22 ms·

Not to speak for anyone else, but one thing I gently disagree with: >Given that Hackintoshers are a particular bunch who don’t take kindly to the Apple-tax[...

by xoa 6y ago

Not to speak for anyone else, but one thing I gently disagree with: >Given that Hackintoshers are a particular bunch who don’t take kindly to the Apple-tax[...] I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. I think a major generator of interest in hackintoshes has been that there are significant segments of computing that Apple has simply completely (or nearly completely) given up on, including essentially any non-AIO desktop system above the Mini. At one point they had quite competitive PowerMacs and then Mac Pros covering the range of $2k all the way up to $10k+, and while sure there was some premium there was feature coverage, and they got regular yearly updates. They were "boring", but in the best way. There didn't need to be anything exciting about them. The prices did steadily inch upward, but far more critically sometime between 2010 and 2012 somebody at Apple decided the MP had to be exciting or something and created the Mac Cube 2, except this time to force it by eliminating the MP entirely. And it was complete shit, and to zero surprise never got a single update (since they totally fucked the power/thermal envelope, there was nowhere to go) and users completely lost the ability to make up for that. And then that was it, for 6 years. Then they did a kind of sort of ok update, but at a bad point given that Intel was collapsing, and forcing in some of their consumer design in ways that really hurt the value. The hackintosh, particularly virtualized ones in my opinion (running macOS under ESXi deals with a ton of the regular problem spots), has helped fill that hole as frankenstein MP 2010s finally hit their limits. I'm sure Apple Silicon will be great for a range of systems, but it won't help in areas that Apple just organizationally doesn't care about/doesn't have the bandwidth for because that's not a technology problem. So I'm a bit pessimistic/whistful about that particular area, even though it'll be a long time before the axe completely falls on it. It'll be fantastic and it's exciting to see the return of more experimentation in silicon, but at the same time it was a nice dream for a decade or so to be able to freely take advantage of a range of hardware the PC market offered which filled holes Apple couldn't.

