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The End of OS X

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Re: The End of OS X

#441

Post by billyhoffman »

kelnos wrote: post #408
chongli wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. It isn't just the cost of new parts. It's also the cost of those parts being larger in order to accommodate user-accessibility and replacement. When everything is surface-mounted on the PCB it can be made a lot…

> Why do we want this from laptops? Why shouldn't we? I would gladly sacrifice a few mm of thickness for a machine where I could upgrade the RAM and storage (and replace the battery) every few years. Not only would that save me money, but it's much more sustainable from a manufacturing and waste perspective. I just finally threw out my old (sadly broken) 12" G4 PowerBook, and marveled that it had a removable battery…

The 12” powermac g4 was 4.6 lb.

Yes, modern Apple laptops gave up the “brick battery that slips out with a latch.” But in place of that we have Terraced internal batteries that can fill any volume

Re: The End of OS X

#442

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

diminish wrote: post #362
y7 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. Even Homebrew works pretty nicely. The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried: smooth graphics, font rendering, HiDPI support, etc. Some aspects of Mac hardware (screen, touchpad) are very hard to come by with other manufacturers. At this point I'll probably switch to Linux as soon as my 2015 Macbook stops working, but I would've really…

The window animation delays in mac are killing me - kind of in a month you lose hours of screen animation time. also macos has ZERO use case as a cloud OS. Any stuff you learn is meaningless except the unixy ones where linux rocks.

1) You can turn off windows animation, and it seems strange that it is a performance bottleneck.

2) macOS is not a cloud OS. It certainly can be a portal to the cloud quite easily, via terminal, iterm2, ssh/mosh, VNC etc. But you know that already.

You can also run VMs, KVM, docker et al on it as well.

Re: The End of OS X

#444

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

cortesoft wrote: post #237
mstade wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus is why I'm wholly invested in the Apple ecosystem. I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?

I recently ran into some trouble with some tools installed in /usr/bin a while ago, and wanted to try making some changes. Even with root, you can't touch /usr/bin. It took me way too long to try to figure out what was going on, and all the fixes were hacks.

which is what /usr/local/bin is for, right?

Re: The End of OS X

#445

Post by badRNG »

stupendousyappi wrote: post #423
badRNG wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was probably a fair assessment a decade ago, but Linux seriously "just works" now. About a year ago I bought a Dell XPS 13, I've thrown Pop!_OS on there, and it worked out of the box, no driver downloads, no sneakernetting Wi-Fi drivers, no codec installs, no track-pad problems (two fingers to right click works!), no scaling issues, no 3rd party repos. It just works. (I'm sure FOSS folks may dislike the distribu…

I bought my 2018 XPS 13 with a Windows 10 license, but tried installing Dell's official Ubuntu image on it after a few days, and couldn't live with it. Trackpad acceleration was awkward, fingerprint reader unlock didn't work, and font scaling was too small (along with other UI elements). I wouldn't be surprised if the trackpad and font scaling issues were fixable, but I no longer have the interest in fixing those iss…

Pop!_OS is far more polished than Ubuntu nowadays, scaling is better on Hi-DPI displays and theming is far more consistent (largely due to the fact that their vastly superior store defaults to either DEB or flatpak.)

I will concede that the fingerprint reader doesn't work, and I haven't spent any time trying to make it work, I don't have much patience for tinkering with stuff like that these days.

Re: The End of OS X

#446

Post by rdslw »

alkonaut wrote: post #351
sudosysgen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. A new application you have needs more RAM. Your battery is not holding up very well and you want to replace it. Your SSD will fail soon and you want to replace it. I had every single one of those issues on a laptop, and fixing them cost me from 25$ to 100$, about a fifth of what the Apple Store or OEM was quoting me. Instead of being without my laptop for a week or two, I got all of them over in an hour and a h…

Did Apple start using soldered on storage or RAM for (non-air) Macbooks?

