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Any statistics to back that up? Because some random hacker news comments dislike new MacBooks it doesn't mean other developers would. I find it hard to see any

by illuminati1911 10y ago

Any statistics to back that up? Because some random hacker news comments dislike new MacBooks it doesn't mean other developers would. I find it hard to see any realistic alternatives for MacBooks in software development. They give you all the tools you need from the Windows world that are not available on linux like Office, Photoshop etc. and it is still a UNIX system which can do all the stuff that linux can without kernel panics, crashes, bugs and other crap. Also unlike Windows or Linux, a single macOS installation can last pretty much forever and doesn't need to reinstalled every year because of the lost performance like Windows. And last but not least MacBooks are well optimised for the hardware they run on which gives them 1.5-2.5 times the performance with the same hardware as on Windows or Linux. The whole thing about complaining about new MacBooks is same thing as with iPhones. People complain because it's trendy to whine about anything Apple does even if they would create eternal world peace and still everybody will buy them because there is nothing better or even similar on the market.

Baeocystin 10y ago
You mean direct, market-research-supplied numbers? No. I am just one of thousands of people who makes a living in the tech world. What I can say is that 1) A very large portion of other devs I know use(d) MacBooks, and 2) A very large portion of them said "F this, I'm out" when Apple released their most recent machine. Many switched to Surfaces. Your hyperbole against Linux and Windows does your point no credit. Linux has been rock-stable for a very, very long time, and Windows 10 is a pleasure to use, particularly on touch-enabled devices. MS went through severe growing pains with Win8, but those days are past. And the OS/hardware combinations that have emerged since make Apple's offerings feel old and out of touch.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  > Many switched to Surfaces They switched to Surfaces because they wanted power-user hardware?
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    They switched to Surfaces because they saw what I was doing with mine, wanted to be able to do the same, and Apple had no comparable answer. Simple as that.
    - Philipp__ 10y ago
      But that is just people in your surrounding. Anyone amazed by Surface (tablet and touchscreen things) switched but that is ok, it is not so much of Apple's loss as of MS's gain. I do not want touchscreen, I don't need it, I need classic laptop and many Apple MacBook users want just that, a laptop, no touchscreen.
      - Baeocystin 10y ago
        For what it is worth, I used to feel exactly the same way until I got a machine that had one. Now I miss it when touch is unavailable. Being able to use touch, mouse/trackpad, & keyboard all at the same time is, perhaps surprisingly, a very pleasant way to work. To pick one example: being able to flick through long documents with a finger while keeping focus on other parts of the screen alone has been a huge productivity booster, and I do not say that lightly.
        kaishiro 10y ago
        How is this different from being able to flick through long documents with a finger via a touchpad (aside from not having to reach up to the screen)?
        Baeocystin 10y ago
        It turns out that it is less effort to flick/move directly on the item you want to adjust than to do it via proxy on the touchpad. Like I said before, I was firmly in the "touchscreens are a waste of time for me" camp until I actually started using my Surface. Not trying to sound like an ad, it just has been my actual experience.
- smcl 10y ago
  I agree with you except for "Linux has been rock-stable for a very, very long time". This depends on what you mean by "rock-stable" but things begin to get really annoying really quickly once you move on from relatively simple tasks. Even basic stuff like getting good battery life on laptops, or waking up from sleep/suspend/hibernate, using >1 monitors can be flakey or unpredictable. If they've worked fine for you then congrats, but when they don't it can be infuriating. This is not to disparage the kernel developers, package maintainers or the distributions themselves - there's a lot of people doing excellent work without being compensated at all. However let's not kid ourselves - linux can still be tough.
  - Baeocystin 10y ago
