Hacker News Reader

Comment by gervase | Hacker News Reader

I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).

This would be similar to, for example, many sportswear brands who say they are for professional athletes, but whose primary consumer base is... not.

In both cases, they may still attract the audience they claim to target, but in practice, that niche market makes up only a small fraction of their total sales.

View on HN

Nicely put. People also like to buy over-featured products for “bragging rights” (huge pick up trucks used to go shopping, ultralight trekking gear for 5 km hikes, €300 knives to cut apples in slices etc.)

I'm reminded of the recent "news story" making the rounds, that some researchers found iPhone ownership to be the clearest signal of wealth.

"Signal"

There is a lot of signaling going on, using these product choices. And Apple's at the top of the heap.

It has transitioned from "tech" to "brand".

I've seen people write off William Gibson's more recent work, that takes this on as a central topic for examination and exposition. It may not be as... "awesome" as the universe of Molly and Wintermute. But it's a very good and engaging application of creating writing to this topic. Recommended.

I agree with you, but also think there might be more nuance going on here than all that.

I think this is actually sometimes about minimalism. I'd rather have one nice, good, high-quality thing than to accumulate junk over the years as I get deeper into a hobby. The longest hike I've done was a three-day section hike on the AT, but I have ultralight hiking and camping gear. I know, in the future, when I have more time, I'll do longer and more frequent hikes, and even now, lighter is more comfortable to carry.

There's also the Paradox of Choice. Upper middle class folks are strapped for time and flush with cash. Would I rather spend two hours reading reviews to find out whether the discount pocket knife is really as good for my purposes as a Benchmade, or just make the purchase secure in the knowledge that I bought a well-regarded brand with excellent customer service? Maybe I overpaid, but the speed and hassle-free nature of the transaction are worth it.

Well, in this case, the deluxe/upsell machine is just the wrong tool for the job. An overbuilt kitchen knife, a high-performance light truck, or ultralight hiking gear will generally accomplish those tasks as well or better than a mid-market alternative. A new MacBook Pro is worse for most developers than one from a couple years ago, and worse in all sorts of other ways (namely the slashing of battery capacity in exchange for an ultimately minor reduction in size and weight).

> €300 knives to cut apples in slices

Oh, I really enjoy prep-work. I have to admit, I like using a nice, sharp knife (plus, it's much safer).

I hate doing prep-work at other peoples houses. The knives are just so dull.

So, I spend more money on knives than I should because I enjoy good knives and get lots of good use out of them.

What are your fave brands?

I have to admit I've gone through a few, but my daily driver can be found for ~ $30 online if you watch for it. I also spend good money on sharpeners, etc. Ironic? yes.

https://www.amazon.com/Victorinox-Fibrox-Chefs-Knife-8-Inch/...

It’s funny because I “perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets” but no laptop (or even desktop) is capable of handling them. I normally need to SSH to some cluster with thousands of CPU cores and terabytes of RAM. I’m actually kind of curious who the target user is for a high performance laptop nowadays. Video editors? What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?

I currently have a 2012 MBP Retina, but am not sure if I want my next laptop to be another MBP or just the regular MacBook. I really like the 15” screen and would have a hard time giving that up. I wish they had a regular MacBook with a high quality screen, battery, and keyboard and not much else.

I suspect that a ryzen+ or even eypc+ when its out would be good or initial investigations on the desk top and as an interface to a bigger hpc cluster when needed.

I can get a much better idea how my ML models will behave at scale if I prototype on my 16GB MBP than if I only had whatever ram is leftover from 8GB after Chrome and everything use up most of it. It's no match for server GPUs but I can run multiple Jupyter notebooks with decent size datasets loaded and not have to think about it.

> What kinds of tasks require more performance than a standard laptop but less than a desktop?

I suppose it depends on the desktop! I just moved from a MacBook Pro to a Dell XPS 15. I thought I'd replace the MBP with the Dell, but I ended up replacing my desktop machine with the Dell, and still using the MacBook in my dining room.

