After Mac?
tbray.org
tbray.org
I very much remember the development and push of cocoa and the slow transition away from carbon and quickdraw.
I believe NSDrawer was something that first showed up in third party code and then was adopted in Cocoa.
Apple has constantly refined their toolkit by looking at well designed apps. Everything on Linux seems to be doing the exact opposite.
Although GTK was developed out of Gimp it's so much easier to make a good looking photo editor on Mac than it is on any other platform.
Until we sit down and design a good looking and easy to use GUI toolkit we can forget about decent Gui applications on Linux. (with a focus on easy to use)
Not really inspiring.
Also not everyone jumps of joy to use JavaScript to describe GUIs.
Honestly I jump with joy every time I start a new react project.
I can spot QML from the ill-fitting looks and mostly poorly though-of interaction.
People think QML has magic powers, but in reality any UI designed in 5 minutes has only the value of a 5 minute interface.
To me QML is the biggest mistake in Qt5.
I think they are trying to appeal to the JavaScript hipsters as a way to stay relevant, and in the process also annoyed many C++ developers that don't see a value in it.
All the other major declarative toolkits, XAML, AXML, JavaFX, Cocoa don't use a JavaScript like language for the UI descriptions.
The web might run on BSD sockets, but that doesn't have any meaning on the rendering side.
Any OS able to run a browser will do.
Personally Apple's UI API's and toolkits are a non-starter for me since I don't want to write UI code twice, and Objective-C and XCode are a nightmare to me. YMMV of course.
With CMake Qt is a breeze to integrate. Four lines in a CMakeLists.txt and you are off the races.
Or just use a cross-platform core with multiple UIs.
Qt gives one a lot more freedom to screw up and look out of place if they're not careful. But when one wants to customize controls or build a customized UI Qt will win hands down.
The problem with Linux UI has nothing to do with Qt per se. Qt is more than able to build high-quality UIs, but as long as Linux is lacking a UI identity (like Unity, which many hate) it will never be as good as macOS.
I have some complaints about the way that macOS (or OSX) has progressed. My computer feels more like a Windows 8 desktop running a tablet operating system than ever before. Core usability features that I love have morphed and changed (exposé, spaces). I have more but that's not the point. The point is, despite my personal feelings that macOS continues to decline in quality, I haven't found any hardware that is in any way comparable.
I use a 13" Macbook Air base model and I've used the Dell XPS 13 clone. The Dell has a basically unusable trackpad while the air has the best trackpad on the market. Little things like this make a big difference. Longevity is another big one.
I'm only using MBPrs for OSX at this point. If Apple licensed out the OS to other manufacturers there is not a slivers chance I would be using their hardware anymore, unfortunately I don't feel like dealing with a hackintop (can't run it on Kaby Lake yet, either). But I also don't keep a laptop for 4 years, I typically refresh yearly or bi-yearly (depending on the Intel release cycle). I was actually expecting this new MBPr to be Kaby Lake with a 32gb max and was going to upgrade from my 2015, but I guess I'll wait for the next update unless I move back to a windows PC with linux (I'm aware of the TDP limitations).
Some great recent reviews with different options; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEwOCfv6Ucg
What keeps me from the XPS is really bad experience with Dell and the fact that I can't seem to customize it on the Dutch Dell site. And, perhaps more importantly, I keep hearing that the trackpad sucks. What is your experience with it?
The issue I have with the Razor is that it's apparently not so easy to get in Holland. Any thoughts on that?
Or, for that matter, any other suggestions you can think of? I keep hearing good things about the ThinkPads, but they're too ugly for my taste...
I'm EXTREMELY wary of Razer products as I hear nothing but complaints about their mice/keyboards breaking and the fact that they put out a laptop that gets such rave reviews and seems very well received really kind of blows my mind. Maybe someone else manufacturers it. Normally I'd say stay away from Razer, but I've watched review after review and know people with the Stealth and they love them.
Thinkpads are great but their screens were abysmal for the longest time. The newer ones I believe have really upped the game but it was years and years of them offing 1368x720 or so resolution on their 12-13s with low quality TN panels. They're the ultimate "Pro" machines in my mind. They're super customizable, from docks to adding on extra battery packs, etc.
