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The Mac Pro Lives

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Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#361

Post by Eric_WVGG »

ThomPete wrote: post #338
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Secrecy has plenty of benefits, like keeping plans secret from competitors, dominating the news cycle, and delighting customers. None of those things speak to a hemorrhaging segment of users whose needs are performance and expandability. It's a show of strength for the modern era of Apple that they are willing to switch strategies when necessary.

If they were really serious they would make an open letter or they would write out to their Mac Pro users personally. That way their "openness" would actually make sense and they would show they really cared. Pushing this to a little elite group of bloggers is just an amateurish move on Apples part.

Well now we're talking about subjective opinion. To me, press releases and corporate double-speak are petulant. Actual engineers speaking frankly to journalists, to me, is the height of professionalism.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#362

Post by specialp »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #297
Eun wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window management in OSX is horrible. Finder is even more horrible. It reminds me of the Windows 95 Explorer. A network drive hangs? Good luck with Finder..., the whole system halts.

> Window management in OSX is horrible. What is so horrible about it ? I have the exact same reaction every time I have to use Microsoft Windows. Window management is one of the strongpoints of MacOS. > A network drive hangs? Good luck with Finder..., the whole system halts. I've never encountered this problem on both AFP and SMB shares.

Fullscreen mode loses focus constantly with 2 monitors, SMB shares are very slow especially with large amounts of files to be listed. Finder crashes a lot dealing with network filesystems. The search on Finder is extremely bad and doesn't hold a candle to Windows 10 search.

I am typing this on a Macbook Pro so I am not some Windows fan. OS X has fallen way behind in its desktop incarnation. The only reason I use OS X is due to its Unix shell for development. I don't think anyone can honestly say that as a GUI OS X is better than recent Windows.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#363

Post by yokohummer7 »

Keyframe wrote: post #333
yokohummer7 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 made a wrong statement. PowerShell is a great shell! I want a shell and gnu chain from coreutils onwards within Windows. Babun takes me close, but not close enough. Namely it's slow as hell, 64-bit is no really there, and it's cygwin. I'm one of those "runs Vim and writes their own Makefiles and uses GCC and stuff like that doesn't like cygwin" guys.

I see. I'm also kinda a "runs Vim and writes Makefiles" guy, but I'm more hopeful about the Ubuntu layer being more seamlessly integrated into the native rather than waiting for Cygwin to improve. After all, WSL is official, and Microsoft seems to put a lot of efforts into it.

As a side note, like you said, Cygwin is slow. I once measured how much time compiling things consumed on both Cygwin/MSYS2 and WSL. `./configure` was 3 times faster on WSL, and `make` was 2 times faster. I assume the reason to be WSL's process management being lighter. This is another reason I'm looking forward to see the improvements to WSL's native integration.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#364

Post by Godel_unicode »

nottorp wrote: post #319
m_mueller wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scripting and CLI. * Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows reg…

* Touchpad support. I think most people who haven't used an Apple laptop extensively are not aware that the touchpad actually works, and you do not need to carry an external mouse to use the device comfortably.

Precision touchpad gestures on Windows 10 solves that problem, especially on the Dell XPS/Precision machines. It's really, really good.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#365

Post by kerbalspacepro »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #297
Eun wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window management in OSX is horrible. Finder is even more horrible. It reminds me of the Windows 95 Explorer. A network drive hangs? Good luck with Finder..., the whole system halts.

> Window management in OSX is horrible. What is so horrible about it ? I have the exact same reaction every time I have to use Microsoft Windows. Window management is one of the strongpoints of MacOS. > A network drive hangs? Good luck with Finder..., the whole system halts. I've never encountered this problem on both AFP and SMB shares.

... on Windows you drag a window to the right and make it 1/2 or 1/3 or 1/4 the screen. On a Mac dragging the window... drags the window.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#366

Post by dexterdog »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #275
dexterdog wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On pretty much every other product line, yes.

My Mac Mini's RAM says otherwise. Pretty sure that, for the vast majority of its history, the same goes for the iMac. And, obviously, the Mac Pro, even in its current iteration. What other product lines are you thinking of, aside from laptops?

The iMac only allowed RAM changing from what I know and it only had two slots. Changing the hard drive was a surgery that very few people are going to do. Apple is now in the habit of making the RAM and SSD part of the main board in the name of space saving.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#367

Post by m_mueller »

scholia wrote: post #353
m_mueller wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scripting and CLI. * Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows reg…

> The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now) Use the Alt key. For example, open Word and press Alt to show the keyboard commands. If you want the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press H as shown. Alternatively, to open the Ribbon and show the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press Alt-H. So, if you want to center some selected text in Word,…

As I wrote I still do consider keyboard UI on windows the best, because it's AFAIK the only widely supported destop OS with full keyboard control of the GUI. But the Ribbons are not for me - it's a menu system that's also trying to be a context aware palette, which makes it worse than either a classic menu (easy to skim though and find what you want, especially on MacOS) or a palette (can be placed wherever it's the most useful, i.e. allowing the shortest mouse travel).

Please note that I still do consider Windows Office the best version nevertheless, but for different reasons.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#368

Post by Godel_unicode »

jvzr wrote: post #342
maccard wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu. Another anecdote, I right clicked and clicked "unpin from start" and never saw it again.

It's still there though, isn't it? Granted you don't see it in the Start Menu, but it remained installed on your system. God knows if it's not having its own process at launch, doing similarly nasty stuff?

God, and anyone who knows how to read logfiles.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#369

Post by simonh »

m_mueller wrote: post #290
SippinLean wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scripting and CLI. * Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows reg…

Big items for me on MacOS

* Drag-and-drop automation, scripting and workflow tools. I love folder actions.

* Built-in screen recording in QuickTime Player, which also works with attached iOS devices

* Time Machine backups. So easy to use and has saved my bacon over and over

* iMovie and Photos. I don't use the rest of the bundled apps, both those two are essentials for me.

Re: The Mac Pro Lives

#370

Post by scholia »

jvzr wrote: post #342
maccard wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dunno, I've done all kinds of stuff to my windows 10 machine to keep Candy Crush Soda from reinstalling itself. Yet every few weeks/months that King garbage ends up on my start menu. Another anecdote, I right clicked and clicked "unpin from start" and never saw it again.

It's still there though, isn't it? Granted you don't see it in the Start Menu, but it remained installed on your system. God knows if it's not having its own process at launch, doing similarly nasty stuff?

It isn't. You could easily check that in Task Manager or Process Explorer and/or Glasswire or whatever.

Most of these things take up a trivial amount of disk space -- some of them are just placeholders -- so they're not worth the time taken to worry about them.

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