Return of the Mac (2005)

Yah, I think Windows has gotten a lot better since the Vista days. But, VS - I was trying out porting some iOS Obj-C to run on Windows. Impressive that it actually worked, but VS was like, blech.

Granted, Xcode is a piece of crap too - it's so buggy and unstable a lot of the time. But I can at least read or figure out what's going on. VS, tiny fonts, things you can't read, tons of "what's this for?" configuration.

After my playing around with it (and I used the first few versions of VC years ago) I was thinking, yah, I don't think I could get into this dev environment again.. :-\

Idea: Dell could make an incredible coup by launching their own Linux.

Dell is limited by Windows not being Unix-based and not being open-source. Dell is losing thousands of sales by not having a Linux – Apple users don't switch even though everyone wants Dell laptops today. Dell has a very pro image, have sold reliable hardware and as far as I'm aware, their OEM drivers on Windows aren't compete crap (Is it Lenovo who shipped a root CA?). Dell could capture an incredible market by launching a stunning version of Linux, even if the OS doubled the price of their laptops. Heck, Dell could charge for the OS separately.

Whether they do it or not, Dell's future heavily relies on Linux' success today. I wish an independent software editor would do it, but if Dell does it, fine enough. We've finally succeed to align the incentives between open-souce and big powers at play.

> Dell should be making sure Ubuntu works

But why? Imagine a sea change such that 30% of new desktop Dell machines are used under Linux by 2020. How would that benefit Dell? They appear to have passed on (or mostly passed on) the savings of not buying a Windows license to their customers in the past. Hardware manufacturers making Linux drivers work flawlessly is to be lauded and hoped for, but the current desktop Linux market isn't high enough for it to be anything other than a pet project or PR exercise: spending the cash to make drivers work perfectly on Linux doesn't seem likely to do much to improve sales or lower costs, costs money, and for many drivers would even help competitors to the extent that they use the same components.

> Don't you think that it's rather stuff on top of Darwin (e. g. Cocoa and the default apps) and the hardware support that make "things work" on macOS?

You're right. I have never actually used a BSD OS that is no OS X, but I have a suspicion that a lot of the stability in OS X is due to BSD.

> What Linux distributions / desktop environments have you tried so far? Setting up dual-boot on a Macbook is rather good supported IIRC.

A few years ago I spent quite a bit of time playing with Ubuntu. I grew up with Windows, but after 8 came out, I had essentially no desire to ever touch Windows again. People claim Windows 10 is not that bad, but not that bad isn't good enough. Linux Mint was pretty nice as well. Elementary OS seems cool. CrunchBang was nice for a super lightweight system.

System76 seems cool, but their hardware is just kind of clunky to me. I would much rather by an old Thinkpad, but even still that doesn't fully solve my OS dilemma.

Out of curiosity, what system do you use primarily?

The reason I ask is I suspect you use something very specific that allows you to be very productive.

Also, what kind of work do you generally do?

Can you elaborate on the unusability of Terminal.app?

It's one of my most used apps and I have no issue with it.

Also, I didn't know many of these until recently:

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/09/26/mac-terminal-tips/

Oh come on. It's not so different from the server ( POSIX ), there are not a lot of tricks and there is a package manager ( homebrew ) & also there is iTerm, that replaces Terminal.app.

Linux on the other hand does not have mature desktop environment, Safari, Sketch, Photoshop and a lot of other really good software that comes built-in with OS X.

As a matter of fact I've never seen a tool that works only on Linux ( except probably some low-level kernel-dependent tools like iptables & others ) and does not compile on OS X.

Even for developers, there are often apps available for MacOS but not Linux that can be very important for specific tasks. Audio/video/photo editing apps, Office, Exchange support, etc.

(I'm sure there are many workarounds for Linux for all of these, but I'm willing to bet they take a lot more to get working than on Mac.)

So Macs are in a sweet spot, of being both outstanding development machines, great application support, and no questions about hardware support.

Also, Mac OS absolutely has package managers for command line software.

> it's a different system from the server, lots of tricks are needed to make it work invisibly (either with a VM or a lighter equivalent)

I used to use Linux for this reason, but it's no longer a factor in my opinion.

Ideally your development environment should mirror the production environment, and just saying "the server is running Ubuntu Server 14.04LTS and I'm running Ubuntu 14.04LTS" is a pretty lazy and incomplete way of half-achieving that goal. What about your nginx config? What about your permissions? What about your PostgreSQL version?

