16 ms·

Return of the Mac (2005)

100 points by jnieminen 5y ago

ianai 5y ago
Chock full of golden material and contrast/comparable points to today: "If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing. "
- AlexanderDhoore 5y ago
  Your point being that this is completely untrue? Normal people have absolutely not learned how to program/automate using computers. All companies I've seen from the inside either use excel for everything or have dedicated personnel for automation. Excel is a good step but it still requires a lot of manual work.
  - samcal 5y ago
    I think it's true, just meant to be a little less literal. Things like communicating over the internet, taking notes and yes, automation are all useful. However, when they start, the UX is academic and inaccessible to a "normal person". The arg is that it takes ~10 years to construct the correct abstractions so that the normal people can do those useful things.
- danybittel 5y ago
  It would have been better to walk around a Visual Effects facility. Lots of 3D. Face swapping / face filters. Photo / Video retouching. Background Tracking, face tracking, motion capture. 3D scanning (with photos). It is quite interesting that Weta / ILM were at the forefront of what happens in general computing.
nvella 5y ago
Before the inevitable comments regarding Apple's moves with macOS and how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple, I think I'll chime in with my two cents. I switched from my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of 2019, and switched back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few months ago. To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain. I often dock between standard-DPI displays and portable mode (with the high-DPI/'retina' display.) I first noticed that Windows doesn't correctly handle DPI switching with window borders, Explorer, and notifications back in 2019 (the old 2x scaling level remains when switching from portable to docked), and filed a feedback with the built-in app on Windows. I worked around this by killing dwm.exe and explorer.exe every time I docked my Surface. This issue was still present earlier this year, and deciding I had enough of dealing with all these little Windows 'quirks', wherever they arose, I switched back to my old Mac. It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once. The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought I'd never get used to them, have actually grown on me. Since switching back, I've discovered a lot of quality native apps that simply have no analog on Windows–OmniFocus stands out here. And as always, Homebrew still exists and works just as well as it always has for most of my *nix related tasks. Hearing about the M1 performance improvements, I can see myself staying on Mac for quite some time yet–I'll upgrade to an M1 MacBook Air once this 2015 MBP (six years old!) kicks the bucket. Edit: For some context, I'm mainly a .NET developer. .NET Core/5 is a game-changer for cross-platform and development is first class on really any system nowadays. I've settled on JetBrains Rider for my IDE and find myself generally happier than I was with VS on Windows.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Switching to windows and expecting an improvement from MacOS is silly. I switched to Linux from MacOs in 2015 and never looked back. I cam dual boot into Windows, but do so less than once a year these days.
- zepto 5y ago
  I’ve made a serious effort to switch away - using a retina Mac pro with Ubuntu, and a bunch of raspberry PIs. I love Linux, and I love the PIs, but it can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop. When a pro level M1 or M2 iMac is released, I will be moving back.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    > i can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop Then don't. Linux has hundreds of alternative desktops that you can install and try out in minutes. KDE, i3, Awesome, bspwm, Openbox and many many more are all at your fingertips.
    - zepto 5y ago
      I have experimented with this stuff for decades. It’s all frankly half baked and clunky, and the time investment in configuration is insane. Yes, you can find individual features that are better than MacOS spread across them, but you can’t get good design, aesthetics and features in any single one of them. You can certainly get by with it, but why would I want to just ‘get by’?
      - ficklepoet 5y ago
        It's a two way street. Why would I want to "get by" without a package manager, or "get by" without 32-bit libraries, or "get by" without a functional graphics API? I'm the user: the choice should be mine. If Apple doesn't present that choice, I don't consider Apple an option. Simple as that. As a developer, these points are non-negotiable. Apple has built computers for 30 years now, they should be well aware of that.
larusso 5y ago
