Leaving Apple Behind – Part 2

Last week I wrote a brain dump on why I finally decided, after almost 20 years of being an Apple fan boy, that it was time to move “back” to Windows and PC as a desktop.

The benchmarks and bank balance tell a good part of the story, a machine which is 30-60% faster and yet roughly 1/3 the price of the Apple equivalent, and that’s with me throwing in a few frivolous extras like RGB lighting and an “Elite” case when a basic case would have done.

My daily editing work-flow has been based around Davinci Resolve for a while now. I used to be a devout Final Cut Editor, from “back in the day” with Final Cut Studio and iDVD, all the way through the trials and tribulations of Final Cut Pro X. There was a time when I used to edit in Adobe Premiere, however when I decided to move to Apple in 2000, Adobe annoyed me by saying that I would have to re-buy their entire suite of tools if I wanted to use them on the Mac, my Windows licenses were not transferable … so I did the big “screw you Adobe” and bought Final Cut instead (for over £1,000 at the time).

Roll on 2020 and the world of lockdown and quarantine. I’ve had a lot of spare time on my hands the last few weeks and finally decided that it was time to pull the trigger and move to Windows. I had been experimenting with Windows 10 in a virtual machine on my Mac Desktop, and have been supporting Windows 201x server installations for years as part of my $dayjob. Now was the time to jump in with both feet.

Rather than build a “toe in the water” build, (Ryzen 5 (1600 AF), 16GB RAM and an RTX 2060 Super) which would potentially cost me about £1,200, I decided to jump in with both feet and instead splurge on the Ryzen 9 3950X processor, 64GB of RAM and an RTX 2080Ti GPU. The total build cost comes in at about £3,500 with VAT, X570 motherboard, case, power supply and ultra-fast NVMe storage.

Why did I choose the AS Rock X570 Creator motherboard instead of a cheaper but still viable motherboard? Well, a year ago I migrated all my storage onto a new QNAP TS-932X SAN with dual 10 Gig NICs and spent a small fortune on 10 Gig switches and 10 Gig interfaces for the Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro (the dongle life!). As I was going to need 10Gig, I could either buy a motherboard with it built-in or lose an expansion slot to a 10Gig NIC. I may want those expansion slots (3 x PCIe4.0) for NVIDIA RTX Graphics cards (especially when the RTX 3000 range launches with PCIe4.0 support later this year!).

I guess I went for the Ryzen 9 3950X instead of a cheaper CPU as I didn’t want to have to upgrade again for at least 12-18 months (the CPUs can be swapped without needing to replace the entire machine) and the 16 cores/32 threads just got me excited. I could rationalise till the cows come home, but fundamentally more cores mean faster performance (rendering) and I wanted a silky smooth 8K editing workstation, as well as an amazing gaming experience!

How has the experience been so far?

Having missed out on the debacle that was Windows 7, Windows Vista and to be honest even Windows Millenium Edition I have come to Windows 10 without a lot of the negativity and bad experiences that other Windows users have had over the last 25 years or so. On the whole, I quite like the Windows 10 UI and whilst there have been some niggles with Windows trying to be “clever”, on the whole life so far has been relatively easy.

Ok, so I have had some issues. Office 365/Outlook no longer lets me add custom Exchange servers, so I can’t use Outlook to read my 5 different email accounts – all of which are hosted on Fido Glide (Zimbra based email service), but I was shocked and amazed to find that Windows Mail is actually usable now, and handles Exchange (EWS) mailboxes and even Google Suite/Gmail mailboxes as well as the usual POP/IMAP setups. I do honestly wonder why I’m bothering to pay for the Office 365 subscription these days (£79.99/year) as I’m using Google Docs for anything vaguely Word/Excel/Powerpoint related, I can no longer use Outlook (not that I ever really have done) and I really don’t need Microsoft Access DB or whatever else they bundle with the Office suite.

