7 ms·

> If you are a pro mainly using the Mac for professional work... This is extremely dishonest assessment that only 'Developers' do professional work. Mac is use

> If you are a pro mainly using the Mac for professional work... This is extremely dishonest assessment that only 'Developers' do professional work. Mac is used by Engineers, CAD/CAM, designers, illustrators, artists, musicians, etc and to reduce it only to developers is disingenuous. I for one is happy with the new Mac and there are several people who've found it great for 'pro' use.

marmaduke 10y ago
The mac users in science are also legion
- stinos 10y ago
  Sometimes for reasons beyond my understanding: I've seen many people bent over a 15" MB playing with MRI images in matlab/spm/... It's hard imagining something with worse posture, less ergonomics and less efficient.
  - marmaduke 10y ago
    mac has word, osirix and freesurfer etc but I agree about posture
    - stinos 10y ago
      Not sure why you get downvoted for what is imo an ok reply? Only Osirix is strictly OSX and even though I haven't used it I'm pretty sure there are viable linux/windows alternatives for that and the other software you mention. Anyway, next time I see someone in a situation as I pictured I'll just ask why they chose the Macbook
      - marmaduke 10y ago
        Osirix is the only FDA approved software of its kind (MRI, 3D reconstruction, database), as far as I know. Mac is the only platform where you can run freesurfer and word natively. I didn't notice the downvotes..
zardeh 10y ago
I'm not sure how you got that out of his post.
et-al 10y ago
Pretty sure folks in the other professions mentioned are also lamenting over the missing successor to the Mac Pro, and the loss of not-yet-outdated ports on the MBP (especially since they probably have more peripheral devices than developers).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
intoverflow2 10y ago
Weirdly from your list software developers are the only ones the New MBP can serve. It's got plenty of power to run XCode or a web dev environment. Engineers, CAD, musicians, 3D artists all need more power than it provides and increasingly need CUDA cores.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  Why do you assume that software developers don't need more power and/or CUDA cores, too? Development does not only consist of web development.
  - oceanswave 10y ago
    He said plenty of power
  - acdha 10y ago
    How many developers need more capacity than the new MacBook Pro but still less than the largest laptops offer? The few non-gamers I know who are still CPU/GPU-limited are using clusters of machines because no single machine is large enough and in most cases it's significantly cheaper to rent capacity for the few times when they need it rather than pay up-front for something which will be idle a fair percent of the year.
    - talmand 10y ago
      I'm not sure I'm understanding what you are suggesting here.
      - acdha 10y ago
        I see three potential groups of buyers: 1. People whose needs are satisfied by almost any laptop with an SSD and semi-recent CPU/GPU. 2. People who need the absolute top-end system but can fit their work on a single machine (e.g. if you had a model which uses 20GB of RAM, a 16GB machine is unsuitable but a 32GB machine is fine). 3. People who have so much data / computation that no normal computer can handle it. My gut feeling is that #1 covers most of the market and the question is really how many people fall into group #2 but not group #3, especially in the context of laptops where the ceilings are smaller on both the Mac and PC side. I would further expect that a fair number of the people in the second group are not running those workloads 24x7 and thus have a practical, often cheaper, option of renting an hour of time on AWS/Google/Azure/etc. when they need to do something and get the results faster rather than leaving their laptop running for a day or two — even the best laptop GPUs are smaller capacity than what you can rent on a server.
codazoda 10y ago
I'm a developer and plan to get the new MacBook Pro. I just don't use function or escape keys that much. So, it seems like it's a subset of developers that are bothered by this. I used Windows when I was young, then switched to Linux for 10 years professionally, and finally I switched to the Mac about 5 years ago. I find it much easier to use day-to-day than Linux. Especially using multiple displays in different offices.
- module0000 10y ago
  The "oh I can live with this" moment for me with the new mac was remapping caps-lock to escape. It's not as bad as I expected it to be(the new keyboard layout). Not as good as I wanted, but not as horrible as HN and other places warned.

marmaduke 10y ago

The mac users in science are also legion

stinos 10y ago
Sometimes for reasons beyond my understanding: I've seen many people bent over a 15" MB playing with MRI images in matlab/spm/... It's hard imagining something with worse posture, less ergonomics and less efficient.
- marmaduke 10y ago
  mac has word, osirix and freesurfer etc but I agree about posture
  - stinos 10y ago
    Not sure why you get downvoted for what is imo an ok reply? Only Osirix is strictly OSX and even though I haven't used it I'm pretty sure there are viable linux/windows alternatives for that and the other software you mention. Anyway, next time I see someone in a situation as I pictured I'll just ask why they chose the Macbook
    - marmaduke 10y ago
      Osirix is the only FDA approved software of its kind (MRI, 3D reconstruction, database), as far as I know. Mac is the only platform where you can run freesurfer and word natively. I didn't notice the downvotes..

zardeh 10y ago

I'm not sure how you got that out of his post.

et-al 10y ago

Pretty sure folks in the other professions mentioned are also lamenting over the missing successor to the Mac Pro, and the loss of not-yet-outdated ports on the MBP (especially since they probably have more peripheral devices than developers).

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

intoverflow2 10y ago

Weirdly from your list software developers are the only ones the New MBP can serve. It's got plenty of power to run XCode or a web dev environment. Engineers, CAD, musicians, 3D artists all need more power than it provides and increasingly need CUDA cores.

wolfgke 10y ago
Why do you assume that software developers don't need more power and/or CUDA cores, too? Development does not only consist of web development.
- oceanswave 10y ago
  He said plenty of power
- acdha 10y ago
  How many developers need more capacity than the new MacBook Pro but still less than the largest laptops offer? The few non-gamers I know who are still CPU/GPU-limited are using clusters of machines because no single machine is large enough and in most cases it's significantly cheaper to rent capacity for the few times when they need it rather than pay up-front for something which will be idle a fair percent of the year.
  - talmand 10y ago
    I'm not sure I'm understanding what you are suggesting here.
    - acdha 10y ago
      I see three potential groups of buyers: 1. People whose needs are satisfied by almost any laptop with an SSD and semi-recent CPU/GPU. 2. People who need the absolute top-end system but can fit their work on a single machine (e.g. if you had a model which uses 20GB of RAM, a 16GB machine is unsuitable but a 32GB machine is fine). 3. People who have so much data / computation that no normal computer can handle it. My gut feeling is that #1 covers most of the market and the question is really how many people fall into group #2 but not group #3, especially in the context of laptops where the ceilings are smaller on both the Mac and PC side. I would further expect that a fair number of the people in the second group are not running those workloads 24x7 and thus have a practical, often cheaper, option of renting an hour of time on AWS/Google/Azure/etc. when they need to do something and get the results faster rather than leaving their laptop running for a day or two — even the best laptop GPUs are smaller capacity than what you can rent on a server.

codazoda 10y ago

I'm a developer and plan to get the new MacBook Pro. I just don't use function or escape keys that much. So, it seems like it's a subset of developers that are bothered by this. I used Windows when I was young, then switched to Linux for 10 years professionally, and finally I switched to the Mac about 5 years ago. I find it much easier to use day-to-day than Linux. Especially using multiple displays in different offices.

module0000 10y ago
The "oh I can live with this" moment for me with the new mac was remapping caps-lock to escape. It's not as bad as I expected it to be(the new keyboard layout). Not as good as I wanted, but not as horrible as HN and other places warned.