Laptop Pricing - A small rant.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
I don't remember macs ever being fast. I remember them false advertising themselves as fast, like with their "The world's most powerful personal computer" campaign w/ Jeff Goldblum that they had to stop airing because it was deemed preposterously false ( was a 2 CPU desktop that would lose in benchmarks to a single CPU, low-end Windows box ).
OMG, I remember those days. They were so outrageous. It was so trivial to get stuff SO much faster for half the price - even for running Mac OS let alone running "anything." That was a lot for why I've avoided Macs so much, I feel a bit embarrassed using them as people might think I fell for the outrageous claims.
Everywhere I look I see developers using them, and honestly I just don't get it. They make me feel about 40% as productive as I otherwise do, and using Windows on a MacBook Pro makes keyboard shortcuts feel slower and more awkward to me, which also feels like a dramatic productivity hit. I've tried switching for primary use about 10 times, but in the end always retreat, including a 6 month stint where I used OS X for web development. I have no idea how people do it. I notice the delay between when I'm typing and when the letters render on the screen even, which makes my blood boil.
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For Video production and graphics work they used to be fast. A windows machine couldn't touch a mac from the 1990's until about 2002 or maybe a little before when the Pentium 4 had came out along with the Athlon XP. They supported features better and the vendors worked on making their software take advantage of the new cpu features.. That was the first time windows really became viable at all for serious video production. The Athlon's actually were faster than the Intel's but, Intel had paid modified the benchmark software to make theirs look better on all tests. (which has went to a class action now, if you owned a p4 computer you can get a whole $15 out of it.)
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@creayt said:
Everywhere I look I see developers using them, and honestly I just don't get it.
That's what convinced me to give one a try. It's not bad, but it's not good. Certainly not on par with Windows or Linux systems that I use for a fraction of the price. Last week I asked my office to replace mine with a $250 Chromebook as I'd be more productive. $5,000 isn't as useful as $250!!
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@thecreativeone91 said:
For Video production and graphics work they used to be fast. A windows machine couldn't touch a mac from the 1990's until about 2002 or maybe a little before when the Pentium 4 had came out along with the Athlon XP.
Actually the Pentium IIIS was faster than the Pentium 4. The PIII / PIIIS and Athlon XP were really good. The P4 era was the big "dip" in Windows performance. It was with the Pentium Pro family that Windows made the big leap to where Mac just wasn't in the performance game anymore.
Long ago when Mac was M68K based and Windows was on Intel 386, yeah, Mac had lot more power. But Amiga had way more than either because of the better support hardware.
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The problem is Apple is trying to do too much. in the PowerPC days things were simple they focused on one market. Now they are trying to get everyone and doing none of it well. I also think they should decided if they want to be a software company or a hardware. If they want to keep making OS 10 do it, then charge a small amount for it and let it run on any computer, forget about the hardware - which in recent years hasn't been to great. And make the software a lot better.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
The problem is Apple is trying to do too much. in the PowerPC days things were simple they focused on one market. Now they are trying to get everyone and doing none of it well. I also think they should decided if they want to be a software company or a hardware. If they want to keep making OS 10 do it, then charge a small amount for it and let it run on any computer, forget about the hardware - which in recent years hasn't been to great. And make the software a lot better.
Mac OSX isn't good enough to pay for, though. What little value Apple has, is in the integration. Neither the hardware is good enough to buy and run Windows on (although I know people doing exactly that - only full Mac shop I know does that) and the software isn't good enough to pay for on its own outside of having a copy in a lab to make supporting Mac users easier.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
For Video production and graphics work they used to be fast. A windows machine couldn't touch a mac from the 1990's until about 2002 or maybe a little before when the Pentium 4 had came out along with the Athlon XP.
Actually the Pentium IIIS was faster than the Pentium 4.
Yeah but the P3 didn't have SSE2 like the p4 (and eventually SSE3) That's what made a lot of it possible. And AMD's ripped off versions.
