Shortly after the New Year, before Coronavirus – when tech folk were still considering the New Mac Pro, my hand was forced. My #2 Workstation, an older, used 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 was starting to show evidence of it’s advancing age. It would shut down or would randomly restart without prompting. Often it would not wake from sleep without a hard restart. Uh Oh. And so I went down the home IT checklist and Did All The Things. Repair permissions. Reset PRAM. Reset PMU. New PMU Battery. Reseat the graphics cards and RAM modules… Nope Nope Nope. Thankfully the hard drives seemed to be okay. And shortly after I posted the previous entry, I added the following comment—
Well, imagine that. In the midst of this process, my workstation #2 – an older used 2008 MP, has been getting cranky and seems to have a failing logic board. So now these numbers have grown a whole LEVEL of REAL. What I am considering is the “horizontal upgrade.” Workstation #2 is retired, and Workstation #1 (mid 2010 MP) becomes #2. And we replace Workstation #1 with a used or refurbished 2012 12-Core Mac Pro. We trick the bitch out with SSDs, a CHUNK of Ram, Big Storage, and a better GPU…
Should hold us a few more years. But if Apple would just pour the specs of the iMac Pro into a user-upgradable tower – Those bitches would FLY out of the Apple Store.
After exhausting my bag of tricks, and I’m not a chump, my local tech shop confirmed my suspicions, Failing Logic Board. Ugh. And, oh well. Replacing the board would be more costly than the value of the machine, a machine that was becoming increasingly obsolete. Given the studio’s revenue, as I mentioned in the last post, a New Mac Pro was absolutely NOT in the cards. Continue reading