throw0101a 6y ago
> I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. Especially if the margins allow them to not engage in silliness on the software side of things like violating privacy and serving ads in the OS. There are certainly places that Apple can be criticized, but I think in these two areas they're acting pretty well.
- donor20 6y ago
  What I don't understand - Windows 10 Pro comes with tons of pre-installed junk - Candy Crush etc. Just charge what you need to, business don't want this stuff.
  - nycticorax 6y ago
    Well, large businesses at least get Windows 10 Enterprise, which doesn't come with all of that nonsense. The real shame is that you can't get Windows 10 Enterprise without a volume license.
    - kube-system 6y ago
      You can get Win 10 Pro. I don’t remember my system having any of that junk preinstalled
      - Shared404 6y ago
        You do get obtrusive telemetry (Cortana is a good example), but you avoid Candy Crush et al. You can disable some of the telemetry during install as well.
        brutal_boi 6y ago
        Just run any of the reclaim series. Pure gold if you ask me. https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1 https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1
        vetinari 6y ago
        That looks like fork of https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
      - brirec 6y ago
        It installed itself on any Win 10 machine I saw (most of which run Pro), except those running Enterprise (or LTSC/LTSB), or an education license. Er, I heard that junk doesn’t install itself on “Pro for Workstations,” but I’m not certain and even then that’s another hundred dollars more expensive than Pro. And even Enterprise still comes with a lot of junk that, like, 90% of users won’t need. Windows AR? Paint 3D? And so on… half the things in the start menu of a stock Windows 10 Pro install are either crap like Candy Crush, fluff like 3D viewer, or niche like the Windows AR thing. The worst part about this is that there’s definitely a middle ground between not including anything and pushing crap on people — both nearly every Linux distro I have ever seen, as well as Apple nail that balance, and to be frank with the App Store or Microsoft Store and such I really don’t see the need to include hardly anything.
chongli 6y ago
Apple does not want to offer to the hackintosh/enthusiast market because they are the most price conscious segment. Targeting that segment means putting out extremely performant, low-margin commodity machines. Doing so then cannibalizes the market for their ultra-high-end stuff. Not only that, though. Enthusiasts are also extremely fickle and quick to jump ship to a cheaper hardware offering. If you look at all of Apple’s other markets, you’ll see loads of brand loyalty. Fickle enthusiasts don’t fit the mould.
- momokoko 6y ago
  I would be extraordinarily grateful for some insight into why this comment was downvoted.
  - sidm83 6y ago
    Agreed. Do not see anything worth downvoting at all.
  - hrktb 6y ago
    I think the parent comment is just completely ignoring the argument of the post they reply to. Just looking at the first sentences: GP: > I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. parent: > the hackintosh/enthusiast market [...] are the most price conscious segment
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      Then buy the new Mac Pro? I don't understand why that's not an option for GP.
      - tolien 6y ago
        Because as the sibling comments point out, the price of a Mac Pro isn't just an "Apple Tax^WPremium" over a desktop machine but is an order of magnitude more expensive (assuming you don't care about workstation-class components, i.e. Xeon Ws, Radeon Pro GPUs and ECC RAM). There's an enormous price gap between a Mac Mini and the Mac Pro (especially when the Mini now has higher single-threaded performance than the base Pro...) which Apple has widened in the last decade or two.
vbezhenar 6y ago
If you don't have issues with paying a lot for hardware, why don't you buy Mac Pro?
- cactus2093 6y ago
  Obviously “I’m willing to pay a lot” can mean a wide range of things, but pretty clearly the comment is talking about paying a moderate premium over the competition. The same way a MacBook Pro model might cost $2500 where you could get a similarly specked windows laptop for $1800. Or an iPhone might cost 30% more than a similar android flagship. It’s an order of magnitude different with the Mac Pro, the base model is a $6000 machine that will perform like a ~$1500 PC. And the base model makes no sense to buy, it’s really a $10k-$30k machine. It’s a completely different product category.
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    I don't mind paying for a new Apple, but I do mind paying for repairs on a system that fails just after the warranty runs out. Paying $1500 for a new computer every 5 years or so is good. Paying $1500 for a computer every 16 months, not so much. The monitor on my MacBook Pro just died, and I bought it July of last year. The repair was about $850 USD. Luckily my credit card covered the hardware warranty, but I'm kind of wishing I'd bought AppleCare.
    - dschuler 6y ago
      AppleCare for the Macs is definitely worth it. They even replaced the display on my MBP after 5 years when I called (that seems to be the key is to call someone at Apple directly). This was a part they should've recalled, but anyway I wouldn't have gotten a new display without AppleCare.
      - vetinari 6y ago
        There was a display replacement program for 2012-2015 MBP13s, due to the staingate. Though I recall that it was for 4 years since date of purchase, or so.
headmelted 6y ago
Agree completely. I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either. The machines have always commanded a premium for things that enthusiasts don’t see value in (I.e. anything beyond numeric spec sheet values), so most critics completely miss the point of them. There’s a valid argument to be made that they’re also marked up to higher margins than rivals even beyond the above, but I’m not sure if any end user has really ever eaten that cost - If you buy a MacBook, there has always been someone (students) to buy it back again 3/5/10 years down the road for a significant chunk of it’s original outlay. That doesn’t happen with any other laptop - they’re essentially scrap (or worth next to nothing) within 5 years. After 10 years I might actually expect the value to be static or even increase for its collector value (e.g. clamshell iBook G3s) The total cost of ownership for Apple products is actually lower over three years than any rival products I’m aware of.
- headmelted 6y ago
  In terms of high performance products, I’m actually really excited for the next Mac Pro. They’ve got novel design options open to them that no rival has. The M1 costs Apple relatively little to produce per unit - I would expect them to keep the overall design for a Mac Pro but have stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has. Obviously performance would depend upon the application being amenable to a design like that but a 32 or 64 5nm core Mac Pro is not out of the question, and would be impossible to match for performance in the next few years by any Hackintosh. Even after capacity frees up at TSMC for AMD to move to 5nm, they won’t be able to co-locate memory like the M1 does due to standards compliance with DRAM sticks. I think the next couple of years will be really turbulent for other vendors - the M1 is likely far more significant for the PC market due to how disruptive it is than it is for the Mac market.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    AMD would be able to do DRAM on package for the lowest wattage "ultrabook" chips, at the cost of producing a very different package for them vs. the bigger laptops that are expected to have upgradable SODIMMs. But I doubt that this "co-location" is that huge for performance. Whatever memory frequency and timings Apple is using are likely easily achievable through the regular mainboard PCB, maybe at the cost of slightly more voltage. DDR4 on desktop is overclockable to crazy levels and that's going through lots of things (CPU package - socket pins - board - slots - DIMMs). > stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has Quad or more package NUMA topology?? The latency would absolutely suck.
derefr 6y ago
> it won't help in areas that Apple just organizationally doesn't care about/doesn't have the bandwidth for because that's not a technology problem I would posit that Apple is always going to keep macOS working on some workstation-class hardware, just because that kind of machine is what Apple's software engineers will be using internally, and they need to write macOS software using macOS. Which means one of two things: 1. If they never release a workstation-class Apple Silicon chip, that'll likely mean that they're still using Intel/AMD chips internally, and so macOS will likely continue to be compiled for Intel indefinitely. 2. If they do design workstation-class Apple Silicon chips for internal use, they may as well also sell the resulting workstation-class machines to people at that point. (Or, to rearrange that statement: they wouldn't make the chips if they didn't intend to commercialize them. Designing and fabbing chips costs too much money!) Which is to say, whether it be a Hackintosh or an Apple Mac Pro, there's always going to be something to cater to workstation-class users of Apple products — because Apple itself is full of workstation-class users of Apple products.
- rsync 6y ago
  "I would posit that Apple is always going to keep macOS working on some workstation-class hardware, just because that kind of machine is what Apple's software engineers will be using internally, and they need to write macOS software using macOS." I have always hoped that we could rely on that heuristic - that internal Apple usage of their own products would guarantee that certain workflows would be unbroken. In practice, this has never held up. Over the past 10-12 years it has been reinforced over and over and over: Apple engineers use single monitor systems with scattered, overlapping windows which they interact with using mousey-mousey-everything and never keyboard shortcuts. They perform backups of critical files - and manage financial identities - using their mp3 player. The fact that multiple monitors - and monitor handoff - is broken in fascinating new ways with every version of OSX tells you how Apple folks are (and are not) using their own products.
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    It sounds like you have an issue with the lack of window snapping keyboard shortcuts that are in Windows 10, as well as iPhone backups happening in iTunes until they moved to finder, and iCloud being connected to iTunes although it's managed in SysPrefs. And you have seen some regressions along with the successive improvements to display management. Is that fair? If so, what is the connection to professional workflows on macOS?

