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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

>OS X on a Retina Macbook (Early 2015).

Why do apple users do this? Do you really not know what's under the hood of your macbook? Honest question.

Because that's how apple indicates the 'version' or 'revision' of the model, instead of just numbering they give the 'produced from' date. Kinda like car manufacturers distinguish the different versions of a given model (i.e. the 2012 Tesla model S and 2016 Tesla model S).

Also, since you can't tell from looking at the laptop (they are all identical since the first retina macbook from 2012), you must go to the 'about this mac' menu, which gives you the model name and revision date. In my case this is "Macbook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012)".

When I used to build my own PC's, I could tell you the brand, model, revision etc of every component inside, but since just about every internal part of an Apple laptop (motherboard, SSD, memory etc) is custom fabricated, there is no point in trying to remember what's inside. I know my laptop has the 'second fastest' i7 I could choose from in that time, and the 16GB memory option, but don't ask me which specific i7 or which DDR type I have, I don't know and honestly I no longer care.

Are you referring to the omission of the exact specs? I don't think there's much variation if any among the first-gen 12" Retina MacBooks, and with Macs usually saying the size+year+class is enough to get an idea of the specs or look them up.

Or are you saying it's because of weak hardware? Other, arguably more taxing software runs fine, but TorBrowser suffers from an uncanny slowdown.

Isn't a lot of this longer routing of packets?

They're referring to application performance, specifically UI, not network latency.

Correct. I gave up trying to figure it out, wiped my settings, redownloaded TorBrowser and it is fine now, even after reinstalling my add-ons.

Too late to edit but I agree with the other poster about not installing add-ons, if you're serious about privacy. However I just use TorBroswer as a quick proxy to bypass my network's blacklists.

I have absolutely no idea.

I can tell you my last computer was a 4 x 1GB Kingston HyperX on a Q9450 Core 2 Quad with a Gigabyte GA-X48-DQ2 motherboard, and it's been a few years.

I only know my Mac has 16GB of RAM, and that's part of the beauty of it.

Sure I do. So, likely, do you and most other people reading it, or at least have a general idea. So what's the point of typing out my specs? Should I also type out the specs of my Nexus 6P or just tell you I have a Nexus 6P?

For worse (or better, but not really), phones are a lot more customized than laptops. A Nexus 6P that uses a Snapdragon 810 might have it set up differently a HTC One M9. I remember some reviews were talking about how the 6P wasn't throttling as hard as other 810-powered phones.

An i7-6700K will be and perform the same as any other 6700K, save for poor cooling and aftermarket overclocking.

Unless the model does something special with the components (it shouldn't) then just typing out the components is what matters, not whether (or when) Acer, Apple, or ASUS designed the chassis.

I don't memorize the specs in Apple products, so I actually have no idea what's under your laptop's hood.

I can tell you that my thinkpad is an i7 with 16GB of memory, so if it ran slow on my machine I'd blame the browser.

My point was that you spend just as many keystrokes to tell the reader it's a late 2015 model macbook pro as you would to type out "i5/8GB" or whatever, but the phrase "late 2015 macbook" means literally nothing to some readers.

That's an official model name.

Because it makes more sense to specify a single model/year than exhaustively list all the under-the-good configurations which others can quite easily look up?

That makes no sense. He's only got one laptop, why would he exhaustively list all the configurations?

It might be the name of his model, mine is: MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012). It might tell you more than "2.6 GHz Intel Core i7"

It's one of the most common laptop brands. Specs are easily looked up, and even without looking it up this tells people it's a relatively new laptop, so specs are probably at least half decent.

It has a Core M though.

I don't see a problem here. The exact model of CPU, memory and other chipsets are irrelevant to me. As long as I can work comfortably on it. I also don't care what's under the hood of my car. I'm technical enough to find out and study it and discuss it, but I'd like to focus on other things. The Macbook is just a tool to me. And one I'm very satisfied with. So I'm very happy there are only a few models which can accurately be referenced by using the model and year.

> I also don't care what's under the hood of my car.

Well, if you're a Mac user then presumably the hood of your car is welded shut.

This might surprise you, but very few people even look under the hoods of their cars. This even includes non-Mac users.

There used to be a free software advocacy slogan explicitly asking "would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?".

An intuition behind that analogy, I think, is that people will appreciate the importance of being allowed to do car maintenance even if they don't do it: that non-car-tinkerers will still see the value in having a hood that they can open. For example, they'll want to be able to choose others to perform the maintenance or not be dependent on the manufacturer in an emergency. Maybe sufficiently Apple-like car companies will succeed in changing that intuition or have already changed it quite a bit?

When you're discussing performance, then the hardware that's ostensibly underperforming is relevant.

To use your analogy: If our cars are the same model year but mine is faster and you're wondering why or just complaining about it, maybe you'd care what's under the hood then.

Why would it matter what's under the hood? I care much more about what I can do than what's inside.

Because we're specifically talking about performance issues, and the issue could very well be what's inside. In this case, the model of computer is given so that we know what's inside.

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