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Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

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Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#151
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea where this analogy is going. I'd rather be on a mountain making sleds?

Don't be a douche, it was a good analogy.

Of course it wasn't. People on laptops and people on desktops are making the same thing, just desktop users are doing so with more horsepower.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#152
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive. What boggles my mind is how many of them max out at 8G. I couldn't care less about CPU, and I'm flexible about storage, but 8G RAM is ridiculous. I'm currently using a couple of MS office apps and a web browser on my 2015 MBP and it's using…

> but 8G RAM is ridiculous 8G RAM is not ridiculous. Statements like this just show how far out of touch people are. Many workloads benefit from more RAM. And for some it's a hard requirement (e.g. VMs), but web browsing and a bit of office is not one of them. This is why virtual memory/swap space is a thing - and with an SSD that's also not as horrible as it used to be.

Web browsing and a bit of office is offered as an example of the lightest imaginable load for someone actually using a computer. My daily needs are much heavier than that.

To offer a line of laptops with 8GB of RAM as the max in 2017 is ridiculous.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#153
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can spend about $350 and get a high quality 13" IPS 1080p display Chromebook that weighs under 3 pounds if you're willing to spend 5 minutes putting in an SSD and installing Linux natively on it. I've been using the above set up for half a year now roughly and it's great. I can do all of my development work, writing, browsing, etc. without feeling like I'm giving up much for those sorts of tasks and the price is…

I've switched out HDDs and installed Linux a few times and it's never taken me 5 minutes. Not even 50 minutes. Sure, it's a one-time "cost" and nearly insignificant over the course of the lifetime of the machine, but please be honest about the time spent.

It's 5 minutes to unscrew a couple of screws, slide out the SSD card, put in the new SSD card and screw it back together.

The GalliumOS installer is also really straight forward. You pretty much run 2 commands and hit ok a few times. This part is more than 5 minutes, but it's mainly just twiddling your thumbs waiting for things to download and install.

Then you boot up and you're in.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#154
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. Completely. First: Your theory isn't new. It's been discussed to death here and elsewhere. Second: There's no evidence that content creators are actually leaving the Mac. It's easy to look at the new machines and Apple's trends and conclude that, but go look on Youtube at any major content creator. FCPX is still popular. If not, Adobe on OSX is still very popular. I'm not suggesting that no one ha…

"Second: There's no evidence that content creators are actually leaving the Mac. " I don't think this is true. It's hard to say but there is a lot of noise about it. Consider this: most 'creatives' are poor. Or kind of. My landlords wife is a 'photographer'. She doesn't make a lot of money. She - like many others - are 'money sensitive'. She uses a PC to do all her high-end work. I don't know why, or if she used Mac…

I'm in two minds about this, because e.g. Lululemon or the surface book aren't cheap either - so price isn't the only factor. But at least with the surface book you could argue that the stylus is a huge value add. And while I hate touchscreen laptops with a passion, I can definitely see it's a form factor many people enjoy. Especially "normal" users (non-terminal users?).

Having said that, there's definitely a herd mentality. People buy what other people in the group have, and what is considered "cool/chic/whatever". The second part is really hard to track, especially with something as tool-like as laptops ultimately are. So there is a huge risk here. The question is "are techies still the 'category leaders'"? Microsoft seems to be betting they aren't, and they are following through with that.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with noise though? Scala and SBT can make the whole Apple product line noisy in my experience :)

You mean make the fans blast? Well, they're not that loud. The building H/V airflow is usually a lot louder. And my Retina MacBook doesn't even have a fan. (Though I also don't do a lot of software development on it, I have done development on slower machines, and it wasn't terribly painful. Depending on what I was doing, of course.) I still remember the days of programming in C++ using C-front, and a compile would t…

Of course, the MacBook is passive :)

Incremental compilation makes my coworkers' gear loud enough I can hear it anywhere in the room. No HVAC over here. Maybe a MacPro would handle the load better, but that's completely overkill for our needs. The MBPr and iMac keep getting thinner, for no good reason in the iMac's case.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#156
post #64
post #10

Makes sense with Apple's current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13" Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13" Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen. The 12" MacBook is there...but it is a super…

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion. The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-…

Always seems rather silly. By all means, test everything on a slow computer. Make sure that it runs smooth, even on older computers. But there's no reason to make your developers wait through unnecessarily long compile times before testing.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#157

Are there any models from Lenovo/Dell/HP that have a good keyboard (obviously there is some subjectivity here)? If Lenovo made a model with the thinkpad keyboard from 10 years ago, I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

I've used the T450s keyboard and love it. There are reports of variation in quality. They have two providers, one sucks. But get it with a warranty then they'll replace it for you (send out a tech and everything).

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#158

Back when I worked at Apple the dirty secret was that the cheapest models, despite all the marketing of the MacBook Pro, made up the majority of sales. Back then it was the white plastic MacBook but now it's the 11" MacBook Air that occupies that slot. That model and its crappy TN screen is vastly inferior and more expensive than similarly-sized ultrabooks. The only redeeming feature it has is MacOS. Instead of repla…

Quite a few years ago I saw someone at college using a white plastic laptop and man I thought that looked sharp. I glanced at the top of it and saw it was a Mac. At the time I didn't own a Mac and I didn't follow their product lines, but that was a hell of a good looking laptop, I thought. That was actually the first time I'd ever seen a Macbook, I don't come from a very well-off or tech-forward area. Everyone at the…

That case (basically the same as the iBook G4) was a beast. In the pre-Magsafe days, I had an iBook G4 survive three surprise drops to a hardwood floor without so much as a ding on the case.

I miss that in the new Macs -- my 2013 MBP has picked up a couple of battle scars. But incidentally, I just bought a ThinkPad, and it took a bit of a tumble the other day, and there is zero evidence of this on the case. Once I get past the couple of interface and power-management deficiencies, I could get used to this.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#159
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion. The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-…

If it's 'good enough' now, how will it be an OS update or two down the road?

Probably still fine. MacOS updates tend to get faster if anything.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#160
Apple's pro laptop design peak was the first Unibody. Just imagine what can get done with the volume: RAM, CPU and GPU wise.

I'm a professional developer, I'm comfortable with my web routines but damn I'd love to have a handy tool to work on the edge of that zone.

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