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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for bringing this up since it's been massively painful for years. As an example, when I first started developing for iOS back in 2009, I had to buy a $500 used macbook before I could even get started coding. That hardware was obsolete within about 3 years (couldn't update to the latest OSX or XCode), so then I had to pony up another $800 for a refurbished mac mini just to still be able to develop. Meanwhile, Android Studio runs on... actually I don't know what it doesn't run on.

And yes, I know that leasing time on a mac for dev work is an option, but that gets rather pricey over time ($1 per hour or $20/month is not cheap if you need to work on and maintain apps for multiple years). And an RDC experience will never be as good as having the actual computer in front of you, even on a fast connection.

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That hardware was obsolete within about 3 years (couldn't update to the latest OSX or XCode

I call shenanigans - latest OSX and XCode running on a 2008 Macbook right here on my desk. I plan to get 10 years usage out of this machine - that's value for money right there.

Not shenanigans, happened to as well: couldn't upgrade OS X, so couldn't upgrade to latest xcode, and Apple required using the latest xcode... so I had to buy a new mac. That was a long time ago though, now Apple seems to support HW for much longer.

This is shenanigans. You only need the latest XCode to take advantage of bleeding edge features released in the latest iOS. 90% of apps never take advantage of the bleeding edge; you can continue to develop apps for all versions of iOS - including the latest release - with a 5 year old laptop.

I have MacMini Late 2009 and it can hardly run the OS itself, let alone something else :) It's practically unusable. It doesn't have much memory though, only 2 GB.

4G in mine. The memory compression feature in 10.9 was a godsend for older hardware, proof that Apple is serious about longevity of older kit.

Could be a polycarbonate model. Models of those up to 2008 stopped receiving upgrades after OS X Lion (2011):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook#Model_specifications

In my experience Apple laptops tend to hold their value pretty well so I'm guessing a $500 machine was 4-5 years old when purchased. So the fact OP could use it for 3 more seems about right. Personally I upgrade around every 4 years and the laptop is still in great condition for most people and sells for well over half what I paid for it.

8 years from a laptop is still more than you would expect from almost any other manufacturer, save maybe IBM/Lenovo tho' I have heard the build quality of Thinkpads has really deteriorated lately.

2009 Thinkpad T400 still working fine, although with updated RAM and SSD. Another 2012 T430s also working fine.

Refreshing current Apple computers won't be that easy. Even if you are capable of opening it, compatible M.2 drives won't be easy to find and you won't be able to swap soldered RAM. I'm not sure that my 2015 rMBP will be able to serve so long as that T430s will.

Unfortunately this seems to be less and less true over the years. When I got my MacBook about 4 or 5 years ago, it only had 4GB of ram and a pretty slow hard disk. If have upgraded it to 12GB Ram and a pretty good SSD, this is why I can still use such an old MacBook. For the new ones, I have to decide the RAM, and disk upfront and can't replace them anymore (this is especially worrying with the small lifetime with SSDs).

I wish Apple made their pro products more bulky so we can upgrade the hardware and let the air products be the sexy, thin ones for Starbucks hipsters.

As a long time mac user, I do agree that the lack of upgradability in their Pro line is a problem, and it probably should be the defining factor of Pro versus the Air/Straight Macbook line.

That being said, Apple has gone to pretty crazy lengths to ensure that it's modern OSes work on legacy hardware; I was a bit shocked to hear from my parents that they were able to install El Capitan on my dad's 2008 iMac, as I was wary about putting it on my 2012 Macbook Air due to performance concerns. I don't know if this was a conscious decision by Apple to cater to the idea of "Apple = Longevity", but it's very nice to know that a single purchase takes you pretty far. I think Apple could take it a step further and really win over more people if they added the millimeter or two to the Pro line and allowed for the upgrades.

It's really a back and forth thing for me; on the one hand, I wish I had more options and the ability to customize later on. On the other hand, since ~2010, the appliance like nature of the portables has worked so seamlessly that my only complaint comes from the lack of an option to upgrade, not the need for an upgrade. For my previous Apple laptop, my own incompetence when trying to do a repair hurt the laptop's longevity; had I not had butterfingers when working on the insides, I'm sure that I could have had another 3 years with my already 5 year old Macbook.

Performance has essentially plateaued for the last decade in laptops - aside from sticking SSDs and more memory in them, there isn't a ton of difference in specs. I have a 2006 Windows laptop that runs better now on Win 10 than it did originally on Vista. Except for power consumption, it's the same as my two year old laptop.

Of course, with a Windows PC, you've got a variety of options, and can buy something that is actually upgradable, rather than being locked into what Apple deigns to give you.

I believe the SSD is a pretty large aside, isn't it? GPUs have also vastly improved, I believe. It's just CPU that stagnate at the "good enough" level.

While I do agree with most things, there will be a need to upgrade something in the future.

When I bought my MacBook, 4GB of Ram were plenty but it is not anymore. Chrome takes to much ram and with 16GB, I don't have to worry about anything. Furthermore, apples new laptops are all dual core (until you buy the bigger one). This is also dealbreaker for me – quad cores are really awesome when using VMs. Sure a CPU cannot be updated on most laptops (and certainly not on apples but I can't blame really).