With that said, I use my laptop as a desktop. I never, ever use the trackpad unless I'm on a flight or laying in bed or something so the trackpad isn't a deal breaker to me. I don't ever use gestures or anything like that. I get serious hand cramps when I'm forced to use a trackpad for more than simple quick things.
Take a look at that Youtube channel I posted (MobileTechReviews) she does fantastic reviews on ultrabooks. She's a MBP user herself so she's fantastic at comparing the various competitors to it. She sounds very unhappy with Apple in that specific video I posted, though.
Unfortunately I'm in the USA so I can't speak on affordability/access to the devices in Holland. I saw a breakdown of the EU prices on the new MBP + vat and it was terrible. Something like a $200-300 mark up when the pound is $1.09 to a dollar plus +$300 VAT.
The guy who I watched break down the pricing is Irish and was pretty livid about Apple using them as a tax haven then arbitrarily marking up (beyond EU/$ difference) the prices for him in Ireland. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQtrmjubfEo
My last laptop was running Linux Mint and I had zero problems with anything other than a couple of useful (Popclip) small OSX apps missing and 1password has to be run in Wine but their Chrome plugin can't find the main app because it's running in Wine (there's an old fix on github but it hasn't been updated in a year or two and I don't believe works anymore).
I'm actually testing running OSX in a VM now to see if it's viable for day to day development. Evidently a fix for the screen lag caused by vsync was made (it's called beam on osx).
The price was about that of a MBP, and its battery life probably worse. But overall I was very pleased with the purchase.
At least back then, the people who provided support for their workstation-class products seemed to be a totally different group within Dell. They were far more responsive and helpful than Dell's non-workstation support people are reputed to be.
Not disagreeing with about the changes to exposé etc., but I find it interesting how often this 'decline' is talked about. I read somebody saying that Snow Leopard was the last solid release the other day...and I'm wondering, do some people have selective memory here? Are they remembering the same OS I remember?
I've been using OS X since 10.3 Panther, and it's always been a 'work in progress' and rough around the edges. It's currently the best it's ever been in terms of security, for sure. There are some superficial areas that I don't like much (Mission Control, Launchpad), but they can be ignored. The OS itself is as solid as it's ever been...which is to say it does still have issues (the discoveryd debacle being a notable example), but it's also had a lot of improvements to its fundamentals too (Core Storage, APFS to pick two big examples).
I also think it hasn't helped that the change to high-DPI screens certainly made the whole OS feel slower, and I think we've haven't quite recovered from that yet.
Endless little annoyances on the GUI side on OS/X (and Sierra)! Some recent issues are, app store crashing when you click the menu and press Cmd+Q, a lot of confusion on the terminal app between the use of command and ctrl, alt, and other key combinations. A lot of drivers being obsolete and unsupported after jump to Sierra. The update/packaging mechanism being a total failure, where I need to update xcode by downloading 4.5GB of files again and again. Apple software appears so far to me an incomplete toy, filled by annoying delaying animations. Apple fails to develop stable software just for couple of hardware, while having a fanatic user base which can accept any kind of planned obsolescence. Sad.
I never had a laptop that I used as long as my MBP (2011) and it's still going strong.
That being said the problem with the new Macbook Pro's is that in their quest of making things thinner a lot of possibilities regarding future upgrades disappeared. Through the years I have upgrade my RAM and replaced the HDD with a SSD. I spend in total (including the macbook pro itself) 1500 euro's max and that over a couple of years.
I do work but I'm also disabled making that my income is not at the range that I honestly can afford the new Macbook Pro's or can cough the amount to get a configuration that will last me 5 years... The base model costs more than my current system (including the upgrades) and the price they ask for a simple 16Gb RAM makes the cost even more out of my reach. And unfortunately in this we aren't able to buy refurbs from the store as it only includes iPods and iPads.
That being said there are more important things in life than a MBP and I'm also thinking about my post mac life that will happen when my current machine dies.
In periods of low use, the OS may choose to swap most of the RAM to disk and switch it off to save energy.
However enabling and disabling RAM chips and rebooting the laptop, like a low-power toggle, would be possible.
For whatever reason, Skylake doesn't support LPDDR4. And the Kaby Lake refresh isn't going to include chips suitable for the MBPs, but even if it did they also won't support LPDDR4.
