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The Untouchables – Apple’s new OS “activation” for Touch Bar MacBook Pros
- curiousgal 10y agoFor a company that targets Professionals, some Apple policies seems rather hostile towards them.
- elmigranto 10y ago> targets Professionals All we know, there's a word "pro" in marketing materials (includes product names). Who they actually target with that is Apple's internal affairs, and everyone should judge for himself, whether it matches one's requirements. Some people are fine with X limitation, but that doesn't mean they aren't "serious" users. Some people find limitation X to be a deal breaker, but that doesn't invalidate "pro" status of everyone else.
- drvdevd 10y agoUnfortunately, in this case the "pro" is the admin who has to manage the Mac fleet or the developer who has to use a Mac at their place of employment. This is all being due to their widespread popularity as "pro" devices. If Apple plays fast and loose with this as a marketing term only, when will this "pro" market open to competition? I suppose it already has, judging from this article.
- nerdponx 10y agoExcept it's not. At least not until someone starts making aluminum unibody laptops with Retina displays running some enterprise Linux distro in which everything on the desktop "just works" including printing and networking.
- vetinari 10y agoPrinting and networking in Linux is a solved problem. HiDPI is going through a growing pains, and some things for enterprises are better on Linux than macOS (have you seen what FreeIPA can do? You can have Kerberos+OTP authenticated VPN, for example). What's wrong with all the PC laptops is an attention to detail. Just have look at the recent Dell XPS thread. I mean - coil whine? In 2016? Seriously?
- ni-hil 10y agoAudio, monitor detection, battery life, etc. are not solved problems though. Linux is mostly fine, but there is still a lot of little things that makes it "painful" to use on a day to day basis.
- vetinari 10y agoI admit that last few years my experience with Linux is limited to T and X-series Thinkpads. On them, almost everything worked out of the box, including the fingerprint reader and WWAN networking. The only thing that I found not installed out-of-the box was tlp (power management daemon, it relates to battery life you mentioned). After a 'dnf install tlp tlp-rdw' it was solved too and that takes care of the almost qualifier in the previous sentence. The other issue I had was with external monitor was, that the primary display for the login screen was the built-in display, not the external monitor (that's my subjective preference. After login, the arrangement was according to user preferences). Both certainly not earth shattering. If other laptops or computers have more serious problems, that's issue to be solved by their manufacturer. They are selling their wares to you, after all, why would you accept incomplete support?
- in_the_sticks 10y agoWhy Retina? 15" HP Spectre x360. UHD display. Option for double the max RAM in the new MBP. Several other nifty features, including an aluminum body and somewhat replaceable components without all of the glue nonsense you'll see in Apple products.
- elcapitan 10y ago>> targets Professionals > All we know, there's a word "pro" in marketing materials (includes product names). Who they actually target with that is Apple's internal affairs, and everyone should judge for himself, whether it matches one's requirements. So nowadays Apple's "pro" is more like the "pro" in Playstation Pro.
- BerislavLopac 10y agoMore to the point, it's like the "pro" in iPad Pro.
- briandear 10y agoI would argue that "pro" doesn't mean "user in an aggressively locked down IT department." I am a pro and I never need this.
- organsnyder 10y agoNot all pros work in large enterprises, but a large portion of them do. My employer (a 20,000+ employee healthcare system) issues me a MacBook Pro, but the client techs have to do heroics do manage it, compared to the Thinkpads that are normally issued. I'm happy to have the choice (I actually like the Thinkpad hardware better, but OSX is better suited to my workflow as a developer compared to Windows), but Apple certainly isn't making it easy. If they keep doing these sorts of shenanigans, it won't be long before I'm adapting my workflow to Windows 10 on a T460.
- msbarnett 10y agoYikes. As a professional, I'd never submit to someone else controlling the tools I use to ply my trade, and in my entire career I've never had to. Even when I've worked for large orgs (40k+ employees), Developers have always been root on their own machines, which were never managed centrally. Do you seriously beg some tech to allow you to install the tools you need, or allow you to load kexts to instrument system calls for debugging, etc? That sounds demeaning.
- organsnyder 10y agoNo, I get root access. But I still need centrally-provisioned tools in order to access the VPN, email, etc.—basically, the non-development parts of my job.
- userbinator 10y agoI think by "professional" they do not really mean "power user" or "developer", but the stereotypically computer-illiterate user who happens to be a professional in a different field.
- curried_haskell 10y agoExactly. They mean someone like a design professional who is just a usual computer illiterate user who knows Photoshop.
- iSnow 10y agoAnother indication that Apple is no longer committed to professional customers of their computer line and their needs - iDevices get the required admin tools, but the target demographics for their computers are consumers and web dev shops where everyone tends to their systems.
- chillacy 10y agoI'd be good with less corporate governance on the machine they issued me, more in line with what google does. The windows machines are unusable with all the forced updating, antivirus inefficiencies, and basically spyware. The Macbooks are on their way there, though you can at least still unload the kexts today
- blauditore 10y ago> The windows machines are unusable with all the forced updating, antivirus inefficiencies, and basically spyware. Hardly ever had such problems on machines I was able to manage myself. I'm not sure what you're referring to by "forced updating"; the W10 upgrade or just regular updates?
- johnward 10y agoAre they referring to corporate policies/software forcing updates?
