Wed Nov 11 2020 15:36:40 EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ Uncensored

Mine clearly varies significantly. I collect a lot of old hardware too. I'm actually surprised how many machines still run and run well. I'm generally happy with Apple products, but they've lost a number of things over the past few years. Again, the only Mac that I've had that up and died is a relatively recent one.

Laptops generally suck. I don't care what brand they are.

I think laptops generally get abused With that said, I agree that most laptops suck. I've been very particular about the brands I've bought - and have always picked well. I had a Toshiba Satellite 486DX color, one of the first, when they were the "ultimate laptop" to own. I gave it to my sister-in-law, she used it through Jr. High into high school, and it never died. She gave it back to me. I have an HP DV8339US 17" laptop I bought in my 30s from the Good Guys in Sacramento where the hostage situation took place. It is a Centrino Duo. It is still running fine. I've got a Lenovo T61. It is a much sought after Lenovo Core 2 Duo, to this day. It won't die. 
People buy cheap Dell Latitude laptops, cheap Toshiba laptops, cheap MSI laptops... and they die. 
People buy expensive gaming laptops, and they're not good gaming machines, and they're not good laptops, and they're trying to do too much, and they die. 
But Macs are the most expensive, and seem to have the most problems of any brand of PC - along with maybe Microsoft Surface. And ultimately, when you get down to brass tacks, that is all they are. 

Just another Intel based PC. They're not really *special* at all. 

Thu Nov 12 2020 10:20:30 EST from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

That's one of the reasons I'm kind of looking forward to seeing the ARM based Macs. It'll be something different, something a little bit special. And it will be interesting to see if Apple can pull it off. They seem to be good at these transitions, having done it twice before. It will be especially fun to watch Apple succeed at this where Microsoft failed.

I am not an Apple user. Their platform simply isn't a fit for me. But I enjoy watching what they do, and they do seem to have a knack for moving the entire industry forward by pioneering things no one else is willing to try.

I've been FAMOUSLY wrong about Apple being able to pull off unlikely things, in the past: 

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/techrepublic-out-loud/why-the-ipad-will-fail-to-win-significant-market-share/


I think ultimately, Android did win the war... and that was my actual thesis. But the headline did not age well. 

With that said, I think Apple *lies* about Performance, and always has. The 2011 Unibody Macbook Pro i7 was supposed to be WAY faster than an i7 PC. Thunderbolt 2, which never took off, buried USB and they were getting more out of the ATI Radeon and i7 than PC designs. 

Unfortunately, if you USED it like that, it cooked itself. 

Now they're claiming their Mac Silicon ARM iPads are outperforming Intel cores. I simply don't believe that. I don't think it is an apples to apples comparison. The physics of it doesn't really make sense. I don't think they're out designing and out-engineering Intel on gate architecture for *performance*. They're great at optimizing for battery life. 

But more than that, they've been making claims like this since the Mac 68k machines - and they've always been theoretical wins. Real world, it doesn't work out quite like that. "You've got the fastest machine? But can you do this? No? Why not? It would be so much better on your FASTER machine. Show me another incredible demo of what it COULD do!"

The logic of dumping Intel and going ARM and making all OS X and iOS apps cross platform compatible kind of escapes me. 

But I'm not going to say it won't succeed. They have a very loyal cul... following. 

Thu Nov 12 2020 15:01:50 EST from Ragnar Danneskjold @ Uncensored

Eh - the older I get, the more I realize, none of it really matters. We can all talk about how fast a machine is, which architecture is best, etc. etc.


It's meaningless.

All that matters is how much work you can get done with the least amount of intrusiveness and problems.

If switching to ARM gives me 20 hour battery life, I'm all for it.

After spending 2+ decades with photography as a hobby, I see the same thing.
People arguing about which cameras are "better". But in the end, when you look at a picture, do you have any idea what kind of camera was used?

Nope.

And a lot of the most iconic photos ever take were shot with downright primative equipment.

All that matters is getting the shot.

Well, and a lot of that is very subjective. What works best for me may not work best for you. The things you value in your workflow may not be the things I value. I think this is what people lose in these discussions. 

You prefer a certain set of factors that are different than the factors I value - and in fact, we probably have different *goals* too. But what happens is both sides get defensive seeing the other person's objections as, basically, a *personal* attack. 

I'm a systems guy, I've never had a failed Linux or Windows install thereafter prevent me from falling back or clean installing a different Linux or Windows system without resetting non volatile ram. My experience with Macs focuses on their systems integration, robustness and reliability - from an engineering and support perspective, not from an end-user perspective. 

An end user who basically drives their Mac like a car and takes it into the shop to have a mechanic fix it might find it more reliable than a PC - OS X is a *good* OS, for the most part, and is very user oriented... making things that are arguably still complicated far more simple in most cases in *user* space. 

But ultimately - I agree completely - and I feel that way about most systems. People get invested in their choice as an extension of themselves - and someone picking a different solution becomes a rejection of them personally. 

If I say "this sucks about Mac," a lot of people hear, "I think you suck if you choose Mac." 

You want to have fun, go onto Facebook, join the retro computing communities, and stick around long enough to see collectors of original equipment, people who use emulation, and people who use FPGA solutions all fight with one another over 35 year old technology that your PHONE can do without breaking a sweat. 

They also have fights about LCDs vs. CRTs and 16:9 vs. 4:3 aspect ratios. 

People are tribal, and if you're not in their tribe, you're the enemy. 

I have always been a fan of ARM even back in the days of Acorn. But i hate the modern Apple..  So i'm torn here to be honest. It may start out as 'true' ARM, but of course they will keep adding their own proprietary extensions and if anyone even thinks about replicating or using them ( re: API lawsuits in play now ), expect their lawyers to descend upon you like Democrats on loose money...

( and to show you how much i like ARM, this is being posted from an NVIDIA Jetson NX.. via a RK3399 based VPN tunnel back to my house. I left my PinbookPro at home today...)

And yes, the buy-out of ARM scares the pee out of me. Could be great, but absorptions like that never seem to work out in the long run for the ones being absorbed ( RE: Oracle + sun... )

Well, allow me to keep it interestingly on topic. I was surprised today to find that Dex, the Samsung app that streams your phone's desktop to your PC - works far better on the Mac than on my Surface Pro 5/Windows 10 device. I've never been able to do the drag and drop from the Dex window to the Windows 10 desktop. I end up resorting to just dragging it over the old fashioned way from the Explorer - but it worked great on my Sierra based Mac. 

I was shocked. Android on ARM playing better with OS X than with Windows is not something one expects.