All of my video clips are ingested and stored on a QNAP TS-932X NAS which has 5 x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 12TB drives, and 2 x 1TB Samsung EVO Pro SSDs for read/write cache. I built this NAS about a year ago and wrote up my experiences at the time.

Editing on the NAS was problematic at times, not because of the network but because of Mac OS/X’s incredibly poor Finder integration with CIFS/Samba. A few years ago, Apple decided to quietly drop support for their own network file technology AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) and instead recommend everyone uses CIFS (Samba) for networking. Final Cut Pro was tweaked to support CIFS shares and AFP was basically left to fall by the wayside. Getting Samba (SMB/CIFS) to work initially was tricky, and you had to make various tweaks in smb.conf to get it to work. Eventually Samba matured and became reliable, however it has never been as rock solid as AFP (in my experience) on the Mac.

With some trepidation, I performed file system performance tests on the new Ryzen based PC using the built in 10 Gig NIC. Performance was good. Amazingly so in fact. Twice the speed of the Mac Pro 2013 (850MB/sec vs 420MB/sec) despite using exactly the same cables, switch ports, files, software, everything. The only difference was the OS and of course the new hardware. Even better are the local disks. 4000MB/second over PCIe4.0 compared to barely 1000MB/second on the Mac Pro / MacBook Pro.

So finally came time to test the entire setup in a real world scenario. Davinci Resolve rendering the last short film I made (Geneticide). The short is 7 minutes long, 4K and includes various SFX, a full colour grade in Davinci Resolve and sound design (with OpenFX effects on the sounds) in Fairlight. The project took approximately 30 minutes to render on Mac Pro and 21 minutes on the MacBook Pro with an eGPU (Radeon RX580). On the Ryzen PC, the entire project rendered from scratch in 4’48”.

I had to update the project and change the paths as I’d had so many problems rendering the project over the SAN on OSX that I had actually copied all the material to a local Thunderbolt 2 RAID array (Pegasus R8) and used that as a scratch disk. I undid the kludges (which took about 5 minutes) and pointed Davinci back at the SAN storage for all files, updated the destination path from the Mac Desktop to the Windows Desktop and hit render. I was amazed at how quickly Davinci sped through the footage, and the file it created looked perfect – no artefacts or glitches anywhere!)

What else has improved? Well, a year ago I was buoyed by Apple’s announcement of VR support coming to OSX, and I bought the HTC Vive headset. I also love playing Elite Dangerous and had previously bought the Oculus Rift Developer Kit so I could play Elite through the early beta phases as a backer. Elite sadly outgrew my Mac and Frontier eventually dropped support for Elite on the Mac because the hardware simply wasn’t up to the job. Remember that impassioned speech from Steve Jobs about Killer Graphics going forwards? It seems the boffins at Apple have certainly forgotten anyway 🙁 Even Valve, the poster boys for VR at WWDC 2017 have now announced they’re dropping Mac support on their platform.

Once upon a time the Mac was a powerhouse, the machine you aspired to own, something immutable. Now, Apple’s phones are more powerful than their desktops and Apple only seem interested in selling you a new colour strap for your Apple Watch. They may be big now, but all it will take is for another manufacturer (Samsung?) to innovate and produce a better handset than Apple and the sheep will migrate. Yes, Apple are trying to lock people into their ecosystem with Apple TV and iTunes/Apple Music/etc, but that market place is saturated and given time another Napster will emerge and chances are the customer base won’t be all that loyal to Apple.

Check back in next week for more details on the actual work flow and how I’m coping after what will have been roughly 3 weeks using Windows as my daily driver.

If you’re interested in buying my old Mac Pro, it is currently for sale on eBay and has just under 4 days left to run.

Why I gave up on Apple after 20 years

What follows is an attempt to explain why, after almost 20 years of being an Apple/Mac devotee (fan boy) I have finally reverted to “the dark side” … and (spoiler alert!) I’m loving it!

