"Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change."
When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platform was, I said! And it was!
The platform I switched to in 2005 wasn't Linux. It was OS X.
In 10 years the world has changed and today if you are in most of the "creative" professions, not using a Mac is the exception. You can today make a lot of arguments against desktop linux, yet for the past several years I've run it exclusively on all my main systems (laptops and desktops, work and home).
10 years ago, plenty of Windows users couldn't imagine a world in which Macs were where they are today. I mean couldn't imagine. The way Mac enthusiasts can't imagine desktop linux today. The parallels aren't exact. They don't need to be. I am neither predicting success or failure. I am simply pointing out that imagination fails and it is a mistake to say "that will probably never change."
Virtually all of the rendering heavy lifting and many of the desktops in the world of cinematic VFX are Linux. Have been for years. Even Pixar has a Linux desktop fleet.
Arment is way too positive on the Mac Pro's thermal design. Recently I worked on an application where we had about a dozen Mac Pros doing heavy video encoding workloads. Four of these computers started having GPU overheating issues, and turns out that this is a common occurrence on the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple has been quietly replacing units over the years (searching for the specific console error message reveals that it's common among Mac Pro owners).
My theory is that the Mac Pro hasn't seen an update because Apple knows that its current thermal design is a lemon, and they don't really want to sell any more of these because the replacement rate is so high.
Can confirm, had a similar set up with six Mac Pros for video processing and compression. We had to replace every single one of them at least once, and some 3 times and still we feel there are heat-based performance issues that Apple hasn't addressed.
Also, I think Apple will have to come out with a new display to go with the Mac Pro.
It was already evident from the Anandtech review, where the 12 core model was reaching around 100 C (CPU and GPU) under stress load.
Anand tried to downplay the issue somewhat, but the numbers speak for themselves, it's not a computer you can rely on for prolonged high loads.
> Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change.
Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore.
I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did.
If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior. If you are a developer who spends most of your time split between the terminal and the browser, then Linux is not just an acceptable substitute, but can in fact be a superior replacement.
> If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior.
Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both, and would give Adobe a possible "out" to the world they live in right now, where Apple tries to do their best to keep Adobe "in check". Seriously: every single one of these threads ends up in the holding pattern of "we could all be using Linux tomorrow if we had [software which is almost entirely controlled by Adobe and which is already designed by them in a way where the UI seems to be an in-house toolkit and which would be trivial for them to port to Linux]"; that would effectively just leave "office productivity" as the only class of software where Microsoft (and to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Apple) would be able to hold people on their platform (and OMG: a future where the next Adobe CS release was a word processor... that would be brutal).
I can relate.
Since I setup a Linux desktop PC running Arch & bspwm, I feel less productive in macOS. The only other desktop UX tool I use is dmenu.
It feels like when I first moved from Windows to OS X. Makes sense, since back then OS X felt minimal compared to Windows, and a bare tiling manager over Linux is the ultimate minimalism.
There are professional crews running Linux and using either Krita for art / comic work or Blender for modeling and 3d animation. The only industries really lacking right now are video editing, which I believe Kdenlive is making great inroads on, and professional audio, which is the only major field that Mac Pros can target that is not really having their needs met at all (Ardour can be... something, but its UI is barf and the prerequisites to using it are fairly high).
I guess we are also missing professional photo editing to match photoshop (Krita isn't trying to be one, and Gimp is kind of a mess) and 2d animation (in a world of toonboom and flash, synfig is a poor substitute). Freecad is also not a very effective substitute for CAD workstations, but to my knowledge those users have never left Windows for OSX in the first place.
How is Linux now on things like suspend/resume and wireless networking these days? I was using Linux for my primary dev laptop until 2010. Once I realized I could shut the lid and reliably wake it up -- something I have yet to see a Windows or Linux laptop do -- I switched over. (But I still use a Linux VM for the actual dev tools).
> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up — and they won’t do everything right.
So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is it doing so much better than Windows that at minimum a decade would be required for it to catch up?
