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

How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 587 posts

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#511

Post by Fomite »

I'll likely keep buying Apple laptops, because it's the environment I prefer for scientific computing and general productivity rolled into one.

But for a long time, I was also a Mac Pro loyalist. They were my workhorse workstations, and there was every reason to suspect my lab would keep buying them in the future. But the new ones are overly expensive, have no CUDA-capable GPU option, a pain to upgrade and generally weird to target.

When a recent grant got funded, I ended up going with Boxx.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#512

Post by neotek »

My new MacBook Pro finally arrived yesterday and I'm feeling pretty underwhelmed to be honest. Don't get me wrong, it's a genuinely beautiful piece of art; every line, every curve is beautiful, the screen is utterly mindblowing, it's blazing fast and responsive, only having USB-C ports hasn't been any sort of impediment whatsoever, and Sierra is a great OS.

But overall, it just feels like it's going to be a complete chore to get accustomed to the horrific keyboard and the ridiculously large trackpad, the Touch Bar is actually pretty useless as far as my workflow is concerned, and not having a physical escape key is a lot more disorienting than I expected it to be.

My day-to-day processes rely on me being fast and proficient with the way I interact with my machine and every time I have to look down at the keyboard just to figure out where the fuck my fingers are or adjust my hands because my palms keep drifting over the touchpad or fumble around for the escape key, I lose focus for a millisecond and my flow gets ruined.

Fortunately I've got two weeks to figure out if I can adjust before it becomes too late to return the machine to Apple for a refund, so we'll see.

Right now, though, I paid well over $4,000 AUD for this thing and I'm not entirely sure why.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#513

Post by rasz_pl »

eiriklv wrote: post #109
iplaw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same boat as you. I have a late-2011 17" MBP with an i7, maxed out RAM, and a 512GB SSD. I think that the graphics processor is starting to fail and I'm starting to experience some very odd DNS-related issues with the OS. I am very unsatisfied with my replacement options.

If the GPU fails and you want to fix it this seems to be the only "permanent" solution: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Macbook-Pro-A1297-820-2914-B-1...

US $14.81 reballing = someone heats up your GPU with a paint gun to make it "work" for about a day to a week.

its a scam

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#514

Post by bonzini »

sqeaky wrote: post #442
bonzini wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And more available memory, letting the OS cache more files in RAM.

The older machine as 32 GB of RAM and the newer has 64gb. This could potentially be an issue, but generally the build consumes no more than 6GB leaving a leaving amount unused. Memory bandwidth is more likely. But really I am building C++, all the parsing and re-parsing is stupidly CPU intensive. most 5400 rpm drives can feed the compiler fast enough to keep them saturated.

With a hot cache, your disk is only going to do writes (and waiting on those writes is the reason why they suggest a make -jN with N higher than the number of cores). All reads are going to be serviced from memory. All writes will also go to the cache and will be coalesced on close().

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#515

Post by ScottBurson »

Recurecur wrote: post #32
deedubaya wrote: post #13

I still think macOS/OSX provides the best user experience for personal computing. It's the lack of substantial hardware updates which is driving users away. If creatives are going to pay a premium for a Mac, there should be something to differentiate it between the competition besides the privilege to run macOS. Heck, it should have something to differentiate it from the last model! I'll still recommend Macs for my f…

Not just lack of hardware updates, but the lack of complete system categories. It's the height of hypocrisy to tout a green approach to things, while not even offering an upgradable machine, e.g. a tower. All-in-ones like the iMac are usually discarded if either the motherboard or the display goes south, whereas a tower is easily fixed. Also, power users are left out in the cold, with the Mac Pro the only system fitt…

Agreed on licensing macOS. They don't need to make it available to everyone; they just need to work with a couple of carefully selected manufacturers to fill one or two niches that they consider too small to bother with themselves, like developers/power users.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#516

Post by natch »

jc4p wrote: post #502
natch wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your code doesn't fit in 1TB? What kind of development is that?

Not the code, the databases. And actually the specific databases I need to run (we have minimal PII scrubbed versions we use for local testing) could live on my internal HD but I don't have enough storage for all my files + the backup files of the DBs for restoring + the restored database files.

I wonder if any of the AWS stuff would help with this. An EC2 instance or something. Sure there would be latency but if the data processing is mostly kept local to the AMI, it might work. But then I don't know your workflow.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#517

Post by PetahNZ »

slededit wrote: post #476
hellofunk wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. You don't need Xcode for all the code you write for Apple's platforms. You need it to build and link to Apple libraries or the App Store, but you can edit code elsewhere.

You can compile and link without XCode too. Apple just makes it annoying to do so, and the documentation frequently says the equivalent of "just use XCode".

"Apple just makes it annoying to do so" case in point

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#518

Post by PetahNZ »

delegate wrote: post #333
saurik wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with no way to downgrade to previous XCode version. What? The Apple Xcode downloads page lets you manually download every version of Xcode going back to at least 2008. I mean: I clearly love to complain about Apple, and I am shocked anyone uses Xcode at all for any reason, but the only thing keeping you from downgrading versions of Xcode is really old copies have GUI issues on newer versions of OS X... Apple at lea…

I don't remember exactly in what way this wasn't working for me, but it was something related to Carthage and xcodebuild. The workaround, which I use to this day is to define TOOLCHAINS=com.apple.dt.toolchain.Swift_2_3 before calling Carthage. Even if I did downgrade to Xcode 7.x, it would still add quite a bit of effort on my side, which Apple forces me to do by nagging me to update Xcode. I think it should work the…

The update prompt really annoys me. "Would you like to update now, tomorrow, or never ever again?"

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#519

Post by pfranz »

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…

Portable devices go through a heck of a lot more stresses than desktops. I've gone through my share if issues. At least half the time Apple takes care of it without issue. I have a 2011 MBP and a month or two ago my hard drive cable went bad. It was $20 on Amazon[1] and easy to replace. Apple products are so ubiquitous I feel like spare parts are easier to find. Maybe there are PC equivalents, but I can't imagine ordering a hard drive cable for a 5yo laptop off Amazon Prime.

I also avoid 1st gen models and usually wait a few weeks/months under the suspicion production issues are fixed.

[1] http://a.co/21dD7Iw

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#520

Post by bsder »

stuckagain wrote: post #427
bsder wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there were a wired protocol that is high-speed, has a standard connector, can deliver power, and has both bandwidth and latency controls ... wouldn't that be wonderful? Then we wouldn't have to reinvent all of these wires. (Yes, sarcasm. That protocol is called Ethernet. And basically every high-speed interface we currently have is a bad reimplementation of it for political reasons.)

Ethernet does not have any of the guarantees that 1394 offers.

Incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking

Post reply on HN