Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

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More than a single event, it is the string of events which create the disappointment. While Apple is indeed bound by Intels schedule for CPU upgrades, this would not prevent Apple from regular other components in their devices.

A computer like the Mini should get yearly updates - and there is no good reason to solder in the memory. While it kept the very same design, it went from a quad-core i7 to a dual-core, with fixed memory. Which then stopped to be upgraded.

The versatile Mac Pro got replaced with the current can-like design, limiting the choices and then never got upgraded. If you make a machine which cannot be user-upgraded, please upgrade it every year. There is no good reason, there is no option for the current NVidia or AMD cards available.

The iMac is still one of the better offerings - I got the 5k after the last refresh. However, while this gives you the fastest CPU, it only offers mobile graphics performance. There is no good reason why its internals, especially the drive bay are not user-accessible. While having a gorgeous display, why for all its expensiveness does it not offer any kind of video-in? If it had the ability to accept HDMI or DisplayPort input and display them in a special application window, that would be just great.

Especially, if Apple does not focus on the desktop, why are they so reluctant to sell a more traditional desktop machine? Where the user can change the hardware, if Apple cannot be bothered to do it?

All of this just adds up - and while power users in the pre-can age had at least an expensive but powerful alternative, this does not longer exist. And the other choices also get more and more limited. So it should not come as a surprise, when even the most faithful supporters get frustrated.

The most insane part of this to me, is the inability to upgrade or repair any of the desktop Macs by making them locked down, soldered machines.

These are machines meant to sit on a desk. Who cares about shaving off few centimeters of desk space if means you can't replace your RAM or hard disk or video card with off the shelf parts?

I find this both anti-user and environmentally unfriendly.

Seriously, if anyone has a technical answer to this I'd love to know what it is. Right now I can't intepret the soldered-on ram in desktops as anything other than a user-hostile cash grab.

Cash grab. Apple charge $1200 to upgrade from 16GB to 64GB in the Mac Pro. The retail price for 64GB of ECC DDR3 is $530. The markups on processor upgrades are similarly high.

Even worse when you realize that you're paying that $1200 for only 48GB of memory.

I'm pretty sure it is exactly just a user-hostile cash grab.

Soldering down the ram uses less vertical space (thinner laptop by a few mm) and less planar space (smaller PCB). This lets them make the laptop marginally thinner and have more space for other things (mainly batteries). If you look at the smallest form factors in consumer electronics (cell phones for example), nearly everything is soldered to one board in pursuit of reducing size. Realistically, Apple would not be able to make their laptops as thin as they are without doing this. That being said, it does provide them with the nice side effect of being able to extract incredible margins on hardware upgrades.

Edit: Missed the point that we are talking about desktops, same idea still exists, it lets you make the form factor smaller and it requires less space since you don't need the connectors and you can be a bit more creative with the chip layout.

I'm not saying that I prefer the soldered-in versions, but back when I had a Mac with user-replaceable memory, the RAM would get unseated from time to time as my machine got jostled around in my bag and I'd have to open it up to fix it. I imagine that the Genius Bar saw a non-zero number of people bringing in computers that wouldn't boot because of this. Also, soldered-in saves space and thus helps with their pathological need to make MBPs thinner.

It's hostile to users who want to upgrade RAM, but pretty friendly to everyone else. It gets into the point of this article...when Apple looks at both demographics, the group that doesn't upgrade is much larger. Apple used to make decisions that would cater to the more non-mainstream use cases of their pro users. Now, they're focused almost entirely on the mainstream users.

Huh?

I'm using a Dell Latitude E7440, it's about 3 years old, and I carry it everywhere. It has a few dents here and there. I've gone to the pub with it a few times and only God (and Google location services) know how I got back, luckily with the notebook still in my backpack, and the backpack somehow inside my place.

The RAM never dislodged.

http://17c4dcd7f91259d8cc66-f5932f6db0039e8c02f89a70c334ff0e...

But of course, soldering them in is not surprising. It cuts costs. A lot I guess. You need less connectors, you need less time assembling the laptop, less time supporting the very rare cases when there's a problem with the RAM.

>> But of course, soldering them in is not surprising. It cuts costs.

Unfortunately these cost savings don't get passed to the customer. RAM bumps in Apple BTOs cost notably more than socketed RAM of equivalent quality. And because the RAM is pre-soldered, you can't chalk the price premium to the cost of some guy popping RAM into sockets.

> Unfortunately these cost savings don't get passed to the customer.

You don't get to be the most profitable enterprise by passing on savings to the customer.

The premium price is there because people buy it. As simple as that. Peer fucking pressure. (Because no one wants to be the lame duck fiddling with a subpar device, even if the only thing that really SHIES is the polish on the same Intel turd.) Consumerism. It works very well.

> he RAM would get unseated from time to time as my machine got jostled around in my bag

this seems like a pretty big stretch

He specified desktops though. Pretty sure you don't have a desktop jostling around in your bag.

It probably lets them reuse more of the same assembly line/processes for desktops/laptops/tablets.

