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A world without the Mac Pro

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Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#161

Post by sigjuice »

mikhailt wrote: post #154
sigjuice wrote: post #49

Any particular reason why Apple should sell Macs at all, given they make almost all their money from other products? Besides Xcode, is there any other app (or equivalent) that can't be had on other systems?

First of all, Apple is making more money from Macs than iPads. In the last quarter, they had ~$6B in revenue from Macs versus $4.2B from iPads (~$7B same quarter last year). Are you seriously suggesting that Apple should drop that kind of money just because the iPhone had ~$30B instead? (Source: http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy16datasum.pdf ) They're not going to make macOS a paid OS for sale on other hardware, wh…

Five years down the line Macs will be an even smaller piece of the pie. The way Apple has been neglecting Macs has me concerned of a not too distant dystopia where Apple decides that Macs and macOS are not worth the trouble any more. Sure they will still use macOS internally for development that they can run on older Macs or generic PCs themselves. Swift Playgrounds on the iPad will be the way most developers get to make apps. Larger and more prominent developers like Adobe, Microsoft, big name game publishers etc. get some sort of special treatment, e.g they get to buy iOS "devkits" (2013 Mac Pro preloaded with Xcode or some sort of macOS VM) from Apple for a lot of money.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#162

Post by hosh »

gaius wrote: post #110
hosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Even today the only way to make this work in Linux is to run Windows or OSX on the hardware, then VirtualBox or VMware, then Linux full-screen. Let the host OS do the tricky stuff like power management and networking.

That was what I ended up doing. Dev work in VM, and let OSX be egregriously good at talking to people. After I switched to a cloud machine for the Linux dev and started using mosh, I don't really notice that I am not working on a cloud machine. Though if I want to say, take a 3-month coding cruise or travel by train across the US while coding, that might be different.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#163

Post by hosh »

witty_username wrote: post #99
hosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I have never encountered any wireless issue. Suspend works fine. (IIRC suspend issues are mostly due to proprietary drivers, which is basically nVidia and AMD to a smaller extent (AMD's open source drivers work well))

I have, back in 2002 - 2010. That was when the fulltime job I signed on for issued me a MBP. Suspend and wake was terrible. I've had Linux geek swagger in there claiming they could fix it, and then running away when they realized, there was no fix.

That was why I was asking if the state of things for Linux has improved now that it is 2016. Thanks for sharing.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#164

Post by hosh »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #58
hosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Let's put it this way: We had someone in to demo a piece of software (webapp) this week which we were considering licensing, they had a Linux laptop (Ubuntu). They weren't able to connect to our corporate wireless and the meeting was delayed almost 40 minutes (ultimately we loaned them an in-house Windows ultrabook to do the demo). I felt embarrassed for them. I've not seen sleep issues on MacOS or Windows for over t…

I've never seen OSX sleep issues. I have seen Windows sleep issues, but less than for Linux. I'm hoping things are better now in 2016. But yeah, I got OSX because I know OSX can talk to everyone.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#165

Post by bigpeopleareold »

Adaptive wrote: post #16

"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." When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platfo…

I copied that exact phrase to create a comment around the fact that the phrase is utter nonsense. It's a not a black-and-white situation. I switched back and forth between OS X and Ubuntu, mainly when changing jobs (I was always saying 'ooo, I can get a Mac' at the new job.) But this has stopped for me. I do not like dealing with the subtle issues with Mac OS X anymore. I'd rather deal with the blunt oddities I see in Ubuntu if it means I get a consistent environment through the years (which it has been after they switched to Unity as a default.)

My much more powerful Macbook Pro provided to me from my job sits and collects dust as I use something that I actually feel more productive in.

By the way, I am a software engineer. People use software to reach their goals and if they choose Mac, Windows, Linux or BSD or whatever, God bless them.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#166

Post by spo81rty »

mhermher wrote: post #159
mhenr18 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't be commenting on things working at high DPIs on Windows if you've been using a Mac for the past few years. It's really one of those things where a lot of Windows users think that it's fine, but once you see how well seamless and fully supported things are on OSX you realise just how much there is left to do. Every single app integrates well and the scaling is flawless even for the few that don't support…

I've never dragged a window between screens on Windows because that's not something you do on Windows. You use win+direction. Something sorely missing from osx and third party software is nowhere near as good as the native Windows solution. I use both OSs almost everyday. Mac for work, and win for home. The fact that you mention dragging windows (a necessity on mac) in Windows shows that you probably don't use it ver…

Not everyone uses the short cut keys. I never use them but I know they exist.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#167

Post by spo81rty »

mhermher wrote: post #159
mhenr18 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't be commenting on things working at high DPIs on Windows if you've been using a Mac for the past few years. It's really one of those things where a lot of Windows users think that it's fine, but once you see how well seamless and fully supported things are on OSX you realise just how much there is left to do. Every single app integrates well and the scaling is flawless even for the few that don't support…

I've never dragged a window between screens on Windows because that's not something you do on Windows. You use win+direction. Something sorely missing from osx and third party software is nowhere near as good as the native Windows solution. I use both OSs almost everyday. Mac for work, and win for home. The fact that you mention dragging windows (a necessity on mac) in Windows shows that you probably don't use it ver…

Not everyone uses the short cut keys. I never use them but I know they exist.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#168

Post by laserbeams »

riffic wrote: post #158
laserbeams wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet. And those machines are terrible. Teradici thin clients streaming Red Hat from a closet somewhere. The latency on those things was significant, and the fonts unreadable. The hardware was really buggy, the monitors were really low resolution, and there was some irony on typing on a broken Dell keyboard in the Steve Jobs building. The crappyness of having to sit in front of those…

DreamWorks Animation/PDI gave their crew decent HP x86 RHEL boxes. Desktop and farm Linux is a necessity in these fields.

> Desktop and farm Linux is a necessity in these fields.

Howso? I was working with animation tools developed entirely internally -- last I checked C++ and Qt work fine on OS X.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#169

Post by dolguldur »

derefr wrote: post #142
saosebastiao wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to run macOS on my NUC with 32 gigs of ram for iOS development instead of buying a shitty Mac mini. This sounds pretty awesome but I only understand a fraction of what you're talking about. Is there some kind of tutorial for setting this up?

Not that I know of. I mostly pieced the process together from disparate sources. Let me try to give you a brain-dump: First, a point of note: one funny thing is that the VSphere ecosystem assumes, is that the ops people deploying VSphere use Windows. So the tooling around VSphere—even the unofficial community tooling—are Windows programs. Besides the server computer I was setting up, I only have a MBP (with no Boot C…

Sounds interesting. Does this introduce any latency for the UI? I can't stand using anything besides a terminal in normal VMs like virtualbox.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#170

Post by greenhatman »

Adaptive wrote: post #16

"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." When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platfo…

I've been using Linux exclusively for three years now, and I don't see that changing, probably ever.

I'm way more productive on my Linux Mint Cinnamon setup than I am on anything else. And I can make it look beautiful with 5 minutes of tweaking.

I keep an OS X partition on my MacBook Pro, just for the off chance that I might want to do iOS development at some point.

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