Yes I remember the shift around that time. I had my first contact with a Mac at school in ca 2001. OSX was just released and the school received a new order of iMac G3’s as lab computers. What can I say. I hated the machines. Everything was so weird and ugly. It didn’t help that the teachers had to run OS9 for compatibility reasons with the school software. I had a brand new WinXP desktop machine at home which was miles and leaps ahead of the iMacs ;) well for me anyways. The only thing I really liked was iTunes. That is a story on it own ;). It took a few more years for me to come around. It was with the release of snow leopard that I saw that macOS was way better than windows. I switched in 2011 professionally to mac and use it still as my daily driver. But my love for the system that sparked with snow leopard dwindled. I didn’t want to update to Catalina (was forced in the end due to a new machine I got and well Xcode) and still refuse the UI of BigSur. I switched to Arch Linux on my personal machine but have to stay on macOS professionally as the only other option my company IT can support is Windows. Well macOS is no longer the highland for developers, WSL and Apple itself saw to that. But Windows is still a no go area as a daily driver for me.
- thrower123 5y ago
  Apple pumping iBooks into schools was a big coup for them in the early 2000s. A lot of people my age got into Macs and never got out of them, just because of that early exposure. https://bangordailynews.com/2002/06/11/news/during-visit-to-portland-laptop-program-gets-seal-of-approval-from-apple-ceo/ https://bangordailynews.com/2002/06/11/news/during-visit-to-...
  - larusso 5y ago
    I'm from germany. Here Apple was never a huge player. I learned very late of its existence. My school was a so called OSZ (Oberstufen Zentrum) which is something like school a where you can gain work related diplomas. I'm really bad at describing this. They had a design and print department and they run all on apple.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      I think the English term is vocational.
zabzonk 5y ago
Is it just me, or did all these "hackers" that apparently bought Macs back then not really produce all that much hacker software (or non-hacker software, come to that)? It seems to me that Windows and Linux both had much greater funds of developer software than did the Mac ecosystem.
- zepto 5y ago
  The hackers that bought the Macs built startups.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  I believe that objective-c and the Apple documentation didn't encourage people to create on Mac for a long time. Now it's a bit better with Swift or web applications using Electron.
  - WanderPanda 5y ago
    What the M1 giveth, Electron taketh away
    - tomxor 5y ago
      vi inspired the concept of the GUI. Then Electron sent many of us back to vi in search of lost CPU cycles. -- A JavaScript Dev
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Just the plain idea that vi had anything to do with GUI is hilarious.
        tomxor 5y ago
        It is. It's modality was an anti-inspiration, as in... how the hell can we not have modes (a GUI)... sort of... then everyone started burring crap under menus though feature accretion... hence we go full circle, because people get fed up of bloat, leading to both UX fatigue and performance fatigue, which eventually gives you a kind of appreciation for simple modal interfaces.
peterburkimsher 5y ago
"In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. We weren't sure at the time whether this was a proper use of the Internet" I also have a girlfriend in Taiwan, and met her while working there for 4 years, at a job partly made possible by PTT BBS (a very old Telnet web forum). I'm so grateful for VoIP, fast Internet connections, and being able to chat to her every night (at 5:20 of course, which sounds like 我愛你 in Mandarin). "If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It's not enough to make it 'open.' It has to be open and good." Are there any such platforms nowadays, that aren't restricted by a walled garden? (says he, typing this on a 2014 MacBook Pro running 10.13, while charging his iPhone 4S running jailbroken iOS 6.1.3).
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > (at 5:20 of course, which sounds like 我愛你 in Mandarin) Huh? The 零-你 pun relies on not making a sound distinction which does exist in Mandarin. They sound similar in other Chinese languages, not Mandarin.
gogopuppygogo 5y ago
MacOS was a breath of fresh air to those of us who wanted Office, Adobe, and a more polished experience than Microsoft or Linux offered at the time. My friend bought one of the last G3 iBooks. It ran Mac OS X 10.2 that was arguably the first “stable” release of Mac OS X. I had such a great experience I bought a 15” October 2005 PowerBook as my first Apple laptop. It was under performant compared to Intel offerings of the day but I badly wanted Mac OS X. I was thrilled when I could buy a 2007 MacBook Pro to replace it with a Core2Duo processor. Now, the M1 MacBook Air is so unbelievably fast and power efficient.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > MacOS was a breath of fresh air to those of us who wanted Office, Adobe, I used both MS Word, Excel and Adobe Framemaker on Windows in the 1990s (much less 2005) with very few problems - I was really impressed at how well such a complex piece of software as Frame ran on Windows, and I don't think it now supported on the Mac.
willswire 5y ago
The timing of this article is interesting - I feel that the same thing is happening again with the advent of Apple Silicon.
- LucidLynx 5y ago
