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I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix co

by mstade 6y ago

I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus is why I'm wholly invested in the Apple ecosystem. I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?

ARandomerDude 6y ago
For me, the React Native experience has been instructive. Android is quick and easy to develop, debug, and deploy. The iOS side includes multiple hoops, constant frustration stemming from XCode, long app release times, and minutes-long builds for production-size apps. Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release.
- askafriend 6y ago
  As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. It's always janky and commpromises UX in ways that made me simply use the app less or had the effect of teaching me to "get in and out of the app as quickly as possible".
  - ARandomerDude 6y ago
    As with everything, it depends on the implementation. There are some things I'd like to clean up about our app, but overall feedback has been very positive.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    > As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. If it is a good react native app you won't know it is RN. If you notice it, it is by definition poorly done. There are some things (e.g. specific animations, UI elements) that RN just isn't great at, the best way to avoid making a janky app is to avoid even trying to do those things.
    - 72deluxe 6y ago
      Non-native menus and poor keyboard focus handling and shortcuts are the giveaway, and extreme memory usage!
  - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
    That’s your bias. Most consumers have mo clue what react native is
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release. Interestingly our team has gone the opposite way (again, no official policy). The deciding factor in our case has been the relative performance of Xcode/iOS Simulator vs Android Studio + Android Emulator. Android Studio on it's own slows my computer down more than Xcode compiling AND the iOS Simulator running at the same time. The Android emulator is all but unusable on my MacBook. I agree there's a lot of painful bits around signing/release on iOS though.
cortesoft 6y ago
I recently ran into some trouble with some tools installed in /usr/bin a while ago, and wanted to try making some changes. Even with root, you can't touch /usr/bin. It took me way too long to try to figure out what was going on, and all the fixes were hacks.
- wuunderbar 6y ago
  I may be missing something here, but why would you need to change the stock installed tools in /usr/bin? Seems like an easy way to screw up your OS installation. And it's not like a VM where you can rollback to a snapshot or relaunch. If there really was an issue there then you either need to file a bug and have them mainline a fix, or yes hack/shim a fix on top for your needs. Perhaps leveraging PATH precedence.
  - luma 6y ago
    Embedded in your response is the general attitude one hears when concerned about not being able to do "a thing" in the Apple ecosystem: why would you want to do that? Questioning the use case and insisting that one doesn't actually _want_ to do a thing instead of allowing the user to control their own system is the quintessential Apple experience.
    - qeternity 6y ago
      You can still do this thing, you just do it a different way that doesn't fundamentally risk breaking the OS. I understand that there may be some non-zero sized group of people who absolutely want to screw with protected OS files, and even for this group of people you can go and disable SIP and mess with the OS all you want (one of the Macs I have is a hackintosh, which requires some decent modification). However most people, including me, and I'd venture most engineers too, would rather have a hardened system.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      > Embedded in your response is the general attitude one hears when concerned about not being able to do "a thing" in the Apple ecosystem: why would you want to do that? Funny, that's a quote I hear a lot in Linux Desktop ecosystems as well. I think it is just the nature of people so accustomed to a certain way of thinking that any other use case that comes along is automatically considered to be doing it wrong.
banachtarski 6y ago
I just "use linux" and I get all the benefits with much better hardware (more memory, disk storage, speed for compilation), better drivers (important especially for GPU support for either graphics/rendering work or machine learning) and my downsides are... what exactly? Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I don't use Safari. From your perspective, what aspect of the "customer focus" materially improves anything? ICloud? The thing that lost a ton of my data over the years? Safari? The thing that doesn't even support WebGL 2 or other standards that are a decade old? (seriously, safari is the new internet explorer).
- davedx 6y ago
  I use Safari as my main browser now due to the password generation/sharing with my iPhone. It's a killer feature for me.
  - faemir 6y ago
    Firefox does this too FYI
    - IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
      As does chrome and edge.
    - davedx 6y ago
      I like Firefox but I don't use it on my iPhone. I use the Apple pw manager to log into websites on both phone/laptop a lot. The syncing to my iPhone is great.
  - viklove 6y ago
    Almost every browser has this feature...
    - danaris 6y ago
      But "almost every browser" doesn't sync your saved passwords seamlessly between devices (mobile and desktop) with an end-to-end encrypted database, and automatically offer to autofill them, with the autofill itself protected by Touch ID/Face ID on the devices that support those.
FillardMillmore 6y ago
I can't speak for why the OP feels this way, but I think one of the main gripes I've seen from "power users" of the latest MBPs are the touchbar and Apple's continued insistence on it and the larger trackpad that some find obtrusive (these features are generally embraced by end-users). Then of course there's the lack of USB ports that some take issue with and the fairly disappointing built-in webcam on the latest models. These are not problems for everyone and most have workarounds, but some "power users" are turned off by this. The abandonment of the butterfly keyboard is definitely a step in the right direction.
warent 6y ago