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@scottalanmiller said:
That's what convinced me to give one a try. It's not bad, but it's not good. Certainly not on par with Windows or Linux systems that I use for a fraction of the price. Last week I asked my office to replace mine with a $250 Chromebook as I'd be more productive. $5,000 isn't as useful as $250!!
It's so funny that you say that!!!!! I have an Acer Chromebook that was $160, and it blows the 15" Retina MacBook Pro away for web browsing. The scrolling and rendering performance is so much better that I almost made a video for YouTube. God it's such a relief to hear someone else say these things aloud.
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@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
Everywhere I look I see developers using them, and honestly I just don't get it.
That's what convinced me to give one a try. It's not bad, but it's not good. Certainly not on par with Windows or Linux systems that I use for a fraction of the price. Last week I asked my office to replace mine with a $250 Chromebook as I'd be more productive. $5,000 isn't as useful as $250!!
It's so funny that you say that!!!!! I have an Acer Chromebook that was $160, and it blows the 15" Retina MacBook Pro away for web browsing. The scrolling and rendering performance is so much better that I almost made a video for YouTube. God it's such a relief to hear someone else say these things aloud.
Mac OS has the worst performance for web based streaming now days. Flash sucks much much worse on it. Html5 isn't too much better.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Yeah but the P3 didn't have SSE2 like the p4 (and eventually SSE3) That's what made a lot of it possible. And AMD's ripped off versions.
It was backported to the PPro family with the PIII's rebranding to the Pentium M.
PPro was PPro -> PII -> PIII -> PIIIS -> PM
Netburst was P4 -> PD
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@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
Everywhere I look I see developers using them, and honestly I just don't get it.
That's what convinced me to give one a try. It's not bad, but it's not good. Certainly not on par with Windows or Linux systems that I use for a fraction of the price. Last week I asked my office to replace mine with a $250 Chromebook as I'd be more productive. $5,000 isn't as useful as $250!!
It's so funny that you say that!!!!! I have an Acer Chromebook that was $160, and it blows the 15" Retina MacBook Pro away for web browsing. The scrolling and rendering performance is so much better that I almost made a video for YouTube. God it's such a relief to hear someone else say these things aloud.
I have you beat. My $150 Acer Chromebook that is years old is better than the just purchased MacBook Pro
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@thecreativeone91 said:
The problem is Apple is trying to do too much. in the PowerPC days things were simple they focused on one market. Now they are trying to get everyone and doing none of it well. I also think they should decided if they want to be a software company or a hardware. If they want to keep making OS 10 do it, then charge a small amount for it and let it run on any computer, forget about the hardware - which in recent years hasn't been to great. And make the software a lot better.
Totally disagree here. Their hardware is what IS great(ish), their software is what's terrible. Everything from the handicapped mouse acceleration curve, to their core mechanisms for windows placement and resizing, to their omnipresent top strip to represent application focus, to their implementation of "cut", and how they selectively withhold transferring focus to system dialogs in certain situations such that you have to hop in your mouse ( and they make the world's worst mouses, btw ) and drive across town to dismiss a dialog. I could literally go on for hours but there are just endless, endless software design decisions that slow you down on a minutely basis compared to Windows.
I'd tried literally 5 different 4k monitors before I got to the retina iMac, and couldn't use any of them for work because of performance. It's the first one that actually manages 60Hz at a crisp and readable size, and for that reason I love it ( running Windows ). Their laptops, phones, and tablets are also typically well-made from a hardware perspective, IMO.
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Font rendering used to be a big thing for mac os too but, the cleartype fonts on windows are just as good as the OS X antialiasing to me now.
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@creayt said:
I'm the asshole that thinks OS X is too sprinkled w/ latency to use for web development. I notice that command + tab has a slight, imperceptible to some people, delay before it fades onto the screen when compared w/ Windows' alt + tab on the same machine. I wouldn't be shocked if I did feel some benefit
I doubt you are the only one. I find that the latest version of OS X (Yosemite?) and the one bfore it is basically unusable for me. Everything is just dirt slow (even on a 21" iMac from 2014). It adds extra characters to files when you access them over a windows share, and a host of other issues.
