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Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

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61–70 of 111 posts

Re: Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

#61
No, not laptops. I do run a few hackintosh desktops though. Macbooks are still the best (unless you are a heavy gamer). Over the years of having used a variety of machines, I haven't found anything close.

Build/Reliability: Probably more reliable than my IBM-era thinkpads. Excellent build quality, NVME, good battery life, slim aluminum frame, and one of the better notebook displays with retina. Trackpad is the best in the industry period, no one has anything as good or responsive.

Support: Very big support network. I can walk into a store and get a loaner, fix, or a brand new machine. If you don't have your own IT department this is a huge value to your startup/small business.

OS: If you want to develop for iOS there really isn't an option, so that's not a fair comparison. However, Apple supports practically every professional level software suites (Adobe, FCP, etc). OS X is also certified Unix with a polished ui and has pretty good compatibility with most of Linux/GNU with homebrew.

Re: Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

#62

No. I own a 2015 15" MacBook Pro, fully loaded except for only 512 SSD. I'll wait for the next refresh when, hopefully, they'll have Kabylake, 32 GB of LPDDR4, and maybe they will have rethought the SD card slot. By that time developers will have figured out what to do with the Touch Bar and knowing Apple they will have sorted out any hardware problems. I really wanted to upgrade. Every announcement Apple has I am th…

I doubt the touch bar will see much adoption, its on too few computers. If they were serious about it I'd expect a replacement keyboard for the iMacs as well as making it universally available on all their laptops.

It just won't make sense to target it for anything other than trivial features until it has more market penetration.

Re: Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

#63

Personally, I'm kind of amused by the appalled and horrified tech bloggers I see posting about the sky falling. I keep reading about "life long" Apple users threatening to switch ecosystems because of an SD card slot. Or function keys. I mean, people must step through A LOT OF CODE to have that impact this kind of decision. My perspective is biased by my moving in the opposite direction. I'm just in the process of co…

remember that article a day ago complaining that they used old processors? that's another benefit. microsoft shipped skylake with an experimental sleep state (one hp refused to turn on) and it was a disaster. not being cutting edge is how apple will keep its hardware "just working."

now if apple would only add a trackpoint :(

Re: Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

#66
I have recently tried to connect my old iPhone5 to my very old MacBook with Snow Leopard, and I could not open the phone to transfer some photos. I connected the phone to PC and got access to the catalogue righ away. I'm litterally pissed of at Apple and the next time I buy a computer I want to be in full control of what is going on. (having said that both the laptop and the phone work quite well despite their age).

Re: Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

#67

No, and perhaps that is why I and many others continue to be somewhat disquieted with Apple's stewardship of its Mac platform: It would take much more to make me switch. Apple would have to treat its professional users much worse than they do today. The corollary to this being, it could get much worse. The best parallel I can draw, if you'll permit a terrible political analogy, might be idealistic Bernie supporters s…

That's a bad analogy I discovered that I can write in Bernie and have a solid conscience knowing I didn't choose the corrupt politician, the rapist, the hippie Bernie wannabe who has no clue about actually running anything in government, or the always seemingly-high libertarian. - I really wanted to like Jill Stein and vote for but couldn't...I voted democrat for all other tickets in hopes that they were more progressive in general.

As for the new mac stuff I've never been a mac fan, not a win fan either.. I'd much rather have my arch linux builds any day, but I'm not a hardcore gamer or graphic designer either. I'm just a laravel / elixir developer. But I do feel like Apple's lost their way there's just too much negative 'mojo' in the air, they need to pivot and embrace the hard core techies who used to love them, or they'll become irrelevant and it'll be like the 90's again.

Google and microsoft have both had pretty exciting launches this year, there's lots of amazing tech going on in the world today, but when the majority of the stories are negative that can have an effect maybe not today or this quarter, but down the line in 2018 for example.

Re: Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

#68
post #53

This isn't quite the question asked, but it pertains. My personal laptop is a 2010 MBP. I was waiting to replace it until, well, I saw the new one. Now, I'm really undecided. I'm planning on borrowing a laptop to run Debian on and see how much my workflow changes. I spend a lot of time in vim and the terminal in general, connected to mostly Linux machines, so in that sense, at least system directories will be more si…

I recommend giving Antergos a try it's based on Arch Linux, and I'd also recommend i3wm - it's a tiled window manager that makes your workspace seem like you're in vim i.e. tons of shortcuts and hardly need to touch the mouse, and it's extremely low on memory/ram resource usage.

Re: Ask HN: Will you really move away from Apple hardware?

#69
Not me, I'm sticking with Apple even though I mostly run Win10 on my Macbooks. I looked at the alternatives and they are either crappy build quality, huge heavy bricks, or just as expensive as the Macbooks. Might as well stick with Apple since I trust their hardware.
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