  I do not agree on this based on what I saw generally on the web. The article was about *hackers* moving from a platform to OS X. With M1, I saw a lot of content producers, web devs, ... to go to the M1, but not so much hackers... especially as the platform is *very* restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc. A lot of my friends moved from macOS to a GNU/Linux distribution recently, especially as the hardware in general is more and more "as good" as a macbook. But, again, this is my own opinion based on what I read and saw - I do not have stats to show how many hackers just passed from macOS to anything else (or stayed on an Intel powered macbook).
  - zepto 5y ago
    > especially as the platform is very restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc. This is utterly false.
    - ficklepoet 5y ago
      Nope, it's completely true. I left MacOS when they ditched support for 32-bit software, and was delighted to find that 95% of my software "just worked" on Linux. If you're looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting yourself in the foot by buying a Mac, especially today. "the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are updated constantly. They want a package manager and an extensible system. They don't want their computer to second-guess them, and they don't want a large corporation to decide what's right for them.
      - zepto 5y ago
        > when they ditched support for 32-bit software This has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs. > If you're looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting yourself in the foot by buying a Mac, especially today. This has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs. > "the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are updated constantly. They want a package manager and an extensible system. They don't want their computer to second-guess them, and they don't want a large corporation to decide what's right for them. This is an ideological statement that has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs. All of what you said may be true, but it doesn’t make the claim about restrictive apis any less false.
jimnotgym 5y ago
Anecdata: One of our developers had used mac since the pre-Intel days. He used to develop mostly mac native apps. In recent years it has been mostly web dev in linux. He ran Linux through vagrant on mac. Now he does the same on pc. He says that the hardest thing about moving is that he lost his browser shortcuts. Ps he has a company provided PC, Intel and M1 macs on his home desk so really he can use whatever he wants.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Firefox sync?
vishnugupta 5y ago
> So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these. This aged well :-)
- zabzonk 5y ago
  Actually, I am writing this on an Asus laptop with so-called "Bang & Olufsen Technology". The laptop is fine, though showing its age, but the sound quality through the built-in speakers is awful, and always has been - I now use a cheap Anker bluetooth speaker which is far better. And to be honest, I was never very impressed with the sound quality of B&O way back in the 1970s, when they were seen to be the height of sophistication.
  - leoc 5y ago
    I get the impression that Apple since Jobs' return has actively gone out of its way to try not to have pundits and the general public make the pretty obvious comparisons to B & O or Bose, because they rightly see it as not a flattering comparison for Apple.
    - skavi 5y ago
      Bose’ QC series of headphones is great. Incredibly comfortable and well tuned with noise canceling that’s still very competitive with more recent headphones. The newer Bose 700 makes too many compromises to look nice IMO.
  - ch_sm 5y ago
    You should definitely try the newer Bang and Olufsens, if you‘re into high-end audio - like the Beolab 20 or Beolab 28. They‘re incredible, and actually compare favorably to B&W or KEF in the same price range. The laptop licensing shenanigans are awful though.
quijoteuniv 5y ago
For me is more: Exodus from the Mac Or even better: Return of the Linux converted Mac. Great machines that can be use many years if transformed. The software filoshopy does not relate to the (end of)world we are living. People that can afford them is an elite and this is not the way to go. Is Tim Cook planning to go to space just for fun too? We have a responsibility to the planet!
pvtmert 5y ago
What motivates hackers like me is not the freedom. Quite opposite actually. Hacking the device require some kind of lock-in. So, when you achieve something, it will worth the effort.
kensai 5y ago
"Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary." Funny enough, the situation was not temporary, the change in trend was real and sustained.
- tootie 5y ago
  The tipping point wasn't anything to do with OSX IMO. It was iOS. Still my absolutely biggest grudge against Apple is how shitty and locked in the iOS ecosystem is. I haven't wanted a Mac as a developer machine for the last 5 years but since I have to support iOS, I don't have a choice. I had a year "break" where I actually needed at Windows machine and it was a dream. Touchscreen was so incredibly useful.
robomartin 5y ago