I have Said iMac sitting on my desk next to me... Running Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, lol.
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@dafyre said:
I doubt you are the only one. I find that the latest version of OS X (Yosemite?) and the one bfore it is basically unusable for me. Everything is just dirt slow (even on a 21" iMac from 2014). It adds extra characters to files when you access them over a windows share, and a host of other issues.
I have Said iMac sitting on my desk next to me... Running Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, lol.
That's hilarious. I may not be the only one, but I'm the only developer out of 20 or so that I've talked to about it that notices it.
![😕](https://mangolassi.it/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=3hrg7a1ige4 ":\")
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@scottalanmiller said:
I have you beat. My $150 Acer Chromebook that is years old is better than the just purchased MacBook Pro
This whole conversation is especially hilarious to me, because when I stumbled upon that SMB Journal site I was like "Sweet! Someone that's actually extremely good and passionate at their job and that has just schooled me on a handful of important RAID considerations" ( I read like 7 articles on it the first night ).
And then... when you had me join Mango, and I stumbled onto the "what's your desk like" thread... and saw that you worked off of just a MacBook Pro... my jaw hit the floor. And I was like "WTF?!?!, how is that possible?" Now I know the real story LOL.
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@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I have you beat. My $150 Acer Chromebook that is years old is better than the just purchased MacBook Pro
This whole conversation is especially hilarious to me, because when I stumbled upon that SMB Journal site I was like "Sweet! Someone that's actually extremely good and passionate at their job and that has just schooled me on a handful of important RAID considerations" ( I read like 7 articles on it the first night ). And then... when you had me join Mango, and I stumbled onto the "what's your desk like" thread... and saw that you worked off o just a MacBook Pro... my jaw hit the floor. And I was like "WTF?!?!, how is that possible?" Now I know the real story LOL.
This is my first Mac since I bought a G4 Mini as an easy way to own something with Power architecture (it was always just a toy but even failed at that so got used as a DVD player for a few years - literally!!) New job is nearly all Mac so I figured I stick with the standard, especially as it wasn't my money, I can always trade it in for a Windows machine if I need, everyone else is using one and they must be much better now, right?
The answer is... they are much better now. Way better. Useful, actually. But are they great? Nope. Good enough, sure. Useable. But flaky, slow and hard to use. They require way too much "desktop expertise" for basic tasks. With Windows and Linux you never have to do things like "Google how to rename a file." They have obvious, graphical, on screen clues for things. Mac is "if you aren't a Mac expert, go away." Least inviting OS ever.
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@scottalanmiller we have a big push here to switch over, lead by senior manglement. It's pretty funny to watch them get what they ask for.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The answer is... they are much better now. Way better. Useful, actually. But are they great? Nope. Good enough, sure. Useable. But flaky, slow and hard to use. They require way too much "desktop expertise" for basic tasks. With Windows and Linux you never have to do things like "Google how to rename a file." They have obvious, graphical, on screen clues for things. Mac is "if you aren't a Mac expert, go away." Least inviting OS ever.
Agree. Only I think that even if you are a Mac expert, you're still fundamentally constrained in a lot of usage scenarios and forced to do things more slowly and less efficiently than on Windows. On top of that the interface/OS performance in general is just palpably slower in almost all situations. Some things are pretty, others are nightmarishly ugly ( like the new dock and icon set ), but in the end, none of that matters to me personally as much as the ability to do things as close to instantly as possible, while working for money, at least.
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There's a reason this didn't piss me off to much. I'm using a much much older Lenovo T410 with windows 10 Preview and it is more powerful than this Macbook Pro Rentia which was the latest model. I dropped it on some stairs and the aluminum actually curved to the same of the steps. I didn't drop it from very high, it was hip height out of a laptop back that came unzipped and dropped on concrete stairs.