I would also consider myself to be a power user. However, one huge annoying problem I've encountered is sharing homebrew between multiple users. It seems like it's not possible for homebrew and all of it's libraries/binaries to be owned/usable by more than one user at a time. Apple should roll their own package management tool or officially support homebrew.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  The homebrew developers (of the homebrew framework itself not all the random app maintainers) have been "doing it wrong since day one. It is utterly and unforgivably wrong to install system-wide binaries owned by a normal user outside of the users own home dir. That's what they were doing for years until fairly recently when Apple had to simply change the os to break their install, forcing brew to change it, finally, against their will. Macports did it right, but "brew ..." is just a cooler catchier name. It litterally comes down to that. The more fun name. When someone is new and confused and overwhelmed, a slight difference like that, or the design of the website, or the charisma of the people talking on forum posts, is the tipping factor in which of the 11 possible things they try. And as long as the first thing they tried worked, they keep doing it and quickly gain a rewarding feeling of accomplishment and confidense doing that thing. At that point this is their home and their comfort. They aren't bothering with anything else when it doesn't seem to be any different. They conclude they chose wisely the first time (which is a good feeling that anyone can always simply decide to reward themself with, ie confirmation bias). So, no one should have ever used homebrew. Homebrew "won" anyway, but not by being the better-architected more technically correct system with wiser engineers. I forgive all the users for not realizing that the directions they are terrible and broken. There is no excuse for the developers writing that system. So, your problem with homebrew, I say, the problem is homebrew not Apple.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    > It litterally comes down to that. The more fun name. I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched from MacPorts to Homebrew, after having previously switched from Fink to MacPorts many years ago despite not only being told but having actually experienced that Homebrew was slower and more fragile. And the reason was not "the more fun name." The reason was that both MacPorts and Fink were incredibly slow at expanding and updating their ports tree. Stuff that I knew from my Linux and FreeBSD days, or cool stuff that I read about on weblogs or in places like Slashdot and HN, was nearly always right there in a current or new-current version in Homebrew. That was rarely true of MacPorts: often it wasn't there at all, and if it was, it was often several minor or even a full major version behind. This may have changed since then -- I hope it has, since I suspect it's been over a decade at this point -- but IIRC, the last straw was trying to install the terminal version of a program (either Emacs or Vim, I think) that also had a GUI version available and, after going to make coffee and coming back to the computer, discovering MacPorts (a) didn't care that I had explicitly asked for the terminal version, it was going to install the GUI version for me anyway, and (b) because of MacPorts' aggressive "never depend on the system version of anything no way no how", it was building a new version of the entire bleeping XFree86 from source for me. Yes, I understand why MacPorts takes that "no system dependencies" approach; yes, I get that was probably a badly-specified port file. But I ripped it out and never looked back. Well, I take that back. I think I looked back once, about four years ago, to see if everything that I had installed under Homebrew on a machine could be installed with MacPorts, because maybe it was time to give it another chance. The answer was no, everything could not be installed. So the answer was no, it was not time to go back. I don't care that Homebrew has a fun name. I care that it has the stuff that I want kept reasonably current with upstream versions. Homebrew has, as far as I can tell, gotten a lot better over the years at not being fragile. It's still no speed demon, but the truth is that I don't actually run it that often. If a more native macOS package for a given piece of software is available, I'll install that in preference.
elipsey 6y ago
>> I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus [...] I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?" I just plugged an extra ssd into my my old thinkpad yesterday. My boot volume is mSata. The hard drive hole was empty, and I added it with one screw. Now I have a vm storage pool. It now has more storage than my gf's mac, and it cost 1/6th as much. I tried something similar with her computer yesterday. Plugged in a usb SATA ssd. ext4 isn't supported. alt-tab is broken. Using the touchpad for everything is mandatory because hotkeys are counter revolutionary I guess? GNU userland is there but like half of it is broken or fake, like fs/mtab aren’t real? The console clipboard doesn’t seem to work. All the apps are already running instances without a window or something? Is this supposed to be like a phone? I just want it to fullscreen tmux and leave me alone, but I keep having to search the internet for the cutesy name of the GUI thing that is the only way to do <trivial task>. I could format the disk and put the data back after, but I'm now afraid file io in python will be even more fun than I am already having, so I go find another computer. I keep trying to learn how to use a mac, but it's always so much harder than just using any other computer that is around that I just can't seem to make time. I find the UI willfully contrarian, and more alien than anything I have every used. I'm not trying to be an OS fanboy here, I know lot's of smart devs who say they like it. I want to "get it" but I just don't "get it". Discover-ability seems poor, especially as a user friendly tool for beginners, but the UI and locked down software eco-system seems so limiting for devs. Like, who is this for? My gf told to stop trying to think and just click on things… She’s a modeler/dev and she hates her mac, but her employer won’t let her use linux anymore. None of this feels like a dev or “power user” experience. It feels like using Windows XP because the boss made me. Is this like that thing Neal Stephenson said about the difference between "easy to learn" and "easy to use"? Like if I learn to use it properly I will start having "ah ha!" moments and become more productive? EDIT: I really don't mean to be flippant! OP asked why people find it limiting. They seemed like they know what they're doing, and might be a dev, and lot's of devs use mac. OP called it "the best of Unix combined with customer focus", which sounds great to me! I just don't understand what went wrong...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Beached 6y ago
have you tried windows with subsystem before? I've noticed significantly better performance from windows 10 on Lenovo t580 (from 2018)than my Macbook pro (from 2029). I love win 10 + subsystem combo 10x more than my Mac that I now have moved all development and daily work over to my windows box. I only touch the Mac as a test box before running things in production, when it use to be the other way around.
bengale 6y ago
Sometimes it feels like I live in another dimension. I worked with dozens of developers using macs that never make complaints beyond little niggles, then I come on here and you’d think the entire ecosystem was a dumpster fire. It’s enough to make me think I don’t work on the same system they’re describing for 60+ hours a week.
jki275 6y ago
This - precisely. I live on a Mac all day every day. Does everything I want, exactly how I want it, and makes me so much more productive than if I had to fight with Linux all day long.