While I have no issues with Apple/MacOS (we own several) or Windows (I think the nit-picking is silly) I still remember what Apple did in the PowerPC transition. That left a level of distrust for the company and how it makes decisions. Context is important here. I wasn't running my own business at the time. I was working for a company that had somewhere around 250 Macs and maybe 10 or 20 PC's. What happened? Apple made the transition and, as a result, all software and hardware this company had invested in became obsolete, virtually overnight. We are talking about a non-trivial amount of money and resources. I saw and experienced the pain that caused first hand. From that point forward I always had this in the back of my mind. As I moved to run my own business with limited funds, the last thing I wanted to face was making any investment that could be subject to that kind of a pole-shift effect. Macs, for the most part, were out. It's interesting to see the level of nit-picking people on HN tend to apply to a PC running Windows. I think things change when you are responsible for your own bottom line and have to get practical. There's nothing wrong with the hardware or software. At least nothing wrong enough to be a deal-breaker. The proof? Probably tens to hundreds of millions of companies running all kids of businesses just fine using PC's. Compatibility, long term viability, cost and cost of ownership (repairs!) are far more important than being able to right-click an icon to get a convenient function to work. Microsoft/Windows has always been about long term compatibility. That means things evolve slowly. That's OK. Aside from that, at least in our case, the engineering software we run won't work on anything else. In some industries you have no other options. The Linux question and WSL. I don't understand the complaints. I run multiple Linux virtual machines on any of our powerful Windows desktop or laptops. No issues whatsoever. Some of us dual-boot. Other than Linux hardware and other issues, no problems at all. In fact, we carefully select our hardware during builds (or when buying laptops) in order to ensure the greatest level of compatibility with both Windows and Linux software we use. If there is a solid justification for using an Apple machine, I am all for it. That's why we have several of them. No issues at all. I just don't think the nit-picking is valid or useful any more. If you are in business you just want to get shit done. There's nothing seriously wrong with quality PC hardware and the software ecosystem that runs on it, Linux or Windows.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  > Apple made the transition and, as a result, all software and hardware this company had invested in became obsolete, virtually overnight. We are talking about a non-trivial amount of money and resources. Are you talking about the 68k to PPC transition? Because Apple made an enormous amount of effort to ensure both forward and back compatibility so I don't think your statement is true at all. "Fat binaries" allowed new software to run on 68k systems for years after the transition - you could even run 68k Mac apps on OS X for a few years! And future versions of MacOS remained compatible with 68k Macs up until (if my memory serves) Mac OS 8.1. Even if you didn't upgrade to OS 9, most software ran on 8 anyway just fine. They had to draw the line somewhere, but you had a long time to deal with the transition thanks to Apples efforts.
user3939382 5y ago
I wonder if the title is an homage to the Mark Morrison song https://youtu.be/uB1D9wWxd2w https://youtu.be/uB1D9wWxd2w
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  I was certainly hoping so but seems very doubtful
atlgator 5y ago
Great. Now I have that song stuck in my head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w
analog31 5y ago
Oddly enough it was around 2005 that I was using one platform at my workplace (Windows) and another at home (Linux). And I've used Apple II, MS-DOS, 68k Mac, etc. I decided two things: 1. Any time spent learning the "innards" of an OS, would be spent on Linux. Most of that learning has resulted from tinkering with the Raspberry Pi. 2. All of the software that I use on a daily basis would be platform independent, especially my programming tools. As a result, right now I have the luxury of being ambivalent about platforms. I actually spend remarkably little time interacting with the platform, mainly setting up networking when I get a new machine. I can choose a new computer based on ergonomics and cost. Windows happens to have the best touch screen support right now, and refurb'd computers are not intolerably expensive.
GameOfKnowing 5y ago
Correct me if I’m misreading the article, but it’s interesting that the differentiators Graham is citing are relatively low-level, (ie keenel stuff, cpu architecture, and OS hacking), whereas almost everyone in these comments is making statements about GUI elements and even display switching. Kinda goes to show just how abstracted away the concerns of even 16 years ago have become to today’s ~devs~
gmmeyer 5y ago
Really love this footnote: "[1] These horrible stickers are much like the intrusive ads popular on pre-Google search engines. They say to the customer: you are unimportant. We care about Intel and Microsoft, not you."

