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A world without the Mac Pro

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Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#151

Post by addicted »

mhenr18 wrote: post #140
addicted wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Windows has free OS updates * Precision Touchpads are equally well supported in Windows. * HiDPI is better on the Mac * I don't know much about this. * Are you referring to Wacom style tablets? Not sure about that, but if tablets in general, OSX tablets don't even exist, so it's irrelevant. * Windows Audio APIs are as good as Core Audio now. * This really isn't that big a deal. In Windows it leads to different bene…

* You're right, but it took how long to get here? * The APIs are there now, but the hardware isn't on many machines. * * * Yes, I'm referring to graphics tablets. I've had to deal with the APIs for that stuff myself and what was about 10 lines of extra event handlers on OSX ended up being well over 200 lines on Windows. * There's still driver issues that aren't present on OSX. * You've got to realise that anywhere wh…

But that's the point. MS is catching up very rapidly now, while OSX is stagnating.

My point about the scrolling isn't that it's not a big deal because it's a minor deficiency. My point is that it's a design choice, and many prefer the Windows method. Neither choice is inherently better.

Despite having come in much later, Cortana is at worst about as good as Siri. For one thing, on the desktop, I can actually type in my Cortana requests. The fact that Cortana combines Siri and Spotlight makes it far more powerful and useful. It's kind of insane that Apple thinks people want different information when they ask the same question when they type it, or when they speak it.

Windows has been a lot better than OSX in many ways as well. Especially since Windows 7. For one thing, it will take until next year before Apple gets a decent File System, instead of a kludgy mess.

What's worrying for Apple is that Windows is improving a lot faster than OSX. The gap between them is narrowed very significantly, and personally, for the past few months, Windows 10 is a much nicer environment than OSX (and I've been using OSX exclusively for over a decade).

I think the idea that Windows is so far behind OSX is just not true. Part of it is that this has been true for so long, and Windows 8 was so bad, that people believe it instinctly. Part of it is that people moving to Windows want it to be like OSX, and anything that is different is considered worse.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#152

Post by mos_basik »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #118
witty_username wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, is that because of VPN?

No nothing I posted about has anything to do with VPN. The user wasn't able to connect to our guest 802.1X (EAP, 802.11n) wireless network using their Ubuntu laptop. MacOS clients and Windows clients have no issue (it is a guest network, non-employees use it often).

The only time I've ever had an issue connecting to a network with Linux was with a specific university network, which (forgive me if I mangle this because I'm not very familiar with networking protocols) used WPA2, PEAP and MSCHAPv2 and required a username and password to authenticate. The only tricky step was you needed to indicate to the network manager to use a certificate at /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt

That was a pain to set up, and I switched to their alternative network that permitted whitelisted MAC IDs pretty quickly.

Also, I've noticed that recently, when I connect to certain guest networks at office buildings and libraries and so forth, there is a "login" page where you consent to not look at porn or whatever on their connection that you are supposed to be automatically redirected to when you first connect and try to load a page.

Sometimes the redirect doesn't work, and you are forbidden from loading pages until you've clicked the button on the page it failed to send you to. Going to 1.1.3.1 or 192.168.1.1 or some variant usually finds it.

But for the most part! I have not had any issues with normal "type the password into the WPA network" or "associate with the unsecured network". See my other comment in this chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881305

And in the worst case, I always have my phone with me, rooted with unlimited 4G and a USB cable to tether it with.

YMMV.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#153

Post by pjmlp »

mhenr18 wrote: post #144
pjmlp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use Cocoa in 2016. There was the Object Pascal Toolbox, replaced by C Toolbox (MacApp), replaced by MPW, replaced by PowerPlant, replaced by Carbon, replaced by Cocoa. I can list many other examples, even Cocoa has lots of deprecated APIs since OS X 10.0.

Sure, but the Windows APIs that I mentioned aren't historical. Those are all currently supported APIs. Carbon/Cocoa was the last time that OS X has had a dual-API situation but even then, Carbon was always referred to as the transitional library and Cocoa was always referred to as what you should use for new code. While Apple floundered during the 90s with their OS strategy, their API strategy in OS X has been absolu…

> It's now 2016, Carbon has come and gone as it was intended to and Cocoa is still around and is still the API you use for working with the Mac. If you're trying to do something on the Mac, there's going to be a single officially supported way to do it and that's it (if it's supported at all).

There are quite a few 32bit apps making use of it and they will never be ported to Cocoa.

> Meanwhile, there are three totally different frameworks on Windows that you can use to do the same thing, all of which are officially supported and none of which are deprecated.

Win32 and MFC are deprecated for new applications, the way forward is UWP with XAML.

Project Centipede is just for porting existing code into UWP world.

Windows Forms was officially deprecated at BUILD 2014.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#154

Post by mikhailt »

sigjuice wrote: post #49

Any particular reason why Apple should sell Macs at all, given they make almost all their money from other products? Besides Xcode, is there any other app (or equivalent) that can't be had on other systems?

First of all, Apple is making more money from Macs than iPads. In the last quarter, they had ~$6B in revenue from Macs versus $4.2B from iPads (~$7B same quarter last year). Are you seriously suggesting that Apple should drop that kind of money just because the iPhone had ~$30B instead? (Source: http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy16datasum.pdf) They're not going to make macOS a paid OS for sale on other hardware, which means they'd lose $4-6B per quarter, that's $20b revenue a year they can use to improve all products.

