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Comment by seanalltogether | Hacker News Reader

My brother has been obsessed with Apple products for the past 20 years, he was the one who convinced my parents to get one in 1998. He's been a professional photographer since 2001 and has worked on different iterations of Mac Pro machines ever since. This Thanksgiving he finally gave in and asked me how to build a PC for his work studio. He just can't justify working on desktop Mac Pros anymore. He'll keep the mac laptop for onsite work, but he wants a real beast for working on the RAW photos.

I keep hearing this story from every creative professional I know. (2 digital artists, 1 painter, 2 video editors)

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I agree and have taken time to build a PC recently, after living in Mac world for 10 years.

The hardware you can get is quite amazing (this is what I built https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/b/6FXPxr). Everything works and it's rock solid, it's also very quiet (something a lot PC users aren't so concerned about).

Windows however I'm finding a lot harder to get on with. Windows 4K support is awful. So many broken and blurry dialogs and applications (including Microsoft ones). Retina, on the Mac, just works.

I missed the Windows 8 disaster, however it appears some of it has spilt over Windows 10.

Seems you can't have the hardware you want and the OS you want, you have to pick one or the other.

Maybe I'm snowblind to it because I've been using Windows for so long now, but what are some examples of "awful" 4k support on Windows? I have a 15 inch 4k laptop and have been fairly pleased with the high DPI support

Edit: Also, that's a rad build!

4k support on Windows 10 is ok. Most major applications work but there are little things, like my home screen photo last night wasn't high enough resolution. For me they aren't usually a big deal, but coming from the Mac ecosystem you definitely notice them

There's quite a bit. The services dialog is blurry. The dialog that details the network devices is blurry. I have an ongoing battle with IntelliJ and PyCharm, fonts are all broken.

Steam is totally broken, not to mention the games. I got QuakeLive (best bit about being back on Windows). Quake was all broken (rendered at twice the DPI), I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).

I could go on.

> The services dialog is blurry.

Not doubting you, but I just opened it and it's not blurry on my 4k monitor. To be clear, I hit Start, typed Services and pressed ENTER when I saw the Services desktop app. (Another way to open it would be to hit Win+R and type: services.msc)

> I have an ongoing battle with IntelliJ and PyCharm, fonts are all broken.

Sounds like a JetBrains problem. What's broken with them anyway?

> I had to find the shortcut and disable Application Scaling (wtf?).

That's called learning how to use a new OS. Also, I can't imagine that you have more complaints about games on Windows than you would on a Mac where there hardly are any games to begin with, are only half-supported or in perma-beta.

As a Mac and Windows user of over 20 years, I feel that Windows is generally more flexible; you can make it do exactly what you want way more often than with the Macintosh OS. Things are simpler on the Mac, but that comes at the price of inflexibility.

When I get home maybe I can take some screen shots. Maybe it will illustrate what I'm talking about.

I take your point about flexibility and you're 100% correct on the gaming aspect.

As a former Mac user, I can say Windows 10's 4K support is getting better. The Fall Creators Update improved some issues I was having when running multiple monitors with different scaling. At Microsoft's current pace, I expect the remaining HiDPI issues will be fixed sooner rather than later.

You can build a really really crazy machine for 4k USD. He made a good choice.

It's no secret that the 2013 Mac Pro was a failure and a design mistake. Apple admitted as much.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/transcript-phil-schiller-c...

It's similar for me. I've been a Mac user for decades and use an old iMac as my main computer - msotly for audio work and web development. This machine needs to be replaced rather sooner than later, but I'm having hard time justifying the price/performance ratio of Macs. The configuration I'm looking for will cost me at least €3000.

I'm also using a PC as media center and gaming system and I envy what €3000 will buy me in PC world. More importantly, it'll be a machine I can selectively upgrade at any point, unlike the iMac. I'm just not sure if the price justifies using Windows, which I kind of tolerate, but really am not fond of.

I've not had any of my friends full on switch yet. Only one friend doing 3D uses a mac- he works in broadcast and the whole department has the trashcan pros.

Other friends in video / photo are still using mac laptops. I never saw any of them pull the trigger on the mac pros personally...

Look how far the other display manufactures have came, too. I don't know if we have Apple to thank but there are some _really_ nice monitors around now that aren't coming from Apple. Maybe it was just the bubble I was in but in ~2005~2007 I don't remember anyone having anything that could compete with Apple's displays for the price.

