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Apple’s 2016 in review

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Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#351

Post by eridius »

jdcarter wrote: post #325
chaostheory wrote: post #286

> Defining products by the spreadsheet: A big percentage of complaints over the new MacBook Pro devices is that they ignore the needs of the “power” user. The problem? This group is fairly small and have needs living well towards the end of the bell curve. The problem with ignoring this niche is because these users are either developers or big influencers. They help with the ongoing success of the App Store as well a…

My household has been Mac-only for about 20 years, but I finally gave up waiting for a decent Mac Pro or a powerful Mac Mini. Last year I put together a PC for about $1500 [1] which looks great and completely demolishes any Mac for GPU-heavy tasks, thanks to its Nvidia GTX 1070. The build was super-easy (my 10 year-old daughter did half of it) and the machine worked perfectly the first time I powered it on. And, much…

I built my first gaming PC (GTX 1070 as well) not that long ago, and you're right, it wasn't too hard (though my wife did most of the work). And I use that for gaming all the time.

However, I would never dream of using it for development. One of the games I play is World of Warcraft, and I maintain a few addons, and even just trying to edit Lua files on Windows is a PITA. Atom kind of sucks, and the CLI isn't very good. I installed Windows Subsystem For Linux in order to get bash and git, but it turns out there's no way to open GUI apps from that system, so I have to independently navigate to my projects in both Explorer and the shell. Oh, and Windows doesn't implement enough of Linux so tmux can't actually remember my paths, so every time I reboot, I have to find all of my projects again. And of course Linux symlinks don't work in Windows, and Windows aliases don't work in Linux, so I have a shell script that copies a bunch of the addons into place that I have to run each time because I can't symlink it. Ultimately, it's all just very annoying.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#352

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ekianjo wrote: post #209
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key take out here is "faster" Even that part is mostly wrong. A fast horse can run more than 40MPH which about all you can expect from a car in a city. The main reason most people don't own a horse isn't that a car is faster. Users ask for things that are obvious. No kidding faster is better. Can we have it cheaper and more reliable too? If you ask most people in 1870 how to improve those aspects of a horse the…

> Even that part is mostly wrong. A fast horse can run more than 40MPH which about all you can expect from a car in a city. The main reason most people don't own a horse isn't that a car is faster. Only on flat ground. Make a horse go uphill for a while and he will soon stop if carrying anything. A car, even an ancient one, not so much. Add to that that cars can maintain a sustained speed as long as they have fuel, a…

> Make a horse go uphill for a while and he will soon stop if carrying anything. A car, even an ancient one, not so much.

> you can get much farther with a car than with a horse in the same amount of time, and it needs less maintenance as well.

But that's not faster. That's endurance, reliability, economy. You're arguing that the tortoise is faster than the hare, but "being faster" isn't how the tortoise won the race.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#353

Post by dragonwriter »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #79
ekianjo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? The key take out here is "faster", so asking questions is not necessarily irrelevant, instead of focusing on making one's horses shinier or more economical. You need to find out what problem to fix.

> The key take out here is "faster" Even that part is mostly wrong. A fast horse can run more than 40MPH which about all you can expect from a car in a city. The main reason most people don't own a horse isn't that a car is faster. Users ask for things that are obvious. No kidding faster is better. Can we have it cheaper and more reliable too? If you ask most people in 1870 how to improve those aspects of a horse the…

> A fast horse can run more than 40MPH which about all you can expect from a car in a city

A slow car can go much more than 40 mph. Both cars and horses may be practically limited by traffic most of the time in crowded urban environments, but cars are still faster, even in most cities, on both peak and practically-attained-average speeds.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#354

Post by exodust »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #218

Just an idle thought: could the construction of, and move to, the new Apple campus be partly to blame for the company becoming distracted?

I highly recommend firing up Google Earth and checking out the new campus. Someone has painstakingly modeled the construction site in 3D. Make sure you have 3D buildings enabled in Google Earth, and give it a chance to load the details. Tiny details like vehicles and machinery, mounds of dirt, even porta-loos have been rendered, You can zoom down inside and between the buildings to get a good feel of the space.

I wouldn't mind knowing who did that, and what their workflow is to model all that stuff.

I think once Apples moves in, they will be inspired to pick things up. It really is an amazing building.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#355

Post by lobster_johnson »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #109
lobster_johnson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a rumour -- Apple has dissolved their internal router/networking group.

I mean they never made any sort of official announcement and they still sell them, right? So wouldn't it technically still be a rumor or did I miss something? I agree with your assessment though. Seems dead.