The Mac Pro is made in the USA; the rest of Apple's product line is made in China. There is already considerable hand-assembly in the Mac Pro; the additional step of installing socketed RAM would add no more than a few cents in cost.

Using soldered RAM in the Mac Pro is transparently user-hostile. It serves no purpose other than to depress the used market and allow Apple to charge a huge premium for extra RAM.

> the additional step of installing socketed RAM would add no more than a few cents in cost.

It's not just about more labour though. It's also about having a different kind of component, another supply chain to manage, different QA processes... on what's at this point a very much non-core product line.

Which is why they don't.

The lack of affordable storage in the retina and up laptops and even desktops has been a deal breaker for me. I am on a five year old mbp and am seriously considering a hackintosh to be a daily driver. That's a whole big can of worms though.

I just built a Mini-ITX Hackintosh (dual-booting Windows 10 and Sierra) that is running great if you have any questions or interest concerning the parts I used.

They're way better now than they were a few years ago thanks to UEFI installations. No more having to do a complete backup prior to updates and having to fix all your kexts/drivers, or a complete reinstall for upgrading to the next OSX/MacOS major release. The biggest problem I have is needing to use a $6 USB adapter for sound, but it's so trivial compared to past headaches.

I was originally looking into buying a Mac Pro. I spent less than $1000 on this build, and got something much, much better than a $4k+ maxed-out Mac Pro or 2016 MBP, plus with the ability to upgrade storage, GPU, and RAM.

Would you mind adding a pcpartpicker list. I think I might go down this route. Thanks!

Not the original poster, but I also built a hackintosh in the last 2 months and its working great, here's the PCpartpicker list ($1350 without monitor): https://pcpartpicker.com/user/bshep/saved/xgn7P6

The only issue was getting the video card to work correctly and that was pretty easy after finding a tutorial on tonymac.

thanks a lot!

Here you go

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcparts45/saved/#view=YfcHxr

I'd be interested to see your part list and share any experiences you have with it. email is in profile if you don't want to share it here.

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/pcparts45/saved/#view=YfcHxr

Thanks! Wow that's a hd monitor. I have a 30" 2560x1600 and I thought that was nice. how do you like it?

It's really nice, but text can be hard to read without scaling or enlarging it. I haven't looked at any other 4k or 5k displays, but I think a 30" 4k would be much better. Sadly those are really expensive at the moment. The P2715Q is the best IPS 4k monitor in the price range, plus I got a great deal on a used one.

Even with the text issue, I think that it's still a significant upgrade over the Thunderbolt displays I was using before (I was using 2). Not quite as huge as going from my previous non-IPS 1920x1200 monitor to 2560x1440, though.

Yes, the lack of storage is really bad - the Mac Pro is the most ridiculous one, being limited to 1T of SSD in a pro machine. Fortunately for me, I was able to order the iMac with the basic HD and my Mac dealer (authorized) replaced it with a 2T Samsung SSD, though for a fee. Still, I got this for roughly the same price as the Apple 1T had cost. Otherwise I probably would not have invested into the iMac. (And what a nice machine it would be, if it had 2 bays of user accessible SSD drives...)

Can you identify specifically the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems? I've spent considerable time using all 3 major OSes as daily drivers and while each platform has perks, I've never felt a strong commitment to OS X for daily use. I'm curious what many people feel is so crucial about it that they'd consider switching to the massively unstable Hackintosh over a customized Windows or Linux installation (or some hybrid of the two, which is what I run).

For me at least it's a lot of little things, including but not limited to:

- The plethora of excellent native apps made by indie/small company on macOS. The platform has attracted small time high quality developers as far back as the pre-OS X days and it still does, mostly. Apps like this are considerably more rare on Windows, and while indie is the name of the desktop Linux game, quality and consistency are huge issues there.

- The workflow. macOS is built to deal with lots of loose, oddly sized windows scattered around which is great for how I work, especially when hooked up to a 27" monitor. Windows' window management starts to breaks down if you don't maximize everything and doesn't allow you to manage windows on a per-application basis. Under macOS you can tell your computer, "Close all windows belonging to TextEdit, but don't quit TextEdit", while Windows cannot offer that sort of control. I also really like having a single, fixed global menubar over a smattering of redundant bars attached to individual windows. There's also the key binds built into every native text field and the way the OS additively stacks key shortcuts and all sorts of other little things.

Linux can be customized to be semi-Maclike but getting all the details right is damn near impossible short of writing an entirely new desktop environment, and even then you're eventually going to find your efforts thwarted by some third party app that where for some reason or another the developer has found it necessary to use some oddball UI toolkit or to do otherwise do odd things that don't play nice with your meticulously arranged desktop.

I'm currently dual booting hackintoshed Sierra and Windows 10 on my tower (keeping windows for games) and in the past have exclusively run several Linux distributions with numerous different desktop setups. At the end of the day I'm facing a productivity loss by switching to either of the alternative platforms.

It's a lot of little things that add up.

There are a ton of quality utilities that add up to a nice experience.

cmd is a lot nicer than ctrl to use as a base for keyboard shortcuts and the keyboard shortcuts are generally well integrated into the os.

How the operating system handles events enables a lot of the tweaking apps to work well.

