Dear Apple, We Need an Affordable and Upgradable Mac | Hacker News Reader

Dear Apple, We Need an Affordable and Upgradable Mac

namityadav.com

44 pointssinatra48 comments

I hate to play the devil's advocate here, but why would Apple make an upgradeable machine? Having everything built in drives sales and they've obviously done the math and come up with the right numbers. They believe they won't get enough new purchases due to upgradability to offset the loss in sales.

The people who are most in favor of this either go PC, Linux or Hackintosh.

There will be a price to pay that's hard to be felt in the early numbers.

I am for the first time considering switching away from Mac simply because getting a relatively powerful machine on mac is how prohibitively expensive.

Remember that Mac/OSX get it's underlying impetus from a vast number of individuals who are not working for big tech etc..

I am not buying their machines. HP laptops are field serviceable for memory and hard drives. That is what we are sticking with for now.

    > I hate to play the devil's advocate here, 
    > but why would Apple make an upgradeable machine?

Because a customer sends Steve an email explaining how many headaches it's causing her. And he says "yeah, this is stupid" and tells someone to fix it.

Oh right, I forgot. It's 2018.

To make happy a small but important segment of the customer base. Consider how before Apple give some love for music, composers or scientific users. In the great scheme of things, them are not big numbers but is good to have them.

Is not as if Apple do this and suddenly most consumers will buy it instead of a simpler/soldered machine. And if it "Cannibalize" is among Apple products, so is not as big of a deal.

I not buy that Apple is not doing this because money. I think the reality is more sad. Them truly believe that what them are given make happy this small segment of the customer base too.

Is pure denial, plain & simple. That is why when aknowledge that the mac pro was a mistake I think them get "shocked".

Dear Apple, please change your economic models that made you the biggest company in the world on account of my blog post.

One component of what made Apple the richest company in the world was a willingness to uphold their reputation, even if it meant leaving money on the table. They've now spent over five years burning through that capital.

For developers, Apple has turned in Comcast. Developers used to evangelize Apple. Now it's "I wish I could switch, but I need MacOS, so they're the only game in town."

Developers tend to overstate how much their love or hatred of apple matters to both Apple themselves and the general public.

It isn't possible to overstate the importance of developers to the health of Apple. There are so many reasons. Maybe the most significant: without love from the developer community, Apple can't hire and retain "A players"

It seems as if in this thread 'developers' means multiple things: 1. developers who make apps? 2. developers who work for Apple.

Been looking at a cheap alternative to my MacBook when traveling. Bought a 2 year old Thinkpad for under $400. Replacing keyboard - pleasantly surprised at how serviceable this machine is. Upgrading RAM and storage is actually doable, and took about 10 minutes. Dual batteries, up to 32gb of ram (2 years ago!), and supported LTE more nice touches.

That sounds like a sweetheart of a deal! I managed to get a 2014 Dell for about that price (after RAM upgrade to 16gb). One SSD and one spinning disk. But the thing was great for popping off the back and plugging and unplugging things. I'd have killed for a Thinkpad though!

It seems like tomorrow is only going to be about iPhone and Apple Watch. iPad Pro and Macs are going to be announced at a later October event.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-10/apple-to-...

Dear Louis Vuitton, I want a sustainable and inexpensive handbag.

I would love to see Apple embark on an OEM program similar to the old clone license of yore.

As an OEM partner (Clevo, Asrock or the like), I can purchase T3 chips (or whatever they'll be called) or whatever silicon IP it takes to bless OEMs to help the Mac platform flourish.

The whole widget philosophy has arguably worked well for macOS, but not so much for the user.

Keep the standards high, but jeez Tim, enable partners to serve the market if you don't care to.

Enthusiasm helps sustain platforms. Ask any Windows user whether they have 'voided their warranty'.

These customers don't buy Apple Care and they don't need the slick retail experience. What they will do is breathe fresh life into a fading platform and bring more people under the tent.

Dear Apple, I want the machine you already said you were working on that will come next year

They haven't even released the charger they announced last year

So in the last 5 years I went from full time Linux at work, over full time Windows (Linux on servers), to full time OSX (and again, Linux on servers). I have dual boot Windows and Linux on my personal rig. I see the pros and cons of all, but to be honest, I can't find something that really makes me dependant on any of them (especially on OSX). I just find it a bit sad to have to beg vendors (hardware and software) for anything. Don't buy their gear for a generation or two and look at them listen for the next ten.

The days we needed to buy hardware every three years are gone.

