6 ms·

This is why I don't understand why so many hackers these days like to use apple products. Apple is the antithesis of the hacker ideal. They're just as bad as M

by readme 14y ago

This is why I don't understand why so many hackers these days like to use apple products. Apple is the antithesis of the hacker ideal. They're just as bad as Microsoft. I mean, seriously. Have you ever been to a radioshack? Multi-charging devices are a common product. Yet apple will have none of it. It's clearly an anti-competitive measure aimed at making sure they're your only supplier. Furthermore, apple's chargers suck. They deliberately have a weaker rubber sleeve around the end of laptop charger cables because it looks aesthetically nice. It's been proven that it's weaker than the conventional rubber joints on most laptop chargers, but they don't change it, because they value aesthetics over functionality. Avoid if possible. /me realizes he's using an ipod shuffle. oh well.

ntaylor 14y ago
"just as bad as Microsoft" ?
- RyanMcGreal 14y ago
  Apple is far more closed and tyrannical with its products and its users than Microsoft ever was.
joenathan 14y ago
>just as bad as Microsoft You have to be joking, Microsoft is way more hacker friendly than Apple. Try to build your own OSX PC and you can't because Apple won't sell you a license, Apple started the whole walled garden game with the iOS.
- shmerl 14y ago
  Not if you compare their stance on open standards in general. They are both bad and acting nasty with using lock-in in different forms.
- eridius 14y ago
  Well, yes. Microsoft is a software company. They're happy to sell you the software to run on any device. Apple is a hardware company. If you want to run their software on a non-Apple piece of hardware, you're not their customer. In fact, in the early 90's when Apple did allow for Mac clones to be built, that almost killed the company.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    Now compare your argument with how they treat software on iPhones and iPads. Apple is a control-freak company.
    - rimantas 14y ago
      No, those who complain about Apple being control-freak are control freaks themselves: because they want to control everything. The problem is, a lot of users are just happy not having to control, they want things to work, not to spend time tweaking.
      - Dylan16807 14y ago
        Wanting to control something I own doesn't make me a control freak; wanting to control someone else's stuff does. And even if those people were hypocrites that wouldn't make them wrong. It doesn't matter if some of apple's customers are control freaks. That doesn't magically change whether apple is a control freak or whether being a control freak is bad. Your counterargument here is basically the word 'no' followed by an irrelevant insult.
- readme 14y ago
  I agree actually. I should have said 'than microsoft was'. They really are a lot better.
pbiggar 14y ago
Its because they make very high quality products. I changed over after being sick of my linux laptop never connecting to wifi, and the full-disk encryption on ubuntu never working. It took some getting used to, but Macs are really great products that are great to work with and write code with.
saraid216 14y ago
Speaking as an MBP user, they're shiny. That's it.
eropple 14y ago
This is why I don't understand why so many hackers these days like to use apple products. Avoid if possible. That's the thing. I can't. Because I want a computer I don't hate. There's nobody else who makes a machine I want to spend 8+ hours a day working and playing on. There are some PC manufacturers where I can get some of what I want, but I've yet to see one where I can get all of it--I like Lenovo's build quality and aesthetic, for example, but their laptops are universally underspecced for what I want (if your only GPU is Intel, you are not getting my money) and I can't get a Retina display, which I now consider mandatory, anywhere else. And, while we're at it, if you're significantly heavier than my rMBP and don't provide at least competitive battery life, you're out too. I carry around enough crap as it is. Worse, there are no operating systems other than OS X that fulfill my needs of a pleasant-to-use Unix/Linux system--certainly no Linux distribution comes close on the "pleasant-to-use" part; I'd rather use Windows 7 and Cygwin than any Linux desktop I've been subjected to in the last five years. For me it's the same as it was with iOS--until Android 4.0 there was simply no worthy competition to iOS as far as I was concerned, but 4.x is fantastic and I switched over because it gave me the environment I don't hate plus the ability to mess around and customize it to my liking. But the first part is more important. If there was a Linux distribution with Apple levels of attention to detail and a modicum of taste--and that doesn't mean "looks like OS X", something different could be fine so long as it was designed for human beings instead of neckbeards and was uncompromising in its attention to detail--I'd probably be there. There isn't (and very well may never be), so I'm not.
- Kerrick 14y ago
  > Worse, there are no operating systems other than OS X that fulfill my needs of a pleasant-to-use Unix/Linux system--certainly no Linux distribution comes close on the "pleasant-to-use" part There is one. It's currently in beta, but it's a Linux distribution that wrote its own Human Interface Guidelines, wrote its own suite of default applications that conform to that HIG, and is firmly devoted to the desktop/laptop paradigm instead of the touchscreen/tablet up-and-comers. It's elementary. http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/
  - eropple 14y ago
cbs 14y ago
But don't you see? I have an emotional bond with my tools. That's healthy, right?
- Apocryphon 14y ago
  Pretty sure hardcore Linux and Windows fans have a bond with their tools, too. It's just usually it would be in software and not hardware.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - wting 14y ago
    Thinkpad fans are probably the only other group that likes a product line based on hardware. They may be smaller and/or less vocal group, but they're out there.
- eropple 14y ago
  You don't have an emotional bond with good, well-crafted tools? They don't make you happy to be using them? I do. It's why I consciously pay a premium for a Mac. It's why I pay for Photoshop. It's why I pay money for IntelliJ when Eclipse is free. They're good tools that make me better at doing things I want to do and they make me happier because I'm using them.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  For me using tools is the only sacrament. It's tinkering and improving and learning from them that makes me human, besides keeping me from starving in a cave somewhere. Contempt for tools would have been an unimaginable luxury just a few generations ago, and I'm disturbed to see it steadily emerging here.
