Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

folklore.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#101

Post by array_key_first »

chihuahua wrote: post #82
pwthornton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster? And then he told them to fix it and make Mac laptops sleep/wake just as well as iOS. Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.

How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.

Yes, provided it's not dead because it didn't actually sleep or you have to boot it up because it decided to shut itself down at some point (windows update?)

Sleep on windows is a hot mess, I've never had an experience I had any amount of confidence in.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#102

Post by array_key_first »

leidenfrost wrote: post #24
santoshalper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enjoy your tacky, Vista-esque, liquid glass.

It's tacky, but not the end of the world. It remins me of some gnome themes from 2005-2009. I'd choose that a thousand times over an ad filled start menu

Fair, but you could have 2025 gnome, or even KDE!

My main problem with liquid glass is it's slow, and the trade off is... a worse user experience in literally every conceivable way? Wow, okay, not a very good deal.

Granted, most downgrades in things like legibility or density are very slight. But they're still downgrades. Downgrading is only worth it if you get something out of it.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#103

Post by array_key_first »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #53
lostlogin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s dishonest about wanting a quicker boot time?

Saying it "saves lives"?

It probably doesn't save lives, except maybe in some extreme scenarios. But it does save life. Time, the most precious resource, even more precious than money.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#104

Post by kalleboo »

array_key_first wrote: post #100
cogman10 wrote: post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

The main problem with the "a little lag is fine" mentality is that, in most organizations, it's becomes cancerous. It spread and infiltrates every team, every corner. When you have hundreds of teams and they're all doing suboptimal things for shits and giggles, that extra 500 milliseconds is now a minute. And, the real kicker is that usually the slow stuff isn't even simpler or better. It's just naive and poorly thou…

Also for a platform vendor, it also infects everyone who develops for their platform.

Writing iOS apps, I've been in meetings where the discussion has basically made Apple's equivalent a benchmark. You can't make your feature slower/worse/buggier than theirs, but making it faster/better is optional.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#105

Post by cogman10 »

array_key_first wrote: post #100
cogman10 wrote: post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

The main problem with the "a little lag is fine" mentality is that, in most organizations, it's becomes cancerous. It spread and infiltrates every team, every corner. When you have hundreds of teams and they're all doing suboptimal things for shits and giggles, that extra 500 milliseconds is now a minute. And, the real kicker is that usually the slow stuff isn't even simpler or better. It's just naive and poorly thou…

> So it's not even laziness really, it's something else. Apathy, maybe?

My hypothesis is that it comes from a bygone of tech.

Consider the lyrics from Weird Al's "It's all about the pentiums" (1999)

    My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
    But it was obsolete before I opened the box
    You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
    Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

    Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
    If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
From around the 80s all the way up until ~2010, one of the most reliable ways to make software run faster was to wait a year. You could get 50 or even 100% faster CPUs in a matter of a year or two.

Tech CEOs weren't blind to this fact. I have a lot of old software dev coworkers that lamented that era because they never had to think about performance problems. It was always "this won't be an issue if we wait a year".

I think that era has mostly built in an industry wide sloppiness and attitude.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#106

Post by milch »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #57
Esophagus4 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs was one of the original product managers. He brought the customer perspective right into engineering. Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions. He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)

>> He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… What history have you been reading? Sure we can find examples of each of these by I can also give you counter examples - big ones - off the top of my head. 1. Did his absolute best (but failed) to cut the Apple II product line, even though it was the only money maker for the company, to support several losing prduct lines.…

> So all you want is your CEO to make repeated big bets and be consistently right?

Isn't that what they get the big pay package for?

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#108

Post by seba_dos1 »

cogman10 wrote: post #99
abanana wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs... No. Absolutely, unequivocally, no . You're talking about the difference between then and now in the way software was/is built, not the difference between Jobs and everyone else! The deification of Jobs is bad enough without the constant historical revisionism. Back then, generally tuning/maximising performance and quality was a top priority for the majority of…

> "Faster hardware" just didn't affordably exist for them back then. Not what I said. And I think you are the one that's doing historical revisionism now. Even in this email from 1983, it starts off with > since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II From the 80s through the 00s (which I was alive through and very aware of), computer hardware was frequently doubling in performance.…

> The common wisdom then was to make things fast enough. Anything more was a waste of time because in a year or two hardware would be twice as fast.

...and people would be using hardware spanning several generations that actually considerably differed in performance, as nobody but the nerds was buying a new PC every year.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#109

Post by JoeAltmaier »

pear01 wrote: post #64
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. The one-button mouse? That was part of the design impact - for user experience, it wasn't much of a win. Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!) How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'. In fact, I'm not sure wher…

These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative. And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understa…

I get it. Lots of people fall for design over usefulness. Not very technical, so a mac is enough.

but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.

People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.

I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.

Not entitled; just very tired of fighting it.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#110

Post by seec »

chihuahua wrote: post #82
pwthornton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster? And then he told them to fix it and make Mac laptops sleep/wake just as well as iOS. Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.

How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.

They just need to feel superior about their Macs. My experience is that Windows wake just as fast if not faster.

But in typical Apple fanboy fashion, they will compare a 2K laptop to a random 500 cheapo laptop.

Apple real strength is in the efficiency, but there are many things it can't run and they leave top end performance on the table (outside of video editing).

Post reply on HN