No announcement, but an anonymous "source close to the company" according to e.g. The Guardian [1].

I think that's a bit more solid than a rumour, though Apple is secretive enough that it could also mean that they're planning a replacement product similar to Alexa, for example.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/22/apple-sto...

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#356

Post by realityking »

Animats wrote: post #135

Apple doesn't seem to have anything new. Just minor upgrades of the old stuff. The car project, whatever that was, seems to have been canceled. The watch is something of a dud. Amazon and Google are fighting it out in the voice operated home control space, while Nest doesn't have an entry. Apple is still making tons of money. Boring but profitable isn't that bad a place to be. It's possible to be boring, profitable,…

Your comment sounds like Nest is a division of Apple. That's not the case, it's a subsidiary of Google-parten Alphabet.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#357

Post by exodust »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #311
hogrammer wrote: post #2

I switched from Mac Pro to PC a few months ago. We needed NVIDIA and running some hack over thunderbolt isn't a real option, despite what the Apple Zealots say.

Recently made the same decision myself to use CUDA too. After months of considering hacked open thunderbolt enclosures that nearly cost the same as a PC anyway I just switched. I now measure my 3D render times in seconds not double digit minutes. There is no doubt in my mind that if the trashcan mac had Nvidia GPUs I would have just saved up and spent over double I spent on this PC even if it had worse performance. I…

Can I ask what sort of rendering you're doing? Do you mean animation or still images... what software? I find that between different software you can get vastly differing render times. Also, for really serious and large work aren't people using render farms now anyway?

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#358

Post by johnsmith21006 »

tomschlick wrote: post #110
lobster_johnson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a rumour -- Apple has dissolved their internal router/networking group.

Some have pointed out that Apple may be moving from the Airport to some sort of all in one Alexa/Google Home type device that also is your wireless router... Has anyone debunked that rumor?

Do not know about the all in one. But do have the Google Mesh three pack and really like it. It is pretty cool how it moves around connections and you do not even know.

Network is faster but the app is what I really like. Now just roll over grab my tablet and see if the proper kids are at home. Also allows you see if who they said went home actually went home. How long until they figure how I know?

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#359

Post by jdcarter »

eridius wrote: post #351
jdcarter wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My household has been Mac-only for about 20 years, but I finally gave up waiting for a decent Mac Pro or a powerful Mac Mini. Last year I put together a PC for about $1500 [1] which looks great and completely demolishes any Mac for GPU-heavy tasks, thanks to its Nvidia GTX 1070. The build was super-easy (my 10 year-old daughter did half of it) and the machine worked perfectly the first time I powered it on. And, much…

I built my first gaming PC (GTX 1070 as well) not that long ago, and you're right, it wasn't too hard (though my wife did most of the work). And I use that for gaming all the time. However, I would never dream of using it for development. One of the games I play is World of Warcraft, and I maintain a few addons, and even just trying to edit Lua files on Windows is a PITA. Atom kind of sucks, and the CLI isn't very go…

Agreed, macOS is a far superior blend of Unix underpinnings and a graphical front-end. I love that I can have my terminal and Emacs run seamlessly on the same platform as Sketch and Photoshop. Fortunately, my MacBook Pro is still a plenty capable machine for the programming I do in my day job.

But I have to say, PC hardware has come a long way, not just in terms of performance, but also in build quality and ease of use. The aluminum case I bought looks as good as any Mac Pro tower Apple has made, it has fantastic cable routing so everything's clean and tidy, and tons of options for thermal management--I can run games on ultra quality and my PC is still silent!

It's really too bad we can't have the best of both worlds. But I don't see Apple going towards PC-standard hardware, Windows will probably never be a great Unix, and Linux never quite gets the software adoption it needs to become my desktop OS. I'd love to be proven wrong on any of those, however!

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#360

Post by sctb »

elcct wrote: post #172
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #8

In 2009 I bought my first Apple product: an 8GB 13" MacBook Pro that cost $3000 ($1000 for the extra 4gb, like a dumbass). Quite soon after I got an iPhone 3GS. Now every computer in the house (family of four) is an Apple. Every phone is an Apple. Even AirPlay was an influencing factor in selecting a hi-fi receiver (HTR7065). Apple TVs sit next to actual TVs. Yesterday I replaced our fleet of TimeCapsules and Airport…

By the way, contrary to the popular belief, the "Pro" in the MacBook stands for "Prostate" not "Professional.

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