Having been a Windows user since the early days (well Windows 3.11 and Windows NT) and then IBM’s OS/2, as well as Linux (Slackware!), I was looking for something “better”. In steps a young Steve Jobs with a possible solution!

Steve Jobs launches the single OS strategy for Apple
Image result for osx public beta initial release date

So, it’s January 2000, and Steve Jobs announces plans for a new state of the art operating system. Fast forward to September 13th 2000, and Apple has released Public Beta 1 of their new (to become) flagship operating system “Mac OS X”.

The promise of “state of the art plumbing” (hardware), killer graphics, designed for the Internet from the ground up … and the promise to “make the next great personal computer operating system”. Having battled with OS/2, Windows 3.11, Novell Netware and even Slackware, I was keen to see what Apple had to offer and I bought a MacBook Pro, initially with System 9 (the old Mac OS) installed and I waited with bated breath for the beta of OSX which I’d ordered online. The future was here, and it looked amazing!

Since then, there have been 15 iterations of OSX, Steve Jobs sadly lost a battle with pancreatic cancer and Apple had a few false starts in their “Pro” lineup, launching Final Cut Pro X and dropping support for Final Cut Studio on the same day (which saw hundreds of thousands of filmmakers move to Adobe Premier overnight too when they saw how incomplete FCP X was and they saw that Final Cut Studio was no more). One of the biggest mistakes Apple made here was having no migration path available for existing Final Cut users. They upgraded/installed the new version and had no way of opening any of their old Final Cut projects. (Unless they installed Premier, which had the option to import from FCP).

Apple went from strength to strength in the Pro market from a hardware perspective, with adverts extolling the virtues of the G4 and then G5 Mac Pro, so powerful it was classed as a munition and needed an export license from the US Department of Defence. They eventually moved from PowerPC processors to Intel processors and did that move so seamlessly that no-one really noticed the processor under the hood.

The old Mac Pro (G4/G5 and Intel)

I was hooked! I bought G4 Mac Pros, G5 Mac Pros, iMacs .. I moved a number of my consultancy/business customers onto them because they were so easy to use and such low maintenance (this actually backfired as they were so easy to use and such low maintenance that we lost a fortune in revenue from callouts that didn’t happen to clean viruses from the machines. Windows users were so often in trouble with malware and viruses, but Mac users never seemed to experience the problem).

The new Cheese grater Mac Pro

They also had more than a few problems with their “Pro” lineup of hardware though, the i9 MacBook Pro overheated and had to be “crippled” with a firmware update (which only worked in OSX so if you booted into Windows you would still thermal throttle). They launched the trash can Mac Pro (the iBin) in 2013. Barely upgradeable, they were out of date almost as soon as they’d launched. A small hardware refresh happened after a couple of years, but they were still underpowered and under spec’d – with no sign of anything new on the horizon. Apple finally realised this and launched the iMac Pro as a stop-gap (with an eye-watering $17,000 price tag for anything powerful enough), they then made a gushing apology at WWDC and promised a new Mac Pro that would be upgradeable, that would be powerful and that would, of course, be stylish. This was the “cheese grater”. They failed to mention that it would cost more than a Tesla and that it would still take them nearly 2 years to deliver, however.

The iBin (Mac Pro Late 2013)

Over the period from 2000 to 2018 I have been loyally giving Apple my hard-earned cash, falling for every marketing line they offered up, whilst slowly wondering if they were ever going to actually innovate any more (beyond the amazing new colours for their new watch straps and phone cases). The iPhone is getting bigger and bigger, the price of their kit is getting more and more expensive, and I’ve now realised that if I want to buy a Mac Pro of any relatively decent specification, I need to re-mortgage the house to do it. At the same time, I look at the actual specifications of the hardware that Apple are putting into the new Mac Pro and the prices of the components. A CPU that can theoretically handle 2TB of RAM which costs $7,500 – although that 2TB is realistically only 1.5TB – and Intel actually sell an equivalent CPU that can address up to 1TB of physical RAM for $3,800).

