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

Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 623 posts

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#181

Post by girvo »

milankragujevic wrote: post #95
derefr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could keep a virtual machine on the SSD, with each docking host having the same VM software installed. Then you'd literally be able to hibernate the VM and physically move it.

I literally thought about doing this today. Have Ubuntu + VirtualBox on multiple computers and any OS in a virtual machine and use a USB 3 SSD (you can get either a specialized one or a generic SATA SSD and a USB 3 enclosure) as the storage medium. I'm going to try it now, might even make a blog post if it works out.

I ran VMs on a Thunderbolt HDD, and had issues with VirtualBox being frustrating to setup regarding file-paths. There might be a better way of handling that now, at least!

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#182

Post by ascorbic »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #75
aroman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they weren't on the brink of death before the iPhone. They were doing very well, selling lots of Macs, and had already rebounded.

Yup, the iPod is what helped make them relevant again.

The iMac and OS X made them relevant. The iPod made them massive.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#183

Post by sudhirj »

lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

The Intel Skull Canyon NUC works great. Didn't even realise I was doing just this until you mentioned it.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#184

Post by wineisfine »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #141
enjo wrote: post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly. So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh…

Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly.

I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS.

Pretty lame.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#185

Post by BoorishBears »

taigeair wrote: post #170
BoorishBears wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Zenbook. Windows for development isn't nearly as convinent as OSX. Yes there's lots of customization you can do to make it bearable. Powershell isn't as awful as CMD, but projects aren't supporting Powershell as much as bash any time this decade AFAIK. The Linux subsystem works, but the flow between Windows and Linux is lacking. I tried Linux. Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (…

Thanks for the details! Interesting the touchscreen still works.

Yeah, I sometimes joke that Asus put out a touchscreen MacBook before Apple did

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#186

Post by nextos »

wineisfine wrote: post #184
lobster_johnson wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly. So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh…

Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly. I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS. Pretty lame.

Try something without any design at all, like Linux with a tiling window manager and some minimal applications.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#187

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

enjo wrote: post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

Same here, switched to a Dell XPS13 after 15 years of macs (Still use an iMac at work).

Dell quality has been very bad though, I'm not amused.

Linux bash on Windows also helped me a lot to transition development work to Windows.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#188

Post by eps »

derefr wrote: post #72
lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

You could keep a virtual machine on the SSD, with each docking host having the same VM software installed. Then you'd literally be able to hibernate the VM and physically move it.

Having a VM in picture decimates video and storage performance.

I've tried this exact approach not a week ago. There's an NVMe drive with ~700MBps read speed and a GFX 10xx hooked up to a 4K display. The best I could squeeze from VM was 245 MBps in read and I couldn't get rid of a lag in cursor movement when running Visual Studio full screen. Going up and down one a page was OK, but when you get to the edge, there was a very noticeable hiccup before it started scrolling. CPU and memory throughputs were largely unaffected though. That's using VMware Workstation 12.5 with Win 8.1 as both guest and host.

I ended up with just sticking all data onto an encrypted USB3.1 SSD and setting up the desktop and the laptop identically. Not as elegant as a VM would've been, but works really well so far.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#189

Post by lobster_johnson »

flukus wrote: post #179
lobster_johnson wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? The Mac is not a PC.

The mac is a personal computer.

Yes, but "PC" has a very specific meaning in almost every context, and Apple never refer to their machines as PCs. Which is why Apple was able to run those "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#190

Post by justinator »

lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

No one mention the Mac Powerbook Duo, so I'm just going to do that, for completeness.

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/slick...

Post reply on HN