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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

The article comes from CDM which is a music production website, MacBooks are very popular in that field, and basically all audio producers use external audio interfaces, it's not an uncommon use case. This is not the first time that this type of issues happens (from memory, last year an OSX update broke compatibility with Native Instruments Maschine, a very popular music software). So I think the point that the article is trying to make, is that music producers are one of the most Apple-leaning crowds, and yet they feel like they are being ignored by Apple. But at the same time I understand your point, this is a small market in the grand scheme of things.

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music producers are one of the most Apple-leaning crowds, and yet they feel like they are being ignored by Apple. [...] this is a small market in the grand scheme of things.

This is the same point that’s often made about developers. But if it’s not developers and it’s not music producers, what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else? And are they at least getting the products and features they want?

> what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else?

Hipsters?

You are mixing up artisan single origin drip coffee with Macs.

The main market for Macs are people who want an expensive-looking, high perceived quality machine for emails, Facebook, and Slack.

Do you have data to support that claim?

Pretty much what I use my macbook air for - £900 back in 2013, battery still lasts several hours. The electrical tape over the webcam reduces the 'expensive looking' part.

For real work on the road I use my t410s and ubuntu (although the hinge has now gone, which is a right pain), but most of the time I do real work I'm at home and use my z440 HP workstation (also with ubuntu)

And Brew, Postgres, Atom, VIM, VirtualBox, tmux, fish and probably 100.000 more things. Why do you think Brew exists and with such stats??[1]

1. https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/install/365d/

> what is the large market for Macs

There are legitimate reasons to buy macs, but I'd say most people want them because they look nice and they consider them a status symbol.

Consumers. (i.e. casual computer users who aren't terribly demanding in any particular dimension) Unfortunately they've been flocking in for the 'just works' Apple reputation as it is being un-earned by Apple. But for many in this group, it's probably good enough vs. what they were using before.

They are so far ahead of Microsoft when it comes to not annoying of frustrating regular users that they can probably fall for a decade before people start abandoning the platform in any significant numbers.

I just tried switching from my MBP to a Surface Laptop, and the bullshit that win 10 makes you deal with is just insane O_O

Same here, I have Windows VMs for work but even Skype is a piece of crap that forces me to reboot the VMs regularly while having serious bugs that interrupt my meetings. 9/10 meetings are starting with fixing Skype issues. If people were serious about not wasting their time Skype would be not used in businesses at all.

I disagree with this actually. I've had a MacBook for a number of years and bought a new one (a 2018 MacBook Air). The keyboard on it was awful and stopped working properly resulting in duplicate key hits. I was also fighting half of the OSX software at this point. Mail was getting buggy, iPhoto is just horrid and I'm not even going to start writing the massive rant about Pages / Numbers.

Alas I took the MBA back and got a refund and grabbed my spare Thinkpad T440 out of the cupboard and put windows 10 on it. The OS is a shell to run Chrome, Excel, Word, Putty, iTunes, kicad, LTspice, WSJTX and I use Fastmail for mail. Literally nothing gets in my way. It just works. And everything like photos and videos are in FILES not weird opaque containers and buggy as crap apps. The CPU is about the same speed, I've got more RAM in this, it's got a FHD display which is good enough and the keyboard is amazing compared to anything Apple had to offer. Plus it cost me literally 1/5th of the cost.

Also comparing OSX to windows, you can actually mostly drive windows from the keyboard without resorting to hand warping shortcut combinations reminiscent of Megadrive Streetfighter cheat codes.

I think after switching back I just had stockholm syndrome.

> Also comparing OSX to windows, you can actually mostly drive windows from the keyboard without resorting to hand warping shortcut combinations reminiscent of Megadrive Streetfighter cheat codes.

As a long-time Win user, having wrist pain, this is the killer thing for me. Everything about a Mac feels extremely unergonomic to me. Many things are not doable from keyboard at all. AFAIU most of the Mac developers do all stuff with touchpad so they don't care though.

You may find Control-F2 helpful.

It focuses the menubar, at which point you can navigate the menus by typing/arrow key, Spacebar to focus, and Enter to select.

It helps me avoid a lot of mouse usage.

...come to think of it, I should probably give that a binding on my ErgoDox somewhere.

Cmd-Shift-/ triggers menubar search too, which lets you just type the name of the menu entry you want and hit enter.

Thanks. I did not know that one and it sounds nifty.