That's what bothers me about the article. I can't think of a single piece of professional production software that is Mac only, apart from Apple's own apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic. Those are great apps but they have equivalents on Windows, and some of the Linux pro audio and video apps are getting really good.
As for web development, there is nothing you can do on a Mac that can't be done on Linux or BSD apart from testing in Safari, and Safari has a smaller user base than IE/Edge. Hell, even Windows is improving in this space.
I guess one could argue that macOS is a more aesthetically pleasing environment to work in, to which I counter that I'd rather work in BeOS/Haiku as I find it more aesthetically appealing than any other OS. In other words, that's purely subjective.
* Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS.
* Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI setup). I cannot stress how poorly Windows 10 performs in this regard. This has been a solved problem on the Mac for years.
* Better colour management through the whole UI stack.
* Better tablet support (OSX has had integrated support for tablet events since 10.4, on the Windows side there were still apps that broke when the Surface 3 launched almost a decade later due to using a third-party API for tablet events that needed custom drivers)
* Core Audio. OS X has had the same set of audio APIs since 10.3, and they've been well regarded for years and years. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could argue Microsoft had finally caught up, and there's still people with ASIO driver compatibility issues. That's literally 12 years it took for Microsoft to catch up.
* OS X had scrolling of inactive windows for over a decade before Windows caught up. I actually think it's something that was there in 10.0 but I only started using Macs at 10.3 so I can't be sure.
* Spotlight. Spotlight is almost the perfect analogy of the difference between OS X and Windows, and I'm just going to look at one tiny feature of it. If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10. Cortana isn't even available in every country. Meanwhile OSX has had that built into Spotlight since 10.4 and it works on every Mac ever shipped since then, no matter what country you're in.
* File tagging. OSX has had this for over a decade, and you still can't do it in Windows.
* An integrated C/C++ runtime library, like every other Unix ever. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could ship C/C++ code without worrying about whether your end user had the right msvcr/msvcp DLL installed on their machine.
I'll stop here, because there's so many things that OSX has had for a decade or more that Windows still hasn't caught up with that I wouldn't be surprised if Windows doesn't catch up after another decade.
Yeah, I don't really get that either. I have been using Windows, OS X (I mean macOS) and various Linux distributions for years.
Each one of them comes with their own particular set of quirks/warts and I can't objectively say one is so superior that I'd rather use it to the exclusion of the others.
I feel like I'm living in a crazytown where nobody sees what's so plainly obvious. Doesn't anyone remember when IBM wasn't able to deliver chips to Apple on the schedule they demanded, and customers were complaining, and they were taking a drubbing in the press for it? And Apple let their existing product line stagnate for a little while, and then we got the Intel Macs?
Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except Apple owns their own chip designs and has 200 billion dollars laying around.
What others are seeing that you aren't is that
(a) Unlike the PowerPC days when the Mac gave Apple over 90% of it's profits, it now probably accounts for closer to 10% of Apple's profits
(b) The Intel excuse seriously does not fly with the Mac Pro.
(c) The CEO has openly wondered why anyone would buy a PC. Some have argued he meant Windows computers, but it doesn't inspire confidence (especially since he has stated he uses an iPad pro for most of his work)
(d) Clearly Apple's top priorities are making things smaller and lighter. This is out of step with a lot of "Pro" users' needs. Compare the new Mac Pro to its previous incarnation, and the changes in design priority could not be more obvious.
Apple has indeed some great chip designs available. But one should not forget that the switch to Intel not only gave Apple nicer CPUs but also made Apple compatible to the rest of the PC world. You can run any x86 application on a Mac via VMware or Parallels. Moving away from Intel would kill this.
Intel can certainly deliver chips to Apple to make better MacPros. I've got a hackintosh that I built last year which will easily outdo an Apple MacPro. Apple could decide to not be clever and just ship a pretty standard looking desktop computer with the latest chipsets and CPUs, spacious memory expansion and a couple expansion slots for GPUs and crank out a new rev every year and it would keep the people buying the MacPros happy and Apple wouldn't have to invest a ton of money overdesigning the thing -- and Intel would certainly be able to keep up with the demand easily.
