It should work fine, though they recommend a GPU capable of supporting Metal. That should include Intel graphics from Ivy Bridge onward, Nvidia Kepler and newer, and GCN Radeons (the HD 7700 series on up). Let's hope Metal support isn't a hard requirement...

And - until APFS comes along - they're still stuck with the godawful latency of HFS+. That's good news for unlocking the hardware's capabilities in the future, but APFS ain't in the wild yet.

Really now? Show me how to performance tune my Macbook Pro mid 2012 15 inch model that contains a traditional 1TB HDD (not SSD) so that a single large block read or write won't block all over I/O operations. Or hell, even any Mac that doesn't use an SSD. I can assure, it is needed and just to note, I can switch I/O scheduler on most Unix systems and Linux for performance (which is usually just a configuration variable in a text file).

Most of that's probably down to the godawful old HFS+ filesystem that needed to be relegated to legacy support a full decade ago. It's absolutely atrocious and a sign of Apple's indolence that they're only now within striking distance of releasing APFS to the wild. Positive change needed to be made on that front when George W. was in the White House.

In my experience, Windows is often snappier particularly the moment you start using cross platform 3D software or wanting to have applications that are asynchroniously doing I/O.

Amen to that. 3D software on the mac is also hobbled by Apple's refusal to update their OpenGL implementation; they're stuck at version 4.1 with a few extensions, performance has always lagged behind the competition, and the situation hasn't changed for years. In head to head benchmarks on a MacBook Air between the latest version of macOS and Windows 10, the latter's performance was sometimes 50% greater. No amount of honest marketing can paper over that kind of difference. All their engineers seem to be assigned to Metal now, which doesn't seem like a bad API. It's just restricted solely to iOS and macOS, and thus doesn't matter to any other platforms. macOS devices are being relegated to authentication dongles for making and maximizing convenience for using iOS apps. A few gimmicky R&D expenses don't make up for the sensation that the platform's sinking into the murk compared to the competition.

Not(e) that macOS's BSD subsystem is proprietary and is beaten by Windows' old POSIX subsystem.

Yes, and the Bash shell for Windows 10 is only going to open that gap wider going forward.

What kind of Radeon is it? Outside of the very newest kit, the open drivers have come a long way across the board.

"God, I just don't understand how he can be such a dick. Anyway, I've gotta go, time to put my cake in the oven." Two minutes, an idle Facebook moment, and an ad for erotic cakes later...

Necessary, sadly. They moved the VRM back out of the die, which necessitates a socket change. Naturally the team working on what's supposed to be its successor was the one who moved into the die in the first place, so they intend to put it [i]back[/i] for their revision. No such thing as reusing a perfectly good motherboard in Intel country.

Yep - nothing like extra logical threads to take maximum advantage of a high performance architecture.

In fairness Piledriver did a tolerable job against Sandy Bridge... The problem is that Intel hasn't exactly stood still since 2012, and between three generations of minor but cumulative performance and power improvements and the platform updates that came with them, there's a huge difference even in the consumer market. AMD doesn't have an answer to Haswell-E, and Opterons have languished in the same three year old doldrums as their FX cousins. Zen will be a make or break proposition; they can't continue the way they have been.

There are embarrassingly well-threaded applications where AMD does well. The x264 encoder does a fantastic job and hammers all 8 of the cores in my FX-8320 at >90% utilization, and it was cheerfully faster at that than the i5 3570K I used to keep around. But IPC does ultimately win out, and Haswell's AVX2 support is sufficient to let an i5 4690K generally pull out ahead of my FX. That's especially true on interlaced media, where the deinterlacer's essentially single-threaded and the rest of the chip's basically waiting for that single core to finish before tackling the rest of the workload. For most other uses it's somewhere around a Nehalem quad core: certainly fast enough for what I do, but the overall performance outside of niche applications isn't impressive in absolute terms. At least it took to undervolting well, and it's a friggin' behemoth for virtualization.

It's like hastily cobbling PulseAudio into the works so many years ago, but dramatically worse. Ubuntu's its own worst enemy, and you're foolish if you slap 15.04 onto bare hardware on day one.

That it does. Ditto Chromecasts and a lot of "smart" Blu-ray players; I just meant for typical PCs.

As far as I know Hulu and Amazon Prime won't work without it for now. Otherwise it's basically flushable.

It's galling, isn't it? "We know our software's as safe on the unprotected web as a Craigslist hookup, so be sure to keep this software rubber handy." And it might not be so insulting if McAfee was good at anything besides eating hardware resources...

It's a problem born from software bloat. It was originally intended to be a means of drawing vector graphics and simple animations, but there was a void in functionality in the days before PCs were fast enough to handle Javascript (or even had browsers that could cope with the highly abstracted pages written now). So more functionality was added, and with that came layer after layer of gooey, exploitable cruft. Now Flash doesn't just offer vector graphics. It's a multimedia environment with DRM, a method of offering rich internet applications, a video player, and a buttload more besides. All that bloat's been encouraged because Adobe wants Flash to be used by as many people as possible - it's publicly traded, you've got to show investors and stockholders where all that money's going - and we've now arrived at the point where it's a suppurating pile of vulnerabilities and patched-together functionality with legacy support, far more trouble than it's worth for most users.

That's CMOS resetting, my bad. *cough*