jlgreco 14y ago
People forget what a company that is friendly to hackers is like.. if indeed they ever knew in the first place. They see "Oh, it's a UNIX?" and think that is the end of the story, the best you could possibly ask for.
- eropple 14y ago
  I don't think anyone thinks that. I think that for many developers it's a balance between a solid platform to write code for and a user interface that appeals to them. I flat-out won't go back to a Linux desktop environment until one demonstrates as much basic give-a-shit for building a great computer experience as Apple does. That's as important to me as being "friendly to hackers" because I have to live in front of it every single day.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    If you don't claim to have chosen Apple because the company hold good hacker ideals, then... okay? Good for you? My concern is with those that have. You think those people don't exist; if not, then my concern is with nobody. I suspect that is not the case. In fact, I know it is not the case, with at least a small subset of Apple users I have met personally. To be fair these particular people are not affording Apple any undeserved 'hacker cred' for having a UNIX operating system, but rather giving them the 'hacker cred' for the legacy of Woz. Woz is great, but that is irrelevant.
    - veemjeem 14y ago
      Weird, maybe everyone you know is old. I don't think I know anyone that cares about Apple because of Woz. Many don't even know who the heck Woz is anyway. Apple has hacker cred because they do have lots of engineers working on products that we use, like gcc-llvm, or webkit rendering engine, etc.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        I am not saying that everybody I know who uses Apple products thinks this way. They are a minority. > at least a small subset of Apple users I have met personally The people who give Apple undeserved 'hacker cred' (a minority among Apple users) all seem to provide justifications along the lines of pointing out how Apple used to have deserved 'hacker cred'. Invariably they are Woz fans (as am I, lest I give off the wrong impression).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Suan 14y ago
A big thing for me are the Macbook trackpads (and the standalone magic trackpads). They're just so awesome to use and no other manufacturer's comes close to Apple's.
- MBCook 14y ago
  In the last year I've gotten practically addicted to my Magic Trackpad. I've been using gestures on my MBP for a few years, but when I got the trackpad for my iMac at work last year and stated using it full time... wow. If I want to play a game, I'll use a mouse. Same with drawing (or I'd get a tablet). But my my daily work of programming, surfing, email, etc the trackpad works great. But the thing that has me addicted are the gestures. Three finger swipe left or right to go forward/back in Safari, IntelliJ, Mail, and every where else. Four fingers up to trigger Expose to show all my windows. Expand all fingers to show the desktop. Pinch-to-zoom is one I don't use much, but when you want to look at a larger version of a screenshot on a web page it comes in handy. It seems like such a little thing, but I'm lost without the back/forward gestures. They are second nature to me now, and when I use someone else's computer I'm constantly frustrated by not being able to do it. I'm sure there are gestures in other OSes at this point. Two-finger scrolling was an instant hit with me. After trying it, the PC laptop solution (special scroll areas on the trackpad) just seemed so pathetic. Two finger right-click was great. I'm still consistently surprised to see relatively new PCs with small trackpads. My boss has a 17" Alienware he bought last year, and it has a much smaller trackpad than the 5" pad on my 15" MBP. Apple's trackpads are an amazing feature.
krickle 14y ago
I completely agree. You cannot put your own software on it and if you have one you're forced to take an extra set of cables when you vacation, and you need to baby those cables because adding protective sleeves to the ends "isn't the right design" but a new one is priced like they are made from gold.
ricardobeat 14y ago
My macbook is nearing 3 years of age. The 'weaker' rubber sleeve in the charger is still good, same goes for four other Apple mobile chargers and headphones. Meanwhile another laptop I have has basically crumbled into pieces after 4 years. The screen is blotched, burnt, uneven, the keyboard is failing. It heats up like a toaster. Power brick had to be replaced a couple years ago. So no, that's not a good argument to avoid Apple.
waxjar 14y ago
I don't think it's just aesthetics, they ask a lot of money for a new charger. And because they conveniently chose to use a patented charger thingy nobody else is allowed to make, you're going to pay them that bundle of money. I'm convinced Apple designs their products to break quickly, especially components that are not covered by warranty (e.g. cables, chargers, earphones, etc). Those inexpensive components render the whole thing pretty much unusable, so you're forced to buy a replacement. It pisses me off. Yet, if I were to buy a new laptop, I'd probably buy a MacBook. They're just so damn nice to use.
smsm42 14y ago
No, it's not as bad as Microsoft. The software is actually reasonably fine, it has its warts, especially when Apple gave their incessant mania to reinvent the wheel to run free, but OS X provides reasonably comfortable environment. If you stay out of iOS prison-like ecosystem, Apple's software solutions are reasonably hacker-friendly, I think. The hardware is not that bad functionally too, in many aspects better than the competition, but there are much more things that suck. Primary of it being connections to outside world. There's still no proper docking solution for Macs, which is just shameful. Power connectors universally suck through all recent Apple hardware. Macbooks power sucks, iPod power sucks, iPhone power sucks. One can't help but think it's done deliberately. And on top of that they don't even agree to be charged from any USB, some just don't work, no idea why. I'd say "worse than Microsoft", but as Microsoft doesn't make any comparable hardware, Apple is left in a class of itself, without peer to be compared to.
rimantas 14y ago
> Apple is the antithesis of the hacker ideal. Not for me. I want a nice, reliable machine with unix underneath and a sane GUI on top so I can just open it and hack away. My Mac gives me exactly that. Long gone are days when I used to look at Linux boot screen flying by and felt being a hacker because of that.

