MaX & the 2019 Mac Pro

2019 Mac Pro is not good enough for MaX

MaX & the 2019 Mac Pro

Having had Mac Pros in the past, MaX welcomed the news of a new Mac Pro for 2019; however, MaX can see barely incremental advances in the components.

The sum of the parts is good but it is not good enough for me.

When Apple ditched IBM Power in favour of Intel's x86 processors, I was concerned they would slide into the ditch of lacking progress trapped by Intel's cash cows history has taught me to avoid.

Having said all of the above, I wrote this article on an eight-core Intel Core-i9-powered 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro.

I was hoping the 2019 Mac Pro would be the first Mac with PCIe 4.0; instead, we were given a refresh of the 2010 and 2013 Mac Pro with limited PCIe 3.0 switched fabric and the same NVMe (PCIe 3.0 x4) storage we have been using since 2015; however, NVMe has somewhat been supported since 2012.

We are in 2020. I hope Apple will come to their senses and launch a 2020 Mac Pro with an update Intel Xeon with 56-cores and PCIe 4.0; however, Apple has never launched a significantly updated Mac Pro one year after launching a significantly updated Mac Pro.

MaX's Virtualised macOS

I aimed to stay away from virtualisation in favour of Kubernetes which I was successful in doing in 2019 but 2020 seems to be the year I virtualise macOS on a bespoke IBM POWER workstation running the Red Hat QEMU-KVM and OpenShift Container Platform.