The territory that they'd concede though is that expandability and people buying CPUs, RAM, drives and GPUs from non-Apple vendors. But that would buy them continuing to tie professionals down to macOS and then selling them laptops and building hype. Instead I think they're going to ditch macOS and switch to iOS on desktops and laptops and you'll see their laptop and desktop sales shrink and they'll be become entirely an iphone/ipad company. I don't think this has anything to do with supply chain and this is entirely self-inflicted damage because they're prioritizing their walled garden strategy above all else.
>Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except Apple owns their own chip designs and has 200 billion dollars laying around.
And? If any of the handful of people on the entire planet capable of building an ARM capable of rivaling Intel's current x86 designs were hired by Apple, it would be all over the tech industry news sites instantly. 200 billion doesn't mean a thing if it isn't applied properly.
This time Apple's explicitly saying the iPad Pro is their next personal computer so I wouldn't bet on that transition to ARM including macOS!
The only piece missing is creating iOS apps on iOS devices, for which they've already created a language and an app to learn programming, then everything we do and know and learn just to keep our computers running is kind of legacy stuff.
What's wrong with Intel? They release new processors every year. Apple could easily update every mac every year with new processor, they just don't care.
> We can’t just buy hideous Xeon workstations from Dell and install macOS on them.
Sure you can. Or rather, you can install the [free] VMWare ESXi hypervisor on said hideous box, and then install macOS on that. The ESXi hypervisor is an officially-supported macOS hardware configuration. Apple want you to only run macOS guests through ESXi if you're on macOS hardware, but there's literally nothing stopping you from doing otherwise.
Default new USB device attachments to the macOS VM; add a USB Bluetooth dongle; use SR/IOV to feed the VM a dedicated video card, and plug your monitor into that. You'll never even know ESXi is running.
> The ESXi hypervisor is an officially-supported macOS hardware configuration.
ON APPLE HARDWARE. If you run MacOS on non-Apple hardware it isn't officially supported at all, effectively piracy, and you need to hack ESXi to make it work at all (ESXi Unlocker, etc).
> but there's literally nothing stopping you from doing otherwise.
Except the license agreements (both Apple and VMWare), and the fact that ESXi won't do it unless modified.
I'd love to run macOS on my NUC with 32 gigs of ram for iOS development instead of buying a shitty Mac mini. This sounds pretty awesome but I only understand a fraction of what you're talking about. Is there some kind of tutorial for setting this up?
As a software developer, I can't say I really care about the Mac Pro.
It's not to say that I don't care about performance, I have a MacBook Pro bought by my work that's about 5 months old and it's great.
But honestly, I run the hell out of this thing and I never really notice a slowdown.
I can have Chrome open with a bunch of tabs (I probably limit it to a dozen before I force myself to start reading/closing them), multiple VM's spun up with vagrant/virtual box, a Windows 10 VM via Parallels, an entire linux software stock via docker-compose, Sublime Text, Slack, SourceTree, PostMan, 4 or 5 terminals, a VPN manager, multiple web servers and not notice any slowdown whatsoever.
If a new MBP came out and offered 32GB of RAM, I'd take the option. But do I really have any reason based on reality that I need more than 16GB of RAM? No.
Would I ever buy a 4K or 5K Mac Pro? Unless I had some sort of big data or scientific computing need, no. And even then, wouldn't I have a cluster somewhere else for that? Probably.
"Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change."
Miserable is a strong word. Ubuntu is hardly miserable. Chromebooks are pretty much guaranteed to be able to run Linux without worry, and installing Ubuntu on them shouldn't be much of a hassle.
I personally run Fedora on an XPS 15 and have had very few issues with it, which is crazy since I'm bleeding edge everything by that count (hardware and software).
Yup thats typically this guys MO. Him and Grubber make it pretty lame to be a modern Apple fan. They whine about Apple not doing what they want, they whine about people critiquing Apple, and then they make up or spread nonsense about Apples competitors. They are the "Macs can't game" Windows fan boys of the 90s.
