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How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

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Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#181
post #54

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 s…

A maxed out current iMac is a pretty competitive workstation machine imo. Not especially cheap , but not prohibitive for a company. The top of the line is currently a 4.0 GHz quad-core i7 w/ 32 GB RAM (27" model w/ the memory and CPU upgrades). I have that on my desk at work and am quite happy with it.

A maxed out iMac would depreciate within 5 years, and any particular part would render your entire system unusable for week(s). Three years later and Apple adds a new feature that for the slightest reason requires an entire hardware upgrade because you can't upgrade components individually. Then factor in that the thin iMacs have terrible heat dissipation which means the CPU can't run at full speed without overheating.

That top of the line iMac costs four grand while a Hackintosh costs half that and gets you a top of the line graphics card and the ability to keep on par with the top of the line.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#182
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This week, my mother's crappy Windows computer died, and I bought her a Chromebook. It was great! Yeah, no kidding. I have a $160 Toshiba Chromebook that is great for most tasks. Apple's risk in dropping the Premiere/FCP crowd is that the mass audience they are seeking will discover how good Chromebooks are, and the price tradeoff, and use them with Google cloud services for pretty much everything.

Indeed. One of the big selling points of Macs was that they weren't running Microsoft Virus Studio, and didn't turn into a filthy pit of malware when handed to someone without a degree in computer security. Chromebooks are probably more secure than Macs.

Do they all still have abysmal screen resolutions? All the ones I keep seeing have resolutions from the 1990s.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#184
post #83
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The touch screen on the Surface has one killer application: scrolling while reading. It's very natural to scroll content with a thumb on the edge of the screen.

Yes, but you have to lift your arm up. It is far far faster to scroll through a web page with the touchpad.

> It is far far faster to scroll through a web page with the touchpad.

This is true if you are the only one using it. If people are standing around you or over your shoulder, and you are all interacting with the screen - then a touchable screen is more quickly usable than shuffling who-has-the-keyboard-mouse. Not saying you are wrong, but there are scenarios where a touch screen is the "best" of the available IO options.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#185

After being an Apple "Loyalist" for over 15 years, I recently sold my rMBP and built a desktop (i7 4790k, GTX 1080, 16Gb DDR3 @ 2933Mhz). It was by far the best hardware decision I have ever made. Building the system was an absolute blast. Plus, I now have an extremely powerful PC with first class Linux support, tons of I/O ports, and no vendor lock in. The best part is it cost me about 1/3 of the price of a (maxed-o…

Out of curiosity, if you are such a OS X/homebrew fan, why not try a Hackintosh setup?

I don't know if you can get a dual-boot working well with OS X, but worst case scenario you can have a HD for each OS (after all, you have a desktop now and no longer a notebook) and boot the Linux disk in case the Hackintosh starts to show any signs of trouble.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#186
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So the reason the replacement is so expensive is because you've coupled yourself to a particular OS and so your replacing a macbook with another macbook. Even though there being other cheaper and more powerful options.

Software on one OS is not the same on another OS, despite cross-platform apps getting better.

What else could I run Logic on btw?

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most insane part of this to me, is the inability to upgrade or repair any of the desktop Macs by making them locked down, soldered machines. These are machines meant to sit on a desk. Who cares about shaving off few centimeters of desk space if means you can't replace your RAM or hard disk or video card with off the shelf parts? I find this both anti-user and environmentally unfriendly.

Seriously, if anyone has a technical answer to this I'd love to know what it is. Right now I can't intepret the soldered-on ram in desktops as anything other than a user-hostile cash grab.

I'm not saying that I prefer the soldered-in versions, but back when I had a Mac with user-replaceable memory, the RAM would get unseated from time to time as my machine got jostled around in my bag and I'd have to open it up to fix it. I imagine that the Genius Bar saw a non-zero number of people bringing in computers that wouldn't boot because of this. Also, soldered-in saves space and thus helps with their pathological need to make MBPs thinner.

It's hostile to users who want to upgrade RAM, but pretty friendly to everyone else. It gets into the point of this article...when Apple looks at both demographics, the group that doesn't upgrade is much larger. Apple used to make decisions that would cater to the more non-mainstream use cases of their pro users. Now, they're focused almost entirely on the mainstream users.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the chain of adapters that beat was complaining of.

We're living in a transitory period as we move from a world of wires and connectors to a wireless world. This is the pain we have to endure as technology is pushed forward. If it were up to the luddites and their obsession with compatibility, a laptop would have a dvd drive, firewire, usb-a, usb-c, thunderbolt, hdmi, dvi, vga, sd, microsd,vga, and display port all in one laptop chassis. Having one single port, that c…

Let me see... My laptop has a DVD drive, USB 3 (A), HDMI, SD, and microSD. I already had to buy a DVI adaptor, and already had a VGA one.

It works well. I just miss a 4rt USB port.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#190

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 proje…

Yes, xcode CANNOT refactor C++. Let's all just use Borland products pre-2005 instead.
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