100 points by jnieminen 5y ago

Chock full of golden material and contrast/comparable points to today: "If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing. "

AlexanderDhoore 5y ago
Your point being that this is completely untrue? Normal people have absolutely not learned how to program/automate using computers. All companies I've seen from the inside either use excel for everything or have dedicated personnel for automation. Excel is a good step but it still requires a lot of manual work.
- samcal 5y ago
  I think it's true, just meant to be a little less literal. Things like communicating over the internet, taking notes and yes, automation are all useful. However, when they start, the UX is academic and inaccessible to a "normal person". The arg is that it takes ~10 years to construct the correct abstractions so that the normal people can do those useful things.
danybittel 5y ago
It would have been better to walk around a Visual Effects facility. Lots of 3D. Face swapping / face filters. Photo / Video retouching. Background Tracking, face tracking, motion capture. 3D scanning (with photos). It is quite interesting that Weta / ILM were at the forefront of what happens in general computing.

nvella 5y ago

Before the inevitable comments regarding Apple's moves with macOS and how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple, I think I'll chime in with my two cents. I switched from my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of 2019, and switched back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few months ago. To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain. I often dock between standard-DPI displays and portable mode (with the high-DPI/'retina' display.) I first noticed that Windows doesn't correctly handle DPI switching with window borders, Explorer, and notifications back in 2019 (the old 2x scaling level remains when switching from portable to docked), and filed a feedback with the built-in app on Windows. I worked around this by killing dwm.exe and explorer.exe every time I docked my Surface. This issue was still present earlier this year, and deciding I had enough of dealing with all these little Windows 'quirks', wherever they arose, I switched back to my old Mac. It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once. The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought I'd never get used to them, have actually grown on me. Since switching back, I've discovered a lot of quality native apps that simply have no analog on Windows–OmniFocus stands out here. And as always, Homebrew still exists and works just as well as it always has for most of my *nix related tasks. Hearing about the M1 performance improvements, I can see myself staying on Mac for quite some time yet–I'll upgrade to an M1 MacBook Air once this 2015 MBP (six years old!) kicks the bucket. Edit: For some context, I'm mainly a .NET developer. .NET Core/5 is a game-changer for cross-platform and development is first class on really any system nowadays. I've settled on JetBrains Rider for my IDE and find myself generally happier than I was with VS on Windows.

shkkmo 5y ago
Switching to windows and expecting an improvement from MacOS is silly. I switched to Linux from MacOs in 2015 and never looked back. I cam dual boot into Windows, but do so less than once a year these days.
zepto 5y ago
I’ve made a serious effort to switch away - using a retina Mac pro with Ubuntu, and a bunch of raspberry PIs. I love Linux, and I love the PIs, but it can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop. When a pro level M1 or M2 iMac is released, I will be moving back.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > i can’t see any reason to stick with the Ubuntu desktop Then don't. Linux has hundreds of alternative desktops that you can install and try out in minutes. KDE, i3, Awesome, bspwm, Openbox and many many more are all at your fingertips.
  - zepto 5y ago
    I have experimented with this stuff for decades. It’s all frankly half baked and clunky, and the time investment in configuration is insane. Yes, you can find individual features that are better than MacOS spread across them, but you can’t get good design, aesthetics and features in any single one of them. You can certainly get by with it, but why would I want to just ‘get by’?
    - ficklepoet 5y ago
      It's a two way street. Why would I want to "get by" without a package manager, or "get by" without 32-bit libraries, or "get by" without a functional graphics API? I'm the user: the choice should be mine. If Apple doesn't present that choice, I don't consider Apple an option. Simple as that. As a developer, these points are non-negotiable. Apple has built computers for 30 years now, they should be well aware of that.

larusso 5y ago

Yes I remember the shift around that time. I had my first contact with a Mac at school in ca 2001. OSX was just released and the school received a new order of iMac G3’s as lab computers. What can I say. I hated the machines. Everything was so weird and ugly. It didn’t help that the teachers had to run OS9 for compatibility reasons with the school software. I had a brand new WinXP desktop machine at home which was miles and leaps ahead of the iMacs ;) well for me anyways. The only thing I really liked was iTunes. That is a story on it own ;). It took a few more years for me to come around. It was with the release of snow leopard that I saw that macOS was way better than windows. I switched in 2011 professionally to mac and use it still as my daily driver. But my love for the system that sparked with snow leopard dwindled. I didn’t want to update to Catalina (was forced in the end due to a new machine I got and well Xcode) and still refuse the UI of BigSur. I switched to Arch Linux on my personal machine but have to stay on macOS professionally as the only other option my company IT can support is Windows. Well macOS is no longer the highland for developers, WSL and Apple itself saw to that. But Windows is still a no go area as a daily driver for me.

