Live data from Hacker News

The Mac Pro Lives

daringfireball.net

251–260 of 821 posts

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wasted an entire hardware iteration on the Touch Bar that hardly anyone cares about. That's what put them in this position. If anything is un-Apple about it, it's that they so badly understood the desires of their customers.

Truth. I had $1,500 earmarked for a new macbook pro before they launched. Switched to Linux for all my development work shortly after. Which, I should have done earlier tbh.

To be honest I feel like the touchbar MBP gets a bit of undeserved hate. I do think the touchbar is a total gimmick admittedly but what else did people really want? More RAM, sure, but that'd mean lower battery life.

I was admittedly disappointed at first but then realised there isn't really anything else that they could've done to interest me anyway. I'm genuinely very happy with my existing 2014 MacBook Pro. I just also think it's telling that I as someone who's spent far too much money on Apple hardware also uses a hackintosh desktop.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#252
post #219
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>32/64GB RAM I'm genuinely curious - why do you need 64 GB of RAM on a laptop? Are there industries where this is a necessity? At that point, wouldn't you be better off having remote machines?

Not OP and I'm no professional but Photoshop alone is the reason I can never have enough RAM.

I use Photoshop a ton and currently I'm convinced it doesn't even TRY to use the ram. I open it up and it just seems to use about 2GB and happily chug away on swap rather than taking a bite out of my 32GB

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#253
post #178

Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a har…

From my perspective: If MacOS had: up-to-date OpenGL support, Nvidia made drivers that supported new cards for it, was not locked into Mac hardware - that would be tremendous. On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. If Linux, any desktop variant (Fedora my poison), had Adobe's support for their DCC apps an…

> On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous.

It is PowerShell, and it really is. Until recently I thought Windows had poor CLI support, and I discovered PowerShell and now I favor it even more than bash.

Am I crazy? Possibly, but PowerShell is truly a piece of gem in the CLI history. It is a thoughtfully crafted product regarding what "command-line interface" should look like.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#254
post #178

Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a har…

If Macbooks, and by extension macOS, used a "normal" keyboard layout I'd agree (not talking about the touchbar, which is gimmicky at best imo).

But currently, on the french layout, you can't even pipe things.

A Macbook dual booted with a normal keyboard would be my dream machine I think.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#255
post #178

Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a har…

>I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying. I really like Finder and Spotlight, but not enough to be tied, via licensing, to any specific hardware. Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps…

Windows is pretty bad on high DPI screens, and even third party tools don't help. There's inconsistency everywhere, and most older software is just blurry.

Chocolatey is nowhere near as good as e.g. pacman.

You mentioned disabling telemetry, but the fact that the OS you paid for spies on you and shows ads is a big turn off.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective: If MacOS had: up-to-date OpenGL support, Nvidia made drivers that supported new cards for it, was not locked into Mac hardware - that would be tremendous. On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. If Linux, any desktop variant (Fedora my poison), had Adobe's support for their DCC apps an…

> On the other hand, if Windows had a proper shell and cli tools, like cygwin with zsh, but native and not Ubuntu layer inside - that would be tremendous. It is PowerShell, and it really is. Until recently I thought Windows had poor CLI support, and I discovered PowerShell and now I favor it even more than bash. Am I crazy? Possibly, but PowerShell is truly a piece of gem in the CLI history. It is a thoughtfully craf…

I am using WSL with success, it usualy gets the job done.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#257
post #128

This is an incredibly weird thing... Inviting a bunch of bloggers into a room and saying that they're sorry, but they have great stuff down the line? It feels incredibly un-Apple.

Companies and industries make purchasing decisions that lock them in for several years, so Apple probably finally got their head out of their ass as they could see people heading in another direction. Once you've spent five years transitioning to, say, a Windows setup, there's a significant additional cost to going with Apple, and it's not like Apple has felt like a deluxe experience lately.

This is the thing. A lot of companies have started switching away from Mac and now they're switching away I can't see that this is going to be enough to ever tempt them back unless they do something really amazing.

I genuinely love macOS and I'm happy with Apple's offerings on the whole, but I think there's plenty of people who just don't care and are happy with whatever works. If you're using say, Pro Tools or Avid Media Composer or whatever software you use to produce content, odds are it works just fine on Windows too. I think many are going to try Windows, realise this and then simply not bother switching back.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#258

This is an incredibly weird thing... Inviting a bunch of bloggers into a room and saying that they're sorry, but they have great stuff down the line? It feels incredibly un-Apple.

Why even bother with the speed bump. These guys have been neglecting the mac pro for 4 years and work their ass on a new version, and still spend time updating the legacy ?

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#259
post #178

Am I the only one that sees OS X as the biggest reason to switch to Mac? I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X. And please, don't tell me Ubuntu or other linux flavors. They look good (and are good if you are programming on them) but the UX is still lacking a lot. (Never mind the confusion of the different flavors, packaging systems, and configurations). Also god forbid you have a problem (especially a har…

>I mean Windows is good, but nowhere good as OS X Specifically? People typically point to the telemetry and forced updates, but I've managed to disable both, using what were admittedly much-too-difficult procedures or third-party software. It's annoying, but not that annoying. I really like Finder and Spotlight, but not enough to be tied, via licensing, to any specific hardware. Less cluttering--I can uninstall apps…

I find my workflow in "bash for windows" horribly slow. My prompt command (that does git/virtualenv/etc checks) takes 4 seconds to run on windows and 0.04 seconds to run on the same machine dual-booted to ubuntu, and about the same time on a 2015 Macbook pro running MacOS. Everything else in bash for windows is similarly slower than bash on ubuntu. I haven't found a native windows implementation of bash that's anywhere as responsive as Linux or MacOS. I actually find Windows to be a better window manager than MacOS at this point, but I find myself most effective under Ubuntu and i3.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#260

This is a combination of vaguely encouraging, and vaguely maddening. Perhaps I'm just a Luddite, but what I really want from my desktop Macs is, basically, what I already have in my 2008 Mac Pro and my very ancient Mac Mini, just updated, because those machines won't last forever. The 2008 Mac Pro has the giant aluminum case. It has four drive bays. That machine has been an absolute warhorse for me. It's pretty much…

It feels to me as if their thunderbolt experiment with the Mac Pro was entirely the wrong way round. What I suspect they'll do with the next round of iterations is go strong on thunderbolt with the iMac; at least 4 ports instead of 2. The iMac has a bigger market, so that's how they'll drive adoption. The Mac Pro, meanwhile, won't be so reliant on thunderbolt, although it will still support a good number of ports - why not? - still probably 6.
Post reply on HN