> Switching to Linux isn’t an option due to all the design, legal, and other such documents I need to work with frequently for my startup. I can’t risk using alternative open source tools to edit such important documents because the professionals in those areas, are set in their ways and are not going change just for me.

Excuse me, what? Since when editing such important documents can be done only on Mac? That's the dumbest thing I've read all day.

When the software doesn't exist on Linux?

Name one filetype you can open on OSX that you can't open on linux. I'll wait.

It can also be done on Windows.

Perhaps they are using macOS unique softwares. There are definitely plenty of them.

Even if the files can be opened elsewhere, often the formatting is not consistent.

LMFAO, have you met Apple before? I'm not holding out for them to change their ways anytime soon. They seem to have made every effort to avoid having a general mac box.

> "The smallness or thinness of the machine is absolutely irrelevant for me because it’ll sit under the desk."

It's relevant to apple and a top design consideration. Practicality almost always takes a back seat to shininess and size at Apple.

> If I can get a good Windows desktop for $600 ... I can maybe angrily even pay $1000. But, I can’t justify paying $3000 for it

This is why I can't imagine anyone buying a desktop from these people. Is that something people are still doing? I guess some industries are very apple centric. Baffling to me.

> Why should Apple care?

Let me stop you there, they don't. They never have. There's nothing they care less about than what the user thinks they want. Sometimes this leads to good designs, other times it just adds cost or inconvenience to the customer. This is Apple's MO. Don't like it, buy a Windows or Linux box.

Honestly the best situation for someone like this is to buy a nice $800 Windows machine and do your development in a Linux VM. For years now developers not in the Mac ecosystem have used this approach.

I prefer developing on Mac myself, but have used the other approach too with good success. It works, just maybe not as seamlessly.

In the post they specifically say they can't use Linux due to legal reasons. I imagine this would apply to a VM, also.

They were talking about editing documents that require licensed / non-open source software, no? Not the actual development?

Edit your docs in windows, write your code on the Linux VM.

Why not run Linux with Windows in the VM? Is there a reason?

Potato potato.

For instance for my current dev station I have a Mac and whenever I need Windows for something I use a Windows VM. It works pretty well for me.

The bottom line is that the guy needs cheap hardware that allows for a modern dev environment and also access to windows. Some flavor of linux + windows will check the boxes.

Edit your docs in Windows, write your code with Visual Studio targeting WSL. It’s the future.

... nothing about writing code in windows is the future.

Being a developer doesn't mean programming UNIX software.

Dear Blogger, The thing you want is called a Hackintosh. (MacOS running on standard PC hardware)

The trick is to select hardware that is known to have valid Mac drivers.

https://www.tonymacx86.com

It seems to suck if you are a professional though? Losing a days work over a broken upgrade is hundreds of dollars in lost income.

Why would you apply an update on day one with an OS that still gives the user total control over update behavior?

On a productive machine, waiting a few days to see if a new update causes problems for others is standard advice for any platform.

If you choose to run MacOS in a virtual machine on standard PC hardware, backing up the machine state before applying an update is as simple as duplicating your virtual system disk before applying the update.

A hackintosh is quite different from running macOS in a VM. And even if you wait “a few days” you are part of such a small group of users that you know very little about how you might be affected.

The blogger in question wanted to be able to run MacOS on cheap standard hardware.

A Hackintosh on bare metal and running in a virtual machine both allow them to do exactly that.

If you visit the link to the Hackintosh community provided above you will find plenty of information from Hackintosh users who have already installed the various system updates and even beta OS releases.

I’ve done the hackintosh thing, and I might do it again someday, but as far as I can tell it is nowhere near as smooth as running officially sanctioned hardware.

And regarding running macOS in a VM, so you mean with PCI passthrough? Because AFAIK there are no drivers for virtualized graphics.

If you build a machine using components that leverage the drivers built into the OS you can bypass those problems.

That's why sites like the one given above are so helpful in the process.

They list the specific components that are known for worry free operation.

It's like building a Windows NT machine back in the day. You have to stick with components that are known to work with Apple's drivers, likely because Apple has used that same component in one of it's own computers.

Don't buy Apple products. Problem solved.

You could go ala John Draper and buy a computer with coincidentally similar hardware...

https://www.scan.co.uk

An affordable and upgradable Mac is known as a ThinkPad.

Dear Apple, we need a pear. Why?

Because "we" want it. It's free market capitalism, people have the right to express their opinions and push companies to build products they want to purchase.

Sorry, not gonna happen. Pick two.

Dear Apple, I want a PC.

Dear Apple, I want a cross-platform Macos is probably nearer in what the author wants.

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