I recently upgraded to an iMac Pro to help speed up the 3D modeling work I do. Is anyone else here running one? What do you think are “must have” apps for it?
iMac Pro
- Thread starter mperdue
- Start date
- Latest activity Latest activity:
- Replies 10
- Views 1K
Depending on what you do with it, it could still be faster than the iMac Pro. Not all apps support multiple cores well.
I just picked up the iMac Pro's baby brother, the Mid 2018 Mac Mini. The Apple Refurbished Store now has the base 4-Core and 6-Core models available, but as always, your choice of configurations is pretty much a crapshoot. I managed to score the 4-core, 3.6 GHz model with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of flash storage (40 GB used by macOS System according to the "About this Mac").
I was able to connect my old Mid 2011 Mac Mini via Thunderbolt Target Disk mode and suck the brains out of it to set up the new Mac Mini. I decided not to pull over the Applications so I've been reloading from the Mac App Store and including the browser apps as well. No Flash this time!
The Space Grey case fits in nicely with the dark grey Dell monitor (I guess it's black, but not totally so it looks like it was meant to be sitting next to the Mac Mini
) Just plastic instead of aluminum.
Now to tackle installing MS Office 2016 for Macintosh…
I was able to connect my old Mid 2011 Mac Mini via Thunderbolt Target Disk mode and suck the brains out of it to set up the new Mac Mini. I decided not to pull over the Applications so I've been reloading from the Mac App Store and including the browser apps as well. No Flash this time!
The Space Grey case fits in nicely with the dark grey Dell monitor (I guess it's black, but not totally so it looks like it was meant to be sitting next to the Mac Mini
) Just plastic instead of aluminum.Now to tackle installing MS Office 2016 for Macintosh…
I'm afraid it's going to be Office 365 instead. And Office 2016 for Macintosh? Yeah, it isn't 64-bit compatible, so it won't work after macOS Mojave.
Thanks, Microsoft.
It has never been a good idea to pick a hardware platform without first identifying the software that you will use on it.
Availability of popular titles doesn't seem to be improving like it once was on the Mac and I think a lot of it has to do with many of the latest Windows applications being coded to one of the .NET 4.x virtual machines and Microsoft only offering .NET <=3.0 on non-Windows platforms.
Availability of popular titles doesn't seem to be improving like it once was on the Mac and I think a lot of it has to do with many of the latest Windows applications being coded to one of the .NET 4.x virtual machines and Microsoft only offering .NET <=3.0 on non-Windows platforms.
Also, even though 64-bit OSes have been a thing since the 1990s, Microsoft has just gotten around to producing 64-bit applications like the Office suite. Two years back I installed 64-bit Office 2016 on my 64-bit Win 7 desktop at work and was told by Corporate I had "an unsupported version" as far as they were concerned. Now we're running Office365 Click-to-Install and they've relaxed their stance on my 64-bit shenanigans…
That's interesting about the .NET angle, I hadn't thought about that. Seems silly to base the one Microsoft product that runs on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS on something that is Windows-only. That creates code forks, never a good thing.
That's interesting about the .NET angle, I hadn't thought about that. Seems silly to base the one Microsoft product that runs on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS on something that is Windows-only. That creates code forks, never a good thing.
Office 365 is still pretty much Office 2016 and for most, they've decided the little-used functionality that was absent from the 64 bit versions is made up for by allowing people to use spreadsheets for databases (absent an efficient database engine being included in Windows).
Of course they're also under crushing pressure to offer something to counter the arrival of fairly full-featured software from the open source community and cheap suites that do more than enough for the vast majority of the population (both personal and business uses). I'll try anything that doesn't use the Ribbon as a tool of mass confusion and chronic waster of screen acreage.