by readme 14y ago

ntaylor 14y ago

"just as bad as Microsoft" ?

RyanMcGreal 14y ago
Apple is far more closed and tyrannical with its products and its users than Microsoft ever was.

joenathan 14y ago

>just as bad as Microsoft You have to be joking, Microsoft is way more hacker friendly than Apple. Try to build your own OSX PC and you can't because Apple won't sell you a license, Apple started the whole walled garden game with the iOS.

shmerl 14y ago
Not if you compare their stance on open standards in general. They are both bad and acting nasty with using lock-in in different forms.
eridius 14y ago
Well, yes. Microsoft is a software company. They're happy to sell you the software to run on any device. Apple is a hardware company. If you want to run their software on a non-Apple piece of hardware, you're not their customer. In fact, in the early 90's when Apple did allow for Mac clones to be built, that almost killed the company.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  Now compare your argument with how they treat software on iPhones and iPads. Apple is a control-freak company.
  - rimantas 14y ago
    No, those who complain about Apple being control-freak are control freaks themselves: because they want to control everything. The problem is, a lot of users are just happy not having to control, they want things to work, not to spend time tweaking.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      Wanting to control something I own doesn't make me a control freak; wanting to control someone else's stuff does. And even if those people were hypocrites that wouldn't make them wrong. It doesn't matter if some of apple's customers are control freaks. That doesn't magically change whether apple is a control freak or whether being a control freak is bad. Your counterargument here is basically the word 'no' followed by an irrelevant insult.
readme 14y ago
I agree actually. I should have said 'than microsoft was'. They really are a lot better.

pbiggar 14y ago

Its because they make very high quality products. I changed over after being sick of my linux laptop never connecting to wifi, and the full-disk encryption on ubuntu never working. It took some getting used to, but Macs are really great products that are great to work with and write code with.

