crossed!!
:)
By crushing the disk drives with large compilation jobs, I rarely get even 3 years out of a spinning hard disk or laptop. With a PC, the hardware is modular and super easy to replace. With Apple, not so much. Sketchy Apple hardware design is the reason ifixit exists.
I can engineer the cooling of my PC's to handle the loads. With Apple, you get what you get. As a company, Apple never really "got" developers. So even if Apple built their hardware to handle heavy usage, you can't service and replace parts yourself. iMac's just can't handle huge software work.
For example, my latest software project builds saturate all CPU cores at 100%, while compiling over 1 MILLION source files. This takes 3 hours.
Here I show that, for most of the 3 hours, iMac cooling systems are overwhelmed. The 4GHz base clock rate of an Intel CPU is supposed to be the absolute minimum. Well, here we see that Apple lies, in this case. This was my life for a year, using my iMac as a VM server, using VMware Fusion. BTW VMware Fusion + OS X + iMac 5k is a great combination!! I'd rather have that software stack on less-than-reliable hardware than a perfectly reliable Windows 10 box.
After a year of intermittent abuse, I came home to a dead iMac. *sigh*
I tried everything. Not a peep or beep. D-E-D DEAD. After a trip to a Mac repair store, and about $1,000, it turns out the entire motherboard was completely fried.
Since Apple hardware is weak (especially cooling) but their software is strong, I'll also put in an order for an iMac Pro. Then we'll see if that lies and dies too...
Worst case, I'll have to go back to the dev stack we used in my previous company. Apple iMac's a displays/terminals, VMware ESXi servers, dedicated iSCSI servers for the ESXi, remote monitoring and reboot and VPN's for all the things. It's gross, I know. But we have ESXi servers which have survived almost a decade.
Here's hoping I won't have to do that just yet... Fingers Crossed!!
:)
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