by xoa 6y ago

throw0101a 6y ago

> I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. Especially if the margins allow them to not engage in silliness on the software side of things like violating privacy and serving ads in the OS. There are certainly places that Apple can be criticized, but I think in these two areas they're acting pretty well.

donor20 6y ago
What I don't understand - Windows 10 Pro comes with tons of pre-installed junk - Candy Crush etc. Just charge what you need to, business don't want this stuff.
- nycticorax 6y ago
  Well, large businesses at least get Windows 10 Enterprise, which doesn't come with all of that nonsense. The real shame is that you can't get Windows 10 Enterprise without a volume license.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    You can get Win 10 Pro. I don’t remember my system having any of that junk preinstalled
    - Shared404 6y ago
      You do get obtrusive telemetry (Cortana is a good example), but you avoid Candy Crush et al. You can disable some of the telemetry during install as well.
      - brutal_boi 6y ago
        Just run any of the reclaim series. Pure gold if you ask me. https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1 https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1
        vetinari 6y ago
        That looks like fork of https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
    - brirec 6y ago
      It installed itself on any Win 10 machine I saw (most of which run Pro), except those running Enterprise (or LTSC/LTSB), or an education license. Er, I heard that junk doesn’t install itself on “Pro for Workstations,” but I’m not certain and even then that’s another hundred dollars more expensive than Pro. And even Enterprise still comes with a lot of junk that, like, 90% of users won’t need. Windows AR? Paint 3D? And so on… half the things in the start menu of a stock Windows 10 Pro install are either crap like Candy Crush, fluff like 3D viewer, or niche like the Windows AR thing. The worst part about this is that there’s definitely a middle ground between not including anything and pushing crap on people — both nearly every Linux distro I have ever seen, as well as Apple nail that balance, and to be frank with the App Store or Microsoft Store and such I really don’t see the need to include hardly anything.

