4 ms·

Bingo. So many decisions made perfect sense once I realized Apple is basically a lifestyle brand that makes electronics, and Microsoft is a massive bureaucratic

Bingo. So many decisions made perfect sense once I realized Apple is basically a lifestyle brand that makes electronics, and Microsoft is a massive bureaucratic B2B conglomerate. Totally explained Microsoft’s ineptitude with consumer facing products (remember Windows Phone? Zune?), yet they have a stranglehold on the business world. This is the opposite: Apple is designed for locking individuals into its lifestyle (or ecosystem, if you prefer), and has mostly given up on enterprise facing products.

12_throw_away 2y ago
Heh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...
- robocat 2y ago
  I also wish Microsoft would treat developers as a seperate customer segment to market to. When the people using your tools hate the tools, that isn't a good sign.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    Between GitHub, VS Code, and TypeScript it is hard to make the case Microsoft doesn’t focus on developers as a segment.
    - antifa 2y ago
      I wouldn't use any of those if it required windows.
  - droopyEyelids 2y ago
    It’s not a good sign if they have the choice to use different tools. But if microsoft can make sure they don’t have a choice it’s a neutral sign!
  - josephg 2y ago
    What are you referring to? Microsoft’s developer tools are top notch. I’d pick visual studio over Xcode any day of the week - Xcode is so crazy buggy that I don’t know how anyone at Apple gets work done on it. And VSCode is probably the most popular ide on the planet.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    I'm sure they could do more, but ... They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
    Developers developers developers developers
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Stuff like this? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
- josephg 2y ago
  They do - that’s the point of the Mac Pro. The problem is software. Lots of expensive pcie ports won’t help much when you can’t put a GPU in any of them to use cuda and such. There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software. In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
  - astrange 2y ago
    There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doing. (Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.) If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby. As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      If you were able to keep your housekeeping out of my way I wouldn’t have been looking at metrics in the first place. The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.
      - astrange 2y ago
        "System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are. System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
scarface_74 2y ago
The remote computers are still Macs.
mulmen 2y ago
Microsoft also created the Xbox and every developer I know runs a Macbook.
- dboreham 2y ago
  No MacBook here.
- darthwalsh 2y ago
  I use a MacBook not because it's the best software for development, but because it's the hardest to virtualize. Our project supports the three major desktop operating systems. I have Windows and Linux VMs that I can switch to when I need to test something on those OS. No serious corporation is going to risks Hackintosh.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
walrus01 2y ago
TBH it's still possible to use a macbook air as basically a fancy unix-like workstation that has great battery life, and not buy into any of the apple ecosystem. No icloud account, no icloud backup, no iphone, no use of itunes or appletv, no apple synchronization of anything. The day that stops being viable is the day I stop buying them. The extent of my 'cloud' involvement with apple is the operating system software update mechanism and having an account to download Xcode, so that I can install compiler + macports on a new machine.

12_throw_away 2y ago

Heh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...

robocat 2y ago
I also wish Microsoft would treat developers as a seperate customer segment to market to. When the people using your tools hate the tools, that isn't a good sign.
- mulmen 2y ago
  Between GitHub, VS Code, and TypeScript it is hard to make the case Microsoft doesn’t focus on developers as a segment.
  - antifa 2y ago
    I wouldn't use any of those if it required windows.
- droopyEyelids 2y ago
  It’s not a good sign if they have the choice to use different tools. But if microsoft can make sure they don’t have a choice it’s a neutral sign!
- josephg 2y ago
  What are you referring to? Microsoft’s developer tools are top notch. I’d pick visual studio over Xcode any day of the week - Xcode is so crazy buggy that I don’t know how anyone at Apple gets work done on it. And VSCode is probably the most popular ide on the planet.
- kbolino 2y ago
  I'm sure they could do more, but ... They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
  Developers developers developers developers
- int_19h 2y ago
  Stuff like this? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
josephg 2y ago
They do - that’s the point of the Mac Pro. The problem is software. Lots of expensive pcie ports won’t help much when you can’t put a GPU in any of them to use cuda and such. There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software. In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
- astrange 2y ago
  There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doing. (Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.) If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby. As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    If you were able to keep your housekeeping out of my way I wouldn’t have been looking at metrics in the first place. The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.
    - astrange 2y ago
      "System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are. System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.

scarface_74 2y ago

The remote computers are still Macs.

mulmen 2y ago

Microsoft also created the Xbox and every developer I know runs a Macbook.

dboreham 2y ago
No MacBook here.
darthwalsh 2y ago
I use a MacBook not because it's the best software for development, but because it's the hardest to virtualize. Our project supports the three major desktop operating systems. I have Windows and Linux VMs that I can switch to when I need to test something on those OS. No serious corporation is going to risks Hackintosh.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

walrus01 2y ago

TBH it's still possible to use a macbook air as basically a fancy unix-like workstation that has great battery life, and not buy into any of the apple ecosystem. No icloud account, no icloud backup, no iphone, no use of itunes or appletv, no apple synchronization of anything. The day that stops being viable is the day I stop buying them. The extent of my 'cloud' involvement with apple is the operating system software update mechanism and having an account to download Xcode, so that I can install compiler + macports on a new machine.