> "Care to elaborate?"

Sure. It happened quite by accident. (apologies to those who have read this before) A few years back, I saw my father-in-law struggling with his laptop while on vacation. It was getting old and he needed a new one. (I think the lid was almost falling off) All he did was check his email, surf the web, and play solitaire and I thought, "here's a candidate for an iPad" so I bought him an iPad for his birthday. Of course, he asked me to help him set it up (because I'm the family tech guy) so we did it together. I taped the email icon and it prompted for his email address and password. I thought, what's going on? don't we have to set it up first? So he put in his email and password and the next thing you know he was in his mail! How can this be I thought? Why didn't it ask him for his SMTP server and POP3 server address like Windows does? What didn't it ask him what ports to use? Then it hit me. If your email is bob@abc.net then your SMTP server is probably smtp.abc.net and your POP3 server is probably pop.abc.net and the ports are well know. So what the software was doing was extrapolating the values from his email domain (abc.net) and it worked. But what's MORE than that... It did not ask the customer a question they probably couldn't answer (because my father-in-law would never have known what an SMTP server was anyway) and the programmers could probably figure out for themselves (which they did). That was my first taste of the simplicity of Apple's philosophy toward software and hardware.

It wasn't too long before I went out and bought an iPad for myself (my first Apple product since my Apple ][+). Then while on vacation (without my iPad because I felt it was too big to cary around), my kids were checking their email everyday on heir iPhones and I had a Motorola Flip Phone (no email) and I came home to 1000's of emails. It was on that vacation that I decided to buy an iPhone when I got back (and I did).

The iPhone was the same experience as the iPad. I had started playing with GarageBand on the iPad and realized that I could even compose songs on my iPhone while I was waiting in the car for my daughter to get out of dance and then work on them on my iPad (via iCloud) and then I realized that if I had a Mac, I could work on them on my Mac too. That planted the seed. Then someone at work who had a MacBook Pro left the company and their Mac was offered to me and I took it and the rest, as they say, is history. The same badges on the icons of my iPad were on the MacBook Pro. The same swipes worked on the trackpad like they did on the iPad screen. It was still a desktop but everything was designed to be seamless and while I have to admit that it doesn't always work as designed, the designs are far better than anything I had experienced on Windows and best of all... the Mac didn't expect me to be a system administrator any more (which I was getting tired of). There truly is a seamless integration of hardware and software that only comes from one company owning both.

After that I went out and bought a Mac Mini to use for music composition, got GarageBand and Logic Pro X and never looked back. I slowly moved all of my work over to Mac and eventually bought a used Mac Pro 8-core for video work. Not wanting to give up on Vegas Pro I installed both VMware Fusion with Windows 7 and Bootcamp with Windows 7 on my Mac's so that I could continue to use Vegas Pro but rebooting just to use one application got tired after a while. I tried Final Cut Pro X out of curiosity because there was a free trial. It's surprisingly a lot like Vegas (which is probably why FCP 7 users hate it... lol) and it's has a fresh approach to editing video that is very productive.

I still use Vegas Pro for certain jobs but I also use FCP X now for others. There is a lot from Vegas Pro that FCP X doesn't have like Closed Captioning, Audio Buses, Master Video Bus, S-Curves (can you believe it doesn't have S-Curves? I couldn't believe that!), it's very picky about what files it will read and under what circumstances. I think Sony could have a great NLE for the Mac if they brought some of Vegas' unique abilities over. They may even win the remaining FCP 7 holdouts... who knows.

So I didn't wake up one day, drink the Kool Aid and become a Mac user. It was a slow transition, one Apple product at a time, but the whole Apple ecosystem made it very alluring.

~jr

Yeah, I bought an iPad, then Apple wanted me to sign up for an account, so I did, but they did not like my user name and insisted I change it for another, then they hated my password, and after about 40 tries in which I had to use a combination of letters, number, capital letters, Cyrillic symbols and other crap, they finally said my password was not complex enough and still would not accept it.

Apple's simple approach, my a*r*s*e!

Hey JohnnyRoy,
It was Cinebench in OSX Yosemite I ran. Haven't tried it in Windows 7 yet.
Your remarks on FCPX has me wondering if I should give it another chance... The magnetic/trackless setup is actually what I hate about it!
Maybe I'm just not willing to spend some time on it....

>>>It runs much better on my Mac. In three years .... I maybe had three crashes.<<<

That's 3 more than I've had on this laptop of mine which I bough about 3 years ago.

0 crashes.

It's not Mac/PC issue since hardware is all the same, you just had a bad PC. I know people whose Macs freeze multiple times each day.

