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Apple Is Listening

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Re: Apple Is Listening

#231

Post by zemvpferreira »

_ph_ wrote: post #199
linguae wrote: post #28

I’m glad that Apple is finally updating their Macs again, but at the same time Apple has doubled-down on its refusal to sell user-serviceable, upgradeable, and expandable hardware at prices that are within reach for most customers. The laptops have soldered RAM and soldered storage. The Mac Mini and iMac Pro thankfully have DIMMs, but in order to keep the warranty, you have to visit an Apple-approved repair center to…

I so much agree. The price difference to all its predecessors is killing the otherwise brilliant new machine. I actually had set aside about 5 to 6k for a Mac Pro with a screen, but no luck for me. I am currently using a 27" iMac, but I would like to have a desktop class graphics card and the 27" screen is a bit small compared to the 30" available before. My only hope is, that on the footsteps of the Mac Pro, there w…

If the desktop graphics card is your primary reason to upgrade, consider an egpu. They’re a stable solution in osx and not that expensive. Turned my ageing macbook into a nice vr rig.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#232

Post by gshdg »

ianai wrote: post #38
colmvp wrote: post #10

Back in 2012, I bought the original rMBP. It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s…

The oled touchpad is ridiculous. I never use it “as intended” and it wrecks my function key muscle memory. My laptop is actually expanding because of the battery. I’d like at least a dock that does decent, active cooling.

Get that battery replaced stat. If it’s expanding, it’s a fire risk.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#233

Post by gshdg »

1024core wrote: post #85
colmvp wrote: post #10

Back in 2012, I bought the original rMBP. It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s…

As a vi user, I hate the touchbar and its escape "key". I sometimes find myself turning down the brightness instead of getting into command mode which is irritating.

I have a habit of resting a finger on a key I intend to press soon but not yet. This keeps biting me in the ass with the stupid touchbar escape key.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#234

Post by _ph_ »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #231
_ph_ wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I so much agree. The price difference to all its predecessors is killing the otherwise brilliant new machine. I actually had set aside about 5 to 6k for a Mac Pro with a screen, but no luck for me. I am currently using a 27" iMac, but I would like to have a desktop class graphics card and the 27" screen is a bit small compared to the 30" available before. My only hope is, that on the footsteps of the Mac Pro, there w…

If the desktop graphics card is your primary reason to upgrade, consider an egpu. They’re a stable solution in osx and not that expensive. Turned my ageing macbook into a nice vr rig.

Just that I would need a new machine, my iMac still has TB2.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#235

Post by ohiovr »

linguae wrote: post #28

I’m glad that Apple is finally updating their Macs again, but at the same time Apple has doubled-down on its refusal to sell user-serviceable, upgradeable, and expandable hardware at prices that are within reach for most customers. The laptops have soldered RAM and soldered storage. The Mac Mini and iMac Pro thankfully have DIMMs, but in order to keep the warranty, you have to visit an Apple-approved repair center to…

I got scared and fed up with Windows 10 and retreated to Mac OS for 5 years until I had a fiasco of a time trying to upgrade my mac pro to Mojave. During the time I used Mac OS I became familiar with Bash and some Unix ways of doing things. I found Bash to be really useful and powerful compared to the command interpreter in Windows.

I had a big interest in virtualization and along the years of using the mac I tried all kinds of linux servers in VMs for research and self education. I never did like ubuntu's standard desktop. I tried them all. After the Mojave fiasco I thought I'd buy a mid range computer with the latest Nvidia card (partially just because I could do that and I could not do that with mac). My mac was on the cliff edge of planned obsolescence anyway (Apple decides for you when it is time to upgrade).

Long story short it is indeed difficult to get used to Linux. You have to develop a survival attitude first. I found that changing one thing like fstab could make the system unbootable. Sudo can ruin your system fast if you are not careful and an expert. I did not want to be either careful or an expert just to get work done. So to survive my poor administration skills I found I could lean on a program called TimeShift which works a lot like timemachine for Mac. Its really like the best parts of Time Machine combined with Windows' restore points. Anytime I am about to install something new or tweak something that has the potential for causing a disaster I take a few minutes to make a snapshot via TimeMachine/Rsync. I can always go back, and if I really mess everything up I can boot into a live cd and run TimeShift from that.

