498 karma · joined October 10, 2018
With some hardware skills, one can upgrade / replace the internal storage, though this only goes so far.
Problem is, there are newer, cheaper and better devices with faster storage and higher memory bandwidth, so the market on more recent (non-obsolete or non-vintage) Intel Macs holds steady (for legacy compatibility purposes), while anything that lacks Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C ports becomes a liability.
The last time I saw this was during the transition to Intel chips: PPC G5-based devices fell off the face of the earth within a couple of years, with older G4s holding up the rear for legacy (Mac OS 8.x/9) compatibility. It's a plateau.
As for the on-premise workstation market, this is long rumored to be shrinking, leaving the Dell-HP-Lenovo (DHL) triad to the spoils for Linux or Windows on commercial PCs. That dominance yields when remote / BYOD enters the fray (as Microsoft 365 and Google Docs run nearly anywhere).
This is the easiest way to validate benchmarks across neutral, bloatware-free OS versions (at least the ones supported by that SoC, anyway).
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PACKAGE AUTOMATION
- Windows Package Manager "winget" command-line tool (winget.exe): https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
On both Windows 10 and 11, every application and system package on my devices gets batch-installed, as winget import --import-file {{JSON-file}}, when possible. One can also export a list of installed packages for automation purposes.
Winget is shipped as a component of the App Installer package, which is supplied by default under Windows 11 but is an optional installation for Windows 10.
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DRIVER AUTOMATION
- Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM.exe): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
I use this a lot, as dism /online /export-driver /destination:{{output-directory}}, mainly to manage exported driver packages post-Windows Update that are subsequently cherry-picked (latest active, installed version only), stored on a USB-C thumb drive, and pre-installed into a neutral OS (in Windows Audit Mode, using Ctrl-Shift-F3), via PnPUtil, for clean-machine testing.
- PnPUtil (PnPUtil.exe): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...
As an example, I leverage the exported driver packages from above to one-click install them via a one-line batch command (in Windows Audit Mode, using Ctrl-Shift-F3 on first launch) for neutral-installation, clean-machine testing.
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Automation is key to getting things done, and reproducible environments are a necessity, especially when performing regression testing across various Windows OS build versions.
The combination of DISM and PnPUtil is now fast enough that I actually no longer bother using WinPE to capture and flash system images, or setting up DISM to inject the drivers into an existing image. Time is money and personal sanity.
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SCREEN CALIBRATION
- DisplayCAL: https://github.com/eoyilmaz/displaycal-py3
Every display panel I own (whether portable, laptop, all-in-one desktop, 4K monitor or other) gets a clean-room measurement under daylight (5000K) lamps with an X-Rite i1D3HL OEM colorimeter (e.g., CALIBRITE ColorChecker Display, et al), generating an ICC profile that can then be loaded into Windows Color Management at any later date.
Color calibration makes a huge optical quality-of-life improvement, with the occasional use of an adaptive grey-scale filter (to minimize color distraction, as well as to verify grey-scale compatibility and contrast) a close second.
This repo accommodates the changes required to run with Python 3 support.
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DIAGNOSTICS
- REALIX HWiNFO: https://www.hwinfo.com/
HWiNFO provides "more info about your computer than you'll ever need", which is nonetheless incredibly useful. I've been using this for years.
Secondly, front-end development from a pure programming perspective is less stable (with the rise of AI-assisted development) than the ability to communicate with stakeholders; you may have a superpower that you are in fact under-selling.
Open-source projects are probably your best opportunity to demonstrate your skillset, with NDA-free client projects your second-best opportunity.
ChatGPT is, on one level, a fancy form of Google search: you still need to know how to leverage the prompts in order to make decent progress, and it's based on knowledge (correct OR incorrect) that was originally generated by a human, one of whom must still evaluate as to whether or not the outputs are relevant to the task at hand.
There's a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to this, by the way, that deals with the knowledge lifecycle: how concepts come to be, how they are reinforced socially, and then discarded when no longer relevant. The same lifecycle applies to the data pools used for training "old" models.
As for developers–we've had automated code generation for decades. And machine learning has been a part of investment data analysis for a long time.
Why the fear, uncertainty, and doubt? Are you creeping closer to death?
The signing of binaries is a part of adult developer life, and is certainly required for the platforms you mention as well.
Unquestionably, battery life on 4090-based laptops sucks on a good day, and if you're working long hours, the last thing you want to have to do is park yourself next to your 350W adapter just to get basic work done.
Asahi Linux is shockingly great on Apple Silicon hardware, though.
I know you mean well, though.
There is no Docker on macOS without a hypervisor layer - period - and a VM, though there are multiple possible container runtimes not named Docker that are suitable for devops-y local development deployments (which will always, of course, be constrained in comparison to the scale of lab / staging / production environments). Some of these can better leverage the Rosetta 2 translation layer that Apple provides, than others.
Modern language tooling (Go, Rust et al) allows one to build and test on any architecture, and the native macOS virtualization (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization) provides remarkably better performance compared to Docker (which is a better explanation for its fading from daily use).
Your "trend" may, in fact, not actually reflect the reality of how cloud development works at scale.
And I don't know a single macOS developer that "lean(s) on the team member who is on Linux" to leverage tools that are already present on their local machine. My own development environments are IDENTICAL across all three major platforms.
For any other situations, I use https://pandoc.org/, or, generate a Word doc scriptomatically.