I would be surprised if he's ever really given Ubuntu or Fedora a serious chance. I think he thinks Google's Android and Kindle Fire have the same UI. I listened to him once bitch about Windows and it was so obvious he hadn't installed it properly.
Hey! Thanks for the link. I don't really want a completely PC-like box (I have a mini, and want to upgrade that), but I do want something that can be expandable somehow.
I'm pretty sure I won't get it (or worse, that I'll have to pay through the nose for it at Mac Pro-grade prices), but I'd really like to get a more modular Mac.
I don't think that Apple will do it, though. Jony "VP of Narration" Ive has a thing about unbroken surfaces, and even though I like Apple's overall aesthetics, I don't think there's any way a modular system fits into the Mac "look".
Any particular reason why Apple should sell Macs at all, given they make almost all their money from other products? Besides Xcode, is there any other app (or equivalent) that can't be had on other systems?
First of all, Apple is making more money from Macs than iPads. In the last quarter, they had ~$6B in revenue from Macs versus $4.2B from iPads (~$7B same quarter last year). Are you seriously suggesting that Apple should drop that kind of money just because the iPhone had ~$30B instead? (Source: http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy16datasum.pdf) They're not going to make macOS a paid OS for sale on other hardware, which means they'd lose $4-6B per quarter, that's $20b revenue a year they can use to improve all products.
They're not going to keep making that much money from iPhone forever, it will decline eventually as competitors keep getting better and better. Google is entering the market with products that finally rivals iPhones and Microsoft/HP/Dell with Surface/Spectre/XPS products that does rival Macbooks.
This is Apple, they want total control of the entire stack and the only way to do this is to do it themselves. macOS will not survive on other hardware with questionable QA. I started hating W10 simply because of its driver issues, automatic brightness stuff that I can't turn off on SP4. Same Win10 on my Macs, it works much better and consistent. There's no way Apple will do this to macOS.
If you know what you want a workstation for, you probably have enough know how to get a Supermicro barebones system and stuff it with the exact CPUs, GPUs, RAM, SSDs, and ANY peripheral you want. More flexibility and cheaper. There are even outfits that will build it for you if you're feeling lazy.
And when Linux breaks, there is a wealth of knowledge on how to fix it. I have found OS X's community to be plagued by the opposite.
> Nobody else can make macOS hardware. If Apple doesn’t address someone’s hardware needs, there’s no alternative.
So that's a bad thing right, the closed ecosystem?
Oh no wait.
> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but [even] if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up
Talking about which, that decade an entirely unfounded claim. It doesn't even attempt to make arguments, instead waiting for the mac vs windows users flamewar to start. Then to add some fuel, it says linux sucks as well, not backing up that claim either, inviting anyone using a linux-based desktop (and by extent, the rest of the open source desktop community) to add to the flamewar.
And it's all for nothing. The article is telling about how bad it would be not to get another mac pro, using a hundred arguments that come down to "I like OS X software and software that runs on OS X, and the pro hardware is better than the consumer version [duh]". Apple cannot possibly not have thought of this yet.
PS. My memory must be wrong but I thought I remembered a different company boldly (bravely?) experimenting with hardware.
A strange fact is that many modern PCIe graphics cards work with MacOS, despite the last extendable Mac Pro being sold years ago. Also, Apple knows exactly what hardware they have sold over the years. They could put a whitelist in their OS to prevent Hackintosh or make it at least a lot harder (almost everything can be patched out of course, but it is funny that you can open "About my Mac" and it happily shows configurations that have nothing to do with a real Mac).
I take this as a hint that they secretly tolerate hackintosh at a small scale. They can't allow it altogether, and anyway it is nothing for most Mac customers (who want the "it just works" experience), but some people in the "pro" segment who need the extra power and don't fear some hacking can be satisfied that way. I'm thinking especially about small iOS or macOS developers, or people who work with audio/video, who need a beefy macOS machine.
