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Used totally makes sense. I picked up a Mac Mini with a 27" monitor for $500.

by intrasight 5y ago

barney54 5y ago
The M1 Mac Mini recently was only $600 on sale.
- treesknees 5y ago
  You can also find a refurbished M1 Mac Mini for under $600 on Apple's refurbished store.
smoldesu 5y ago
It's a shame that web developers have to spend $500 to buy a bespoke web-browsing machine just to make their sites work better with Apple hardware. If Apple wanted people to treat their browser seriously, they should have simulators and developer tooling to spare.
- asddubs 5y ago
  or just release safari cross-platform.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Safari (not WebKit specifically; the rest of the browser) relies on OS libraries. Those libraries would have to be reimplemented for other OSes. I don't mean that that would be an impediment to porting; Apple have done this before—Safari 5 was available for Windows. (And interestingly, vice-versa, IE5 was available for macOS!) What I mean is that the differences in implementation of these OS libraries would mean that this version of Safari wouldn't be bug-for-bug compatible with macOS Safari; and therefore, testing on this version of Safari wouldn't necessarily get you what you want, if your goal is finding and squashing 100% of the bugs that testing on macOS Safari would allow you to find and squash. To use a pretty close analogy, it would be like a development workflow for Windows executable that involved running them under Wine in Linux, and never actually under Windows. You've QAed for the API surface, sure; but you haven't actually QAed the software for how Microsoft's own library implementations work (and the bugs that those implementations introduce.)
    - acoard 5y ago
      You're not wrong, but in practice I'd imagine >99% of bugs are in the rendering / webkit layer, not in the OS integration layer. Sure, if you're making a plugin that plays with bookmarks or 'Read Later', you'd likely run afoul of the issues you mention. But most web devs are concerned just about browser compatibility of rendering their web-app. In this context, as long as web page rendering and JS engine is identical between OS' it's fine.
      - derefr 5y ago
        Rendering issues are OS issues too. For example, Safari's font rendering depends on the particulars of macOS/iOS's font-rendering framework. Safari on Windows would presumably use Windows' font-rendering framework, with drastically different results, due to the different frameworks supporting different subsets of e.g. ligature-pair width hinting or hyphenation, thereby causing text to wrap in different places, such that the layout at a given font size + viewport size on Windows wouldn't be predictive of the layout at the same font size + viewport size on macOS. (Which is not even to mention the fonts you'd have by default on Windows and not by default on macOS, that would interfere with the font family cascade, and yet couldn't be suppressed from the cascade because some macOS systems do have them.) Or, for that matter, there could be certain exposed -webkit CSS selectors that are really just features of some or another macOS rendering-layer framework, with no Windows equivalent — the same way that IE's ancient CSS "filters" were really just exposed DirectX features (e.g. filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.blur). For these cases, testing on "Safari on Windows" would essentially just get you what testing in Chrome on Windows already gets you (unless Apple created an entire software renderer that brings in all of macOS's Quartz and all its subsidiary libraries as a big ol' polyfill.) The point at which Safari is guaranteed to work like it does on macOS, is the point at which you're bringing in a polyfill consisting of 99% of macOS's frameworks. May as well bring in the last 1% as well, and call it a VM. (Ideally a thin-as-possible paravirtualized VM where the display driver is written to directly make DirectX calls, etc. — but VM client software is already pretty good at providing these sorts of drivers.)
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - password4321 5y ago
    Last I checked, there is a Windows WebKit/Safari build. I don't think it worked very well though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20700914#20701334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20700914#20701334 Edit: Looks like the new URL is https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67?numbuilds=400 https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67?numbuilds=400 but the build has been broken for almost 2 weeks. The last successful build is the 300MB https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/archives.webkit.org/win-x86_64-release/283797.zip https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/archives.webkit.org/win-x... (as explained in the link above, the Apple Application Support libraries are required).
- syshum 5y ago
  Apple does not believe there are any electronics out side of Apple, nor that there are any web browsers outside of Safari. Apple believe everyone on the plant should only ever use Apple hardware, and Apple Software, why would anyone not want to run over priced low quality products?
  - vxNsr 5y ago
    Meanwhile the CEO uses a windows machine with outlook.
    - maddyboo 5y ago
      Source?
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      What? Tim Cook use Windows?
      - extrememacaroni 5y ago
        BIG if true :O
    - joshgachnang 5y ago
      I'd love a source on that.
      - vxNsr 5y ago
        The guy who wrote the book about the making of the iphone sent a bunch of emails to tim cook with tracking enabled and each time it was opened by a windows device. other comments in this thread have more links the story.
        hulitu 5y ago
        Seems a very good idea from a security POV. You get an email and your favourite Email program will be more than happy to open the link and execute the code. And because this is the CEO of Apple, you presume that he is using MacOSX and send him an Apple executable. Which will not run on a windows machine. Now, ransomware on the other way ...