    Well, let me rephrase- Linux is as stable as you want it to be. If you want an ideal linux laptop experience, you need to do the research and get a model made with linux in mind. Otherwise, you're just rolling the dice. That being said, I only use Linux for server-side work, and I can easily say that it is every bit as stable as any other server OS I've used, and has been for a very long time. There are plenty of weedy areas to play in if you want to, of course. But if your goal is It Just Works, you can do that, too. Perhaps most importantly, you can do it easily, with just a little foresight during the spec stage of planning your project.
  - dsacco 10y ago
    I run Ubuntu 14.04 as my daily driver on a custom-built PC. I agree with you that Linux is not necessarily rock solid, but I would instead suggest that the compelling difference these days is that it can be if you put in the work. In years past, that wasn't even the case. Unless you buy something from System76 or do very meticulous research on hardware support and build your own, Linux is not going to be seamless out of the box. But the real highlight is that it can be seamless at all these days. My PC has four GPUs, 128GB of RAM and a deca-core CPU. I have four monitors, a bluetooth mouse, and I almost never turn it off. Instead, it automatically suspends. When I'm away from home I can ssh into my computer if needed. I have daily backups that are essentially seamless. Now, it was difficult to get to this place. I would say that Linux is, and has for a long time been, rock solid if you're not using a GUI. In my opinion, the single greatest impediment to "Linux on the desktop" is xorg, which is terrible (to put it mildly). Nouveau is absolutely crap, especially since Nvidia puts out its own drivers. But my point here is that after a few days of careful installation and setup work, I have had a seamless desktop experience for something like eight months. What needs to happen for Linux is a software company that takes something like Debian, fork it and dramatically bring it up to wider compatibility with modern hardware across the market. In some sense that's Ubuntu, and it shows in how easy my daily experience has been.
gutnor 10y ago
Developer on HN still count. You know that Apple is at least losing some developers. Then there are the people like me that skips this upgrade waiting to see more clearly Apple plans. So the only question is to know if they are winning some that were on other systems. Objectively, the MBP has more or less stagnated on a performance point of view, it has regressed in autonomy and the new features it gained are at best neutral for developers. Developers is typically the slice of the population that will be affected by reviews, and the reviews are not favourable to this new MBP. Last but not least, competition has not stagnated either. I don't believe there is a better laptop on the market for my usage pattern, but it took me much longer before I came to that conclusion. It is reasonable to think that the new MBP is less successful than the previous one with developers. It could still grow in raw numbers even with the developers, but it is reasonable to think its growth has been dampened a bit. I'm not strongly disagreeing with you, but you are not making a better point than parent. I do believe that if Apple has a spec bump release of the MBP ready end of 2017 and is back in the regular 1 year cycle the whinging will die and you will win the argument.
yabatopia 10y ago
>Also unlike Windows or Linux, a single macOS installation can last pretty much forever and doesn't need to reinstalled every year because of the lost performance like Windows. You need to update your arguments. It's 2017, not 1998. I haven't reinstalled Windows on my desktop system in years and it's running perfectly fine.
Joeri 10y ago
As a developer on windows, I'd have to disagree with most of what you said. Windows hasn't been less stable than a mac for years if you buy equivalent hardware (instead of scrapping together a system with junkyard parts or getting a cheap walmart laptop). Windows does not need to be reinstalled every year if you don't treat it stupidly. My current work windows install is 4 years old, has seen two machines (disk swap) and two major windows versions (in-place upgrade), and it runs as well as when i first used it. OS X is only faster than windows on mac hardware because apple ships bad windows drivers on bootcamp deliberately. On equivalent hardware from other vendors it is just as fast. It sounds to me like you don't actually know windows all that well. I use a mac mini at home and a windows laptop at work, and I'd say that they're pretty much equivalent for my purposes.
AsyncAwait 10y ago
I am not sure this was an issue on Linux ever, but I run a 3+ year old Arch installation, no problem here.