thrower123 5y ago
Apple pumping iBooks into schools was a big coup for them in the early 2000s. A lot of people my age got into Macs and never got out of them, just because of that early exposure. https://bangordailynews.com/2002/06/11/news/during-visit-to-portland-laptop-program-gets-seal-of-approval-from-apple-ceo/ https://bangordailynews.com/2002/06/11/news/during-visit-to-...
- larusso 5y ago
  I'm from germany. Here Apple was never a huge player. I learned very late of its existence. My school was a so called OSZ (Oberstufen Zentrum) which is something like school a where you can gain work related diplomas. I'm really bad at describing this. They had a design and print department and they run all on apple.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    I think the English term is vocational.

zabzonk 5y ago

Is it just me, or did all these "hackers" that apparently bought Macs back then not really produce all that much hacker software (or non-hacker software, come to that)? It seems to me that Windows and Linux both had much greater funds of developer software than did the Mac ecosystem.

zepto 5y ago
The hackers that bought the Macs built startups.
speedgoose 5y ago
I believe that objective-c and the Apple documentation didn't encourage people to create on Mac for a long time. Now it's a bit better with Swift or web applications using Electron.
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  What the M1 giveth, Electron taketh away
  - tomxor 5y ago
    vi inspired the concept of the GUI. Then Electron sent many of us back to vi in search of lost CPU cycles. -- A JavaScript Dev
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Just the plain idea that vi had anything to do with GUI is hilarious.
      - tomxor 5y ago
        It is. It's modality was an anti-inspiration, as in... how the hell can we not have modes (a GUI)... sort of... then everyone started burring crap under menus though feature accretion... hence we go full circle, because people get fed up of bloat, leading to both UX fatigue and performance fatigue, which eventually gives you a kind of appreciation for simple modal interfaces.

peterburkimsher 5y ago

"In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. We weren't sure at the time whether this was a proper use of the Internet" I also have a girlfriend in Taiwan, and met her while working there for 4 years, at a job partly made possible by PTT BBS (a very old Telnet web forum). I'm so grateful for VoIP, fast Internet connections, and being able to chat to her every night (at 5:20 of course, which sounds like 我愛你 in Mandarin). "If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It's not enough to make it 'open.' It has to be open and good." Are there any such platforms nowadays, that aren't restricted by a walled garden? (says he, typing this on a 2014 MacBook Pro running 10.13, while charging his iPhone 4S running jailbroken iOS 6.1.3).

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> (at 5:20 of course, which sounds like 我愛你 in Mandarin) Huh? The 零-你 pun relies on not making a sound distinction which does exist in Mandarin. They sound similar in other Chinese languages, not Mandarin.

gogopuppygogo 5y ago

MacOS was a breath of fresh air to those of us who wanted Office, Adobe, and a more polished experience than Microsoft or Linux offered at the time. My friend bought one of the last G3 iBooks. It ran Mac OS X 10.2 that was arguably the first “stable” release of Mac OS X. I had such a great experience I bought a 15” October 2005 PowerBook as my first Apple laptop. It was under performant compared to Intel offerings of the day but I badly wanted Mac OS X. I was thrilled when I could buy a 2007 MacBook Pro to replace it with a Core2Duo processor. Now, the M1 MacBook Air is so unbelievably fast and power efficient.

zabzonk 5y ago
> MacOS was a breath of fresh air to those of us who wanted Office, Adobe, I used both MS Word, Excel and Adobe Framemaker on Windows in the 1990s (much less 2005) with very few problems - I was really impressed at how well such a complex piece of software as Frame ran on Windows, and I don't think it now supported on the Mac.

willswire 5y ago

The timing of this article is interesting - I feel that the same thing is happening again with the advent of Apple Silicon.