I think your brother is probably going to get a LOT more for his money going to PC...

Why not build a hackintosh?

I've got a beast of a rig that has been flawless. Easy upgrades (though you do have to wait a few days), handoff, continuity, thunderbolt all working 100%.

The only downtime I've had is restarts due to security updates.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/JnJCf8

I saw a dude with a ryzen hackintosh rig, it performed incredibly but... even among enthusiasts he mentioned 'This was not for the faint hearted. I don't recommend you actually do this- even though I got it to work with minimal quirks it took probably more than a month of my life".

Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.

I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.

> Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.

> I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.

The lock-in to Apple products should also be considered as a large blocker.

If you stick to "standard" parts there is little to no risk. There is so much information out there on which parts are compatible and which aren't.

The hardest obstacle for me was sourcing some parts because they weren't available here in Vietnam. I had to fly to Singapore for most of it. Ironically, it was cheaper to do that for the parts I could get here, so everything worked out in the end.

> I've got a beast of a rig that has been flawless.

Can you guarantee that ? Who is responsible if an upgrade doesn't work or bricks your machine ?

Of course not. macOS has no DRM, but that could change at some point.

Information on changes for updates come quickly, and it's pretty standard practice to clone your boot drive before major updates.

In a worst-case scenario, you just stay on a version of macOS until it makes more sense to use that same hardware for a Windows/whatever OS change.

Not true IIRC. Several OS components are decrypted at runtime by “Don’t Steal Mac OS X.kext”. Not very effective, of course.

I'm aware of DSMOS, but as yet it doesn't do any verification of anything before decryption. Also, the actual key used is simply "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc". To virtualize OSX/macOS on hypervisors that don't natively support Mac, you have to pass this in yourself.

That's why you wait a few days. The hackintosh community is very active.

Also, at this point, the things that would brick you in the past are no longer applicable with a modern hackintosh.

> That's why you wait a few days. The hackintosh community is very active.

That may be fine for a home user, but if my livelyhood was dependent on this machine I'd rather buy something less hacked together and with actual support options.

This is not about wether or not it will actually work, it's about liability.

I depend on this machine to pay my rent, keep the lights on, keep insulin in my kid, keep us all fed.

If this machine bites the dust, I swap out the part or I restore from Time Machine. At least with this machine, I have the option of swapping out the part.

It's not some mystical black box. These are standard PC parts that are supported by macOS. I think I only use two kexts that aren't shipped with macOS to get to 100%.

If the hardware fails you can replace it, but what if Apple improves the security of the OS and prevents the next OS update from working on a hackintosh ? What if a bug in one of the hacked parts wipes your entire drive ?

People who depend on Macs for a living also have to stay behind on OS updates for reasons of staying compatible with production software. For instance, my friend works at a publishing house and they are all running Mavericks.

Is that really a big deal? You barely notice any benefits between 2-4 versions on Mac. What's Mavericks? 10.10? And High Sierra is 10.14? I have a computer that is 10.9 or 10.10 and a 10.13 computer. I can barely tell the difference between them.

My 10.13 computer is my main one and was on 10.11 before when I upgraded only because I did a clean install right before the newest release. Don't remember noticing any changes.

I'm a huge Apple user but don't keep up with OS changes since they are so minor. This really isn't an issue. And if it's for business then the apps that are trendy and only for newer versions won't matter either.

I don't get it.. PC for studio and mac for field work.. that seems like a very counter intuitive setup. Whatever benefits he get from a mac laptop is no doubt eroded by using these two platforms together.

this is not the main point of his comment.

sure it is.. it's all under the sentiment of Macs not producing products with performance parity with PCs.. What's wrong with just using a high-end windows laptop for field? Is that gap in the laptop space that big that warrants dealing with two distinct platforms that do not work well together?

Because the laptop is what he keeps his life on, and the work station is just that, for doing heavy lifting work in Photoshop and Lightroom and video and whatever. I don't think he wants to move his life to Windows which is a bigger deal, just his work.

He's most likely using the laptop for capturing photos (possibly tethered capture), and doing post-processing on the PC. Post-processing is what requires high performance hardware. It's also likely that he already had the Macbook and didn't feel the need to replace it at the same time.

I'm in the same boat, as it turns out. I switched from macOS to Windows for post-processing this summer, but I still have my Macbook for image capture and driving a telescope in the field.

You need a Mac in the field, mainly to look professional to the clients...

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