Whether you run Mac or Linux, you're still forced to solve that problem, and the best tools to do it are all available and work great on a Mac. Vagrant is relatively painless and works really well.

I spent '95-'01 using Linux and in '01 switched to OS X. If you do find the UI strange and unintuitive, then I have a few contrasts.

All Linux desktops that I've used look like a cartoon. There's a lot of design theory you can read about but one thing I've never liked with any of the icons is the dark outline and thick lines and over-use of shadows. Still, to this day, even when I tried Elementary, it's not much different. This has been going on for over a decade and it's the accepted look and feel.

Fonts. Granted, Google fonts are avail now, but Mac font rendering just looks better. Linux still, in my mind has not improved much on this. Honestly, I think Helvetica looks great and there's a reason: it's battle tested and has a long, successful history. Linux distros couldn't/didn't want to license Helvetica. Windows made Arial and the rest is history. (ClearType in my mind looks much worse than Linux, so points for Linux there.)

For the Mac terminal, I use it every day and have for a lonnnng time. It's gotten better over the years for sure with tabs and better rendering. I run fish shell in mine and I don't feel like I ever run into any issues with it. I'm not sure what all the hubub is about Terminal.

As for key layouts, Windows is similar. A Windows key where the Mac command key. I use a wireless Microsoft split kbd at work and it works fine with my Mac. I use my Apple keyboard on Linux servers sometimes and I don't get lost in some dark place trying to type my way out to no avail.

ALL my servers are CentOS. I never have any problems shelling in, using vi, getting work done. This has never been an issue for me. And frankly, I dunno why it would be. The Mac Terminal has never blocked me on these things.

I spent a lot of time with Slackware, Redhat/Fedora, Gentoo, and FreeBSD on the desktop. I think Linux is great, but I'm just over fuckin around with things. I wanna work, read/post the web a little, and then have a life. It's awesome if you have and want to spend the time compiling your kernel - I did that and I'm glad I did years ago. But I think after a while, endless configuration becomes old.

macOS is not perfect and I'm actually waiting for the 'Snow Leopard' bug fix release that hasn't happened in a long time. I'm not sure what's going to happen with macOS over the coming years. For me, it hasn't gotten so bad that it's unbearable. I do dislike A LOT the stupid animations for desktop switching. The fact I have to find a utility that disables that (for anyone looking for this it's called TotalSpaces) is moronic. But overall, I've been fine with each upgrade.

The UI is rock solid for me and stuff pretty much just always works. I might be one of those outliers that doesn't experience backups not restoring or iCloud completely dissolving people's music libraries. Dunno..

To each his own I guess. I'm not super excited about some Apple releases this year, but I think there's a lot of drama queens whining about things that don't matter much. And only Apple gets this type of attention. We'll see what next year brings.

The Control/Command placement is _perfect_.

I get all my unix commands on Control (emacs keybindings everywhere including ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the line, ctrl+c to SIGINT), and all my GUI commands on Command (cmd+a to select all, cmd+c to copy). Meanwhile in other OSes, how to copy/paste depends on what app you have open.

(And meanwhile I get accents and special characters on Option, while non-ASCII input is a mess in other OSes)

The package manager isn't preinstalled, but installing Homebrew is really straightforward, and if not having something installed by default is a problem, I don't know any OS that does any better.

I am not sure you've used Linux if you think "everything is just there already" is an accurate description of it... Do modern Ubuntu versions even come with gcc built-in? Maybe you have some obscure distro that bundles literally everything, but using a package manager is seriously not very hard.

Ten years ago, when I tried to switch from Windows to Linux, the defaults were ridiculous, and I bricked the install trying to make it usable (I messed up a poorly-documented config file trying to set up multiple monitors). Meanwhile, ten years ago, multiple monitors worked out of the box when I switched from Windows to Mac OS X, and everything else had sensible defaults.

Like one year ago, the last time I touched Linux, I tried Ubuntu again, and when I plugged in an NTFS drive, it told me something was wrong and it needed to be mounted in read-only mode. It didn't tell me how to mount it in read-only mode. It didn't have a button for mounting it in read-only mode. I had to google for it and type in an obscure terminal command. Meanwhile, I can plug in an NTFS drive to Windows and it just works, no need to touch Google.

> Terminal.app which is borderline unusable (almost as bad as cmd.exe)

This is the point that I stopped reading. Terminal.app on OSX 10.1 was better than cmd.exe... and Terminal.app was a fucking pain in those days. But you know what? I didn't have to use lynx to surf to linux-usb.org to figure out the arcane incantation to issue to mknod to get my USB mouse working when I wanted to install Linux on a computer (this is not an exaggeration, and both experiences are circa the same era).