Custom NVMe2 SSD cards that cost 4x the price of a standard NVMe2 drive, and similar “price gouging” on RAM upgrades – and I finally woke up, Apple are milking their “sheep” fan base as hard as they can. I also started to evaluate what my work flows were and where the bottlenecks were in performance as well as what I could do to improve these either on Apple, or PC, and whether or not I could build a platform that was actually agnostic.

Disk performance test after disk performance test made me realise that whilst Thunderbolt 2 attached external storage was faster, it wasn’t scalable. £3,500 for a 24TB Pegasus2 RAID unit was pricey, but it boosted disk access times from 80MB/sec to 400MB/sec. This meant I could work on 4K video footage in Final Cut. At this stage, I’m still a heavy Final Cut Pro X user, but at the same time, I have started to explore alternatives. I have enrolled in film school with Raindance and they are pushing Adobe Premiere as the NLE of choice. At the same time, Davinci Resolve is starting to look like a serious contender. I have a debate with the lecturers at Raindance and convince them that so long as my work is delivered on time and to a standard, it shouldn’t actually matter which NLE I’m using. An NLE is an NLE. It shouldn’t matter whether I’m using iMovie, Final Cut, Adobe Premiere or Davinci Resolve – and in fact, being able to work in all of these editors should in fact be a bonus were I to try and get a job with a production house at the end of the course.

I decide that it’s time to seriously consider a switch, and spend far too long working out the ideal Intel-based i9 build, Z370 motherboard, RAM and more … and then AMD catches my eye, and Threadripper 2. These are pricey, $3,999 for a 32 core (64 thread) CPU, but boy oh boy is the whole Zen 2 architecture exciting! and then, AMD releases Ryzen 3000. Specifically the Ryzen 3950X with 16 cores (32 threads) and a price that’s shockingly affordable, it only addresses 128GB of RAM though (who am I kidding having been stuck with 16GB as the most my poor MacBook Pro could handle). I spend a few more weeks (months?) thinking about it and then finally decide to pull the trigger in March 2020.

final build of the new Ryzen 3950X desktop PC

The machine should out perform almost anything else out there currently, especially with PCIe4.0 architecture, I spec a PCIe4.0 SSD which benchmarks at over 4000MB/second in read/write tests. I choose a heavy duty X570 motherboard with built in 10 Gig ethernet and 802.11ax (Wifi 6), Thunderbolt 3 and support for Zen 2 and Ryzen 9 (including the 3950x) processors.

The build takes me about 2 hours, I spent over an hour trying to work out the optimal route for the power cables and water cooling so they would look “pretty” through the tempered glass side, and of course the RGB. I confess I am quite pleased with the result.

The Peel

The new machine benchmarks extremely well

AMD Ryzen 9 Geekbench TestScoreApple Mac Pro 2013ScoreDifference
Single-Core Score1234Single-Core Score8351.5x
Multi Core Score13451Multi Core Score32714.11x
CUDA139046Metal223546.22x
OpenCL122296OpenCL210595.8x
Ryzen and a single RTX 2080Ti wipe the floor with Apple and Dual FirePro D300’s

Cinebench R20 is equally as impressive

Ryzen scores 8949 whilst the old Mac Pro scored 1416

Ahh I hear you say, but that’s against a 7 year old Mac Pro. How does your new build compare to the current Mac Pro 2019? Well, I don’t have one to run the tests on myself – however a quick Google of benchmarks comes back with

Mac Pro (Late 2019)ScoresRyzen is faster
Geekbench v5 Single-Core10301.2x
Geekbench v5 Multi-Core80421.67x
CineBench R20 – 16 core Mac Pro68591.3x
Ryzen 9 based Windows machine is half the price and 30%-60% faster in benchmarks
Source: barefeets.com

Enough of the history, if you’re interested in the day to day operation and how well it fits into my workflow then read on – part two coming up next week as I make notes on how Windows 10 fits into my workflow and what (if anything) am I missing from the OSX days.