TimeShift unfortunately does not do home directories very well but there is another gui/cli program called BackInTime that I use for the Time Machine like solution for my home directory and a couple others.

I use rotating backups. I have backups on a big 8 TB external drive and then I rsync that to a copy drive and leave that one offline in case my main machine gets poisoned by ransomware.

So thats my survival technique..

But is it worth it? It took me about a month to figure out what to do for disasters and bad configurations and I spent about a month deciding what "distro" to use. I tried all flavors of Ubuntu, and tried Mint but settled on Debian with the Cinnamon desktop. I got to say I really like cinnamon, it is very ram hungry but ram is cheap so it isn't a problem for me. It supports high dpi (well 2x at least). The file manager is great, it even has ftp built into it. Context menus work good, right click to open as root, or open a terminal. Cinnamon is a classic take on well established principles in UI design that were perfected over a decade ago, instead of changing things just to change them.

But so what if there are no good applications! I have a multimedia background so that was my interest. I used to use Photoshop cs6 for years but Adobe is too incompetent and greedy to rely on for the future. My photo editing needs have not changed much since I bought it in 2008 so Gimp isn't too far behind what I owned since then. I just tried using lightwave recently but it fails to work even in a VM so I decided to learn Blender. I could not justify purchasing Modo even though it is available for Linux. Main thing is Muscle memory. The proof is in the pudding for art programs. If people are doing amazing things with it, the software has merit. So I have a lot of optimism that I can still get some nice work done.

Visual studio code on linux is really nice. There were some snafus I had to get around but when it is setup its terrific.

I never used Microsoft office at home and my office requirements are simple. But if I did need it, I could use Office 365 on a web browser I presume. I just need the occasional word processor and spreadsheet.

Video editing on Linux is still a sore point but I like Olive editor and I am trying to support it with Patreon. It feels a lot like an early verion of Sonic Foundry Vegas. I in no way will ever miss Adobe Premiere

Debian has tens of thousands of software packages that are just a apt install away. That is a gigantic value. I don't have to worry about Window's malware as much as linux malware. I don't have to upgrade my hardware according to Apple's schedules and demands. I have access to the latest or near to the latest Nvidia hardware.

Desktop computing today is a disaster. I hate windows, I can't afford to waste money on inferior hardware and pray that the designers don't forsake my professional platform for consumerish goals. Debian isn't the only or the best linux perhaps. But if I didn't have Linux I would just give up on computing entirely and work at a factory or something.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#236

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

bitL wrote: post #207
golergka wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Ubuntu run Final Cut?

What's the point of this question? Stating the obvious that voluntary platform lock-in has consequences? That software from Apple doesn't run on anything else than Apple hardware (iTunes being an exception)? It runs DaVinci Resolve and Pixar's RenderMan natively. CS6 runs reliably under Wine as well. Can you run 3DS Max on macOS? So, isn't macOS a pro environment then?

For what it’s worth, you can run 3dsmax in Parallels like you can run CS6 in Wine...

Re: Apple Is Listening

#237

Post by michaelt »

amelius wrote: post #226
Aromasin wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new trend should be, in my eyes, to make electronic hardware similar to that of a good leather jacket or pair of denim jeans. If it tears, you patch it. If it fades, you dye it. That same mentality of repair used to exist, but as design has become obfuscated and electronics micro-sized, there's little you can do as a consumer. Collective thought should have been "Well, if it can't be repaired by the consumer, the…

> It harkens back to the days where Wozniak and Jobs argued whether or not to put slots into the Apple 2, and Jobs won that one of course. The Apple ][ had expansion slots.

Aromasin is almost certainly thinking of [1]

"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability [....] Steve [Jobs] was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports."

"Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate [...] He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, [...] But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party."

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Re: Apple Is Listening

#238

Post by nathana »

kilburn wrote: post #136
scarface74 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Intel hasn’t created a consumer processor that is significantly faster than what they did in 2013 that means Apple isn’t listening? What hardware (besides a reliable keyboard) could Apple ship in a laptop in 2019 that would make it a worthy upgrade?

