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How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

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Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#51

Post by _ph_ »

kobeya wrote: post #41
mozumder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also have the same type of maxed-out 2011 17" MacBook Pro. The replacement for that I am looking at costs $3500-$4200.

Sorry that's just not possible. There are gamer targeted systems that are better specs than anything apple ever made (even after market upgrades) in the sun $2k range.

The problem is, they don't run macOS. And if your whole work-environment is centered around macOS, it is not an easy choice to leave that behind, and consequently, hardware upgrades don't come cheap.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#52

Post by beat »

superninja234 wrote: post #21
beat wrote: post #16

My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music. It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I d…

I honestly doubt it would cost $3000 to replace your 5 year old macbook.

The cheapest I can get into a 15" MBP with a terabyte of storage (and I need a terabyte) is $2999.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#53

Post by izacus »

kris-s wrote: post #9
scrrr wrote: post #4

For me, there's still no alternative. And I also will not recommend anything but a Mac to friends and family. They just have the best personal computer on the market, period.

Not to mention the added benefit of being able to say "Take it the Apple store".

Well... unless the closest one is two countries away. :P

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#54

Post by colept »

This is where the Hackintosh market has thrived.

For desktop users, size of the machine is not nearly as important as raw. computational. power. The iMac was good in its time but that time was half a decade ago. The Mac Pro was supposed to be the revolution for Mac desktops, but they neglected it for too long. And since you can't upgrade it yourself that shiny new Mac depreciates exponentially and even more so when software updates bog down resources further.

Support for specific combinations of hardware is near the flawless breaking point where just about anyone could follow the guides to put together a machine that will run MacOS using near top of the line hardware. Being able to dual boot Mac and Windows, so that I can be productive and game on a high end graphics card - and not locked down in expandability is unparalleled.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#55

Post by untog »

electic wrote: post #37
beat wrote: post #16

My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music. It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I d…

I did take a close look at the Surface Pro. Sorry, the build quality is nowhere near a MacBook Pro. Secondly, I found the touch screen very gimmicky. I tried using it for a week and found that my hand just hurt lifting it up repeatedly and also hated switching context from the keyboard to the screen. Not to mention, the screen was full of smudge marks after awhile. To be honest, I really found myself using the keyboa…

> Secondly, I found the touch screen very gimmicky. I tried using it for a week and found that my hand just hurt lifting it up repeatedly and also hated switching context from the keyboard to the screen.

I agree, but on the other hand, I'm yet to find something that requires the use of the touchscreen. So I don't use it. Unless I'm carrying it around like a tablet, in which case it's a great feature to have.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#56

Post by anjc »

macjohnmcc wrote: post #45
beat wrote: post #16

My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music. It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I d…

I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with i7 processor and I would not trade my Macbook Pro (3 1/2 years old) for it. The Surface frequently heats up to be too hot to hold as a tablet and just isn't nearly as fast.

There must be something wrong with it then if it heats up too hot to hold, and its i7 doesn't make it more performant than an old MBP

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#57

Post by delegate »

Hardware is not the only problem Apple has right now vis-a-vis developers.

Apple's flagship IDE, XCode, is also lagging behind, at least when talking about C++ development, but even Swift doesn't get too much love it seems.

Having used it since at least version 5, XCode 8 has been a frustrating experience for me starting from day one, when it defaulted to Swift version 3.0 and so broke all of the existing Swift projects and dependencies from CocoaPods / Carthage.

Me and thousands of devs had to waste hours if not days just to build our projects - with no way to downgrade to previous XCode version.

After that, I constantly struggle with syntax highlighting, unusable code completion, broken navigation and so on.

And that's for Swift ! Ok, my project also has Objective-C++ and C++ code, but all of them are broken beyond frustrating.

Sometimes the "comment/uncomment block" feature just stops working and the only fix is to run a magical sudo command and then restart your mac.

I've revived an older Windows 7 machine just so I could compile my C++ lib on Windows. Visual Studio 2015 + Visual Assist, which I haven't used in years, was a revelation.

I ended up refactoring most of my C++ code on that 7-year old machine and frankly it felt very good that I didn't have to fight the development environment, like I do on my $2500 MacBook pro.

Until then, I didn't even realise how unproductive XCode made me in C++.

So yeah, I'm already thinking about a 32GB of RAM, nVidia 1070 GPU, 17" monitor laptop. It costs like a Macbook pro, but punches a stronger punch at the expense of portability.

I can justify all the gaming and VR that I'll do on it with the fact that it runs Visual Studio well...

I wrote this to vent but also with the hope that someone at Apple is reading these comments and hopefully something will change soon.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#58

Post by WaltPurvis »

ythn wrote: post #17
scrrr wrote: post #4

For me, there's still no alternative. And I also will not recommend anything but a Mac to friends and family. They just have the best personal computer on the market, period.

Out of all the devices I've ever owned, my Apple devices have had the most hardware failures. My iPhone 4S's headphone jack stopped working. I bought a replacement and installed it myself (which was a nightmare) but it was still broken. Turns out the logic board had an issue and replacing that is hundreds of dollars. My Macbook Pro 2010's hard drive cable failed. New one was $50. I've never had any hardware issues wi…

This has been my experience also. It seems like Apple is delivering premium hardware and build quality -- they're certainly charging premium prices -- but in my family I can think of at least five show-stopping hardware failures with Apple products in the past few years, and zero such failures with a comparable number of Windows/Android devices. In addition, Apple's hardware specs no longer justify premium prices, in most cases.

With Apple these days (and especially for Macs) the simple fact is you're paying a high price for underwhelming hardware that's not especially reliable.

I still strongly prefer the Mac OS, so I can't see myself buying a Windows PC anytime soon, but I'm not a happy customer.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#59

Post by brightball »

beat wrote: post #16

My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music. It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I d…

In the same boat with a maxed out 2010 17" MBP. RAM is maxed and I've upgraded the HD 3 times.

The lack of a new 17" is blocking my upgrade entirely and has me shopping for Linux laptops at the point that it finally dies. I use my laptop as a second screen when I work and a screen smaller than 17 makes it less functional in terms of readability from a distance.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#60

Post by treve »

Pigo wrote: post #46
beat wrote: post #16

My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music. It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I d…

I bought a Chromebook Pixel out of curiosity and have loved every minute of it. It's fun and really slick, and even as the most expensive, by far, it's still a fraction the cost. It was easy to put Linux on it for real dev, and I keep hearing about more and more methods ( https://mrchromebox.tech ). Plus it has all the Play Store apps now. Everyone I know is just waiting for work to buy them a Surface, but doesn't wa…

The big thing that has deterred me so far, is that I heard it's not really usable unless you're cool with having a google account. Despite having one, I thought it was a bit offputting for that to be a dependency.
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