Comment by nessus42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nessus42 | Hacker News Reader

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You mean make the fans blast?

Well, they're not that loud. The building H/V airflow is usually a lot louder. And my Retina MacBook doesn't even have a fan. (Though I also don't do a lot of software development on it, I have done development on slower machines, and it wasn't terribly painful. Depending on what I was doing, of course.)

I still remember the days of programming in C++ using C-front, and a compile would take 20 minutes. Being a gdb wizard was essential. These days, even with Scala, compilation is fast enough on a four-core iMac that debugging via print statements is easier than using a debugger.

I guess I'm old enough that I just haven't gotten spoiled by expecting everything to be superfast. Though what does annoy me is how slow many websites are. Grrrrrr! When programming in fancy IDEs is faster than surfing the web, you know that something is wrong with the world....

Of course, the MacBook is passive :)

Incremental compilation makes my coworkers' gear loud enough I can hear it anywhere in the room. No HVAC over here. Maybe a MacPro would handle the load better, but that's completely overkill for our needs. The MBPr and iMac keep getting thinner, for no good reason in the iMac's case.

Personally I love the thinness and lightness of my Retina MacBook. I can easily hold it with one hand. Or even with a few fingers. I can toss it around with ease. Maybe it's gratuitous to be that thin. It's certainly not gratuitous to be that light.

I also loved the hell out of my MacBook Air. I recently gave that to my girlfriend. (Hence me now having a MacBook Retina.) It's four years old and still works as well as the day I got it. It's perfectly zippy. It's only downsides are that the screen isn't nearly as good as the MacBook Retina screen, and the speakers don't go loud enough.

Re iMac fans: well, I love the fact that my MacBook Retina makes no noise at all. But the noises made by my work and home iMacs are not loud enough to bother me in any way. They certainly handle their loads just fine, as long as you don't mind a bit of extra white noise.

But then again, I kind of miss the days when you could hear the disk drive in a computer chugging away. You could often tell what the computer was working on by the rhythm of the chugging.

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