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Home truths about macOS

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Re: Home truths about macOS

#171

Post by chrisandchris »

goosedragons wrote: post #83
chrisandchris wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of these apps will drop support for Monterey within the coming year(s)? How many of your apps will actually stop working when there are no updates? I think that if a Laptop lives for 6-8 years, that's quite good. If you don't think so, maybe Windows is a better fit for you because you can purchase fove (cheap) laptops for the price of one Mac. If you "need" your Mac for work, I think replacing it every 6-8 y…

Why buy 5 Windows laptops for the price of one Mac when one PC laptop can be supported for 2-3 times as long? You can run Windows 10 on a ThinkPad T60 from 2006. Windows 10 will get support until 2025. That's 19 years support from one machine. Use a Linux distro and get even more. Why spend more for a Mac if you get less useful life and are constantly having to repurchase software from OS upgrades breaking stuff?

I think you're missing my point a bit. Sure, if you even want longer support, don't purchase a laptop. Cheapest lifelong option...

My point was that the argument "apps won't run anymore" may be true, but there's no evidence for that. There are a lot of people running 10 year old Macs and the software does not just break.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#172

Post by kennend3 »

pram wrote: post #142
kennend3 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you wrote is accurate. The apps ran on both types of machines thanks to rosetta and the performance hit this takes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) It is doubtful that a PPC system can boot an intel MacOS HD. One is RISC the other CISC. The reason you can "natively" run intel on ARM machines is Rosetta2 "Until recently, Mac developers only had to worry about creating Intel-based apps. However…

lol maybe you should do some reading before posting. Mach-O supports multi-architecture binaries. Rosetta is solely for things that haven’t been made “Universal” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_binary

Great.. now explain why Rosetta exist if it is not needed because "mach-o supports.."

Re: Home truths about macOS

#173

Post by ihatepython »

Maursault wrote: post #81
lapcat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leopard to Mountain Lion were the glory days of OS X stability, with Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, and High Sierra standing out as focusing on bug fixes rather than introducing new features (and new bugs). This is a common misconception. Major OS updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Bertrand Serlet put up a "No New Features" keynote slide for Snow Leopard, but that was highly misleading, because Snow Le…

> This is a common misconception. This is vague. > Major OS updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. This was my major point. > Bertrand Serlet put up a "No New Features" keynote slide for Snow Leopard, but that was highly misleading, because Snow Leopard had many big under the hood changes, But no new features. The major goals of Snow Leopard were to improve performance and reduce its memory footprint (by r…

> But no new features. The major goals of Snow Leopard were to improve performance and reduce its memory footprint (by removing a lot of PPC code). What was nice about it, and what my point was, Apple had 2 years for bug fixes.

But there were major features, but they were not user facing. Snow Leopard introduced Grand Central Dispatch, improvements to Objective-C, things like that are major changes, more significant than simply changing the way the UI looks.

High Sierra introduced APFS, a major major change. Sierra was probably a better release as far as no new features, they fixed the USB stack they broke in El Capitan.

Mountain Lion introduced iCloud related stuff like notifications I think.

The releases that you believe are stable because of no new features, actually have major new features, but the guys writing the low level code are more talented than the guys writing the UI code, that's why those releases are more stable.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#174

Post by michaelcampbell »

saagarjha wrote: post #62
michaelcampbell wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are not talking about Linux here, where if you’re lucky, things work. What percentage of the Internet is even possible due to this, if you're to be believed, barely working and then only by luck, OS? I get the Apple cultiness, but we don't need it here.

Linux on a server and Linux on your laptop are very different experiences.

Fair point, but I've run *buntu on various laptops (old and new) and desktop(s) my son and I constructed from stuff chosen from pcpartpicker.com not 3 months ago.

"It's just worked". Every time.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#175

Post by michaelcampbell »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #64
michaelcampbell wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are not talking about Linux here, where if you’re lucky, things work. What percentage of the Internet is even possible due to this, if you're to be believed, barely working and then only by luck, OS? I get the Apple cultiness, but we don't need it here.