- chillacy 10y agoYes. Corporate IT will install extra software on the machine which does this kind of thing. On the macs, there's an auto-updater which forces a restart with a countdown, no way to stop it. Its not by Apple for sure, based on how jankey it looks, but terminating the process will prevent the restart. The worst is spyware which randomly spins up one of the CPUs to 100% for 10 mins every few hours while it runs du.
- johnward 10y ago
- drvdevd 10y agoSo: > It’s quite clear – Welcome to the future of Apple’s hybrid ARM/x86 platform Meaning, in a nutshell, that we have two different system "loading" policies (the ARM policy and the x86 policy) having fun together on the same disk? Three if you count macOS and EFI as two different systems really. So naturally this would make disk imaging complex. Seriously, why wasn't this documented (or better documented)? I'm quite impressed with the author's polite tone. His list of unanswered questions is mind boggling. [edit: perhaps not "mind boggling" ... maybe just alarming is a better term]
- intoverflow2 10y ago> questions is mind boggling Becomes less mind boggling when you take this hint that Apple genuinely doesn't care about their machines being used in scenarios that require this anymore.
- simonh 10y agoFrom the article: > Good news everyone: Mac imaging isn't dead... yet. Also the article title doesn't mention breaking anything. So why does the title of the HN post say disk imaging has been broken?
- _pmf_ 10y agoMy theory is hat the reason the touch bar exists is that Apple needs to get rid of overstocked (or contractually overproduced) Watch SoCs.
- coldtea 10y agoApple doesn't make design decisions based on redundant stock. Besides, Apple Watch sold extremely well for its product category.
- _pmf_ 10y ago> Apple doesn't make design decisions based on redundant stock. One would like to think that way.
- orbitur 10y agoAll the (expensive and custom-manufactured) evidence backs up that thinking, so I'm not sure why you're being snarky about it.
- canuckintime 10y agoiPhone 5c, iPhone SE, Apple watch series 1 etc use evidence that Apple takes availability of stock parts into design considerations. That doesn't imply that the Apple Watch poor sales theory is correct though
- orbitur 10y agoThe iPhone 5c was an attempt at a "youth market" that didn't exist, but I'll agree it was cheap for them to make it. However, the iPhone SE had 98% of the guts of the 6S in a smaller package. That's not a cheap or simple thing to do. And the Series 1 Apple Watch had a better CPU. That's basically a different watch.
- hellofunk 10y agoThe title of this HN post has been edited and does not reflect the article. The correct title is: "Apple’s new OS “activation” for Touch Bar MacBook Pros"
- acqq 10y agoYes, admins, please, the current title is against HN title non-editorializing policies.
- hellofunk 10y agoI wonder how you can ping one of the admins. Will he respond if I do this: dang or this @dang ?
- NietTim 10y ago/u/dang maybe? Does this even work on here to begin with, since there is no real inbox?
- maxerickson 10y agomailto:hn@ycombinator.com (It's linked in the footer)
- binaryapparatus 10y agoI thought that duplicate links merge automatically? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057200
- lukeh 10y agoiBridge, eh? I can see where this is going...
- SyneRyder 10y agoThe "Fun Bugs" section is really concerning. So, if you set the date on a new MacBook Pro to 1/1/1970, your MBP will fail to boot, because the OS in your keyboard still has a bug that was patched in iOS, but not in keyboardOS? I must be misreading that bit, surely?
- metafunctor 10y agoNope, just tried it. The machine will boot, it just takes a long time (some timeouts at play, I assume). If anything, Touch ID not working if the system time is wildly incorrect is makes me trust it more, rather than less. Would I like the system design be more open and better documented? Sure. But if a security feature doesn't work when the clock is set 45 years in the past… is not concerning per se.
- SyneRyder 10y agoThat doesn't sound quite so bad then, I'm assuming it's possible to login without Touch ID. Although it does make worry about how usable the machine will be when Apple eventually stops updating/signing the TouchBar firmware.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pawadu 10y agoSo I can cause some serious economic damage around the Bay area by spoofing a few NTP messages?
- na85 10y agoSeems to me that if the OS can write the touchpad firmware, it's of dubious security value as a sort of "secure enclave" for fingerprint id or whatever else.
- m_eiman 10y agoAs long as the embedded SoC checks the firmware signature, it's not a problem.
- al2o3cr 10y agoShorter this article: "Blindly overwriting the partition map the machine ships with has negative side-effects."
- kevin_b_er 10y ago> We need a up-to-date portal with information regarding the future of mac management. "mac management" is not in Apple's target market anymore. Actual professional usage ended with this mac laptop series.
- Terretta 10y agoTell that to IBM, adding 1500 professional Macs a week. By the end of 2016, roughly one in four IBM employees will use a Macintosh computer. The tech giant, which employs 400,000 people, bought and provisioned 90,000 Macs since it started to support Apple laptops in June 2015. It expects to have at least 100,000 Macs deployed by 2017. IBM now has the largest enterprise Mac deployment in the world, and it is Apple's biggest business customer for Macs, according to Mac maker. Apple declined to provide details on the other leading enterprise Mac customers, but SAP, Kelly Services and Intuit are among the company's most recognizable clients. In total, IBM says it manages 217,000 Apple devices for its employees today, including those 90,000 Macs, 81,000 iPhones and 48,000 iPads. http://www.cio.com/article/3133945/hardware/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-543-per-user.html http://www.cio.com/article/3133945/hardware/ibm-says-macs-sa...
- cmurf 10y agoBetween this and the Windows 10 dual boot blowing speakers in the new MBP, I question the short term Linux viability on Macs, let alone the long term.