The problem with this article is that Marco presents a rational argument for the need of a Mac Pro, but Apple is way past rationality in their view of the future; they are engaged in a holy war against local computing, against ports, wired connections, and against being tethered to a desk.
While there is no doubt that Apple did neglect the Mac Pro, I am quite hopeful that it gets a significant refresh in the spring. As with so many Mac releases, Apple is limited by the Intel release schedules. That is why the Mac Pro has to wait till spring for a refresh. And that the Mac Pro has not being bumped in smaller features points to me to a rather larger change.
And it would make a lot of sense to go back to a bit more "PC" like design like the predecessor of the current machine. That would mean that Apple has less pressure to update it frequently, it would be sufficient to have updates whenever Intel releases new CPUs, but all the other stuff, especially graphics cards, could be updated independent of Apple releases.
I think for some people customisation is a pain, especially when you have to workarounds bugs or find some hardware configuration incompatibility.
Not saying there's anything wrong with people enjoying tinkering with their setup, but I guess the advantage OSX offers you is most of that is taken care of you on the desktop, you just install your apps on top
I think this is the first article on HN that touches on the real problem with the Mac lineup. It's not that the notebook aren't powerful enough (they're notebooks, not desktop replacements) it's that there isn't a viable Mac backend to do the heavy lifting.
They discontinued the rackable servers, yet require developers to do software testing and compiling on MacOS. On what? Racks of macbooks and imac mini apparently.
What backend are we supposed to render on? A single, 3 year old Mac pro?
I get wanting to only sell in highly profitable segments, but maybe they should give developers a little sugar
Stop begging to get crumbs from Apple. They are big company run by adults. They've been exploiting our desire to get their computers for a long time.
They make some really nice computers, but the whole point is that there are others. I really miss times when I would assemble my own computer. Obviously you can't do this with laptops, but I still miss freedom it gave me.
I am exploring how to get my work done on something else, for start on desktop, some nice linux machine for start.
I tried several times in the past, but without us actually using linux, there will never be real need to fix issues that it has.
[+] [-] Adaptive|9 years ago|reply
When I switched in 2005 I had to convince friends I wasn't crazy. I advocated for the platform. I suffered weird incompatibilities. I dealt with bad updates. I found work arounds for non-multi-platform tools I had to run. But look how stable, how much less restrictive the platform was, I said! And it was!
The platform I switched to in 2005 wasn't Linux. It was OS X.
In 10 years the world has changed and today if you are in most of the "creative" professions, not using a Mac is the exception. You can today make a lot of arguments against desktop linux, yet for the past several years I've run it exclusively on all my main systems (laptops and desktops, work and home).
10 years ago, plenty of Windows users couldn't imagine a world in which Macs were where they are today. I mean couldn't imagine. The way Mac enthusiasts can't imagine desktop linux today. The parallels aren't exact. They don't need to be. I am neither predicting success or failure. I am simply pointing out that imagination fails and it is a mistake to say "that will probably never change."
[+] [-] bitwize|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|9 years ago|reply
My theory is that the Mac Pro hasn't seen an update because Apple knows that its current thermal design is a lemon, and they don't really want to sell any more of these because the replacement rate is so high.
[+] [-] dbg31415|9 years ago|reply
Also, I think Apple will have to come out with a new display to go with the Mac Pro.
[+] [-] whyoh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinclift|9 years ago|reply
MacPro "SubZero Edition". :)
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wfleming|9 years ago|reply
Depending on which pro needs We're talking about, I don't believe this is true anymore.
I was a Linux user for many years, then an OS X user for over a decade, and earlier this year I'd had enough with being annoyed by OS X & switched back to Linux. I am extremely happy I did.
If you want beautiful GUIs or do video/audio/graphics editing then, yes, macOS is still superior. If you are a developer who spends most of your time split between the terminal and the browser, then Linux is not just an acceptable substitute, but can in fact be a superior replacement.