They’re probably talking about most desktop Linux distributions, which are less stable than what servers are running both because servers run distros with packages that are older and more polished and because servers don’t usually have hardware with notoriously troublesome drivers (e.g. Broadcom, Nvidia, some Realtek stuff, etc). Of course desktop users can tailor their machines to use with Linux and also run somethi…

> which are indeed more likely on average to break

Maybe; it's not happened to me in 15 or so years, but people have different experiences. That said, "more likely on average to break" is a far, FAR cry from "it works, if you're lucky".

Re: Home truths about macOS

#176

Post by [deleted] »

simondotau wrote: post #167
dangus wrote: post #132

Hard truths about software : they have bugs. There's no such thing as an OS that has zero bugs. All major versions of software become abandoned eventually. Then you either upgrade to a newer version of the software or you live with whatever bugs you have. > Those residual bugs are often severe: El Capitan continued to cause many Macs to grind to a halt through its entire cycle, the cause not being addressed until Sie…

(Apologies in advance for embracing the off-topic tangent.) What you quoted from the article: "Most people under the age of 70 who are in reasonably good health should be safe" For someone anti-vax, his own choice of words is odd. Most? Reasonably? Should? Is this supposed to be a compelling formulation of their argument? It's astounding to me that anti-vax arguments are so often laced in ambiguity and "principles",…

[deleted]

Re: Home truths about macOS

#177

Post by godDLL »

kmfpl wrote: post #48

This is simply how Apple does things. They provide software support for ~10 years and then they drop it. Is it wrong? I’m not entirely sure. You can call that greedy, but take a few things into consideration. Firstly, Apple provides highly specialized software that runs extremely well and efficiently on their own hardware. Continuously providing support for old hardware while simultaneously maintaining the same level…

I can't disagree.

On the other hand, if thinking about the world as it is and not about the abstract, I'd have to say that none of what Apple did since 2015 has anything to make me upgrade my hardware.

So I have like 6-8 computers that are all more than 7 years old by now. I'm not looking for new hardware.

And looking at the software they've released in those years, I'm not looking forward to new software.

Methinks I ate myself, thanks Apple. You got me spoiled.

And you can't compete.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#178

Post by godDLL »

lizardactivist wrote: post #13

Sort of agrees with my own opinion, that your use of Macs and iPhones and your stay in the ecosystem is only secure as long as you keep paying up. More specifically, you're good for a year after you do a major upgrade. After that you may or may not see critical issues addressed, and after two years all bets are off. I'm not sure how long Apple supports their overly expensive things these days, but I will not be surpr…

I don't know. I was a fan of what they were doing circa 2009-2014.

Big fan.

Haven't bought any computers since 2012 tho. And it looks to me like I am stuck with what I have, as what PC makers peddle is not meant for me.

If I was forced to, say for business reasons, to buy a bunch or even just one for the coming years, then in 2022 it would be Apple. Because they have memory and computing and bus on the same chip, and you can only beat that with a cluster. They even have a product that is a miniaturized computing cluster for a quarter of the price of one.

Apple is the greatest shit shoveler in PC-making right now. I'd go with Apple.

Re: Home truths about macOS

#180

Post by uni_rule »

kennend3 wrote: post #129
Maursault wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer BSD to Linux for a few reasons. Firstly, BSD is not encumbered by GPL. Also, any BSD is a complete operating system while Linux requires distros subject to the whims of their creators, which seem to focus on form over function. Any long term stability is almost accidental, and there is no standard edition of Linux. Lastly and I think most importantly, the centralized BSD ports system is more trustworthy than…

> Firstly, BSD is not encumbered by GPL. Also, any BSD is a complete operating system while Linux requires distros subject to the whims of their creators, which seem to focus on form over function This "BSD is a complete operating system" that you speak of... Do you mean FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragnonFly BSD, Darwin? Thankfully BSD is not subject to teh whims of any distro?

Has anything workable been made from Darwin in the past decade or has Apple mostly left that community high and dry?
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