Baeocystin 10y ago

You mean direct, market-research-supplied numbers? No. I am just one of thousands of people who makes a living in the tech world. What I can say is that 1) A very large portion of other devs I know use(d) MacBooks, and 2) A very large portion of them said "F this, I'm out" when Apple released their most recent machine. Many switched to Surfaces. Your hyperbole against Linux and Windows does your point no credit. Linux has been rock-stable for a very, very long time, and Windows 10 is a pleasure to use, particularly on touch-enabled devices. MS went through severe growing pains with Win8, but those days are past. And the OS/hardware combinations that have emerged since make Apple's offerings feel old and out of touch.

paulddraper 10y ago
> Many switched to Surfaces They switched to Surfaces because they wanted power-user hardware?
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  They switched to Surfaces because they saw what I was doing with mine, wanted to be able to do the same, and Apple had no comparable answer. Simple as that.
  - Philipp__ 10y ago
    But that is just people in your surrounding. Anyone amazed by Surface (tablet and touchscreen things) switched but that is ok, it is not so much of Apple's loss as of MS's gain. I do not want touchscreen, I don't need it, I need classic laptop and many Apple MacBook users want just that, a laptop, no touchscreen.
    - Baeocystin 10y ago
      For what it is worth, I used to feel exactly the same way until I got a machine that had one. Now I miss it when touch is unavailable. Being able to use touch, mouse/trackpad, & keyboard all at the same time is, perhaps surprisingly, a very pleasant way to work. To pick one example: being able to flick through long documents with a finger while keeping focus on other parts of the screen alone has been a huge productivity booster, and I do not say that lightly.
      - kaishiro 10y ago
        How is this different from being able to flick through long documents with a finger via a touchpad (aside from not having to reach up to the screen)?
        Baeocystin 10y ago
        It turns out that it is less effort to flick/move directly on the item you want to adjust than to do it via proxy on the touchpad. Like I said before, I was firmly in the "touchscreens are a waste of time for me" camp until I actually started using my Surface. Not trying to sound like an ad, it just has been my actual experience.
smcl 10y ago
I agree with you except for "Linux has been rock-stable for a very, very long time". This depends on what you mean by "rock-stable" but things begin to get really annoying really quickly once you move on from relatively simple tasks. Even basic stuff like getting good battery life on laptops, or waking up from sleep/suspend/hibernate, using >1 monitors can be flakey or unpredictable. If they've worked fine for you then congrats, but when they don't it can be infuriating. This is not to disparage the kernel developers, package maintainers or the distributions themselves - there's a lot of people doing excellent work without being compensated at all. However let's not kid ourselves - linux can still be tough.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  Well, let me rephrase- Linux is as stable as you want it to be. If you want an ideal linux laptop experience, you need to do the research and get a model made with linux in mind. Otherwise, you're just rolling the dice. That being said, I only use Linux for server-side work, and I can easily say that it is every bit as stable as any other server OS I've used, and has been for a very long time. There are plenty of weedy areas to play in if you want to, of course. But if your goal is It Just Works, you can do that, too. Perhaps most importantly, you can do it easily, with just a little foresight during the spec stage of planning your project.
- dsacco 10y ago
  I run Ubuntu 14.04 as my daily driver on a custom-built PC. I agree with you that Linux is not necessarily rock solid, but I would instead suggest that the compelling difference these days is that it can be if you put in the work. In years past, that wasn't even the case. Unless you buy something from System76 or do very meticulous research on hardware support and build your own, Linux is not going to be seamless out of the box. But the real highlight is that it can be seamless at all these days. My PC has four GPUs, 128GB of RAM and a deca-core CPU. I have four monitors, a bluetooth mouse, and I almost never turn it off. Instead, it automatically suspends. When I'm away from home I can ssh into my computer if needed. I have daily backups that are essentially seamless. Now, it was difficult to get to this place. I would say that Linux is, and has for a long time been, rock solid if you're not using a GUI. In my opinion, the single greatest impediment to "Linux on the desktop" is xorg, which is terrible (to put it mildly). Nouveau is absolutely crap, especially since Nvidia puts out its own drivers. But my point here is that after a few days of careful installation and setup work, I have had a seamless desktop experience for something like eight months. What needs to happen for Linux is a software company that takes something like Debian, fork it and dramatically bring it up to wider compatibility with modern hardware across the market. In some sense that's Ubuntu, and it shows in how easy my daily experience has been.

gutnor 10y ago

Developer on HN still count. You know that Apple is at least losing some developers. Then there are the people like me that skips this upgrade waiting to see more clearly Apple plans. So the only question is to know if they are winning some that were on other systems. Objectively, the MBP has more or less stagnated on a performance point of view, it has regressed in autonomy and the new features it gained are at best neutral for developers. Developers is typically the slice of the population that will be affected by reviews, and the reviews are not favourable to this new MBP. Last but not least, competition has not stagnated either. I don't believe there is a better laptop on the market for my usage pattern, but it took me much longer before I came to that conclusion. It is reasonable to think that the new MBP is less successful than the previous one with developers. It could still grow in raw numbers even with the developers, but it is reasonable to think its growth has been dampened a bit. I'm not strongly disagreeing with you, but you are not making a better point than parent. I do believe that if Apple has a spec bump release of the MBP ready end of 2017 and is back in the regular 1 year cycle the whinging will die and you will win the argument.

yabatopia 10y ago

>Also unlike Windows or Linux, a single macOS installation can last pretty much forever and doesn't need to reinstalled every year because of the lost performance like Windows. You need to update your arguments. It's 2017, not 1998. I haven't reinstalled Windows on my desktop system in years and it's running perfectly fine.

Joeri 10y ago

As a developer on windows, I'd have to disagree with most of what you said. Windows hasn't been less stable than a mac for years if you buy equivalent hardware (instead of scrapping together a system with junkyard parts or getting a cheap walmart laptop). Windows does not need to be reinstalled every year if you don't treat it stupidly. My current work windows install is 4 years old, has seen two machines (disk swap) and two major windows versions (in-place upgrade), and it runs as well as when i first used it. OS X is only faster than windows on mac hardware because apple ships bad windows drivers on bootcamp deliberately. On equivalent hardware from other vendors it is just as fast. It sounds to me like you don't actually know windows all that well. I use a mac mini at home and a windows laptop at work, and I'd say that they're pretty much equivalent for my purposes.

AsyncAwait 10y ago

I am not sure this was an issue on Linux ever, but I run a 3+ year old Arch installation, no problem here.