> Have you used it?

This. This x 1000.

Everyone is complaining without any hands on experience. The "magic mouse" is one of my least favorite pieces of tech to come from Apple (I use a trusty Logitech) and I do 95% or more of my work with an external mechanical keyboard. I wouldn't even notice the change and I think a lot of people wouldn't, either.

The track pad is lightyears beyond anything I've had from Lenovo (can't speak for HP) and has to be the One Killer Feature™ that would make me ^happily pick a brand new MBP.

They really should support more ram though...

Both Apple Pay scanner and Touch Bar display run on a separate ARM processor.

Macbooks don't have a row of "function keys" though. They have a row of keys that do very specific things in the OS:

* Adjust screen brightness (x2)

* Adjust volume and mute (x3)

* Adjust keyboard brightness (x2)

* Power button (x1)

* Play/pause and next/previous (x3)

* Rearrange the desktop windows (x2)

So, if you launch an app that uses the touch bar, will you lose the ability to adjust the brightness and volume?

> I don't really understand why one should look down and search for what to press instead of simply using a keyboard shortcut via muscle memory.

From a personal perspective, I agree. I think we generally forget though, we are vastly in the minority and this technology is designed for the layman

Basically my litmus test for this stuff is "would my technologically illiterate mum use and understand this. Will it enrich her computing experience". If yes, it's not a dumb idea. We'll see how the market reacts though

If you've never used a Windows touch screen PC, I can imagine that you can't imagine why you'd want a touch screen. If you have, then you know that after a day or so, you just start reaching for the screen intuitively, and it's a rude reminder of the bad old days when it's not a touch screen. This is what Apple missed: none of them use a touch screen, none of them bother to check out Windows, so they can't imagine how important it can be. The Touch Bar is a poor substitute for it, and calling any laptop "premium" in 2016 without full touch is marketing, not reality.

Yup, but why would a video editor buy a laptop that's limited to 16GB of RAM these days?

Exactly.

I don't want fingerprints all over my screen, there isn't much real value in a touchscreen laptop for 80% of users, and their tablets already cover those bases (especially with the advent of the iPad Pro).

The only thing I have to say, to play devils advocate, is that I wish they would've made it so that the escape key was in the very very left when it is there, so that I wouldn't have to learn a new offset location The only thing I have to say, to play devils advocate, is that I wish they would've made it so that the escape key was in the very very left when it is there, so that I wouldn't have to learn a new offset location. I'm assuming the location is offset by about the width of one key, based on the pictures I've seen.

You can remap Caps Lock to Esc from the keyboard preferences pane in the latest Sierra update.

All for a price tag of $6k for an 8lb machine that no one would buy.

Why would you use the touchscreen for a full 8 hours expecially on a large desktop monitor? It's ok to use it sometimes on a laptop, where the screen is close to the hands and much lower than the shoulders. I tried and sometimes I was using the trackpad, sometimes the screen.

I have a Lenovo Yoga with touch screen and it's frequently easier to just touch the screen than guide the mouse over. It is convenient enough that I probably will never go back (willingly). It doesn't mean that I'm pointing 8 hours a day. Most of the time I'm just typing.

It's easy in Xcode to pop up a simulation of the Touch Bar for Macs that don't have them. Obviously not as good as the real thing, but I expect we'll see at least basic Touch Bar use become a standard feature very rapidly.

I understand your frustration, I guess the question is if they try and cater for too many preferences would it ultimately compromise the focus of the product? It's very similar to the original 'too-soon' shift to USB on the iMac, though as a consumer product you could argue that was more justifiable.

But it is more powerful hardware. The CPU is upgraded. The SSD has read/write speeds that smoke most competitors. Graphics got a big boost (though people found an excuse to rant about it not being Nvidia). The only thing that's not better is the ability to upgrade to 32/64GB of RAM. That's really it. And the problem here is the Intel's lack of support for LPDDR4. Apple was faced with choosing two out of three between thin/lightweight, good battery life, and support for up to 64GB of RAM. I think the decision Apple would make here is more than obvious. Look at the existing market for 64GB capable laptops and all of them are either bulky or just suffer in battery life performance. And the whole deal with only Thunderbolt 3/USB-C is way overblown; just buy the 1-2 cables you need and your problems are solved. The only genuinely valid complaint I see is the price. I don't know how much of that is attributed to more expensive components (CPU/GPU) vs the cost of the TouchBar itself.

