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“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

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Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#181

I recently saved an old (2012) Mac Pro from the trash at work. As a lockdown project, I decided to do the rejuvenate the thing, thing. Cleaned it up, wiped and put a fresh copy of High Sierra on it. I am a long time Linux guy and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s almost fun to use! That said, I believe High Sierra is the last release before things start getting...weird? My wife has a newer Mac (cannot remember the rel…

Crazy hurdles: right click the installer or app, click Open.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but seemingly that hasn't mattered or helped much? Apple is a more valuable company in terms of market cap, and almost certainly a more 'loved' company in terms of mindshare. Many people thought they'd be doomed without Jobs but they've seemingly been doing just fine still (ignoring many valid criticisms here, of course, but talking about the general population). Which I really find fascinating. Aside from t…

Just to take a recent HN front page example, the link to SyncThing. It says " Since Android phones, at least, are Linux-based, one need only set up a normal shell environment on it and put Syncthing there to achieve this goal; the process shouldn't take more than a day or so. " The disconnect between the two worlds "people who use Apple products" and "people who think a day or so of your life is a reasonable amount o…

The FOSS movement has failed to appeal to end users, and a big part of that is the chronic inability of FOSS leaders to understand UX.

Us programmers want to believe that technology is enough. That just because because our implantation is technically superior in x, y and z metrics, consumers should be flocking to our solutions. But that’s not good enough. We have to get the technology right, and we have to make the product a joy to use.

As you said, there is a real disconnect between technical people and users. User-centered design tends to be treated with a kind of hostility. It’s often viewed as “dumbing down” rather than making the product better. I’m not sure why this disconnect exists, but until we close it, customers will continue to flock to closed ecosystem solutions.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#183
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative to escape in vi and vi-alikes: control-[ I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards. I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it s…

Also the Alt key + letter keys produces a series of key codes prefixed by escape, so one can use any single letter normal-mode command with the Alt key, resulting in "Escape"+ . This is convenient to quickly switch to e.g. moving the cursor with e.g. `Alt+j` to both escape from insert mode back to normal mode _and_ move down a line.

Brilliant! If this was all I learned today, it would not be a wasted day. Thank you.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#184

Naive question, today can you work at microsoft as use a mac for development on the job? (non windows specific development of course) I think about how if you work at apple, you're probably strongly pushed to not use an android phone (I'm sure some exist). Compared to google, you could probably use either android or ios (even with google "owning" android), or mac, windows, or their own flavor of ubuntu for developmen…

Yep - worked there for a few years on an iOS/Mac team. Was pretty fun to watch the progression over the years. When I joined they gave me a mac and a PC desktop because so many internal tools only worked on windows or IE. But that changed rather quickly from 2016-2020. By the time I left I hadn't turned on that old desktop in months (unless I had to do some windows specific dev work) and could do nearly everything fr…

Sadly, I still have to support IE11. There are some people so entrenched that IE is the internet, that we've seen tickets come in through IT where people reported others for using Chrome because it isn't IE and they were concerned.

Sometimes I wish we could just tell these ignorant people get bent and figure it out. I'm not telling you to build goddamn Arch, it's just running a different piece of software. 100% of them didn't even ask to install it either.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#186
post #158
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!

I'm curious, with a macbook do the right thing if you plug in a USB keyboard? I'm not suggesting you just use a USB keyboard instead (although, now that I say it, that does seem like a solution). What I'm actually wondering is how much work it would be just to create a single button that's an escape key on a USB stick that implements the USB keyboard protocol (but only ever reports that the escape key was hit).

Yes, it does. I do know that single-purpose keyboard extensions like this might be harder to integrate than you'd think. When I had my first Powerbook back in 2004, I bought a USB numeric keypad for entering grades into a spreadsheet quickly. One of the OS X upgrades in the following years rendered the keypad unrecognizable.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#187
post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

I remember around this time talking with a coworker about the Vista UI and questioning why they made the start button smaller, round, and protruding out above the taskbar. He looked at me with credulity and said “they made it look like a gem”. From his perspective this completely explained and justified the change. But from my perspective I was even more confused.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#188
post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

I'm in the minority on this, but I like the touch bar, especially in the newer Macbooks which have restored the physical escape key. I can never remember what F-key is supposed to do what and having contextually significant buttons that I can press is, for me at least, an improvement. When I'm using my Macbook docked with my big monitor and with an external keyboard and trackpad, I'll sometimes still reach over to the Mac keyboard to use the touchbar for things like stepping through the debugger.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#189
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

', and ship Vista.' You spelled 'shit' wrong?

Maybe I’m the minority but I’ve only had good things to say about Vista. Maybe the problem isn’t Vista but trying to run it on underpowered hardware? It ran perfectly fine on a quad-core and 4GB of RAM.

I had it preinstalled on a very nice 17" Dell Inspiron 2.4Ghz Core Duo. Vista ran perfectly. I don't think I had a bluescreen on that laptop until I upgraded to 7 (no joke). I guess it all comes down to conservative hardware design from Dell and the right drivers from Microsoft/luck.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#190
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was mostly based off the base-model 13" MacBook Pro from before which didn't have a touchbar.

No, it is based on leaked schematics[1] from one of Apple's component suppliers who were the unfortunate victims of a ransomeware attach. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/21/macbook-pro-stolen-sche...

I'm aware of the leaks/rumors, but I'm saying the M1 MBP isn't any indication. It's not an entirely newly designed body, just the old base model with a new processor (and I think the new non-butterfly keyboard?)
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