> "after about 40 tries in which I had to use a combination of letters, number, capital letters, Cyrillic symbols and other crap, they finally said my password was not complex enough and still would not accept it."

I have to admit that this was back before all of the major retailers were hacked and everyone was changing password rules. I can tell you that back then, my password was only lowercase letters and numbers. No uppercase or special characters or anything so yea, they may have tightened up security since then but a lot of sites have.

One thing that's really nice on the Mac is that Safari will now suggest passwords and remember them and they are sufficiently complex for most sites. It also syncs across devices so I now let Safari make up my passwords and then when I'm on another device they just work because they got synced.

I agree with you, I hate convoluted password rules. If you are going to make me create something that I can't remember, then I'm going to write it down and if I write it down, it's not secure anymore.

~jr

> "It's not Mac/PC issue since hardware is all the same, you just had a bad PC. I know people whose Macs freeze multiple times each day."

+1

My MacBook Pro now randomly reboots. I didn't know what was going on. Then I went to turn it on one day and all I got was three beeps. I looked up three beeps and it said "bad memory module". Then I remembered that I upgraded from 8GB to 16GB of Crucial memory. I took one module out to see if it was bad and the Mac booted. Then I replaced it with the other module just to be sure it was the bad one and the Mac booted. Then I but both back and the Mac booted! So I'm thinking I got a flakey Crucial memory module which I plan to replace on Black Friday with another brand. (btw, my daughter is now complaining that her MacBook Pro is randomly rebooting and I bought her Crucial memory too so I am definitely using another brand this time)

I agree with deusx... at the end of the day it's just an Intel computer and things can and will go wrong. Apple tends to use high quality parts so less goes wrong but no less than any PC workstation that uses high quality parts. Like I've said before, you can buy a laptop for $500 and you can buy a laptop for $2000, you should not expect the quality of the build to be the same.

~jr

[I]I agree with you, I hate convoluted password rules. If you are going to make me create something that I can't remember, then I'm going to write it down and if I write it down, it's not secure anymore. [/I]

The annoying part is that I don't consider my Apple account to be a secure item, I could not care less if it was hacked. They are taking it way more serious than I would. In fact, other than my banking, I don't consider the zillion usernames and passwords the Internet wants you to create as being of any great importance.

I have been using the same username and password for the last 15 years or so, and with good reason, it is the only one I can remember!

I would be interested to know how many of us are the same?

It depends on what you do with your Apple account. If you have your credit card details in it like I have, then you most certainly want it to be secure.

I have many different passwords for all the websites that require one, some more secure some less. I keep all my passwords in an app called eWallet which works on every platform and they all are synced to the same encrypted file.

> Part 2: "I just downloaded Maxon Cinebench for you. The results are a little depressing: OpenGL - 44.99 fps, CPU 437cb"

OK, I have an update and you're going to be even more depressed with your score but this is a very interesting turn of events.

I just got my 2010 Mac Pro 2.93Ghz 12-Core, 24GB Memory, Radeon HD 5870 and I ran Cinebench again and got new scores (are you sitting down?):

OS X OpenGL - 64.37 fps
OS X CPU - 1379 cb

Remember my old scores were:

OS X OpenGL - 39.13 fps
OS X CPU - 590 cb

Now the CPU score should not be surprising because I went from an 8-Core (Harpertown) to a 12-Core (Westmere) so that's understandable... BUT...

Both Mac Pro's have an ATI Radeon HD 5870 yet the 2010 benchmarks more than a third faster than the 2008.

That speaks volumes about newer motherboard architectures, PCI lanes, FSB speeds, memory speeds, more cores, etc. So just getting an HD 5870 is not as important as how old a computer you put it in. BTW, Apple said the 5870 was not intended for the 2008's and this is probably why.

So I am extremely happy with my new 2010 Mac Pro 12-Core. :-D

~jr

@JR

Would you mind running the 4K SCS Benchmark on your 2010 Mac Pro and let us know how well it fares with that? I that a single or dual CPU Mac?

" tried Final Cut Pro X out of curiosity because there was a free trial. It's surprisingly a lot like Vegas "

Hey Johnny, does FCPX have scripting support like Vegas Pro does? I'm heavily dependent on the scripting support in Vegas Pro as it saves me tons of time, basically managing my websites without it would be all but impossible by myself. That and Vegas's ease of use is what has kept me on it for years now. I tried Premiere Pro but found it literally took me an order of magnitude longer to get my work done compared to Vegas Pro. I've never tried FCPX but I've been curious about it.

