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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

> Macs used to be for professionals

Makes you wonder who is then buying these expensive MacBook Pros, Mac Studios and Mac Pros.

I guess it's those grandmas needing 28 cores for their recipes.

That matches my experience with recipe websites lately. 4 cores for the ads, 3 for the author’s life story, 6 cores for the autoplay video showing an unrelated dish being cooked, 2 for the partner grocery delivery links, 3 for performance analytics, and of course 1% of a core to display the actual recipe. I have actually seen iPad Safari crash on trying to read a recipe.

It does indeed make you wonder considering the top composers are on Windows running Cubase/Nuendo, almost everybody in game dev is on Windows or Linux, and most of Hollywood's VFX teams are on Linux or Windows integrating with Da Vinci Resolve.

What about the professional C-suite executives who want to look sharp when meeting potential clients or inventors.

Most C-suite execs don't even seem to use a Mac in 2022. All seem to be about the iPad Pro, Surface Pro, or ThinkPad.

I also don't think a $2000 laptop is making anybody look "sharp" in 2022 when financing is readily available for anything Apple. What car you drive or what watch you have says more, but there's so many counterfeit watches out there that it's also fairly meaningless. Even cars, easily financed or leased these days.

A sure way to identify C-suites at my current place is by MacBooks. Their close assistants, sorry, their chief of staffs are the same.

There are a million "creators" in the middle that Apple and co. serve perfectly bar none. Just look at Procreate and similar music making apps.

Yet apple released a $6000 mac pro (that when fully specced, came out to be ~$60000, iirc), a $5000 monitor that competed with monitors almost used exclusively by Hollywood production houses and an optional $1000 stand for said monitor.

I guess that was 2019 and things have changed?

Supply doesn't equal demand, and it certainly doesn't equal all demand.

You’re absolutely right. It just seems that apples market in Hollywood could begin to dwindle because all of the alternatives. I guess they can sell a apple silicon mac pro on speed, but what about the ease of customization that linux offers these companies. I think I’ve read that a lot of these production companies develop their own Linux distro, and probably software, and extensions (for the likes of davinci resolve). Is the raw speed advantage of their chips going to outweigh all the investment these companies have made in their previous solutions? I feel like a variation of this question floated along in the time after the announcement of the 2019 macpro as well.

Anyways, I’m not really in disagreement with you, I think, just writing some thoughts out.

Not if they're doing mobile game development in my experience, still lots of us developing on macs.

Ableton works fantastically on my Mac, and for that matter so does Da Vinci. Anecdotal but nevertheless.

Seems like you're joking but I know far too many people who have bought a garbage $300 windows laptop, absolutely hated it, then they bought a $2000 MacBook Pro.

They always mention how much nicer the Mac is than their old Windows laptop but never mention that they bought a bargain-bin Windows laptop and a modern flagship Mac.

Even if I try to advise them to to just get a Windows laptop in the $800 range or so, they pretty much always go with a Mac because it feels like the safe purchase.

My current work laptop is twice the price of my personal M1 Air. There is no comparison, the Apple wins on all but one front: I cant install uBlock into Safari.

That's a lot like people saying android is slow and laggy when they bought the cheapest one they could find at target and compared it to a thousand dollar iPhone.

For a lot of people, having a macbook pro is a fashion statement. Sort of like owning a luxury car to be stuck in traffic most of the time.

After all, is the base model of the 13in MBP actually a 'pro' device? $1300 gets you a paltry 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM - now they've upgraded from more than 2 ports though.

The 13" Macbook Pro is pro in name only.

If you can't replace the basics like battery, display, keyboard, RAM, CPU, SSD, it isn't "professional", IMO. ThinkPad really set the standard for that. Used to be able to do that on MacBooks.

Likewise, if you need to take it to an Apple Store and wait 1-2 weeks for parts to come in, again, it isn't fit for purpose versus repairing it in-house, or RMAing it fast.

Professionals are not only big businesses. Most Mac-Users I know are small creators, freelancers or independent. By which I mean writers, designers, artists and the like who don't need to connect with the infrastructure of their team/company, and can just deliver/release the finished product.

Every professional I know is on Mac

Within what industry/industries?

Has the same energy as "everybody I've ever met in my entire life both use SUSE Linux".

The past 3 companies I’ve worked at since 2014 issue MBPs to all developers, data analysts, etc.

True for SV-style tech companies, not true for most other industries.

My current company is a retail chain in Texas. All devs get an MBP. Not SV, not tech.

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