Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A world without the Mac Pro

marco.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 191 posts

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#31

Post by sigjuice »

_ph_ wrote: post #15
thenewwazoo wrote: post #6

I feel like I'm living in a crazytown where nobody sees what's so plainly obvious. Doesn't anyone remember when IBM wasn't able to deliver chips to Apple on the schedule they demanded, and customers were complaining, and they were taking a drubbing in the press for it? And Apple let their existing product line stagnate for a little while, and then we got the Intel Macs? Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except…

Apple has indeed some great chip designs available. But one should not forget that the switch to Intel not only gave Apple nicer CPUs but also made Apple compatible to the rest of the PC world. You can run any x86 application on a Mac via VMware or Parallels. Moving away from Intel would kill this.

Apple could make the equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) to run x86 apps on non-Intel Macs. But the thing is, Apple has no good reason to make a different type of computer, considering computers are not that important, at least to Apple.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#32

Post by alyandon »

cwyers wrote: post #2

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up — and they won’t do everything right. So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is i…

Yeah, I don't really get that either. I have been using Windows, OS X (I mean macOS) and various Linux distributions for years.

Each one of them comes with their own particular set of quirks/warts and I can't objectively say one is so superior that I'd rather use it to the exclusion of the others.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#33

Post by ditados »

nkurz wrote: post #19

3. “Hackintoshes” aren’t good enough. ↩︎ Is this really true? Yes, there are currently support issues, but this would seem to be because Apple exclusively makes its own hardware and doesn't legally permit running their OS on anything else. Might macOS thrive if it was retargeted to (or at least officially permitted use of) high-end 3rd-party hardware? Microsoft doesn't make their own high-end workstations, and Window…

Marco does iOS development, and there are a number of features that simply won't run on a Hackintosh. Anything involving crypto is dicey, and stuff that relies on (for instance) having an official serial number (like iMessage) will also fail.

But that is irrelevant for a lot other use cases.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#34

Post by saurik »

wfleming wrote: post #7

> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change. Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore. I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did. I…

> If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior.

Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both, and would give Adobe a possible "out" to the world they live in right now, where Apple tries to do their best to keep Adobe "in check". Seriously: every single one of these threads ends up in the holding pattern of "we could all be using Linux tomorrow if we had [software which is almost entirely controlled by Adobe and which is already designed by them in a way where the UI seems to be an in-house toolkit and which would be trivial for them to port to Linux]"; that would effectively just leave "office productivity" as the only class of software where Microsoft (and to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Apple) would be able to hold people on their platform (and OMG: a future where the next Adobe CS release was a word processor... that would be brutal).

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#35

Post by no1youknowz »

WayneBro wrote: post #25
m_mueller wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* The windows registry vs the OSX defaults system * Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa * HiDPI that always works or has good fallbacks * Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use * Battery life * Multidesktop * POSIX scripting (that one is slowly coming to windows now) * Can be restored from another computer in a matter of minutes (se…

Everything you listed as either incorrect or extremely insignificant. I don't have time to correct you right now but please, you're really reaching on quite a few of those. Edit: maybe it would help you to level out your perspective by thinking about some reasons why almost every business on the planet runs Windows and not Mac.

* Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use

* Multidesktop

* PDF support baked into OS

He's right with these.

I now solely use the touchpad on my MBPr. I cannot see myself ever switching back to a mouse. Having been a mouse user for 16 years!

The ability to do a 3 finger swipe and switch to another virtual desktop in a split second is awesome. Is this possible on Windows? I don't know.

I was working on a Windows 10 machine yesterday and PDFs opened with Edge. Again, I don't know if it's right or not.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#36

Post by hosh »

wfleming wrote: post #7

> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change. Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore. I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did. I…

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#37

Post by morganvachon »

cwyers wrote: post #2

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up — and they won’t do everything right. So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is i…

That's what bothers me about the article. I can't think of a single piece of professional production software that is Mac only, apart from Apple's own apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic. Those are great apps but they have equivalents on Windows, and some of the Linux pro audio and video apps are getting really good.

As for web development, there is nothing you can do on a Mac that can't be done on Linux or BSD apart from testing in Safari, and Safari has a smaller user base than IE/Edge. Hell, even Windows is improving in this space.

I guess one could argue that macOS is a more aesthetically pleasing environment to work in, to which I counter that I'd rather work in BeOS/Haiku as I find it more aesthetically appealing than any other OS. In other words, that's purely subjective.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#38

Post by benologist »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #6

I feel like I'm living in a crazytown where nobody sees what's so plainly obvious. Doesn't anyone remember when IBM wasn't able to deliver chips to Apple on the schedule they demanded, and customers were complaining, and they were taking a drubbing in the press for it? And Apple let their existing product line stagnate for a little while, and then we got the Intel Macs? Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except…

This time Apple's explicitly saying the iPad Pro is their next personal computer so I wouldn't bet on that transition to ARM including macOS!

The only piece missing is creating iOS apps on iOS devices, for which they've already created a language and an app to learn programming, then everything we do and know and learn just to keep our computers running is kind of legacy stuff.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#39

Post by _ph_ »

sigjuice wrote: post #31
_ph_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has indeed some great chip designs available. But one should not forget that the switch to Intel not only gave Apple nicer CPUs but also made Apple compatible to the rest of the PC world. You can run any x86 application on a Mac via VMware or Parallels. Moving away from Intel would kill this.

Apple could make the equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) to run x86 apps on non-Intel Macs. But the thing is, Apple has no good reason to make a different type of computer, considering computers are not that important, at least to Apple.

Rosetta worked, because the Intel chips were a lot faster than the Power PC processors they replaced, and it ran on single applications, not whole virtual machines. Considering how much Apple wants to optimize power usage for the laptop lines, emulating Intel seems to be counter productive to that.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#40

Post by desireco42 »

Stop begging to get crumbs from Apple. They are big company run by adults. They've been exploiting our desire to get their computers for a long time.

They make some really nice computers, but the whole point is that there are others. I really miss times when I would assemble my own computer. Obviously you can't do this with laptops, but I still miss freedom it gave me.

I am exploring how to get my work done on something else, for start on desktop, some nice linux machine for start.

I tried several times in the past, but without us actually using linux, there will never be real need to fix issues that it has.

Post reply on HN