chongli 6y ago

Apple does not want to offer to the hackintosh/enthusiast market because they are the most price conscious segment. Targeting that segment means putting out extremely performant, low-margin commodity machines. Doing so then cannibalizes the market for their ultra-high-end stuff. Not only that, though. Enthusiasts are also extremely fickle and quick to jump ship to a cheaper hardware offering. If you look at all of Apple’s other markets, you’ll see loads of brand loyalty. Fickle enthusiasts don’t fit the mould.

momokoko 6y ago
I would be extraordinarily grateful for some insight into why this comment was downvoted.
- sidm83 6y ago
  Agreed. Do not see anything worth downvoting at all.
- hrktb 6y ago
  I think the parent comment is just completely ignoring the argument of the post they reply to. Just looking at the first sentences: GP: > I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. parent: > the hackintosh/enthusiast market [...] are the most price conscious segment
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Then buy the new Mac Pro? I don't understand why that's not an option for GP.
    - tolien 6y ago
      Because as the sibling comments point out, the price of a Mac Pro isn't just an "Apple Tax^WPremium" over a desktop machine but is an order of magnitude more expensive (assuming you don't care about workstation-class components, i.e. Xeon Ws, Radeon Pro GPUs and ECC RAM). There's an enormous price gap between a Mac Mini and the Mac Pro (especially when the Mini now has higher single-threaded performance than the base Pro...) which Apple has widened in the last decade or two.

vbezhenar 6y ago

If you don't have issues with paying a lot for hardware, why don't you buy Mac Pro?

cactus2093 6y ago
Obviously “I’m willing to pay a lot” can mean a wide range of things, but pretty clearly the comment is talking about paying a moderate premium over the competition. The same way a MacBook Pro model might cost $2500 where you could get a similarly specked windows laptop for $1800. Or an iPhone might cost 30% more than a similar android flagship. It’s an order of magnitude different with the Mac Pro, the base model is a $6000 machine that will perform like a ~$1500 PC. And the base model makes no sense to buy, it’s really a $10k-$30k machine. It’s a completely different product category.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  I don't mind paying for a new Apple, but I do mind paying for repairs on a system that fails just after the warranty runs out. Paying $1500 for a new computer every 5 years or so is good. Paying $1500 for a computer every 16 months, not so much. The monitor on my MacBook Pro just died, and I bought it July of last year. The repair was about $850 USD. Luckily my credit card covered the hardware warranty, but I'm kind of wishing I'd bought AppleCare.
  - dschuler 6y ago
    AppleCare for the Macs is definitely worth it. They even replaced the display on my MBP after 5 years when I called (that seems to be the key is to call someone at Apple directly). This was a part they should've recalled, but anyway I wouldn't have gotten a new display without AppleCare.
    - vetinari 6y ago
      There was a display replacement program for 2012-2015 MBP13s, due to the staingate. Though I recall that it was for 4 years since date of purchase, or so.