Yah, I definitely hear ya. I'm totally scratching my head on the power things. The fact that they invented MagSafe and then toss it because of the C connector really boggles my mind. Especially since a 3rd party - Griffin - made their own tear away magnetic connector. And again, no cord for the brick seems really idiotic too. I just don't get that. Those things were _progress_.

I don't mind getting new connectors. I wasn't outraged at no headphone jack on my iPhone, even though I listen to my earbuds every day. Ok, so I need a little 2" dongle, big deal. Apple used the space for other things, cool, makes sense, moving on. An all C-style port MBPro, ok, that's fine with me. Progress. Move on and I'll take the latest Thunderbolt speeds.

But, the touch bar, yah, I dunno. One one hand, I was totally one of those people that, when I saw the iPhone and Steve said we're going to use a virtual kbd, I was like, awesome, makes sense, move on. Touch bar I _could_ see some cool uses. I do like the touch id part. That seems useful. I would agree tho on underwhelmed on specs that were late and raising the price. I've always maxed out my Mac laptops, so they've always been expensive, but technology is supposed to get cheaper every year and besides touch bar, there's no real new tech in the MBPro.

I like Tim Cook, no grudge against him. But it does feel like the peak of Apple innovation is over. iPhones are all just incremental every year. Apple TV is like, meh (even tho I have one and that's all we use on our tv). The Mac Pro is stagnating while Microsoft (of all companies) actually released a kick ass looking new desktop - hell hath frozen over. Apple has exited the screen business. Their Airports, which once (a long time ago) were really good, are now just meh. I have all these products and more and there is now a definite push going on to dumb down of all their products in regards to the Pro user. The sun is setting on us.

I'm not horrified by this per se since what really seems to be going on is Apple is milking it now. They probably have another 5-10 years where they can do this, but after a while, I think people in general are going to start looking for alternatives. Developers I work with are already talking about this - the influencers are on the move.

All a company has to do is create a good enough MBPro circa 2010 with modern specs, clean up Elementary so it looks less like a cartoon desktop, and get some bigger name native apps and they would be set. If you could enable 'grandparents mode' while keeping pro mode in tact, then the influencers might be able to recommend it.

I'll wager £5 you end up buying one.

Which is why it was a happy confluence of factors. Unix wasn't a call to action though, just an implementation detail.

> No one tries to remove Lenovo

Cerainly they do. Black electrical tape is an effective logo-hider for laptops and cameras.

It is also great for suppressing those bright blue LEDs that feature on many devices.

My MBP has 16gb as well and no problem whatsoever with that. But it's a 5 years old model and when I bought I had only 4gb. So 4x in 5 years. By extension I would probably need at least 2x 16gb in 3-4 years but instead I will be stuck with 16gb.

Apple has reduced the battery from 74.9 to 54.5-watt-hour(27%). This makes the new macbook pro very thin.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Function...

It'll be interesting to see if & when this starts to influence desktop software design. Since the early 90s, it's largely been considered a waste of time to optimize client programs for speed or memory usage, because a new machine will just come out in a couple years with double the memory and double the processing power. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in application-level performance, optimizations that could be done but aren't because the user won't perceive a difference. Now that Moore's Law has largely stalled out, I wonder if we'll start seeing innovation in software platforms (languages, frameworks) to optimize for speed & space instead of ease-of-use, to try and recover that performance that the hardware isn't giving us.

To add to that, the FFA caps the maximum battery size to 100 watt-hours, which is probably the main reason why it's limited to 16GB. I posted it here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841293

Yes, with the more power-hungry DDR4 modules. They take ~1/3 more power than their LPDDR4 counterparts.

Sure, it may be more fair to compare to an XPS model. But, even so...big price difference.

Admittedly, if you really love macOS, buying a Mac is a reasonable choice, and the only realistic choice for non-technical folks (building a Hackintosh is non-trivial, and a license violation). But, I'd just be installing Linux on it, anyway.

An XPS is a more fair comparison, sure, but even an XPS can be had for 2/3 the price of a comparable MacBook Pro.

And, sure, it's an argument that's been made for years...because it's mostly been true for years that Apple products are expensive, even when compared to similarly spec'ed and similarly high build quality devices.

Status signalling.

Don't you think it's a bit ridiculous that Chrome is using 28GB of your RAM?