The End of OS X • Hacker News Board

Re: The End of OS X

#451

Post by ucosty » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #214

crystaln wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a developer and power user. I am incredibly happy with every update from Apple. Unix with good design is exactly what I want from my OS. Sure I can't disassemble my laptop and change the hardware. I have no desire at all to do that. I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this, although I imagine there are a tiny fraction of users who would and you may be among them.

> I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this 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. And Apple used to make it pretty easy to do this, and enough people did that there was a subeconomy of vendors selling for this purpose, al…

Last time I had a laptop with replaceable ram modules, there weren't any bigger modules on the market and the cpu memory interface had a maximum capacity equal to the installed amount. I'm not sure expandable ram in laptop is all that useful, unless you intend on getting the lowest spec version and upgrading it later.

Re: The End of OS X

#452

Post by dkryptr » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:28 PM UTC

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #72

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #53

What I think a lot of us programmers miss is the experience of the end-users who are likely to buy a Mac. The fact of the matter is, 99.9% of people who buy a Mac are not going to know what subpixel hinting is. Or care too much that they can't delete Chess.app. To them, the Mac is nicer looking and easier to use than ever. Will iOS devs care? Not at all - developing for the Mac has become easier with Catalyst. It's e…

> And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has changed. I'd say a lot has changed, because everything is a matter of degrees. As soon as I realized Launchpad was a piece of crap, I put an Applications folder stack in my dock a la the Leopard default, and forgot that Launchpad exists. Can't really ignore it anymore.…

I've been using a MacBook for ~5 years full-time for all sorts of development (including frontend JavaScript, backend APIs, big data involving hadoop, etc.) and I've never used launchpad. I don't see why it can't be ignored? I don't even have it in my menu bar.

Re: The End of OS X

#453

Post by nicoburns » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

ARandomerDude wrote: post #231

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?

For me, the React Native experience has been instructive. Android is quick and easy to develop, debug, and deploy. The iOS side includes multiple hoops, constant frustration stemming from XCode, long app release times, and minutes-long builds for production-size apps. Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release.

> Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release.

Interestingly our team has gone the opposite way (again, no official policy). The deciding factor in our case has been the relative performance of Xcode/iOS Simulator vs Android Studio + Android Emulator. Android Studio on it's own slows my computer down more than Xcode compiling AND the iOS Simulator running at the same time. The Android emulator is all but unusable on my MacBook.

I agree there's a lot of painful bits around signing/release on iOS though.

Re: The End of OS X

#454

Post by 72deluxe » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

growse wrote: post #409

wuunderbar wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be missing something here, but why would you need to change the stock installed tools in /usr/bin? Seems like an easy way to screw up your OS installation. And it's not like a VM where you can rollback to a snapshot or relaunch. If there really was an issue there then you either need to file a bug and have them mainline a fix, or yes hack/shim a fix on top for your needs. Perhaps leveraging PATH precedence.

> I may be missing something here, but why would you need to change the stock installed tools in /usr/bin? Because it's my computer that I paid for with my hard earned cash, and I want to. How far we have fallen.

I can't agree with this more! It's a bleak future. Back to Linux I guess.

Re: The End of OS X

#455

Post by saghm » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #448

saghm wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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

It still has a centralized list of the versions of the packages it supports (on github) though, right? I feel like it should be able to get this list with a single HTTP request to the Github API; I don't see why having a faster or slower schedule to update the packages should affect how long it takes to actually download the list of updated packages with `brew update`.

Re: The End of OS X

#456

Post by trimbo » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #121

parasubvert wrote: post #84

I personally think that the MacBook Pro 16 inch is the world’s best laptop, and look forward to see what the next generations can do. But the whole point has been MacOS. I’m not sure what to think of the changes. If they stabilize the mess that was Catalina, then they’re doing the right things, even with the increased iOS-ification of the Mac. If they just slap more Windows 8 style touch gloss on deep and unresolvabl…

I spent $800 on a new Win 10 laptop with an entry-level NVIDIA GPU plus an extra memory stick. Installing the memory took about 10 minutes and was easy enough for my 11-year-old to do herself. It can stream and video conference at once without even getting warm. It can play mid-tier 3d games pretty comfortably. The MBP is so hot its painful. 15 minutes of Zoom or Minecraft is too much. I only need it because I need t…

What laptop did you get?

Re: The End of OS X

#457

Post by filleduchaos » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

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.

> Even with root, you can't touch /usr/bin

Yes, you can. If you disagree with Apple's System Integrity Protection, you can take two whole minutes of your life (if even up to that, considering how quickly OSes boot these days) to turn it off permanently and mount the entire drive as read-writeable. For some strange reason, though, I tend to encounter far more people complaining about it than actually taking the steps needed to fix the "problem".

Re: The End of OS X

#458

Post by 72deluxe » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #294

askafriend wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. It's always janky and commpromises UX in ways that made me simply use the app less or had the effect of teaching me to "get in and out of the app as quickly as possible".

> As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. If it is a good react native app you won't know it is RN. If you notice it, it is by definition poorly done. There are some things (e.g. specific animations, UI elements) that RN just isn't great at, the best way to avoid making a janky app is to avoid even trying to do those things.

Non-native menus and poor keyboard focus handling and shortcuts are the giveaway, and extreme memory usage!

Re: The End of OS X

#459

Post by koyote » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

TwoBit wrote: post #353

fsflover wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hardware drivers on Mac just work Same for GNU/Linux if you choose the hardware for it (or buy preinstalled).

In my experience this argument is BS. Maybe the computer on day one works OK, but it's downhill from there as you maintain and update.

Huh, in twenty years of using Linux, hardware support has improved with each update not gone down hill.

What I do agree with is that on day one support might not be as good for new types of hardware (especially for more niche hardware like a fingerprint reader for example). Even that has improved a lot over the years though.

Re: The End of OS X

#460

Post by lsaferite » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

fluffything wrote: post #406

banachtarski wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just "use linux" and I get all the benefits with much better hardware (more memory, disk storage, speed for compilation), better drivers (important especially for GPU support for either graphics/rendering work or machine learning) and my downsides are... what exactly? Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I don't use Safari. From your perspective, what aspect of the "cust…

> and my downsides are... what exactly? I've spent zero days, zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds fiddling with setting anything up in macOSX over the last 15 years. I manage a bunch of Linux systems, from laptops to desktop to servers, and over the last 15 years I've probably spent months of my life setting up stuff that should have just worked. I use a mac at home and as my dev machine, because I charge quit…

> I've spent zero days, zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds fiddling with setting anything up in macOSX over the last 15 years.

I have to say that I 100% do not believe this statement.

You mean you you've never used any wireless connections to your machine? You've never had to set up backups or change audio settings? You've never had to deal with setting up one thing in 15 years? Since when did OSX gain the ability to read minds?