My point is that I'm afraid apples pro series has drifted into a state where their lifespan will shorten while the prices go up.

And apple's OS performs really good until you use third party applications that expect better performance then your sad 5-year-old MacBook.

The question is why the software takes up so much more. Firefox is the pain point for me on my 2008 Macbook, for everything else, it's perfectly snappy. I block ads, don't play games or look at animation heavy sites, but even doing nothing but displaying pages, it sits at 2.5G RAM (out of 4) and 100% of one of my two CPU cores. I'd run an old version if it wasn't for the security updates. Utterly ridiculous.

Check about:memory. It's probably not Firefox but the websites.

Oh I'm not suggesting that it will never peak higher than what Apple offers; again, I do agree that it would be nice if the Pro line offered a little more to users looking for more oomph.

It's just that, again, by and large with everything with the Mac line up right now, you throw something at it and you're good to go. Even my 2012' Air can do moderately advanced video editing in Premiere, the only real bottlenecks being local storage and the CPU taking a bit to render video.

The current line up is not a perfect solution for absolutely everything, and Apple's power option in the Mac Pro line is just unacceptable for most people, even if it does bring a lot to the table. But in most cases, Apple's line ups do extremely well for a large majority of things you'd want to use a computer for. I too would enjoy a quad core in the Air/Pro line, or at least the Pro line, though I suspect the issue is heat, and as I said earlier, I'd happily take a bit of thickness to accommodate a heftier processor.

I certainly don't endorse letting Apple tell me what hardware I need; I also don't have too many complaints with what they've given. Price exaggerations aside, I find the price tag for the Macbook Air/Pro lines appropriate for the base models, and comparable to other 13" sized machines with similar specs and amenities (for lack of a better word). Such is sort of the nature with Apple and being a long time user - there's a lot Apple does that bugs you, but at the same time, there is a lot of good you get with the hardware and the OS.

I too would enjoy a quad core in the Air/Pro line, or at least the Pro line

The 15" Macbook Pros are quad-core http://www.apple.com/uk/macbook-pro/specs-retina/

I think this sentiment (pro users want to upgrade their hardware) is inaccurate for most professionals. Hobbyists and freelance/self-employed may want to upgrade their hardware but a professional generally doesn't care. They just want a machine that works and a reasonable path to a new machine that doesn't affect their productivity. That upgrade path is really smooth on OS X. Migration assistant plus thunderbolt cable plus target disk mode makes it really easy.

I still use my 21" iMac 2007. It does the job for household computer, usually my mom use it for web browsing and emails, but I can do dev work relatively nice on it, El Captain installed btw.

It will hit 10 years mark in May next year, I shelled out $1.6k at the time for it, 2 years ago upgraded RAM from OCW, and installed SSD, upgraded magic mouse, and it works really nice! I think I used the hell out of it, and it is amazing machine!

While your concerns and gripes about Apple Dev. environment are 100% true, there are some reasons why are they so. And in a few years I think that will change, Swift will change it! Imagine you can compile swift code on Linux now! It's nowhere near usable for serious development work, but I think with Swift, Apple addressed that problem too, so I think in 5 years you won't need exclusively OSX to dev for Apple devices. I'm sure it would be the best way to do it, but who knows we shall see.

> And in a few years I think that will change, Swift will change it!

The compilers for Swift and Objective-C are command-line tools that are (relatively) easy to port to Linux.

But for a real iOS dev environment or CI server you'll need the iPhone Simulator, which is built on a large stack of proprietary frameworks. I don't see Apple porting it to other platforms anytime soon.

The trivial fix would be to allow virtualisation of OS X on commodity hardware.

Yeap. Afaik you are not even allowed to virtualize OS X on an OS X server. If you could I'd assume AWS et al would do so for CI and such.

This is false

Fair enough. It appears my knowledge is outdated and perhaps was true with an older version of OS X. http://superuser.com/questions/904884/is-it-possible-to-run-...

On the other hand Apple makes virtually no hardware that would be a good fit for a datacenter with many VMs on powerful multiprocessor hardware available in a compact form factor.

If you wanted to program for Windows you still had to buy a computer. You could argue that you could get a Windows computer cheaper than a Mac but in the long run that difference is insignificant when you're spending many years with the same hardware.

I'm still programming iOS apps on a 2012 Macbook Pro because I'm not rich. Performance is still pretty good!

Android Studio runs on a lot of hardware but it's slow unless you have good hardware, which costs money.

That's true, although Windows can be run in a VM. I'm not saying that would be the ideal means of developing for Windows, but it's an available option, and MS even offers free images for testing on various OS versions. Meanwhile OSX can only be run in a VM on Apple hardware.

Ok, so Apple hardware for the win!

So, I haven't tried actually doing this, but is there a real reason you can' load OS X up on a VirtualBox VM, etc, or is that just what Apple tells you you can do with the software you bought from them?