[+] [-] saurik|9 years ago|reply
Adobe porting their Creative Suite to Linux and maybe even releasing their own branded AdobeOS Linux distribution would seem to be a massive existential threat to Apple and Microsoft both, and would give Adobe a possible "out" to the world they live in right now, where Apple tries to do their best to keep Adobe "in check". Seriously: every single one of these threads ends up in the holding pattern of "we could all be using Linux tomorrow if we had [software which is almost entirely controlled by Adobe and which is already designed by them in a way where the UI seems to be an in-house toolkit and which would be trivial for them to port to Linux]"; that would effectively just leave "office productivity" as the only class of software where Microsoft (and to a lesser but still noticeable extent, Apple) would be able to hold people on their platform (and OMG: a future where the next Adobe CS release was a word processor... that would be brutal).
[+] [-] kenOfYugen|9 years ago|reply
It feels like when I first moved from Windows to OS X. Makes sense, since back then OS X felt minimal compared to Windows, and a bare tiling manager over Linux is the ultimate minimalism.
[+] [-] zanny|9 years ago|reply
I guess we are also missing professional photo editing to match photoshop (Krita isn't trying to be one, and Gimp is kind of a mess) and 2d animation (in a world of toonboom and flash, synfig is a poor substitute). Freecad is also not a very effective substitute for CAD workstations, but to my knowledge those users have never left Windows for OSX in the first place.
[+] [-] pjmlp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hosh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sverige|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwyers|9 years ago|reply
So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is it doing so much better than Windows that at minimum a decade would be required for it to catch up?
[+] [-] m_mueller|9 years ago|reply
* Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa
* HiDPI that always works or has good fallbacks
* Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use
* Battery life
* Multidesktop
* POSIX scripting (that one is slowly coming to windows now)
* Can be restored from another computer in a matter of minutes (see also the first point)
* PDF support baked into OS
[+] [-] morganvachon|9 years ago|reply
As for web development, there is nothing you can do on a Mac that can't be done on Linux or BSD apart from testing in Safari, and Safari has a smaller user base than IE/Edge. Hell, even Windows is improving in this space.
I guess one could argue that macOS is a more aesthetically pleasing environment to work in, to which I counter that I'd rather work in BeOS/Haiku as I find it more aesthetically appealing than any other OS. In other words, that's purely subjective.
[+] [-] mhenr18|9 years ago|reply
* Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS.
* Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI setup). I cannot stress how poorly Windows 10 performs in this regard. This has been a solved problem on the Mac for years.
* Better colour management through the whole UI stack.
* Better tablet support (OSX has had integrated support for tablet events since 10.4, on the Windows side there were still apps that broke when the Surface 3 launched almost a decade later due to using a third-party API for tablet events that needed custom drivers)
* Core Audio. OS X has had the same set of audio APIs since 10.3, and they've been well regarded for years and years. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could argue Microsoft had finally caught up, and there's still people with ASIO driver compatibility issues. That's literally 12 years it took for Microsoft to catch up.
* OS X had scrolling of inactive windows for over a decade before Windows caught up. I actually think it's something that was there in 10.0 but I only started using Macs at 10.3 so I can't be sure.
* Spotlight. Spotlight is almost the perfect analogy of the difference between OS X and Windows, and I'm just going to look at one tiny feature of it. If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10. Cortana isn't even available in every country. Meanwhile OSX has had that built into Spotlight since 10.4 and it works on every Mac ever shipped since then, no matter what country you're in.
* File tagging. OSX has had this for over a decade, and you still can't do it in Windows.
* An integrated C/C++ runtime library, like every other Unix ever. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could ship C/C++ code without worrying about whether your end user had the right msvcr/msvcp DLL installed on their machine.
I'll stop here, because there's so many things that OSX has had for a decade or more that Windows still hasn't caught up with that I wouldn't be surprised if Windows doesn't catch up after another decade.
[+] [-] alyandon|9 years ago|reply
Each one of them comes with their own particular set of quirks/warts and I can't objectively say one is so superior that I'd rather use it to the exclusion of the others.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] efvxcgci|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenewwazoo|9 years ago|reply
Well, this time it's Intel and not IBM, except Apple owns their own chip designs and has 200 billion dollars laying around.
