Live data from Hacker News

Apple's Blue Ocean

hypercritical.co

191–200 of 262 posts

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#191
post #151
post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

The lack of MST support caught me by surprise. Six years ago, I intentionally bought an expensive monitor with USB-C and daisy-chaining support as the second screen so that the monitor itself would be able to function as my dock. Lo and behold, it worked fine on Windows but not on MacOS. Had to buy a dock separately and now have one more thing cluttering my desk. I spent so long troubleshooting and trying to figure o…

It's such a frustrating missing feature.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#192
post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them. Also, NVIDIA cards in eGPUs and Thunderbolt (arm64) aren't supported. The best solution is either don't use Apple, or have a machine under warranty and very good backups. Complaints aside, the Anker 777 dock does 5K-8K DP over USB-C, 1 GbE, 100w charging, 4 USB-A and more and works w…

I've got a 14 year old imac that says otherwise

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point Apple refuses to replace the batteries of your macbook as they stop supporting the model. At that point you could be down to a few hours of battery life, with no third party repair shop willing to work on your laptop at a reasonable price. That's where you'd be with a 2017 macbook Air for instance. Replaceable batteries gives an out to that situation, as one battery maker somewhere in the world could be…

Are you sure about that 2017 Macbook Air? I have a 2013 Macbook Pro and I'm getting the battery replaced next week by Apple. My laptop is over 10 years old and they're still doing it at their standard battery replacement price.

My mistake, I mixed up a Macbook pro and an Air. The Air was from 2014, the pro is 2017.

Could it be regional differences ? I rechecked on the online support page - both Jp and Fr -, and repair support falls off right at 2015 (which is nothing to sneeze at for a maker, but I'd still wish for more)

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#194
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy with an LED bulb that lasted a year. I haven't yet found one that can do that reliably. Remember that 60W incandescent bulbs costing $0.25 used to be available that met that goal. We've taken huge steps backwards on interior household lighting.

Just joining in with others who report that I haven't had any problems with LED bulb failures. I've used exclusively LED bulbs for at least 5 years now (maybe about 15 bulbs across my home), and none has ever failed on me. They do sometimes flicker when they're in a traditional dimmer set at an intermediate level, even though the ones I've bought claim to work with a dimmer. That's frustrating. But I haven't had any…

Dimming is complicated. Some switches do it differently to others. Your dimmable bulbs probably have fineprint somewhere saying which it supports.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#195
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you don't understand. SSDs begin to encounter problems over time after some number of read/write cycles. This is entirely expected and when one sector has issues it gets remapped to one of some spares that are built into the drive. Once those are exhausted it's a matter of time before you have an unusable SSD and, if it's soldered to the motherboard, an unusable laptop. A sister comment to mine referred to this t…

But where did they say they only used each device for 1.5 years? That seemed like your assumption based on the quoted dozen laptops across twenty years; I certainly have a number of devices concurrently, with the oldest now being 14 years (still working though only on a power supply as the battery is badly degraded). That said I also strongly prefer a replaceable drive, but more because I don't want to buy the capaci…

It’s a pretty fair assumption, I think. It’d be a really unusual if they kept buying laptops and somehow continued using all or some of them at the same rate.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#196
post #3

The future is batteries with more charge cycles, not replaceable batteries. The solid state battery people are claiming 10,000 charge/discharge cycles. If they can achieve that, it's 27 years of battery life. The case will wear out first.

Actually, if the EU gets its way, a future with mandatory removable batteries might be the only possible future. And I'm so looking forward for it. Next up should be mandatory recycling of batteries by the manufacturers.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a bit of a myth for ever lasting bulbs, its more complicated than that. The life time was a trade off of colour and brightness. If you made them very red shifted and quite dim then there are bulbs that are very old still around, but they don't produce much light and never did. The harder you drive the filament the better the light properties but the quicker it died. The industry choose a point for trade offs as a…

I'd be happy with an LED bulb that lasted a year. I haven't yet found one that can do that reliably. Remember that 60W incandescent bulbs costing $0.25 used to be available that met that goal. We've taken huge steps backwards on interior household lighting.

You likely have an issue with your wiring. LED bulbs last much longer on average on a a good circuit - but they are less tolerant of spikes and drops in voltages, thus circuit, switch, wiring quality comes into play.

Would be much easier instead of embedding an AC/DC converter inside each bulb that we now get standard 12V DC for lighting throughout homes - That would centralize the voltage sensitivity and allow larger circuits / capacitors to regulate this.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#198
post #77

Two things I've been waiting on for years: • MST (DisplayPort daisy chaining) in MacOS. The hardware has supported it for over a decade. The OS is the weak link here. It's the difference between spending $75-$300 for a dock in addition to the cables and just connecting the monitors together along with a single cable to the first monitor. • Non-soldered storage. Seriously. Storage is the most likely component to fail.…

Apple devices aren't engineered to last; they're engineered to be manufactured, sell new, and sometimes sell expensive repairs by them. Also, NVIDIA cards in eGPUs and Thunderbolt (arm64) aren't supported. The best solution is either don't use Apple, or have a machine under warranty and very good backups. Complaints aside, the Anker 777 dock does 5K-8K DP over USB-C, 1 GbE, 100w charging, 4 USB-A and more and works w…

I have had many Apple devices since the 2nd gen iPod, and they have all lasted a very long time compared to my other devices. All my laptops back to my 15” PowerBook is still working. They have fixed a faulty GPU on a 4 year old laptop for free, even though I had opened the laptop and changed thermal paste. (Known manufacturing issue with that GPU, but still impressive)

They have made mistakes. Like the battery in my current 2015 MBP is too hard to replace. And I avoided upgrading for a long time due to the known issues with the keyboards. But it seems like they generally correct when making mistakes like that.

I do agree that SSDs shouldn’t be soldered on though. Hopefully it’s one of the mistakes they’ll eventually fix. I kind of understand the motivation.. you can make it impossible to effectively steal a device, or access its contents. The device becomes very simple and robust in some ways. But they could come up with a good compromise.

Like, sure, keep the concept of not having an SSD controller on the drive, and firmware on the SSD. But sell replacement SSDs with the firmware and a recover OS preloaded. One that lets you provision the new drive with the SOC through your iCloud account. Depending on the on-chip storage and whether it’s fuse/EPROM-based or flash, the number of possible drive replacements might be limited. But that’s an OK compromise.

Re: Apple's Blue Ocean

#200

Non US resident here, I just switched from macbook 13 to system76 lemur. Half the price and double performance, could not be happier. Market is ready for segmentation and users today are more tech savvy then before.

What kind of performance? The best Geekbench scores for a System76 Lemur Pro with an i7 are still significantly lower than those of a M1 MacBook Air, which is the slowest Apple Silicon laptop. The Lemur also costs $1,300+ with the i7 (i.e. not cheaper than the Air) and has a 1080p screen.

Not saying it's a bad machine or anything, but the "half the price compared to a MacBook" meme is now more irrelevant than ever.

Post reply on HN