OS X basically prevents this with default install, you will have to get a hacked OS X image to do this, and that is a legal grey area depending on your country.

You can find out more by looking up hackintosh.

He isn't developing for the Mac though, he is developing for the iPhone. You don't have to have a Linux machine to write code for Android.

Forgive the rambling but it's getting late and I'm sleepy:

I'm just saying that people are complaining too much about having to buy a Mac to write code for iOS. If not must, then you should buy a Windows machine to develop for Windows but you don't hear anyone complain about that. You have to buy an Oculus Rift to develop Oculus Rift software. You have to buy an Android device to test your Android program. etc... You don't have to buy a Linux machine to write code for Android but if you don't have a computer at all then you have to buy one. There's stuff you have to pay for to get into programming...To build software that will make you money. Windows/Linux developers are complaining that Apple didn't release free tools for their platform and overreacting.

>Windows machine to develop for Windows

There are so many ways to develop Windows apps on OSX (unless I'm misreading, which I might be because this point is so blatantly wrong)

>Oculus Rift to develop Oculus Rift software

You can download the SDK without the Rift, you just can't test how it will work on a rift without... a rift

>You don't have to buy a Linux machine to write code for Android but if you don't have a computer at all then you have to buy one

I mean... you're not wrong but the point is you can buy any computer you want, not some overpriced, under-powered laptop with an apple on the lid

I will stand up and be prickly here and say: please do not judge the world by your (apparently) Apple-centric circumstance.

I (personally) am a nomad. I can not carry 27 computers with me. My world would be best served by having one computer that does all the jobs. Apple hinders me in this; it does not help.

Yes, I can (and do) do Hackintosh VMs, but it makes me feel dirty.

Whenever I have to deploy on an iphone, to test I buy a bank of iphones (and give them to the neighborhood children when I am done). That should be good enough.

Run Windows on a Macbook? They're pretty excellent for travelling. Just the other day I dumped half a Caipirinha over the keyboard and I booted right up afte two hours in the Cuban shade :)

You can easily write good Windows applications on Linux and OS X; and Microsoft distributes standard virtualization images for free which you can fire up in a VM to test your Windows applications. In addition to those virtual machines, Wine implements much of the Win32 library and can be used to test your Windows applications with some minor limitations. For iOS you cannot run your build process on a remote machine without jumping high hoops, you cannot build without OS X at all, you cannot sign code for your own device without their IDE and a certificate from their website.

You can program and build programs for Windows and OS X on Linux, Windows Phone I'm not entirely sure about.

You need some precise combinaison of Windows and Visual Studio to target a given version of Windows Phone. At least if you want to use emulators, you'll need a Windows 8 to target WP8 (otherwise Win7 is fine IIRC).

Windows 10 is required to build Win10M apps targeting UWP. You can still use WP8 tools (thus Win8) to make WinPRT or Silverlight apps.

That's the theory. In practice the last insider build have a bug which forbid app deployment, and for some builds nows the Silverlight app runtime had its own bugs (keyboard related for example).

For having used this tools since WP7 I really feel a decline in quality on the mobile OS and I wouldn't recommand to bother anymore.

Windows runs any hardware or virtual machine.

OS X does not.

So, no...you don't have to buy a computer to run Windows because you can run it on your existing computer.

I've never heard of leasing but $20 month is a steal. At $20/month, it would take 7.5 years to pay off a $1800 laptop. If you are leasing in that time you would have upgraded a few times.

You don't get root access or a dedicated server, but it is an option:

http://www.macincloud.com/pricing/compare

have you looked into hackintoshing?

I would note that, if you want to Mackintosh specifically for the sake of compiling OSX/iOS executables, it's far easier to set up a computer to run a bare-metal hypervisor that knows how to run OSX virtual machines (e.g. VMWare ESXi), than it is to directly set up the same computer to run OSX directly. (Source: did both over the last month.)

IIRC I had "build platform nut supported" errors coming back from iTunes Connect when I tried submitting a build from my Hackintosh.

I guess Apple can detect if you're running on a Hackintosh. For example Netflix won't play on my Hackintosh without installing Silverlight. Invalid DRM keys or something.

Yes, I did. As others have pointed out, that tends to go poorly if you plan to actually develop, test, and publish OSX or iOS apps for a few reasons. I've read reports of some people getting it to work, but it's generally a hugely painful process and tends to break whenever there's an update.

My mistake - I thought the leasing program was for a physical machine. Still an interesting option.

Imagine being able to lease such a machine for $20/mo ...

I don't even develop platform-specific apps and I'm happy to pay the cost of a new machine every few years. Three machines, purchased new, have provided my sole income source for over a decade, at a cost of about $1000 per year. Not too bad considering what I profited after paying that ghastly fanboy tax...

For the first few years of the Mac, you had to buy a Lisa to do development at somewhat more than $500!

Well, you should be able to recoup those $1300 you spent on the Macs pretty easily if you do professional iOS development.

And if you're not in for the money but just as a hobby: don't develop for the iPhone then if you don't like the costs. (Even though $1300 over 5 or 6 years is a pretty cheap hobby in my books).

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