By default this is the case but once you learn how macOS is pretty keyboard friendly. I love the ability to set up a keyboard shortcut for literally anything, including third party software, through system preferences.

Only complaint is you have to actually enable Full Keyboard Access from system preferences before you can use the keyboard to do things like select buttons in dialog boxes.

Edit: thanks for the tips, I created a living gist where I will document all the tricks:

https://gist.github.com/jakub-g/e893ffa9e91d08c6098966080978...

As far as driving OSX from the keyboard... yeah, it doesn't go out of its way to teach you how, but there are some pretty deep keyboard shortcuts. Of real note is readline, which is built into every text box. You can use emacs/readline shortcuts everywhere, and because of the ctrl / cmd separation it doesn't interfere with the basic shortcuts.

I've been using Windows 10 more and more over the last 2 years. Its fine. For the first time in a long time I don't feel like Windows is slowing me down, especially now it has sub-system for linux. Its still annoying that processes can lock access to files... but thats small potatoes.

I agree that keyboard navigation in macOS is shit. I don’t think it’s much of a pain point for me personally because i mostly use the laptop keyboard/touchpad combo But when trying to do desktop setups it gets annoying quickly, even the Magic Trackpad sucks in comparison since it cannot be positioned just below the keyboard.

I’ve actually been thinking about writing a keyboard assistant using the accessibility API. In theory it should be easy to drive anything that’s built using UIKit.

Could you give me example of windows specific headaches ?

Afaik, Windows is perfectly fine for casual users.

Apart from updates needing restarts and windows being inconvenient for programming, I don't see any clear disadvantages of using windows.

You sound like someone who has never had to deal with the horrific experience that is ASIO drivers. People use Mac because CoreAudio is great and obviously windows can't be trusted in a live setting due to the many already documented issues that it has with updating/crashing etc.

I don't doubt that there are numerous problems these days with the Mac/OS X and Apple overall.[1] My only point was that the group Apple is focused on today are general-purpose consumer users, not the traditional verticals (creatives, education, developers, etc.) that they built their reputation with. I suspect that's the reason we keep seeing articles like this: it's becoming painfully obvious to members of groups Apple used to serve that they are no longer Apple's focus.

[1] I left about a decade ago when I saw where things were headed with iOS-ification of the platform in general. I'm a developer so I feel/felt your pain as a member of one of the groups Apple used to care about. I moved to Linux which I know is no help to you... power user/pro audio features and software on Linux are still lacking.

The issue is there is great software such as [0] Supercollider and [1] Pd. As interfaces are class compliant the drivers actually work suprisingly well on Linux, its just stability and edge case bugs that will catch you out.

[0] - https://supercollider.github.io/

[1] - https://puredata.info/

Lots of salt in this thread. I have a Mac because I enjoy it the most for software development. It's not a status symbol because, well, almost everyone here has a Mac. The alternatives are Windows-based laptops - who often lag behind software development support (e.g. ports), or Linux which is still just not good enough for desktop use. I use Windows at home for not-development and have used both Windows and Linux for software development so this isn't a biased opinion.

The hardware budget from my employer also helps.

I have been using linux desktops for almost 10 years as my primary environments. When I occasionally return to windows, I find that it is less usable for how I utilize my computer.

Funny I look at Linux on the desktop as less and less usable as things like systemd and KDE 4 and whatever version of Gnome that's equally broken.

> Linux which is still just not good enough for desktop use.

For you perhaps. I've used desktop/laptop linux for nearly 20 years and it works just fine, millions of others do too.

After the windows 10 blunders lately I decided to give Linux on the desktop another shot. Decided to go with Ubuntu since it's the most popular distro so there's more likely to be support for it.

Developer tooling is really damn nice and using the command line is a joy. With proton on steam I can play a lot of the games I like.

But no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get sound to work properly. I'm using a FiiO E10K and a pair of Sennheiser HD650 and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get it to sound right. I tried editing whatever configuration file I could find and I still couldn't get it to sound not choppy. Eventually I gave up and went back on windows. Maybe when I'll change my amp I'll give it another try.

I'm glad it's working for you though.

Windows is not a serious alternative. It is pretty unbelievable that MS did not learn a single thing from Apple over 20 years. The result of this ignorance shows. Their software is complicated, bloated has 100000 features when people use 3 most of the time. Apple got this right with the mandatory app menu where the most used things are the same (like CMD+P). I think for developers Linux is a better alternative today than Windows (if somebody does not like MacOS).