They're not going to keep making that much money from iPhone forever, it will decline eventually as competitors keep getting better and better. Google is entering the market with products that finally rivals iPhones and Microsoft/HP/Dell with Surface/Spectre/XPS products that does rival Macbooks.

This is Apple, they want total control of the entire stack and the only way to do this is to do it themselves. macOS will not survive on other hardware with questionable QA. I started hating W10 simply because of its driver issues, automatic brightness stuff that I can't turn off on SP4. Same Win10 on my Macs, it works much better and consistent. There's no way Apple will do this to macOS.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#155

Post by stevesun21 »

stevesun21 wrote: post #82

I personally don't really care how nerdy criticism sounds like to me. MacBook Pro still the best developer laptop I have ever use. Even, you just keep a closed MBP on everywhere in your house, it looks so like a piece of fine art rather than an electronic device to stand out.

Really, say what product I personally like get down vote?

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#156

Post by JdeBP »

mhenr18 wrote: post #88
cwyers wrote: post #2

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up — and they won’t do everything right. So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is i…

* Free OS updates. * Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS. * Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI setup). I cannot stress how poorly Windows 10 performs in this regard. This has been a solved problem on the Mac for years. * Better colour management through the whole UI stack. * Better tablet support (OSX has had integrated support for tablet events since 10.4…

> If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10.

When I've wanted to do some quick calculations on a Windows PC at a single keypress, I've pressed the calculator button on my keyboard and a calculator has come up. And this has been true since the turn of the century (for me personally; for Windows for several years longer than that).

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#157

Post by CJefferson »

mhenr18 wrote: post #144
pjmlp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use Cocoa in 2016. There was the Object Pascal Toolbox, replaced by C Toolbox (MacApp), replaced by MPW, replaced by PowerPlant, replaced by Carbon, replaced by Cocoa. I can list many other examples, even Cocoa has lots of deprecated APIs since OS X 10.0.

Sure, but the Windows APIs that I mentioned aren't historical. Those are all currently supported APIs. Carbon/Cocoa was the last time that OS X has had a dual-API situation but even then, Carbon was always referred to as the transitional library and Cocoa was always referred to as what you should use for new code. While Apple floundered during the 90s with their OS strategy, their API strategy in OS X has been absolu…

> Sure, but the Windows APIs that I mentioned aren't historical. Those are all currently supported APIs.

That's not a bad thing. It means if I wrote an app 5, or 10, or 15 years ago, I can keep working on it and updating it without having to throw most of the code away and start again.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#158

Post by riffic »

laserbeams wrote: post #150
bitwize wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually all of the rendering heavy lifting and many of the desktops in the world of cinematic VFX are Linux. Have been for years. Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet.

> Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet. And those machines are terrible. Teradici thin clients streaming Red Hat from a closet somewhere. The latency on those things was significant, and the fonts unreadable. The hardware was really buggy, the monitors were really low resolution, and there was some irony on typing on a broken Dell keyboard in the Steve Jobs building. The crappyness of having to sit in front of those…

DreamWorks Animation/PDI gave their crew decent HP x86 RHEL boxes. Desktop and farm Linux is a necessity in these fields.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#159

Post by mhermher »

mhenr18 wrote: post #116
spo81rty wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would most macOS users care about the Windows registry, Microsoft APIs, OS level PDF, or POSIX? Perhaps a programmer, but not an end user? Seems like I would take a super powerful Windows or linux server any day over a lower powered Mac Pro just because of the OS if hardware specs were that critical. Taking 10 vs 1 minute to render would be way more important. BTW, Windows 10 has multi desktop and most apps work…

You wouldn't be commenting on things working at high DPIs on Windows if you've been using a Mac for the past few years. It's really one of those things where a lot of Windows users think that it's fine, but once you see how well seamless and fully supported things are on OSX you realise just how much there is left to do. Every single app integrates well and the scaling is flawless even for the few that don't support…

I've never dragged a window between screens on Windows because that's not something you do on Windows. You use win+direction. Something sorely missing from osx and third party software is nowhere near as good as the native Windows solution. I use both OSs almost everyday. Mac for work, and win for home. The fact that you mention dragging windows (a necessity on mac) in Windows shows that you probably don't use it very much or don't know how to use it conveniently.

I enjoy both OSs (the UX is basically 90% the same btw), they're fine. And there are areas where one works better than the other. By focusing on the issues with one of them without realizing the issues of the other just shows that you're probably not familiar with the other.

I'm not disputing your point, just showing your partiality. I've literally not had to "manually" resize or drag a window in Windows since Win7, but I do it everyday on mac. The Windows model for window management is just better, but you'd never hear it in these comments.

Re: A world without the Mac Pro

#160

Post by hosh »

wfleming wrote: post #143
hosh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).

As you've probably noticed in the other replies here, opinions vary widely :). These kinds of things are also part of why I switched to OS X in 2003-ish, so I understand the hesitation. In my experience, Linux is perfectly fine nowadays for these things. I've been traveling a bit recently (and so have been using a lot more random WiFi access points, tethering with my phone, and relying on battery for power), and ever…

That sounds like it's worth for me to try again if that is the case. Maybe I can find some decent hardware that works well. Thanks for sharing.

The flip side is for the work I do nowadays, I usually use a Linux VM on something like Digital Ocean. There was at one point I was using a 2011 11" Mac Air to dev work.

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