Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel

This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:

- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses

- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid

- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first

As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.

View on HN

My first laptop was G3 Apple laptop.

It was one of the worst laptops I have ever owned. The screen died right after the warranty expired. It would take multiple reboot to get the HDMI to properly register so I could use it as a desktop ... to the point I said fuck it and just tossed it.

Dell XPS 13 was the 2nd worst.

HDMI in 1997–2003?

Sorry, VGA. And yes the G3 laptop was used to create my first software based solution since it could handle Unix / Linux coding.

By the way the person that down voted my comment highlights the rejection of reality that others lived through.

why is this a good thing? This sucks, it would randomly cause IP conflict in some cases

There's gotta be a bit more subtlety going on here. DHCP leases include a lifetime:

    $ ip address show dev br0 | grep -m 1 valid_lft
           valid_lft 69133sec preferred_lft 69133sec

It's possible that older versions of macOS persisted the lease details across reboots and reused unexpired leases on subsequent network reconnections.

I am also fairly sure that I have never personally seen any evidence of any OS doing this, including macOS, including when it was still called Mac OS X. I suspect macOS simply brings up its networking stack earlier in the boot process, so the network connection is more likely to be ready and waiting by the time the desktop loads.

Using the same lease is better but still could cause IP conflict if the lease was revoked and reused (though I guess that’s much rarer)

that said I do agree with you that the behaviour was probably not as described or at least not present in current systems because it would wreak havoc on public wifi etc

I’ve never dhcp being any sort of bottleneck so I hope their just doing the regular dhcp thing

If they implemented it well, they could have just sent an arp and check if it was already taken.

Then again, I haven't ever been limited by the speed of DHCP servers... Windows is just dog-slow for a lot of things, so yeah, macos just "feels better" generally. I doubt it was related to just this IP thing.

Users would assign it to 'just that network is flakey'.. not 'my hardware is not behaving properly' because it works elsewhere.

I do observe this at work sometimes, on Linux I have no issues with wifi/network, but Apple users are complaining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com