I like the single menu bar at the top of the screen.

It's unix under the hood and it has a terminal as a first class citizen. Finder is pretty weak but what can you do? There are some alternatives to finder and the architecture of osx allows for them to exist without causing a bunch of the mac equivalent of "blue screens of death".

I am sure there are some equivalent utilities for windows and linux but I have some mouse gestures that are system wide that I would be severely disappointed not to have anymore.

In general there is a nice little gui that polishes up whatever little utility thing you feel like doing but didn't know.

I am sure I could move to linux if I really needed to but there would be things that I missed quite a bit.

Edit, a few more:

Cmd left and right arrow to go to the beginning and end of a line is great. emacs bindings by default in text areas is nice to have(I think you can turn vi mode on too if you want).

Parallels to use windows when I need to for engineering programs that need it and have it seamlessly work as a mac app is great.

the hardware is of great quality too. (the mac pro before the trashcan was a thoughtful and modular machine that was a joy to work on)

plugging in monitors just works which is great.

Anything with audio. ASIO on Windows is a mess of exclusive application usage and without it you're looking at latency so bad that I can't real-time monitor and talk at the same time because the echo effect kills me (and it's worse if you want to aggregate multiple audio devices). Linux--there's nothing worthwhile in terms of audio software and JACK is a disaster.

Even if I switch everything else I do to Windows and Linux, and I'm considering it, I'll end up keeping a Mac around for the foreseeable future.

Apart from what the sibling posters said about great indie software:

Linux just doesn't seem to be very trackpad-friendly. There is a messy diaspora of tools that translate fixed gestures into hotkeys, and it doesn't help that Linux distros are transitioning from synaptics to libinput. libinput doesn't even have kinetic scrolling, for example.

It's not just muscle memory - every kind of mouse (traditional, 'gamer', vertical) has given me back pain. I wouldn't have expected that, but this is my #1 reason for staying in the Apple ecosystem.

Spaces, the windows 10 version won't fill that gap for me until I can assign apps to specific spaces so that they always open there, as well as key shortcuts e.g. Ctrl 1 to go to space 1. Also remembering my setup through shutdowns.

Quick look - so useful.

Screenshotting (cmd shift 4, cmd shift space etc) and annotations via preview app. Windows expects me to draw highlight boxes by hand which rapidly looks unprofessional.

Using cmd shift 4 to measure pixels for web design work.

Exposé is nice, not sure if Windows has something like that, I think it does?

Spotlight was a big one for me too but I believe Windows does that justice now with Windows button search.

iMessage on desktop is actually a big deal for me, being that most of my friends and family have apple devices. Being on Windows and wanting to send someone a quick link is frustrating when you're used to having iMessage.

As others have mentioned, it's all the small things. Admittedly I haven't looked at Linux on the desktop for a while so this is mostly based on comparisons with Windows.

macOS is great because it combines a flawless UNIX system (with homebrew, the only package manager I've been satisfied with) and a nice GUI with apps that work/look great by default.

Linux has a massive lack of good apps. Simple things like a decent calendar app on Linux doesn't seem to exist.

Homebrew is a children's toy compared to APT or Portage. There's no argument about general polish or calendar apps in particular though.

It's a trade off. You can have rough edges but community control and 100+ backup plans, or you can have sleek, polished, but at the mercy of next year's soldered RAM and SSD pricing guidelines. I personally love breaking things to figure out how they work, but some people have a job to do and can't deal with distractions.

Homebrew works way better than APT for me at least (I've never tried Portage). APT is definitely a way better option for servers, but at a high cost by sacrificing usability.

>the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems?

the apps

I suppose the era of PowerPCs was a little different, with Apple far ahead of PCs for a while, then well behind. Apple could have released Skylake 13" class laptops a long time ago. Possibly they thought there would be suitable Kaby Lake processors with Iris by now.

These MacBook Pros are expensive, but they really are not more expensive than similar machine with matching specs. Given that, here's what I think would have worked a lot better:

Release these MacBook Pros 3-6 months ago, but each model a couple hundred dollars more expensive. In the box for free include an adapter with power pass through, HDMI and a USB-A 3.1, another with mini DisplayPort, and one USB-C to Lighting cable. Make the power cable fully capable for 3.1 data transfer, rather than a potential source of confusion. Sell adapters in the store for close to cost. They should also have released the iPhone 8 and future iOS devices with USB-C rather than Lighting. And to complete the line, maybe a premium-priced dock, that doesn't crowd out other hardware innovators, but proves the market viable.

Presumably the cost of the OS is built into the computers, why not some of the add-ons that facilitate the transition to USB-C? USB-C is superior, but the transition with short-sighted nickle-and-diming seems like it is needlessly aggravating people.

I don't know that PPC Macs were ever far ahead of PCs, performance-wise at least. At best there was a relatively big leap from "much slower than what you can get in a PC" in the tail end of the 68040 era to "pretty close to what you can get in a PC" in the early PPC days. But then PPC performance stagnated and left Apple in the lurch again, which helped drive the eventual jump to Intel.

G3/G4/G5

Especially in the Pentium 4 era.

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