> bloated has 100000 features when people use 3 most of the time

And here's your MP3 player, iTunes...

Please have a look to the default screen of Outlook and iTunes. Which has more functionality showed into your face that you never use.

Windows hasn't learned from the Mac, because user experience was never a key selling point for Windows. Windows dominance was the result of selling large quantities of Windows licences to IT managers who were not chiefly concerned with user experience, but rather with easy management of a large number of machines, integration with other Microsoft products (Office etc), and backwards compatibility so they could continue running the software that their businesses depended on.

The Mac user experience is great in part because Apple is willing to compromise on backwards compatibility. This allows them to innovate in the user interface (which Microsoft also does) while at the same time keeping it relatively consistent, which is what Microsoft is prevented from doing.

Also, since Apple relies on selling directly to consumers, they really have to prioritise the user experience.

This glitch is just another nail in the coffin for using Macs in professional audio setups. Another serious issue is the massively outdated Mac Pro. Yes, a new one will come this year, but many people have switched already. See for instance

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2019/2/7/pro-tool...

I find that truly bizarre. Would people seriously prefer to run a commercial studio and Pro Tools on a windows machine? I've run Logic across a number of versions on various Mac Pros and they're rock solid. I could almost guarantee a very different experience on a PC ....

I find it truly bizarre that there are people who actually still buy a Mac Pro. Just look at the shop page. They sell that thing for 4k$ with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It's completely bonkers. If you need a high-powered audio machine with dedicated PCI-E ports today(!), there's simply no alternative to a Windows PC. And yes, Windows can do audio just fine; you either invest the work and carefully choose components and build it yourself, or you buy it readily from 3XS, VisionDAW, whatever.

There used to be some timing issues with Windows audio 10 years ago that forced people to go for alternatives but I think it got fixed in Windows 7. Now Apple's ignorance and total lack of innovation makes people move to Windows. I think it just shows that market forces work.

Yes, Windows used to be terrible when it comes to audio, but that was a long time ago. Of course, any badly written driver can still destroy everything, that is why you have to choose hardware carefully. But with a good ASIO driver you will achieve very low latencies without problems.

The difference between a $1.5k Windows machine and a $4k Mac, with the intention to use either for the next 4-5 years, is nothing compared to studio budgets. Audio engineers spend tens of thousands just on room treatments, thousands more on analog mic preamps, and you need a hefty collection of different microphones. This is all so that you can bill studio time at $500+ per hour and produce great recordings. Any time you're spending diagnosing blue screens and Windows driver issues is time not booking artists and preparing mixes. OS X happens to be the first-class platform for most DAWs like Ableton, and the only choice for Logic, so you're limiting yourself not using a Mac.

>Would people seriously prefer to run a commercial studio and Pro Tools on a windows machine?

Yes. A specialist system integrator can sell you a Windows machine with reliable low-latency audio performance and modern components. A lot of people can make do with a 2013 Mac Pro and don't want to deal with the inconvenience of switching; plenty of others have switched because they simply can't tolerate working on a machine with an Ivy Bridge processor and a maximum of 64GB of RAM.

In commercial environments the OS starts to not matter so much. The machine is literally bought for one purpose and that alone.

I have worked in environments where vendors actually give a proper legally binding guarantee that Windows boxes work as expected and they charge accordingly.

> Last year an OSX update broke compatibility with Native Instruments Maschine

When you sell packaged software you'd better make sure it runs with the next version of the OS. All registered Apple software developers have access to beta software, including OSs, for a very long time before launch, precisely to prevent things like this.

It actually caused problems a large percentage of the most popular audio software and it was interesting to see which software developers could get the software out first.

The trouble with the beta was it wasn't exactly the same as what shipped which caused delays of several months in most instances.

I remember NI saying that there were issues accessing the beta so they (like other SW houses) were not prepared. I will try to find it and post a link if I'm successful

Edit: I could only find articles from 3rd party sources - NI did not release the statement on their website, but through their newsletter. For example it is mentioned here: https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/critical-co...

Also, I said "from memory [...] last year" but it was 2015! Wow, time flies! :-O

Not just the hardware. Apple also makes the second most popular DAW. It's a billion dollar business for them.

Good point, I forgot to mention. Yes Logic is very popular.

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