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Has Apple sounded the last POST?

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Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#41

Post by replygirl »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #39
replygirl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i didn't say anything about perfection or failure. i don't know how a generous/good-faith interpretation led you to that i agree with you that the computers were good, but i was responding to a post that used an m1 macbook pro as a counterexample to apple choosing form over function, when really it's emblematic of their pattern of occasionally going obviously too far toward form

I bought the M1 with the Touch Bar intentionally because I like the Touch Bar. Even apart from the Touch Bar, it’s the best new laptop I’ve bought since I first switched to Macs in ‘07

Now we're getting into a different topic. They were really well-rounded machines—I just upgraded to 14" from an M1 Air myself, and only for compile + transcode times—but I wouldn't rank them higher than most others I've had:

- Core 2 Duo Pros proved to me you can have a laptop as your main computer for real dev + video work

- First-gen Retina 15" saved me from daily tension headaches

- Second-gen 12" MacBook, after only having a maxed out 15", changed the way I structure my days and where I consider going to work

I briefly had a Touch Bar supplied by a job; initially it was cool, but after the first month my only use for it was volume and brightness. I thought I wouldn't like going back to function keys but when I got the M1 Air I realized I prefer them

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#42

Post by devinprater »

sigh I wish Macs were better for accessibility. But nope, Windows still rules for blind people. VoiceOver's awful support for web apps really shows how...

Safari not responding.

bad things are. I went to Best Buy to check out a Mac. It's really bad when it takes a MacBook Pro to make VoiceOver not freeze for a few seconds when visiting doordash.com. Oh and it works really badly with Google Docs and Drive too, which my job depends on pretty heavily.

I hope Apple's renewed focus on the Mac means a renewed focus on MacOS as well, and definitely accessibility.

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#43

Post by usernew »

nickvanw wrote: post #13
userbinator wrote: post #11

Apple has always chosen form over function, and this isn't any exception; the aesthetics of a "clean" boot process is clearly more important to them than being able to easily figure out what's happening, and I suspect at least part of the reason for this opaqueness is to encourage learned helplessness and visits to the Apple Store (which may result in upselling or otherwise exchange of $$$) when something doesn't wor…

I'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fans is a bonus as well.

I have an 8core xeon laptop from work. it's thin, it's insanely fast, it has 128GB of RAM. I can set the profile to quiet, and the CPU doesn't boost and the fans never come on.

Here's what I can do, that a MBP cannot do - run a whole bunch of crap that doesn't run on ARM - most vendor tools that aren't browser based.

The MBP is a laptop, it's fast, but it's not a "pro" laptop. Pro means I can plug it in with a brick-sized power brick, draw 200 watts, and with lots of loud fans get some major work done. And when I don't run a heavy-hitter script? easily 9 hours of battery life.

M1 is not that much more faster than intel - it just has a lot of precompiled procedures in hardware. The reason no one else did what apple did? Because normal companies design their computer for what it needs to run. Apple designs their computer and says - world, you now have to build all your software for this computer. Well, that's why pretty much nothing I use runs on macs.

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#44

Post by tremere »

userbinator wrote: post #11

Apple has always chosen form over function, and this isn't any exception; the aesthetics of a "clean" boot process is clearly more important to them than being able to easily figure out what's happening, and I suspect at least part of the reason for this opaqueness is to encourage learned helplessness and visits to the Apple Store (which may result in upselling or otherwise exchange of $$$) when something doesn't wor…

When I work with a computer I really don't want to think too much about POST or how the power on button sounds. I simply want it to turn on and work. The functioning of my computer system is mostly orthogonal to my work. I don't distract myself by obsessing over POST messages when I have a backlog to work through.

For your other points, my visits to the Apple Store do not result from learned helplessness. Most problems with Apple products can be resolved using their knowledge base, or if you must, a couple minutes of chat. Apple even has free technical support reachable by phone if you have a real technical issue (like mail issues with your Mac.com address, which came to me as a surprise that they would even do this).

When I do go to the Apple Store the few times that I do, quite frankly it feels like I'm going there to rip them off. Their prices are fair and when you have Apple Care+ they bend backwards to get you up and running. I almost want to apologize to the poor overworked genius after an Apple Store visit.

This is an experience completely different from that from a more conventional PC manufacturer. With a home built PC or one from a gaming vendor like iBuypower, you're pretty much left with the manuals for your components, which are sparse and hardly updated. Even if you get pretty POST beeps it's not reassuring that these problems have little recourse other than "buy more crap to fix your problem" or "flash this shady bin." There is no Apple Store equivalent for regular PC either, if you need help with a regular PC the geek squad is no better at Googling your issue than you are, and very few insurance plans will rebuild your computer for you without a huge copay. "Big" vendors like Dell are even worse, whose support can be summarized as "fuck you pay me" even when the problem is entirely their fault.