I would like to see some hard facts instead of everyone simply quoting what a marketing person from Apple had to say.
IMHO, it's just that they didn't really didn't want to go through the trouble - the % of their target users requiring 16GB+ isn't that large.
Apple went with LPDDR3 which those chipsets do support to increase battery life. I would have rather they'd gone the other way.
I haven't touched the new machines, but they aren't inspiring, though the black option is really nice to see :)
I haven't touched the keyboard, which it sounds like they changed. I really like the one on the generation I have, and I also like the wireless model that Apple came out with. Anyone know if it matches the wireless keyboard? Cause I like that one, short throw and large quiet key movement.
In terms of the touch bar, eh, I really like the idea of having thumbprint access to the computer. I hope this is accessible to other applications. As a developer I'm minorly annoyed at losing function keys for certain tasks, but maybe I can utilize it to create custom keys and icons in different contexts, which could be really cool.
Otherwise, while it doesn't offend me, it's definitely not worth upgrading to. But IMO, like this article, it's still the best Unix OS based laptop on the market (yes I know it's XNU, but it's 100% posix and full BSD subsystem, which is better than windows' posix mode and Linux veneer).
Anyway, while it isn't better than my current machine, it is thinner and lighter which are nice haves, and I might actually like the new keyboard.
I'm not excited by the Touch Bar but I'm not concerned about it either. I think it will take some time to see how useful it is and how committed Apple is to it (e.g. will it appear on a keyboard peripheral soon). You don't lose function keys entirely, you can always call them up by pressing in the fn key.
The Touch ID is available to developers, 1Password will support using it to unlock a vault instead of entering your Master password, same as they do in their iOS app.
I don't care about them being thinner but appreciate them being half a pound lighter. The was achieved, in part, by having a smaller battery, 24% smaller in the 15-inch model, but they claim the 2016 model can get 10 hours of use, vs. 9 hours with the Mid 2015 model.
Just visited the Palo Alto Apple store and I'm pretty sure a Microsoft Surface Tablet has a better keyboard than the new MacBook Pro. They really smushed down the keyboard to make the whole configuration thinner, but whereas the old Pro's were halfway between the quality of a dome keyboard and a mechanical keyboard IMO, the new ones are even worse than domes.
I'm running Xubuntu on an old(ish) Vostro 3750 and with the exception of it's somewhat mediocre touchpad (Alps sucks) literally everything works exactly as you'd expect but that wasn't the case when this was a new machine (certain bits where flaky but got fixed over the following year), if they could provide the experience I have now on a 3 year old machine on a brand new machine with top of the line hardware then they'd be onto a bit of a winner, it would certainly top any list I'd look at for a while since my primary requirement for any hardware is does this work properly on Linux already.
IMO Canonical needs to commit to a partnership with a vendor to produce a machine they can fully focus and support on, that way you get a product you know will just work and can be polished to a high degree.
1) Their goals. They are trying to get Ubuntu more widely adopted, not to polish it, at least, not yet.
2) Orders of magnitude, risk involved and business model. Apple is like what ? 100,000 employees and 50 billion in revenue. And Canonical is something like 1000 employees and 50 million in revenue ?
Now, this is totally the fault of developers and not Apple. Maybe Linux needs some sort of all encompassing app store to incentivize development.
The app ecosystem is just light years beyond anything that Linux offers. Yeah, I can spin up a kubernetes environment pretty quickly from the command line using minikube or a few alternatives, but on OSX I can use Kubesolo which ties into Corectl and lets me control systems from the task tray. Not to mention when I'm going to get new employees to hop on board if they're using OSX it's stupid simple as opposed to fighting various Linux configurations/security/etc.
1password has to be run inside of Wine which means the Chrome plugin can't connect to the application so you have to copy paste usernames/passwords into websites which all but defeats the purpose of it. Yeah, you can use keepass, but that's like trading in your 2016 VW for a 1994.
Then a ton of tiny $2-10 apps that just make my life and job more productive. Popclip is my must have, it's tiny, you wouldn't ever think about using it if you weren't introduced to it, but once you know about it you wonder why it's not on ever system.
Yoink is incredibly useful, it's a bucket where you drag files to input them into other applications. Yeah, that's not difficult, you can cp or move stuff around but once you get used to using it you want it around.