by mstade 6y ago

ARandomerDude 6y ago

For me, the React Native experience has been instructive. Android is quick and easy to develop, debug, and deploy. The iOS side includes multiple hoops, constant frustration stemming from XCode, long app release times, and minutes-long builds for production-size apps. Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release.

askafriend 6y ago
As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. It's always janky and commpromises UX in ways that made me simply use the app less or had the effect of teaching me to "get in and out of the app as quickly as possible".
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  As with everything, it depends on the implementation. There are some things I'd like to clean up about our app, but overall feedback has been very positive.
- com2kid 6y ago
  > As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. If it is a good react native app you won't know it is RN. If you notice it, it is by definition poorly done. There are some things (e.g. specific animations, UI elements) that RN just isn't great at, the best way to avoid making a janky app is to avoid even trying to do those things.
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    Non-native menus and poor keyboard focus handling and shortcuts are the giveaway, and extreme memory usage!
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  That’s your bias. Most consumers have mo clue what react native is
nicoburns 6y ago
> Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release. Interestingly our team has gone the opposite way (again, no official policy). The deciding factor in our case has been the relative performance of Xcode/iOS Simulator vs Android Studio + Android Emulator. Android Studio on it's own slows my computer down more than Xcode compiling AND the iOS Simulator running at the same time. The Android emulator is all but unusable on my MacBook. I agree there's a lot of painful bits around signing/release on iOS though.

cortesoft 6y ago

I recently ran into some trouble with some tools installed in /usr/bin a while ago, and wanted to try making some changes. Even with root, you can't touch /usr/bin. It took me way too long to try to figure out what was going on, and all the fixes were hacks.