[+] [-] addicted|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|9 years ago|reply
The territory that they'd concede though is that expandability and people buying CPUs, RAM, drives and GPUs from non-Apple vendors. But that would buy them continuing to tie professionals down to macOS and then selling them laptops and building hype. Instead I think they're going to ditch macOS and switch to iOS on desktops and laptops and you'll see their laptop and desktop sales shrink and they'll be become entirely an iphone/ipad company. I don't think this has anything to do with supply chain and this is entirely self-inflicted damage because they're prioritizing their walled garden strategy above all else.
[+] [-] RandomOpinion|9 years ago|reply
And? If any of the handful of people on the entire planet capable of building an ARM capable of rivaling Intel's current x86 designs were hired by Apple, it would be all over the tech industry news sites instantly. 200 billion doesn't mean a thing if it isn't applied properly.
[+] [-] benologist|9 years ago|reply
The only piece missing is creating iOS apps on iOS devices, for which they've already created a language and an app to learn programming, then everything we do and know and learn just to keep our computers running is kind of legacy stuff.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|9 years ago|reply
Sure you can. Or rather, you can install the [free] VMWare ESXi hypervisor on said hideous box, and then install macOS on that. The ESXi hypervisor is an officially-supported macOS hardware configuration. Apple want you to only run macOS guests through ESXi if you're on macOS hardware, but there's literally nothing stopping you from doing otherwise.
Default new USB device attachments to the macOS VM; add a USB Bluetooth dongle; use SR/IOV to feed the VM a dedicated video card, and plug your monitor into that. You'll never even know ESXi is running.
Side benefit: cheap sibling Linux VMs!
[+] [-] UnoriginalGuy|9 years ago|reply
ON APPLE HARDWARE. If you run MacOS on non-Apple hardware it isn't officially supported at all, effectively piracy, and you need to hack ESXi to make it work at all (ESXi Unlocker, etc).
> but there's literally nothing stopping you from doing otherwise.
Except the license agreements (both Apple and VMWare), and the fact that ESXi won't do it unless modified.
[+] [-] saosebastiao|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] halis|9 years ago|reply
It's not to say that I don't care about performance, I have a MacBook Pro bought by my work that's about 5 months old and it's great.
But honestly, I run the hell out of this thing and I never really notice a slowdown.
I can have Chrome open with a bunch of tabs (I probably limit it to a dozen before I force myself to start reading/closing them), multiple VM's spun up with vagrant/virtual box, a Windows 10 VM via Parallels, an entire linux software stock via docker-compose, Sublime Text, Slack, SourceTree, PostMan, 4 or 5 terminals, a VPN manager, multiple web servers and not notice any slowdown whatsoever.
If a new MBP came out and offered 32GB of RAM, I'd take the option. But do I really have any reason based on reality that I need more than 16GB of RAM? No.
Would I ever buy a 4K or 5K Mac Pro? Unless I had some sort of big data or scientific computing need, no. And even then, wouldn't I have a cluster somewhere else for that? Probably.
[+] [-] hacknat|9 years ago|reply
Miserable is a strong word. Ubuntu is hardly miserable. Chromebooks are pretty much guaranteed to be able to run Linux without worry, and installing Ubuntu on them shouldn't be much of a hassle.
I personally run Fedora on an XPS 15 and have had very few issues with it, which is crazy since I'm bleeding edge everything by that count (hardware and software).
[+] [-] andreapaiola|9 years ago|reply
And RIP Apple hardware, I give you the Hackintosh!
[+] [-] krosaen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devsquid|9 years ago|reply
I would be surprised if he's ever really given Ubuntu or Fedora a serious chance. I think he thinks Google's Android and Kindle Fire have the same UI. I listened to him once bitch about Windows and it was so obvious he hadn't installed it properly.
[+] [-] ditados|9 years ago|reply
- https://chuqui.com/2016/10/how-apple-could-have-avoided-much...