saraid216 14y ago

Speaking as an MBP user, they're shiny. That's it.

eropple 14y ago

This is why I don't understand why so many hackers these days like to use apple products. Avoid if possible. That's the thing. I can't. Because I want a computer I don't hate. There's nobody else who makes a machine I want to spend 8+ hours a day working and playing on. There are some PC manufacturers where I can get some of what I want, but I've yet to see one where I can get all of it--I like Lenovo's build quality and aesthetic, for example, but their laptops are universally underspecced for what I want (if your only GPU is Intel, you are not getting my money) and I can't get a Retina display, which I now consider mandatory, anywhere else. And, while we're at it, if you're significantly heavier than my rMBP and don't provide at least competitive battery life, you're out too. I carry around enough crap as it is. Worse, there are no operating systems other than OS X that fulfill my needs of a pleasant-to-use Unix/Linux system--certainly no Linux distribution comes close on the "pleasant-to-use" part; I'd rather use Windows 7 and Cygwin than any Linux desktop I've been subjected to in the last five years. For me it's the same as it was with iOS--until Android 4.0 there was simply no worthy competition to iOS as far as I was concerned, but 4.x is fantastic and I switched over because it gave me the environment I don't hate plus the ability to mess around and customize it to my liking. But the first part is more important. If there was a Linux distribution with Apple levels of attention to detail and a modicum of taste--and that doesn't mean "looks like OS X", something different could be fine so long as it was designed for human beings instead of neckbeards and was uncompromising in its attention to detail--I'd probably be there. There isn't (and very well may never be), so I'm not.

Kerrick 14y ago
> Worse, there are no operating systems other than OS X that fulfill my needs of a pleasant-to-use Unix/Linux system--certainly no Linux distribution comes close on the "pleasant-to-use" part There is one. It's currently in beta, but it's a Linux distribution that wrote its own Human Interface Guidelines, wrote its own suite of default applications that conform to that HIG, and is firmly devoted to the desktop/laptop paradigm instead of the touchscreen/tablet up-and-comers. It's elementary. http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/
- eropple 14y ago

cbs 14y ago

But don't you see? I have an emotional bond with my tools. That's healthy, right?

Apocryphon 14y ago
Pretty sure hardcore Linux and Windows fans have a bond with their tools, too. It's just usually it would be in software and not hardware.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- wting 14y ago
  Thinkpad fans are probably the only other group that likes a product line based on hardware. They may be smaller and/or less vocal group, but they're out there.
eropple 14y ago
You don't have an emotional bond with good, well-crafted tools? They don't make you happy to be using them? I do. It's why I consciously pay a premium for a Mac. It's why I pay for Photoshop. It's why I pay money for IntelliJ when Eclipse is free. They're good tools that make me better at doing things I want to do and they make me happier because I'm using them.
prodigal_erik 14y ago
For me using tools is the only sacrament. It's tinkering and improving and learning from them that makes me human, besides keeping me from starving in a cave somewhere. Contempt for tools would have been an unimaginable luxury just a few generations ago, and I'm disturbed to see it steadily emerging here.

jlgreco 14y ago

People forget what a company that is friendly to hackers is like.. if indeed they ever knew in the first place. They see "Oh, it's a UNIX?" and think that is the end of the story, the best you could possibly ask for.

eropple 14y ago
I don't think anyone thinks that. I think that for many developers it's a balance between a solid platform to write code for and a user interface that appeals to them. I flat-out won't go back to a Linux desktop environment until one demonstrates as much basic give-a-shit for building a great computer experience as Apple does. That's as important to me as being "friendly to hackers" because I have to live in front of it every single day.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  If you don't claim to have chosen Apple because the company hold good hacker ideals, then... okay? Good for you? My concern is with those that have. You think those people don't exist; if not, then my concern is with nobody. I suspect that is not the case. In fact, I know it is not the case, with at least a small subset of Apple users I have met personally. To be fair these particular people are not affording Apple any undeserved 'hacker cred' for having a UNIX operating system, but rather giving them the 'hacker cred' for the legacy of Woz. Woz is great, but that is irrelevant.
  - veemjeem 14y ago
    Weird, maybe everyone you know is old. I don't think I know anyone that cares about Apple because of Woz. Many don't even know who the heck Woz is anyway. Apple has hacker cred because they do have lots of engineers working on products that we use, like gcc-llvm, or webkit rendering engine, etc.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I am not saying that everybody I know who uses Apple products thinks this way. They are a minority. > at least a small subset of Apple users I have met personally The people who give Apple undeserved 'hacker cred' (a minority among Apple users) all seem to provide justifications along the lines of pointing out how Apple used to have deserved 'hacker cred'. Invariably they are Woz fans (as am I, lest I give off the wrong impression).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Suan 14y ago