LucidLynx 5y ago
I do not agree on this based on what I saw generally on the web. The article was about *hackers* moving from a platform to OS X. With M1, I saw a lot of content producers, web devs, ... to go to the M1, but not so much hackers... especially as the platform is *very* restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc. A lot of my friends moved from macOS to a GNU/Linux distribution recently, especially as the hardware in general is more and more "as good" as a macbook. But, again, this is my own opinion based on what I read and saw - I do not have stats to show how many hackers just passed from macOS to anything else (or stayed on an Intel powered macbook).
- zepto 5y ago
  > especially as the platform is very restrictive in terms of APIs / apps / etc. This is utterly false.
  - ficklepoet 5y ago
    Nope, it's completely true. I left MacOS when they ditched support for 32-bit software, and was delighted to find that 95% of my software "just worked" on Linux. If you're looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting yourself in the foot by buying a Mac, especially today. "the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are updated constantly. They want a package manager and an extensible system. They don't want their computer to second-guess them, and they don't want a large corporation to decide what's right for them.
    - zepto 5y ago
      > when they ditched support for 32-bit software This has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs. > If you're looking for a true Unix box, you're shooting yourself in the foot by buying a Mac, especially today. This has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs. > "the hacker" wants a suite of coreutils that are updated constantly. They want a package manager and an extensible system. They don't want their computer to second-guess them, and they don't want a large corporation to decide what's right for them. This is an ideological statement that has nothing to do with the false claim about restrictive APIs. All of what you said may be true, but it doesn’t make the claim about restrictive apis any less false.

jimnotgym 5y ago

Anecdata: One of our developers had used mac since the pre-Intel days. He used to develop mostly mac native apps. In recent years it has been mostly web dev in linux. He ran Linux through vagrant on mac. Now he does the same on pc. He says that the hardest thing about moving is that he lost his browser shortcuts. Ps he has a company provided PC, Intel and M1 macs on his home desk so really he can use whatever he wants.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
Firefox sync?

vishnugupta 5y ago

> So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these. This aged well :-)

zabzonk 5y ago
Actually, I am writing this on an Asus laptop with so-called "Bang & Olufsen Technology". The laptop is fine, though showing its age, but the sound quality through the built-in speakers is awful, and always has been - I now use a cheap Anker bluetooth speaker which is far better. And to be honest, I was never very impressed with the sound quality of B&O way back in the 1970s, when they were seen to be the height of sophistication.
- leoc 5y ago
  I get the impression that Apple since Jobs' return has actively gone out of its way to try not to have pundits and the general public make the pretty obvious comparisons to B & O or Bose, because they rightly see it as not a flattering comparison for Apple.
  - skavi 5y ago
    Bose’ QC series of headphones is great. Incredibly comfortable and well tuned with noise canceling that’s still very competitive with more recent headphones. The newer Bose 700 makes too many compromises to look nice IMO.
- ch_sm 5y ago
  You should definitely try the newer Bang and Olufsens, if you‘re into high-end audio - like the Beolab 20 or Beolab 28. They‘re incredible, and actually compare favorably to B&W or KEF in the same price range. The laptop licensing shenanigans are awful though.

quijoteuniv 5y ago

For me is more: Exodus from the Mac Or even better: Return of the Linux converted Mac. Great machines that can be use many years if transformed. The software filoshopy does not relate to the (end of)world we are living. People that can afford them is an elite and this is not the way to go. Is Tim Cook planning to go to space just for fun too? We have a responsibility to the planet!

pvtmert 5y ago

What motivates hackers like me is not the freedom. Quite opposite actually. Hacking the device require some kind of lock-in. So, when you achieve something, it will worth the effort.

kensai 5y ago

"Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary." Funny enough, the situation was not temporary, the change in trend was real and sustained.

tootie 5y ago
The tipping point wasn't anything to do with OSX IMO. It was iOS. Still my absolutely biggest grudge against Apple is how shitty and locked in the iOS ecosystem is. I haven't wanted a Mac as a developer machine for the last 5 years but since I have to support iOS, I don't have a choice. I had a year "break" where I actually needed at Windows machine and it was a dream. Touchscreen was so incredibly useful.