Is it you Elon? DId you return from a few years trip to Mars? ;)

Re: The End of OS X

#447

Post by AlphaSite »

sudosysgen wrote: post #224
oneplane wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your scenario definitely exists, but it also doesn't hit the likes of the user you respond to as much as you might expect. SSD's don't fail the way they used to, RAM requirements don't change as much as it used to and while batteries do die, at this time I've seen more people switch machines before any of that happens. The last time I wanted or needed to replace memory or storage in a laptop must have been 7 years ag…

If SSDs don't fail, more RAM isn't needed, and so on, then why do people feel the need to buy a new laptop every three years? I think the percentage of users that would buy a new, 1500$+ machine instead of a small 100$ upgrade is much lower than one expects living in a bit of an echo chamber. There's a lot of people that get burned by outrageous repair prices or that buy new computers when they could simply upgrade a…

How many upgrade their personal laptops every 3 years?

Work one, sure. But I haven’t upgraded my Mac in years.

Re: The End of OS X

#448

Post by nicoburns »

saghm wrote: post #359
y7 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Applications and hardware drivers on Mac just work. Even Homebrew works pretty nicely. The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried: smooth graphics, font rendering, HiDPI support, etc. Some aspects of Mac hardware (screen, touchpad) are very hard to come by with other manufacturers. At this point I'll probably switch to Linux as soon as my 2015 Macbook stops working, but I would've really…

> Even Homebrew works pretty nicely It always surprises me when people cite homebrew as a plus rather than a minus in these discussions. Compared to the experience I have with Linux package managers, I've found homebrew to be extraordinarily slow even at the best of times. A simple "brew update" will generally take at least 30 seconds; in that time on something like pacman, I'll usually not only have already finished…

> in that time on something like pacman

If you're using Pacman (and presumably Arch or some derivative), that might explain your better experience on Linux. You're on a rolling distro so you get up to date packages (and I believe AUR gets things even quicker).

Homebrew is much closer to that rolling always-up-to-date (within a day or two usually) experience than Apt or Yum on Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora (most people's linux experience), where you have a choice between packages that are 3-6 months out of date or hunting around on the web for a 3rd-party repository to add which contains more up to date packages.

Homebrew can be slow. But the fact that I can `brew install X` or `brew upgrade X` and get on with something else while it's doing it's thing means it doesn't generally take up much of my time.

Re: The End of OS X

#449

Post by Osiris »

badRNG wrote: post #210
_bxg1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is only free if your time has no value Hah, that's great. I'll have to tuck that one away.

That was probably a fair assessment a decade ago, but Linux seriously "just works" now. About a year ago I bought a Dell XPS 13, I've thrown Pop!_OS on there, and it worked out of the box, no driver downloads, no sneakernetting Wi-Fi drivers, no codec installs, no track-pad problems (two fingers to right click works!), no scaling issues, no 3rd party repos. It just works. (I'm sure FOSS folks may dislike the distribu…

As someone that starting using Linux instead of Mac 2 years ago, this is definitely not the case. External monitors are always glitching out (not detected on resume), sleep didn't work at all, adding hibernate support took days of research (due to whole disk encryption). I once completely hosed my system by installing the latest NVIDIA drivers (Windows will automatically fall back to a built in driver if third party ones crash) and it took me days to get it working again and then it never worked the same. Tearing while scrolling Firefox is a disaster even after trying every X11 trick in the book.

The one thing I really, really like is using i3 to make every app run on a specific monitor and tiling all windows. When I restart my machine, every app I use launches on the right monitor. This customization has been awesome.

Re: The End of OS X

#450

Post by chongli »

kelnos wrote: post #408
chongli wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. It isn't just the cost of new parts. It's also the cost of those parts being larger in order to accommodate user-accessibility and replacement. When everything is surface-mounted on the PCB it can be made a lot…

> Why do we want this from laptops? Why shouldn't we? I would gladly sacrifice a few mm of thickness for a machine where I could upgrade the RAM and storage (and replace the battery) every few years. Not only would that save me money, but it's much more sustainable from a manufacturing and waste perspective. I just finally threw out my old (sadly broken) 12" G4 PowerBook, and marveled that it had a removable battery…

My Air is 2.8lbs, far thinner and lighter than a 12” PowerBook G4 (which I used to own as well) with way better battery life. I don’t want to go back to an old brick of a laptop like that. I think most people don’t.

You’re part of a very small niche. The tinkerer who doesn’t want to jump to Linux. This is a tiny number of people, sadly, just as the number of people who want to tinker with their cars is very small. Most people just want something that works and is very convenient. They prefer to leave the service to service people.

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