Also is OSX stable now? I use a current top spec Macbook Pro with Windows 8.x bootcamp for all my work along with a top spec Windows 8.x desktop pc and both are rock solid day in, day out but I did try using OSX Mavericks as well. Alas for me Mavericks was very unstable and full of issues so I gave up on it. I've patched it to Yosemite just to be current but I haven't used it much at all just because of how unreliable Yosemite was. Do you have any issues with it? For me it was all kinds of issues like having the os crash when the usb->network is pulled out, audio would stop working, app store patches stopped working, etc...

> "Would you mind running the 4K SCS Benchmark on your 2010 Mac Pro and let us know how well it fares with that?"

Which 4K SCS Benchmark is that? (sorry I have no interest in 4K and probably missed that thread) I have to set up my Bootcamp partition first but once that's done I'd be happy to run any benchmarks you'd like. I'm hoping to do that tomorrow after I upgrade it to OS X 10.10 (it came with 10.6)

> "I that a single or dual CPU Mac?"

Dual CPU. 2 x 2.93 GHz Six Core 32-nm Xeon X5670 (Westmere) processors with a dedicated 256k of level 2 cache for each core and 12 MB of "fully shared" level 3 cache per processor.

I specifically got one with 24GB of memory and not 32GB because the Mac Pro's run 32GB as dual channel (4 sets of 4GB pairs) but if you use 3 sets of 4GB paris (3 x 2 x 4GB or 6 x 4GB) it runs it triple channel mode. To test this out, I misconfigured the memory by not paring them in the slots and ran Geekbench and then put the memory back in the proper paired slots and my 32-bit Geekbench score went from 23820 to 24850.. a whole 1000 points higher. So configuring memory properly helps. BTW, I was shocked that OS X warned me that my memory was not configured properly when it sensed that the slots were not paired up. I thought that was really nice.

~jr

> "Hey Johnny, does FCPX have scripting support like Vegas Pro does? I'm heavily dependent on the scripting support in Vegas Pro as it saves me tons of time"

There kinda is but Apple disabled it for FCP X for some reason. That's one of the reasons I still use Vegas Pro. I had a photo montage with about 600 photos to do and I immediately went to Vegas Pro and used my VASST Photo Montage tool from Ultimate S. Scripting is the one thing I miss most. You can script any application on OS X with Apple Script but the application controls how much you can do.

> "Also is OSX stable now? ... For me it was all kinds of issues like having the os crash when the usb->network is pulled out, audio would stop working, app store patches stopped working, etc..."

I haven't had any issues at all and I've upgraded several times now. I think my current MacBook Pro came with Lion so I've upgraded in place to Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite without any stability issues and I run lots of virtual machines on my MacBook Pro all day doing development. It's been very stable for me.

I don't like what Apple has done with the look of Yosemite. They've made everything flat like Windows 8. It looks horrible, like we went back to the 1980's when there wasn't enough compute power to draw nice GUI's. I personally hate it. Microsoft is doing the same thing. Maybe the next version will be a black background with just green text. lol.

~jr

@JR

This is the link to the SCS 4K Benchmark project. It basically is the original SCS Benchmark project up scaled to 4K.
Since you now have a dual Xeon machine it would be nice to know how well it can handle 4K editing. 4K is already part of my work and as mentioned in another thread, working with proxies is possible but not desired. If dual CPU is the way to go for 4K editing then so be it and I will invest in it.

> Posted by: OldSmoke "This is the link to the SCS 4K Benchmark project"

I'm sorry, I tried twice in the last 11 hours to download those files and the bandwidth is just horrible. The first time I spent 7 hours downloading all three at about 40K/s and it quit after 2.0GB. Then I spend another 4 hours trying to download just one and it quit again.

I see they are on Google Drive and I've never used that before and the funny thing is I can watch those movies just fine if I click on them but as soon as I press the Download button it just crawls. I don't know why but it does and I have 50Mbps bandwidth to the Internet. It took an hour just to download the first 100MB and in the mean time I was downloading software that was 100MB in about a minute.

Is it possible you can host them someplace elase with more bandwidth like DropBox? Also, do they need to be 4 minutes long and 3GB each? I would think for a benchmark they could be a lot smaller.

Anyway I tried for 11 hours today while I was install all the software on my Windows Bootcamp partition but I was unsuccessful in downloading them. I don't know what else to do. I'm ready to test but I can't get the files downloaded. :(

~jr

JR

Sorry, I forgot to mention that these are huge files, as such I don't really want to move them around. But, if you have the original SCS Benchmark project, you can actually upscale it easily to a 4K project. All I did was rendering the media out as XAVC-S 4K and also set all generated media to 4K.

Again, I apologize for the rather large files.

> "But, if you have the original SCS Benchmark project, you can actually upscale it easily to a 4K project."

Ahh.. OK. I didn't realize that's what it was. I can do that.

I assume you are interested in timeline playback fps performance?

~jr