robomartin 5y ago

While I have no issues with Apple/MacOS (we own several) or Windows (I think the nit-picking is silly) I still remember what Apple did in the PowerPC transition. That left a level of distrust for the company and how it makes decisions. Context is important here. I wasn't running my own business at the time. I was working for a company that had somewhere around 250 Macs and maybe 10 or 20 PC's. What happened? Apple made the transition and, as a result, all software and hardware this company had invested in became obsolete, virtually overnight. We are talking about a non-trivial amount of money and resources. I saw and experienced the pain that caused first hand. From that point forward I always had this in the back of my mind. As I moved to run my own business with limited funds, the last thing I wanted to face was making any investment that could be subject to that kind of a pole-shift effect. Macs, for the most part, were out. It's interesting to see the level of nit-picking people on HN tend to apply to a PC running Windows. I think things change when you are responsible for your own bottom line and have to get practical. There's nothing wrong with the hardware or software. At least nothing wrong enough to be a deal-breaker. The proof? Probably tens to hundreds of millions of companies running all kids of businesses just fine using PC's. Compatibility, long term viability, cost and cost of ownership (repairs!) are far more important than being able to right-click an icon to get a convenient function to work. Microsoft/Windows has always been about long term compatibility. That means things evolve slowly. That's OK. Aside from that, at least in our case, the engineering software we run won't work on anything else. In some industries you have no other options. The Linux question and WSL. I don't understand the complaints. I run multiple Linux virtual machines on any of our powerful Windows desktop or laptops. No issues whatsoever. Some of us dual-boot. Other than Linux hardware and other issues, no problems at all. In fact, we carefully select our hardware during builds (or when buying laptops) in order to ensure the greatest level of compatibility with both Windows and Linux software we use. If there is a solid justification for using an Apple machine, I am all for it. That's why we have several of them. No issues at all. I just don't think the nit-picking is valid or useful any more. If you are in business you just want to get shit done. There's nothing seriously wrong with quality PC hardware and the software ecosystem that runs on it, Linux or Windows.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
> Apple made the transition and, as a result, all software and hardware this company had invested in became obsolete, virtually overnight. We are talking about a non-trivial amount of money and resources. Are you talking about the 68k to PPC transition? Because Apple made an enormous amount of effort to ensure both forward and back compatibility so I don't think your statement is true at all. "Fat binaries" allowed new software to run on 68k systems for years after the transition - you could even run 68k Mac apps on OS X for a few years! And future versions of MacOS remained compatible with 68k Macs up until (if my memory serves) Mac OS 8.1. Even if you didn't upgrade to OS 9, most software ran on 8 anyway just fine. They had to draw the line somewhere, but you had a long time to deal with the transition thanks to Apples efforts.

user3939382 5y ago

I wonder if the title is an homage to the Mark Morrison song https://youtu.be/uB1D9wWxd2w https://youtu.be/uB1D9wWxd2w

vincentmarle 5y ago
I was certainly hoping so but seems very doubtful

atlgator 5y ago

Great. Now I have that song stuck in my head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w

analog31 5y ago

Oddly enough it was around 2005 that I was using one platform at my workplace (Windows) and another at home (Linux). And I've used Apple II, MS-DOS, 68k Mac, etc. I decided two things: 1. Any time spent learning the "innards" of an OS, would be spent on Linux. Most of that learning has resulted from tinkering with the Raspberry Pi. 2. All of the software that I use on a daily basis would be platform independent, especially my programming tools. As a result, right now I have the luxury of being ambivalent about platforms. I actually spend remarkably little time interacting with the platform, mainly setting up networking when I get a new machine. I can choose a new computer based on ergonomics and cost. Windows happens to have the best touch screen support right now, and refurb'd computers are not intolerably expensive.

GameOfKnowing 5y ago

Correct me if I’m misreading the article, but it’s interesting that the differentiators Graham is citing are relatively low-level, (ie keenel stuff, cpu architecture, and OS hacking), whereas almost everyone in these comments is making statements about GUI elements and even display switching. Kinda goes to show just how abstracted away the concerns of even 16 years ago have become to today’s ~devs~

gmmeyer 5y ago

Really love this footnote: "[1] These horrible stickers are much like the intrusive ads popular on pre-Google search engines. They say to the customer: you are unimportant. We care about Intel and Microsoft, not you."