A big thing for me are the Macbook trackpads (and the standalone magic trackpads). They're just so awesome to use and no other manufacturer's comes close to Apple's.

MBCook 14y ago
In the last year I've gotten practically addicted to my Magic Trackpad. I've been using gestures on my MBP for a few years, but when I got the trackpad for my iMac at work last year and stated using it full time... wow. If I want to play a game, I'll use a mouse. Same with drawing (or I'd get a tablet). But my my daily work of programming, surfing, email, etc the trackpad works great. But the thing that has me addicted are the gestures. Three finger swipe left or right to go forward/back in Safari, IntelliJ, Mail, and every where else. Four fingers up to trigger Expose to show all my windows. Expand all fingers to show the desktop. Pinch-to-zoom is one I don't use much, but when you want to look at a larger version of a screenshot on a web page it comes in handy. It seems like such a little thing, but I'm lost without the back/forward gestures. They are second nature to me now, and when I use someone else's computer I'm constantly frustrated by not being able to do it. I'm sure there are gestures in other OSes at this point. Two-finger scrolling was an instant hit with me. After trying it, the PC laptop solution (special scroll areas on the trackpad) just seemed so pathetic. Two finger right-click was great. I'm still consistently surprised to see relatively new PCs with small trackpads. My boss has a 17" Alienware he bought last year, and it has a much smaller trackpad than the 5" pad on my 15" MBP. Apple's trackpads are an amazing feature.

krickle 14y ago

I completely agree. You cannot put your own software on it and if you have one you're forced to take an extra set of cables when you vacation, and you need to baby those cables because adding protective sleeves to the ends "isn't the right design" but a new one is priced like they are made from gold.

ricardobeat 14y ago

My macbook is nearing 3 years of age. The 'weaker' rubber sleeve in the charger is still good, same goes for four other Apple mobile chargers and headphones. Meanwhile another laptop I have has basically crumbled into pieces after 4 years. The screen is blotched, burnt, uneven, the keyboard is failing. It heats up like a toaster. Power brick had to be replaced a couple years ago. So no, that's not a good argument to avoid Apple.

waxjar 14y ago

I don't think it's just aesthetics, they ask a lot of money for a new charger. And because they conveniently chose to use a patented charger thingy nobody else is allowed to make, you're going to pay them that bundle of money. I'm convinced Apple designs their products to break quickly, especially components that are not covered by warranty (e.g. cables, chargers, earphones, etc). Those inexpensive components render the whole thing pretty much unusable, so you're forced to buy a replacement. It pisses me off. Yet, if I were to buy a new laptop, I'd probably buy a MacBook. They're just so damn nice to use.

smsm42 14y ago

No, it's not as bad as Microsoft. The software is actually reasonably fine, it has its warts, especially when Apple gave their incessant mania to reinvent the wheel to run free, but OS X provides reasonably comfortable environment. If you stay out of iOS prison-like ecosystem, Apple's software solutions are reasonably hacker-friendly, I think. The hardware is not that bad functionally too, in many aspects better than the competition, but there are much more things that suck. Primary of it being connections to outside world. There's still no proper docking solution for Macs, which is just shameful. Power connectors universally suck through all recent Apple hardware. Macbooks power sucks, iPod power sucks, iPhone power sucks. One can't help but think it's done deliberately. And on top of that they don't even agree to be charged from any USB, some just don't work, no idea why. I'd say "worse than Microsoft", but as Microsoft doesn't make any comparable hardware, Apple is left in a class of itself, without peer to be compared to.

rimantas 14y ago

> Apple is the antithesis of the hacker ideal. Not for me. I want a nice, reliable machine with unix underneath and a sane GUI on top so I can just open it and hack away. My Mac gives me exactly that. Long gone are days when I used to look at Linux boot screen flying by and felt being a hacker because of that.