To summarize, getting help with a regular PC is a game of passing the buck around by vendors. With Apple there is no one to pass the buck to, so you have them pinned.

All that stuff is worth way more to me than some clunks and beeps.

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#45

Post by userbinator »

doctor_eval wrote: post #36
intelVISA wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this... serious?

Absolutely serious. What do you want me to do? I’m uninterested in fixing it myself. To be clear: I don’t have an opinion about whether or not POST is technically necessary. It is or it isn’t, whatever. I’m just responding to the commentary that somehow Apple’s approach to POST is wrong and that POST messages are somehow important in and of themselves. Just because POST messages float your boat doesn’t mean that they…

You can ignore the messages if you want, but you can't learn from something that you can't see.

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#46

Post by [deleted] »

bentcorner wrote: post #18
doctor_eval wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the opposite. I see all that junk on a PC booting and I think to myself, well, what happens if one of those tests fail? I'm gonna reboot. And if it keeps failing, I'll take it to a shop. If I take a Mac to the Apple store, they will run their in-house diagnostics and tell me what's wrong. If I take a PC to the PC store, they will run their own diagnostics and tell me what's wrong. So what benefit does this messy…

If you build your own PC, POST is your basic smoke test that everything is plugged in and functioning as expected. And if you didn't build your own PC, well, stuff fails and POST can tell you what's wrong. And it's fine if that stuff isn't important to you, but its better to have these tools and not need them instead of the other way around.

[deleted]

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#47

Post by yreg »

devinprater wrote: post #42

sigh I wish Macs were better for accessibility. But nope, Windows still rules for blind people. VoiceOver's awful support for web apps really shows how... Safari not responding. bad things are. I went to Best Buy to check out a Mac. It's really bad when it takes a MacBook Pro to make VoiceOver not freeze for a few seconds when visiting doordash.com. Oh and it works really badly with Google Docs and Drive too, which m…

Anecdotally we have more issues with developing for NVDA and JAWS than for VoiceOver.

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#48

Post by simonh »

sonofhans wrote: post #19
userbinator wrote: post #11

Apple has always chosen form over function, and this isn't any exception; the aesthetics of a "clean" boot process is clearly more important to them than being able to easily figure out what's happening, and I suspect at least part of the reason for this opaqueness is to encourage learned helplessness and visits to the Apple Store (which may result in upselling or otherwise exchange of $$$) when something doesn't wor…

For sure I take your point about seeing POST information. When I switched from Debian to OS X (10.0) I installed an app which gave me that POST info on boot. It looked pretty cool. I was used to seeing it in Linux for years, and it make me happy to have it on OS X. > Apple has always chosen form over function. But this isn’t true, and there’s substantial evidence against it. Steve Jobs is famous for saying, “Design i…

Yep, they haven’t 100% every time got it right, but for Apple in the Jobs era form and function were the same thing, and for the most part they’ve kept to that vision. Just look at AirPods or the watch.

Obviously we’ll never know, but I don't think Jobs would have tolerated the butterfly keyboard debacle anywhere near as long as it dragged on.

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#49

Post by einherjae »

usernew wrote: post #43
nickvanw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fans is a bonus as well.

I have an 8core xeon laptop from work. it's thin, it's insanely fast, it has 128GB of RAM. I can set the profile to quiet, and the CPU doesn't boost and the fans never come on. Here's what I can do, that a MBP cannot do - run a whole bunch of crap that doesn't run on ARM - most vendor tools that aren't browser based. The MBP is a laptop, it's fast, but it's not a "pro" laptop. Pro means I can plug it in with a brick-…

[flagged]

Re: Has Apple sounded the last POST?

#50

Post by wtallis »

usernew wrote: post #43
nickvanw wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take SSDs over hard drives spinning up, and the rest of it is pretty much a clear improvement over what existed before. The fact that my M1 MBP doesn't usually spin up any fans is a bonus as well.

I have an 8core xeon laptop from work. it's thin, it's insanely fast, it has 128GB of RAM. I can set the profile to quiet, and the CPU doesn't boost and the fans never come on. Here's what I can do, that a MBP cannot do - run a whole bunch of crap that doesn't run on ARM - most vendor tools that aren't browser based. The MBP is a laptop, it's fast, but it's not a "pro" laptop. Pro means I can plug it in with a brick-…

> it's thin, it's insanely fast, it has 128GB of RAM.

Really? 128GB of RAM means it has four memory slots, which is usually only found in systems that are using desktop processors in a mobile package. There's no market segment of laptops that's thicker.

> M1 is not that much more faster than intel - it just has a lot of precompiled procedures in hardware.

There's a lot of special-purpose hardware in the M1, but they're not magic. The CPU benchmarks you've seen are still just benchmarks of the general-purpose CPU cores.

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