wuunderbar 6y ago
I may be missing something here, but why would you need to change the stock installed tools in /usr/bin? Seems like an easy way to screw up your OS installation. And it's not like a VM where you can rollback to a snapshot or relaunch. If there really was an issue there then you either need to file a bug and have them mainline a fix, or yes hack/shim a fix on top for your needs. Perhaps leveraging PATH precedence.
- luma 6y ago
  Embedded in your response is the general attitude one hears when concerned about not being able to do "a thing" in the Apple ecosystem: why would you want to do that? Questioning the use case and insisting that one doesn't actually _want_ to do a thing instead of allowing the user to control their own system is the quintessential Apple experience.
  - qeternity 6y ago
    You can still do this thing, you just do it a different way that doesn't fundamentally risk breaking the OS. I understand that there may be some non-zero sized group of people who absolutely want to screw with protected OS files, and even for this group of people you can go and disable SIP and mess with the OS all you want (one of the Macs I have is a hackintosh, which requires some decent modification). However most people, including me, and I'd venture most engineers too, would rather have a hardened system.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > Embedded in your response is the general attitude one hears when concerned about not being able to do "a thing" in the Apple ecosystem: why would you want to do that? Funny, that's a quote I hear a lot in Linux Desktop ecosystems as well. I think it is just the nature of people so accustomed to a certain way of thinking that any other use case that comes along is automatically considered to be doing it wrong.

banachtarski 6y ago

I just "use linux" and I get all the benefits with much better hardware (more memory, disk storage, speed for compilation), better drivers (important especially for GPU support for either graphics/rendering work or machine learning) and my downsides are... what exactly? Itunes, Mail, etc, none of the software shipping with MacOS is actually any good. I don't use Safari. From your perspective, what aspect of the "customer focus" materially improves anything? ICloud? The thing that lost a ton of my data over the years? Safari? The thing that doesn't even support WebGL 2 or other standards that are a decade old? (seriously, safari is the new internet explorer).

davedx 6y ago
I use Safari as my main browser now due to the password generation/sharing with my iPhone. It's a killer feature for me.
- faemir 6y ago
  Firefox does this too FYI
  - IOT_Apprentice 6y ago
    As does chrome and edge.
  - davedx 6y ago
    I like Firefox but I don't use it on my iPhone. I use the Apple pw manager to log into websites on both phone/laptop a lot. The syncing to my iPhone is great.
- viklove 6y ago
  Almost every browser has this feature...
  - danaris 6y ago
    But "almost every browser" doesn't sync your saved passwords seamlessly between devices (mobile and desktop) with an end-to-end encrypted database, and automatically offer to autofill them, with the autofill itself protected by Touch ID/Face ID on the devices that support those.

FillardMillmore 6y ago

I can't speak for why the OP feels this way, but I think one of the main gripes I've seen from "power users" of the latest MBPs are the touchbar and Apple's continued insistence on it and the larger trackpad that some find obtrusive (these features are generally embraced by end-users). Then of course there's the lack of USB ports that some take issue with and the fairly disappointing built-in webcam on the latest models. These are not problems for everyone and most have workarounds, but some "power users" are turned off by this. The abandonment of the butterfly keyboard is definitely a step in the right direction.

warent 6y ago

I would also consider myself to be a power user. However, one huge annoying problem I've encountered is sharing homebrew between multiple users. It seems like it's not possible for homebrew and all of it's libraries/binaries to be owned/usable by more than one user at a time. Apple should roll their own package management tool or officially support homebrew.