I'm probably not a good target, but my wishlist for a laptop (that I cannot buy anywhere right now) is: - Great touchpad (Apple are the only ones ticking that box) - Good keyboard (Old apple and thinkpads are fine. New apples are terrible, just like the Asus UX430 I got at work). - Great thermals (I want to be able to use my laptop as a laptop. Most of them nowadays burn during summer in hot areas). - Good battery li…

I have much the same wishlist as you, and also haven't found anything that ticks all of the boxes. My day job is network/sysadmin/IT, which mostly involves remote connectivity to other hosts, so my local CPU grunt needs are not particularly heavy.

That said, given the dearth of good options out there right now, I just replaced an old MacBook Air with a Surface Book 2, and with a few exceptions, I couldn't be happier right now:

1. This touchpad is just as good as pre-Force Touch ones from Apple. No joke. (If you must have the super-size ones with the Force Touch feedback instead of the "spring-board" style real button click, sorry...nobody else has that. But the non-Force Touch ones were "best in class" before, and that wasn't very long ago...)

2. The keyboard is easily the best laptop keyboard I have ever used. And that's coming from someone who used ThinkPads (I had the 770, the T42p, and the T60p) before switching to MacBooks, and who uses a Model M daily while at my desk. :-P

3. I have the base-model Surface Book. It's only a dual-core i5. But, again, I'm fine with that. The CPU is also housed in the screen, since the screen is made to be detachable from the keyboard. And since I have the base-model, I don't have the dGPU in my keyboard base either. So the base of the laptop stays cool while I use it on my lap. Oh...did I mention that the entire device (both keyboard base and screen) on the non-dGPU model is fanless? So no moving parts in the entire thing, noise-free, and isn't constantly sucking dust from the surrounding environment into itself.

4. There is a battery in both the screen and the keyboard base. Combined, I get amazing battery life, easily 8 hours or more depending. (I use it in laptop-mode 90% of the time.)

5. Screen on this is fantastic. Higher DPI than my 15" Retina MacBook Pro from 2012, way brighter, and the backlighting is more even. (I have the Samsung LCD on my 2012 rMBP...the model that never developed "image retention". I think the SB2 panel is made by Panasonic.)

6. It's got 2 USB-A, 1 USB-C (sadly no Thunderbolt, but it can handle DisplayPort), and a full-size SD.

7. Repairability is one area where it really falls flat, and in even bigger ways than the past MacBooks I own. :-( This thing I think got a repairability index of 1 (out of 10) from iFixIt. It's a sealed box for all intents and purposes. What really pisses me off, though, is that the SSD is not soldered onto the mainboard (it's a standard M.2 module), but there is absolutely no way of accessing it without basically destroying the computer in the process. If there was ONE area where I wish Microsoft had NOT taken any cues from Apple...gah, don't get me started. (And even then, at least with pre-2016 MacBook Pros, you could take the bottom cover off and get at the storage module in an emergency.)

8. The particular model I purchased ranges from $1,100 - 1,500 USD depending (list price is 1,500 but it's usually on sale). Don't know how that translates to your specific market.

9. I have not tried to use "desktop" Linux on it. I have booted SystemRescueCD off of a USB flash drive, though, in order to make a bit-for-bit image of my current Windows installation, and that worked fine (though to be fair I never bothered to start up X11). My understanding is that a lot of the hardware is supported even on current models; you can check out https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren... for more details.

Anyway, just FYI.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#239

Post by Crinus »

bitL wrote: post #207
golergka wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Ubuntu run Final Cut?

What's the point of this question? Stating the obvious that voluntary platform lock-in has consequences? That software from Apple doesn't run on anything else than Apple hardware (iTunes being an exception)? It runs DaVinci Resolve and Pixar's RenderMan natively. CS6 runs reliably under Wine as well. Can you run 3DS Max on macOS? So, isn't macOS a pro environment then?

The point is that he wants to use a program that isn't available on the OS you are suggesting.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#240

Post by whiteacid »

vbezhenar wrote: post #181
ink_13 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried mapping Caps Lock to Esc?

Caps Lock works as a Control key for me. Can't really reach built-in Control comfortably.

That was my problem too but I discovered the Karabiner Elements app which lets you map caps lock to escape when pressed alone and to control when held down.
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