The XPS 15 I bought has an i9, 32GB RAM, and 1TB SSD for $1100 less than the equivalent MacBook. My workload is primarily Adobe- and WordPress-centric, with some coding and article writing thrown in for good measure.

I do video editing, photo editing, and run code with zero issues. The i9 beats the pants off my Skylake i7 desktop. And it's portable! And the screen is amazing. I have it hooked up to my 5K monitor in my home office, and it's gorgeous.

Since my workload is 98% Chrome, Adobe products, Microsoft products, or text editors, everything was pretty much identical from one platform to another. I turned off automatic updates on Windows 10 (I do this on my Mac too) and had no issues at all migrating over.

I don't think I'll be buying a new Mac at this point.

I also "perform complex simulations and handle massive data sets" and often do mockup on my laptop (where power is nice) before shipping it off to the cluster, and often truck the results back to my laptop for analysis.

> I believe this is a case of a disparity between who they say their products are for (power users), and who they are actually for (people who want to think of themselves as power users).

That's true for most gaming rigs and high-end Windows laptops ;-)

computer advert in 2018, truth in advertising version:

"stalk your ex on Facebook, 37% faster"

"Cat videos on youtube look great in Retina full screen"

"Your stolen music files sound fab thanks to deeper bass response from the stereo speakers"

"chat with your dumb friends for hours, with a new longer-lasting battery"

"call in sick without removing your phone from its case, thanks to bluetooth."

Other than dying batteries, or physical damage (broken trackpad/keyboard) I seriously wonder why the average person needs anything but the most basic laptop when a $99 android phone is in all measures more powerful than a 10 year old laptop but we're doing basically the same activities: surf the web, chat, email. Very, very few people create content. Most consume.

YouTube videos don’t serve 4K on Safari. When they do, it’s over Chrome which is using 10W more powerr, which over entire world equals power use of a small country...

h264ify [1] will save you power on Chrome. It does not support 4k however.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihd...

Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake have full hardware VP9 decoding, so all told you'll probably be using more energy playing H.264 in Chrome if you're on a Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake processor.

Yes, been using that. Problem is that YouTube quietly removed 1440p h264 videos too! Used to be my indicator that I can turn off h264ify for a minute to view 4k content...

“complex simulations” strikes me as particularly wannabe-ish. I really do run pretty complex simulations that take hours, sometimes days, to run to completion (on a maxed-out 2012 Mac Mini with dual SSDs and the maximum amount of memory it will support). It would never occur to me to run such stuff on a laptop that might run out of power, throttle back the processor because of heating, or something else going wrong.

“Managing data and complex simulations” seems to allude to ‘em Excel jockeys who should be using a humble database and/or are running some kind of what-if calculations.

Agree with you. I have a ~4k touchbar Macbook Pro and do HPC type of stuff all day... and I rarely consider doing anything more than a toy simulation or computational experiment on my laptop. When I previously used a Macbook Air, my toy PoC stuff ran pretty must just as well.

Anything else either quickly gets offloaded to one of my group's servers with 64-80 threads and 100s of GB of RAM or, if it's even bigger, to the local HPC cluster with 1000s of CPUs.

Even without access to existing resources: I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where, if I have a fixed budget of ~3-5k to do computational work, it'd be better for me to spend that on a top-end MBP than a two-piece solution of laptop+linux server.

A couple months ago, building projections for a rabies elimination program while sitting in a hotel bar in Zambia, I was pretty pleased I wasn't relying on a server.

Edge case, sure, but shrug

Haha fair enough.

How's the rabies situation there? Are people still doing multicompartment SIR models? That kind of stuff is hard to parralelize.

It's still a big deal, but getting better - my university's running a decently successful program in Kenya.

And yeah, people still use compartmental models pretty heavily. A lot of my stuff is stochastic (it's about the beginning or end of epidemics, or in small populations) so that's nicely parallel.

On the other hand, I do this all the time on my laptop, and have found having some more RAM or a couple more cores to be something that would make my life actively easier.

Very nicely put. A $1600 MBP pro user is different than a $4500 MBP pro user. The niche market also drives credibility.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com