Used totally makes sense. I picked up a Mac Mini with a 27" monitor for $500.

barney54 5y ago

The M1 Mac Mini recently was only $600 on sale.

treesknees 5y ago
You can also find a refurbished M1 Mac Mini for under $600 on Apple's refurbished store.

smoldesu 5y ago

It's a shame that web developers have to spend $500 to buy a bespoke web-browsing machine just to make their sites work better with Apple hardware. If Apple wanted people to treat their browser seriously, they should have simulators and developer tooling to spare.

asddubs 5y ago
or just release safari cross-platform.
- derefr 5y ago
  Safari (not WebKit specifically; the rest of the browser) relies on OS libraries. Those libraries would have to be reimplemented for other OSes. I don't mean that that would be an impediment to porting; Apple have done this before—Safari 5 was available for Windows. (And interestingly, vice-versa, IE5 was available for macOS!) What I mean is that the differences in implementation of these OS libraries would mean that this version of Safari wouldn't be bug-for-bug compatible with macOS Safari; and therefore, testing on this version of Safari wouldn't necessarily get you what you want, if your goal is finding and squashing 100% of the bugs that testing on macOS Safari would allow you to find and squash. To use a pretty close analogy, it would be like a development workflow for Windows executable that involved running them under Wine in Linux, and never actually under Windows. You've QAed for the API surface, sure; but you haven't actually QAed the software for how Microsoft's own library implementations work (and the bugs that those implementations introduce.)
  - acoard 5y ago
    You're not wrong, but in practice I'd imagine >99% of bugs are in the rendering / webkit layer, not in the OS integration layer. Sure, if you're making a plugin that plays with bookmarks or 'Read Later', you'd likely run afoul of the issues you mention. But most web devs are concerned just about browser compatibility of rendering their web-app. In this context, as long as web page rendering and JS engine is identical between OS' it's fine.
    - derefr 5y ago
      Rendering issues are OS issues too. For example, Safari's font rendering depends on the particulars of macOS/iOS's font-rendering framework. Safari on Windows would presumably use Windows' font-rendering framework, with drastically different results, due to the different frameworks supporting different subsets of e.g. ligature-pair width hinting or hyphenation, thereby causing text to wrap in different places, such that the layout at a given font size + viewport size on Windows wouldn't be predictive of the layout at the same font size + viewport size on macOS. (Which is not even to mention the fonts you'd have by default on Windows and not by default on macOS, that would interfere with the font family cascade, and yet couldn't be suppressed from the cascade because some macOS systems do have them.) Or, for that matter, there could be certain exposed -webkit CSS selectors that are really just features of some or another macOS rendering-layer framework, with no Windows equivalent — the same way that IE's ancient CSS "filters" were really just exposed DirectX features (e.g. filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.blur). For these cases, testing on "Safari on Windows" would essentially just get you what testing in Chrome on Windows already gets you (unless Apple created an entire software renderer that brings in all of macOS's Quartz and all its subsidiary libraries as a big ol' polyfill.) The point at which Safari is guaranteed to work like it does on macOS, is the point at which you're bringing in a polyfill consisting of 99% of macOS's frameworks. May as well bring in the last 1% as well, and call it a VM. (Ideally a thin-as-possible paravirtualized VM where the display driver is written to directly make DirectX calls, etc. — but VM client software is already pretty good at providing these sorts of drivers.)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- password4321 5y ago
  Last I checked, there is a Windows WebKit/Safari build. I don't think it worked very well though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20700914#20701334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20700914#20701334 Edit: Looks like the new URL is https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67?numbuilds=400 https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67?numbuilds=400 but the build has been broken for almost 2 weeks. The last successful build is the 300MB https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/archives.webkit.org/win-x86_64-release/283797.zip https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/archives.webkit.org/win-x... (as explained in the link above, the Apple Application Support libraries are required).
syshum 5y ago
Apple does not believe there are any electronics out side of Apple, nor that there are any web browsers outside of Safari. Apple believe everyone on the plant should only ever use Apple hardware, and Apple Software, why would anyone not want to run over priced low quality products?
- vxNsr 5y ago
  Meanwhile the CEO uses a windows machine with outlook.
  - maddyboo 5y ago
    Source?
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    What? Tim Cook use Windows?
    - extrememacaroni 5y ago
      BIG if true :O
  - joshgachnang 5y ago
    I'd love a source on that.
    - vxNsr 5y ago
      The guy who wrote the book about the making of the iphone sent a bunch of emails to tim cook with tracking enabled and each time it was opened by a windows device. other comments in this thread have more links the story.
      - hulitu 5y ago
        Seems a very good idea from a security POV. You get an email and your favourite Email program will be more than happy to open the link and execute the code. And because this is the CEO of Apple, you presume that he is using MacOSX and send him an Apple executable. Which will not run on a windows machine. Now, ransomware on the other way ...