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Comment by throwaway20371 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway20371

Is Apple still the only company you can pay for both hardware and software support? Because all I want is to drop down a couple grand and never have to think about "computer maintenance" again. I maintain my car myself because it's so infrequent (pretty much just oil changes) but it feels like my computer maintenance is constant.

One of the reasons for that constant maintenance seems to be The Web. Remember when you didn't need 4 gigs of ram to browse the web? When you didn't need a high-power 3D graphics card to look at Google Maps? (bad example but WebGL is mandatory for some simple sites, and if your graphics sucks/doesn't do hardware acceleration...)

I don't remember ever having to upgrade my car every few years just to visit a new local business. At some point we need to admit that this constant tech churn isn't improving our lives, but it is enriching some billionaires.

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I completely get what you mean. I love freedom, I love being able to tinker, but these days I just want my machine to work. Linux on laptops is a nightmare, often even on the hardware that "supports" it. MacBooks are good enough that I can get things done and I don't have to think about Wi-Fi drivers or GPU drivers or whether I'm using the wrong CPU governor causing it to pump out heat. So I bought one and so far I haven't looked back.

> Linux on laptops is a nightmare, often even on the hardware that "supports" it.

That's just not true. Try a ThinkPad with Fedora and you'll see.

What kind of maintenance are you doing on your machine?

I restart my work and home machines once per month for updates and that's it.

Why do your machines need monthly updates? Do you constantly update any other machine that you own? Lawnmower, car, oven, microwave, bicycle, watch, reciprocating saw, vaccum, garage door, TV?

Because software is buggy, even Apples. It's not like you are updating hardware (like your other examples) you are doing a software update so that the software interfaces with the hardware better or fixes bugs.

nowadays your TV if it's a smart tv also gets monthly or quarterly updates too. they just tend to happen in off-peak hours. and car software updates are when you take them in for service.

you aren't doing a fair comparison asking why your X hardware doesn't need updates when comparing mostly hardware with simple software and full operating systems.

How is it not a fair comparison? They're machines. Just because we are currently building them in a way that is incredibly fragile and needs constant fixes, does not mean they have to be built that way.

Cars used to be built by hand, had tons of bugs, and were expensive. Then a man came along and found a way to produce them faster, cheaper, and with less bugs. That was pretty amazing for a time, but they still had plenty of bugs. And then some people from a culture of very fastidious craftsmen obsessed with quality began producing cars a little cheaper, and with far fewer bugs, and they lasted much longer. Then the whole world realized, "shit, our machines don't actually need to be so fragile," and they followed suit.

The lessons learned by those people in that culture were promoted around the world, and evolved to shape what we now call Lean and Agile. But the people using these new processes forgot the first lesson: we don't have to accept the status quo.

Macs are neither cheaper nor less buggy, so I think I have to agree with the other guy. You're comparing Apples to oranges.

Where there is software, there are bugs.

It's not defeatist, it's reality.

You can test, but testing does not prove an absence of bugs. It just means your tests did not reveal any. Maybe your testing is flawed, incomplete, inappropriate, biased etc.

Just saying for devs to "not write bugs" is pretty naive. Almost like saying "don't have car accidents". We don't want to have them, yet here we are. In complex environments, things happens that are sometimes outside our immediate control.

So then shouldn't we stop writing software? If it's really impossible to make software that doesn't have tons of bugs, yet it's perfectly possible to make hardware without those bugs, shouldn't we be "making hardware" instead?

Actually, now that I think of it, that's not the problem. The problem is we keep changing the software. My laptop from 15 years ago still functions exactly the same way it used to. It hasn't disintegrated into a puddle of bits. You just can't use it to visit any "modern website" or run any "modern software". If we just stopped upgrading everything every 5 seconds we could keep using old technology.

Nice straw man.

Apple machines still needs constantly updates, and worse, they keep nagging you.

My only macOS installation is a Catalina one, and Apple keeps wanting me to upgrade it to Big Sur, that I don't want for some reasons. However, the only workaround I found to stop the update badge from appearing (that is really distracting since it confuses me if this is something important or not) is to set some strange flag and kill Finder. If I open settings for any reason, the update badge reappears and this is really infuriating.

My system with the last amount of maintenance is my NixOS installation, where any workaround that I need for software/hardware issues are forever described in my dotfiles. So yeah, I need to find how to fix something once, however afterwards it will just work. Also different from Apple I can do upgrades when I want, they're atomic and I can also do rollbacks, so they're pretty much safe from a user perspective.

Mitigation against security vulnerabilities? Bug fixes? New features?

This question is intentionally missing the point.

If you think an internet-connected computer used for modern workloads can be treated like a lawn mower and doesn't need any updates over its usable life, you're dreaming.

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