- http://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2016/11/04/2230
- http://www.libertypages.com/clarktech/?p=751
[+] [-] rcarmo|9 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure I won't get it (or worse, that I'll have to pay through the nose for it at Mac Pro-grade prices), but I'd really like to get a more modular Mac.
I don't think that Apple will do it, though. Jony "VP of Narration" Ive has a thing about unbroken surfaces, and even though I like Apple's overall aesthetics, I don't think there's any way a modular system fits into the Mac "look".
[+] [-] sigjuice|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikhailt|9 years ago|reply
They're not going to keep making that much money from iPhone forever, it will decline eventually as competitors keep getting better and better. Google is entering the market with products that finally rivals iPhones and Microsoft/HP/Dell with Surface/Spectre/XPS products that does rival Macbooks.
This is Apple, they want total control of the entire stack and the only way to do this is to do it themselves. macOS will not survive on other hardware with questionable QA. I started hating W10 simply because of its driver issues, automatic brightness stuff that I can't turn off on SP4. Same Win10 on my Macs, it works much better and consistent. There's no way Apple will do this to macOS.
[+] [-] jackyinger|9 years ago|reply
And when Linux breaks, there is a wealth of knowledge on how to fix it. I have found OS X's community to be plagued by the opposite.
[+] [-] lucb1e|9 years ago|reply
> Nobody else can make macOS hardware. If Apple doesn’t address someone’s hardware needs, there’s no alternative.
So that's a bad thing right, the closed ecosystem?
Oh no wait.
> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but [even] if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up
Talking about which, that decade an entirely unfounded claim. It doesn't even attempt to make arguments, instead waiting for the mac vs windows users flamewar to start. Then to add some fuel, it says linux sucks as well, not backing up that claim either, inviting anyone using a linux-based desktop (and by extent, the rest of the open source desktop community) to add to the flamewar.
And it's all for nothing. The article is telling about how bad it would be not to get another mac pro, using a hundred arguments that come down to "I like OS X software and software that runs on OS X, and the pro hardware is better than the consumer version [duh]". Apple cannot possibly not have thought of this yet.
PS. My memory must be wrong but I thought I remembered a different company boldly (bravely?) experimenting with hardware.
[+] [-] captainmuon|9 years ago|reply
I take this as a hint that they secretly tolerate hackintosh at a small scale. They can't allow it altogether, and anyway it is nothing for most Mac customers (who want the "it just works" experience), but some people in the "pro" segment who need the extra power and don't fear some hacking can be satisfied that way. I'm thinking especially about small iOS or macOS developers, or people who work with audio/video, who need a beefy macOS machine.
[+] [-] redial|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sosborn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|9 years ago|reply
And it would make a lot of sense to go back to a bit more "PC" like design like the predecessor of the current machine. That would mean that Apple has less pressure to update it frequently, it would be sufficient to have updates whenever Intel releases new CPUs, but all the other stuff, especially graphics cards, could be updated independent of Apple releases.
[+] [-] ne01|9 years ago|reply
I disagree! A Linux desktop gets as good as your customization.
For me nothing can replace my setup: Debian + custom Stumpwm window manager
Pro users want flexibility.
[+] [-] djhworld|9 years ago|reply
Not saying there's anything wrong with people enjoying tinkering with their setup, but I guess the advantage OSX offers you is most of that is taken care of you on the desktop, you just install your apps on top
[+] [-] wodenokoto|9 years ago|reply
They discontinued the rackable servers, yet require developers to do software testing and compiling on MacOS. On what? Racks of macbooks and imac mini apparently.
What backend are we supposed to render on? A single, 3 year old Mac pro?
I get wanting to only sell in highly profitable segments, but maybe they should give developers a little sugar
[+] [-] desireco42|9 years ago|reply
They make some really nice computers, but the whole point is that there are others. I really miss times when I would assemble my own computer. Obviously you can't do this with laptops, but I still miss freedom it gave me.
I am exploring how to get my work done on something else, for start on desktop, some nice linux machine for start.
I tried several times in the past, but without us actually using linux, there will never be real need to fix issues that it has.