Brian_K_White 6y ago
The homebrew developers (of the homebrew framework itself not all the random app maintainers) have been "doing it wrong since day one. It is utterly and unforgivably wrong to install system-wide binaries owned by a normal user outside of the users own home dir. That's what they were doing for years until fairly recently when Apple had to simply change the os to break their install, forcing brew to change it, finally, against their will. Macports did it right, but "brew ..." is just a cooler catchier name. It litterally comes down to that. The more fun name. When someone is new and confused and overwhelmed, a slight difference like that, or the design of the website, or the charisma of the people talking on forum posts, is the tipping factor in which of the 11 possible things they try. And as long as the first thing they tried worked, they keep doing it and quickly gain a rewarding feeling of accomplishment and confidense doing that thing. At that point this is their home and their comfort. They aren't bothering with anything else when it doesn't seem to be any different. They conclude they chose wisely the first time (which is a good feeling that anyone can always simply decide to reward themself with, ie confirmation bias). So, no one should have ever used homebrew. Homebrew "won" anyway, but not by being the better-architected more technically correct system with wiser engineers. I forgive all the users for not realizing that the directions they are terrible and broken. There is no excuse for the developers writing that system. So, your problem with homebrew, I say, the problem is homebrew not Apple.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  > It litterally comes down to that. The more fun name. I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched from MacPorts to Homebrew, after having previously switched from Fink to MacPorts many years ago despite not only being told but having actually experienced that Homebrew was slower and more fragile. And the reason was not "the more fun name." The reason was that both MacPorts and Fink were incredibly slow at expanding and updating their ports tree. Stuff that I knew from my Linux and FreeBSD days, or cool stuff that I read about on weblogs or in places like Slashdot and HN, was nearly always right there in a current or new-current version in Homebrew. That was rarely true of MacPorts: often it wasn't there at all, and if it was, it was often several minor or even a full major version behind. This may have changed since then -- I hope it has, since I suspect it's been over a decade at this point -- but IIRC, the last straw was trying to install the terminal version of a program (either Emacs or Vim, I think) that also had a GUI version available and, after going to make coffee and coming back to the computer, discovering MacPorts (a) didn't care that I had explicitly asked for the terminal version, it was going to install the GUI version for me anyway, and (b) because of MacPorts' aggressive "never depend on the system version of anything no way no how", it was building a new version of the entire bleeping XFree86 from source for me. Yes, I understand why MacPorts takes that "no system dependencies" approach; yes, I get that was probably a badly-specified port file. But I ripped it out and never looked back. Well, I take that back. I think I looked back once, about four years ago, to see if everything that I had installed under Homebrew on a machine could be installed with MacPorts, because maybe it was time to give it another chance. The answer was no, everything could not be installed. So the answer was no, it was not time to go back. I don't care that Homebrew has a fun name. I care that it has the stuff that I want kept reasonably current with upstream versions. Homebrew has, as far as I can tell, gotten a lot better over the years at not being fragile. It's still no speed demon, but the truth is that I don't actually run it that often. If a more native macOS package for a given piece of software is available, I'll install that in preference.

elipsey 6y ago

>> I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus [...] I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?" I just plugged an extra ssd into my my old thinkpad yesterday. My boot volume is mSata. The hard drive hole was empty, and I added it with one screw. Now I have a vm storage pool. It now has more storage than my gf's mac, and it cost 1/6th as much. I tried something similar with her computer yesterday. Plugged in a usb SATA ssd. ext4 isn't supported. alt-tab is broken. Using the touchpad for everything is mandatory because hotkeys are counter revolutionary I guess? GNU userland is there but like half of it is broken or fake, like fs/mtab aren’t real? The console clipboard doesn’t seem to work. All the apps are already running instances without a window or something? Is this supposed to be like a phone? I just want it to fullscreen tmux and leave me alone, but I keep having to search the internet for the cutesy name of the GUI thing that is the only way to do <trivial task>. I could format the disk and put the data back after, but I'm now afraid file io in python will be even more fun than I am already having, so I go find another computer. I keep trying to learn how to use a mac, but it's always so much harder than just using any other computer that is around that I just can't seem to make time. I find the UI willfully contrarian, and more alien than anything I have every used. I'm not trying to be an OS fanboy here, I know lot's of smart devs who say they like it. I want to "get it" but I just don't "get it". Discover-ability seems poor, especially as a user friendly tool for beginners, but the UI and locked down software eco-system seems so limiting for devs. Like, who is this for? My gf told to stop trying to think and just click on things… She’s a modeler/dev and she hates her mac, but her employer won’t let her use linux anymore. None of this feels like a dev or “power user” experience. It feels like using Windows XP because the boss made me. Is this like that thing Neal Stephenson said about the difference between "easy to learn" and "easy to use"? Like if I learn to use it properly I will start having "ah ha!" moments and become more productive? EDIT: I really don't mean to be flippant! OP asked why people find it limiting. They seemed like they know what they're doing, and might be a dev, and lot's of devs use mac. OP called it "the best of Unix combined with customer focus", which sounds great to me! I just don't understand what went wrong...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Beached 6y ago

have you tried windows with subsystem before? I've noticed significantly better performance from windows 10 on Lenovo t580 (from 2018)than my Macbook pro (from 2029). I love win 10 + subsystem combo 10x more than my Mac that I now have moved all development and daily work over to my windows box. I only touch the Mac as a test box before running things in production, when it use to be the other way around.

bengale 6y ago

Sometimes it feels like I live in another dimension. I worked with dozens of developers using macs that never make complaints beyond little niggles, then I come on here and you’d think the entire ecosystem was a dumpster fire. It’s enough to make me think I don’t work on the same system they’re describing for 60+ hours a week.

jki275 6y ago

This - precisely. I live on a Mac all day every day. Does everything I want, exactly how I want it, and makes me so much more productive than if I had to fight with Linux all day long.