headmelted 6y ago

Agree completely. I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either. The machines have always commanded a premium for things that enthusiasts don’t see value in (I.e. anything beyond numeric spec sheet values), so most critics completely miss the point of them. There’s a valid argument to be made that they’re also marked up to higher margins than rivals even beyond the above, but I’m not sure if any end user has really ever eaten that cost - If you buy a MacBook, there has always been someone (students) to buy it back again 3/5/10 years down the road for a significant chunk of it’s original outlay. That doesn’t happen with any other laptop - they’re essentially scrap (or worth next to nothing) within 5 years. After 10 years I might actually expect the value to be static or even increase for its collector value (e.g. clamshell iBook G3s) The total cost of ownership for Apple products is actually lower over three years than any rival products I’m aware of.

headmelted 6y ago
In terms of high performance products, I’m actually really excited for the next Mac Pro. They’ve got novel design options open to them that no rival has. The M1 costs Apple relatively little to produce per unit - I would expect them to keep the overall design for a Mac Pro but have stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has. Obviously performance would depend upon the application being amenable to a design like that but a 32 or 64 5nm core Mac Pro is not out of the question, and would be impossible to match for performance in the next few years by any Hackintosh. Even after capacity frees up at TSMC for AMD to move to 5nm, they won’t be able to co-locate memory like the M1 does due to standards compliance with DRAM sticks. I think the next couple of years will be really turbulent for other vendors - the M1 is likely far more significant for the PC market due to how disruptive it is than it is for the Mac market.
- floatboth 6y ago
  AMD would be able to do DRAM on package for the lowest wattage "ultrabook" chips, at the cost of producing a very different package for them vs. the bigger laptops that are expected to have upgradable SODIMMs. But I doubt that this "co-location" is that huge for performance. Whatever memory frequency and timings Apple is using are likely easily achievable through the regular mainboard PCB, maybe at the cost of slightly more voltage. DDR4 on desktop is overclockable to crazy levels and that's going through lots of things (CPU package - socket pins - board - slots - DIMMs). > stacked modules such that the side wall of the Mac Pro is a grid of 4 or more such modules each with co-located memory like the M1 has Quad or more package NUMA topology?? The latency would absolutely suck.

derefr 6y ago

> it won't help in areas that Apple just organizationally doesn't care about/doesn't have the bandwidth for because that's not a technology problem I would posit that Apple is always going to keep macOS working on some workstation-class hardware, just because that kind of machine is what Apple's software engineers will be using internally, and they need to write macOS software using macOS. Which means one of two things: 1. If they never release a workstation-class Apple Silicon chip, that'll likely mean that they're still using Intel/AMD chips internally, and so macOS will likely continue to be compiled for Intel indefinitely. 2. If they do design workstation-class Apple Silicon chips for internal use, they may as well also sell the resulting workstation-class machines to people at that point. (Or, to rearrange that statement: they wouldn't make the chips if they didn't intend to commercialize them. Designing and fabbing chips costs too much money!) Which is to say, whether it be a Hackintosh or an Apple Mac Pro, there's always going to be something to cater to workstation-class users of Apple products — because Apple itself is full of workstation-class users of Apple products.

rsync 6y ago
"I would posit that Apple is always going to keep macOS working on some workstation-class hardware, just because that kind of machine is what Apple's software engineers will be using internally, and they need to write macOS software using macOS." I have always hoped that we could rely on that heuristic - that internal Apple usage of their own products would guarantee that certain workflows would be unbroken. In practice, this has never held up. Over the past 10-12 years it has been reinforced over and over and over: Apple engineers use single monitor systems with scattered, overlapping windows which they interact with using mousey-mousey-everything and never keyboard shortcuts. They perform backups of critical files - and manage financial identities - using their mp3 player. The fact that multiple monitors - and monitor handoff - is broken in fascinating new ways with every version of OSX tells you how Apple folks are (and are not) using their own products.
- 1123581321 6y ago
  It sounds like you have an issue with the lack of window snapping keyboard shortcuts that are in Windows 10, as well as iPhone backups happening in iTunes until they moved to finder, and iCloud being connected to iTunes although it's managed in SysPrefs. And you have seen some regressions along with the successive improvements to display management. Is that fair? If so, what is the connection to professional workflows on macOS?