There are Linux alternatives to just about everything but they're nearly always disjointed and nowhere near the quality of the OSX version.
And if I look up software I can almost always KNOW that there's an OSX version available (sans games). The problem is that Linux, in the laptop/desktop world is still a last effort (if any effort) citizen. And that is hugely unfortunate.
But yeah, it's goofy that this isn't a reliable use case. I feel like it is in Windows but I use it a lot less.
There is something wrong when you go to dev conferences, where Apple never shows its face, and you have a sea of Apple laptops in the crowd, many of them Google employees. Then there are the thousands of Google employees back in the office trying to invent the future with walled garden Apple hardware and operating systems.
If you start with an existing Linux system and polish it, instead of starting from scratch, write the drivers and design the hardware to match, and use the needs of your own tens of thousands of in-house producers to guide you, surely you, Google, could come up with something even more attractive to your own developers, artists, producers, inventors than a product built by your competitor that optimizes for thinness, restrictions based on Apple's future plans, and lock-in to Apple stores, products, and services.
> corner of the world, security and warranty issues prevent us from
> doing so at this point. We currently ship to the following countries:
> http://www.razerzone.com/store/shipping-guide#destinations
Razer Blade Stealth - 7th-gen i7 2.7GHz/3.5GHz, 16GB 1866MHz memory, 1TB PCIe SSD, Intel HD 620, 3840x2160 screen, aluminum body - US$ 1999
And just because I was curious: MacBook Pro 13" 1370g MacBook Pro 15" 1830g Razer Blade Stealth 1290g Dell XPS 13 1330g
Wrong. Cherry picking to match the price ($1999).
This is just a joke for anything except desk-bound use, in which case you may as well buy a real desktop computer.
And it weighs 8 pounds.
The Kaby Lake chips that Apple uses in the MBP aren't out yet.
I do most of my work on my desktop, and wouldn't give up my highly configured xmonad+emacs setup for anything. But I recently got a new laptop and decided to go with KDE and was blown away by the polish. The style of all the GUI apps I use is consistent and I can press a button to switch to a nice, consistent dark mode. I have encountered absolutely no issues with screen tearing or performance, with were common when I used linux on previous laptops. I've faced no issues with fonts after installing Google's noto font package. KWin's external monitor support is also satisfactory.
I haven't used recent versions of GNOME/Cinnamon/Unity, so can't comment on them, but KDE Connect is the killer KDE feature for me. I love the integration between all the apps on the KDE ecosystem. The calendar syncs to my Google calendar, and my contacts and mail are handled by KDE too. I didn't need to install a thing apart from the KDE workspace and apps for any of this.
I've even switched to using the Breeze theme on my xmonad desktop.
So even if W10's Linux subsystem ran flawlessly, I don't trust host OS in general to provide a reliable, acceptable environment.
I'm curious if you have the same concerns.
Isn't Apple using the latest & greatest Intel mobile CPUs?
> I want a modern video card so game-playing is cool when I feel like it.
I don't know much about gaming but isn't the Radeon HD in the 15" model based on the latest AMD architecture? I can't even find any benchmarks for it so are you sure it's not good enough?
> I want ludicrously excessive amounts of memory.
Do your memory requirements take disk IO speed into consideration? When you can read from disk at 3GB/sec I'm not sure the old assumptions about memory capacity hold true anymore.
> I want lots of connectors so I can plug in my current USB drives and mouse and keyboard.
USB-C is great for this. You can connect all your accessories to a hub and only need to plugin one cable for power, external display, storage, input devices, etc.
> I want a PS Card reader because I shoot RAW so my photo files are huge and they ingest faster from a card
USB-C card readers cost about $10-$15 so you could probably just buy a few of them if you're concerned about losing them. Most of them are multi-card readers too so you're actually gaining functionality in the process. Also when newer/faster SD standards come out in the future you can simply buy a new USB-C card reader instead of being stuck with the one built into your computer.
Surely Apple is not using latest Intel mobile CPUs, not the Kaby Lake.
> Do your memory requirements take disk IO speed into consideration? When you can read from disk at 3GB/sec I'm not sure the old assumptions about memory capacity hold true anymore.
Why should I use SSD instead of RAM? I use SDD for the persistent storage. Why in general you should look for a trade-off when other laptops manufacturers do ship a decent laptops.
> USB-C is great for this. You can connect all your accessories to a hub and only need to plugin one cable for power, external display, storage, input devices, etc.
Yeh, a hub ... which you will have to take with you every time.
> USB-C card readers cost about ...
Yeh, a USB-C card reader ... which you will have to take with you every time.
Ah I must have missed that in all the hysteria over the TouchBar and USB-C. That is valid criticism especially for the 13" model that would benefit from a faster integrated GPU.
> Why should I use SSD instead of RAM?
The benefit of faster disk IO you can shuffle things in and out of memory faster. In the case of a photographer dealing with lots of relatively small files faster disk IO can be more important than raw memory capacity. In other scenarios raw memory capacity is more important. In every scenario raw memory capacity and faster disk IO is great but there are tradeoffs to that also mainly weight, battery life and cost.
> Why in general you should look for a trade-off when other laptops manufacturers do ship a decent laptops.
There are many factors to consider and different people have different priorities.
> Yeh, a hub ... which you will have to take with you every time.
Along with all the accessories you're already lugging around to plug into it? Never really understood this argument.
The GPU is a new one from AMD, but isn't especially powerful[1][2]. It can kind of do 1080P games, but is more geared towards GPU acceleration for video and photo editing.
[1] https://twitter.com/DShankar/status/791712527394545664 [2] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/amd-radeon-pro-400-se...
AWS charges by the hour, GCP charges in 1 minute increments after the first 10 minutes. That all is extremely costly if you have a number of developers sending all of their tests through those systems.
I'm seeing this sentiment repeated quite a bit, and I'm surprised because it's almost a pre-literate view of things.
Whenever something changes with regards to human life, there is a brief window for content generators to capture increased attention by writing a timely article.
Content creators get more attention (which directly translates into revenue) if the content is contentious, or can be forced into 'explaining' a larger trend.
Understanding this is basic Internet literacy. "Many people" are not unhappy- that is just the content machine striving to grab your attention.
Sadly, a critical mass of support seems to be crucial for things like hardware drivers and commercial software with roots in the shrinkwrap era (Photoshop, Office, etc?).
If the FOSS world wanted to reimplement our own Mac, I've always thought that doubling down on GNUStep would have made the most sense. If Linux + GNUstep were closer to source-compatible with the Mac, with a comparable desktop environment to boot, more of those apps would have likely made the jump.
Even that I'm not sure about now though. Had GNUstep been a viable daily-use platform back in the early 2000s when OSX was ascendant, I think we'd have a different landscape today. Now with the web dominating so much, native app compatibility is less important than it was. You just need to be a big enough target for commercial vendors to care about.
With luck, Chromebooks will help sort out the hardware compatibility issues as more and more of the chipsets are mainlined into the Linux kernel. In terms of software compatibility, I don't know, maybe desktop Android apps will ultimately be what we coalesce around.
Then again, I am not the typical macOS power user and just want a good, stable UNIX with an interface I don't (ever) have to tweak.
Also, while the Unity side dock is iconified like macOS', I think it's functionality more different than the old Gnome2 bottom panel was from the macOS dock.
All subjective I guess.
However for those of us that actually care about macOS software written in Objective-C and Swift, macOS is as good as always.
Of course, the engineering required behind something like that may or may not be too hard even for Microsoft.
A paradigm shift - desktop gets less and less used, I am hoping for a Android/Fuchsia OS on notebook. Today many things are done on mobile iOS and Android - I just want to connect it to a huge TV/projector/monitor and keyboard and mouse and use it for work too.
I'm a Linux guy and Win7 is the last I will ever use personally for my own machines (unless I really need it for work, which case I'll VM it anyway). But my reasons are different, I really don't think they ruined it that much for power users, but it's other details that annoy the hell out of me. Like default online accounts, way too much telemetry data being sent and it still feels like it was designed for a tablet (even Enterprise versions). It is pushing too much for the always-online, always-connected computing experience, which feels like turning PCs back into terminals.
@aweb I dunno, it seems they just moved services and startup from msconfig to the task manager. The Linux subsystem is nice, very nice, actually, the one thing I really liked.