News Apple refreshes MacBook Pro family

Industry inertia. That is..it? People spend thousands more than they need to because of that? **** that man. You can do just as good of a job on a PC with Linux. There are so many programs available on that platform or Windows platform for that matter.

I feel like a dumbass who has had the 'Secret of Apple' hidden from him. I can't see how a tiny improvement in convieniance is worth the extra outlay, not to mention how bad Apple is with upgrades or 3rd party support.

Edit: I feel like I am missing a piece of the puzzle here. That, or everyone else is significantly more gullible than I am. And I doubt that is correct.

 

It's not just the mac, it's all the stuff that goes along with [the 'ecosystem'].

When your choies are:

Buy a mac
Buy a PC, but have to replace several grands worth of audio equipment... and buy new licenses for your macOS-only software, which is another couple of grand... then train everyon to use the new stuff...

Most still opt for option A, because it's less ballache.

Why do people spend thousands more than they need to to play games on PC when you can do just as good a job with Xbox or PS4?

 

Ah finally it clicks. Not being a creator of media and such I had no idea everything was so closesly linked together. What a PITA. So Apple has you guys by the balls in a sense. Happy I aint there. Only reason I have an Iphone 5S is because I bought it from a relative. I would never give those ******s my money.

Thanks RedFlames and MLyons for learnin me a book. (Love you 2 btw --much geek, no homo)

Oh I totally missed the console comparison. I get it, good analogy and all that. For me my PC does EVERYTHING. So a console is just fluff as far as I am concerned. I don't need 5 different things each doing a specific thing. I have one beautiful beast that does it all. From that perspective my PC could even save me money. Especially as I don't follow the upgrade curve. (too poor really)

 

FWIW i don't get the die-hard fawning over iStuff that some exhibit either... and I used to work for them.

But I do know people who work in mac-dominated industries [chiefly audio production] and can appreciate why they are [still] that way.

 

If you think that's bad... Medical equipment has some bad news for you... some Industrial equipment will make you cry and Aerospace and Defence will have you going WTAF?


When you have a multi-million pound MRI that will only work on XP, and only with a specific combo of patches - and any deviation from those very specifc requirements renderes said MRI unusuable [and likely voids any support contracts].

 

I can imagine. I expect the Military has similar problems too, though I would assume they were better at breaking those kinds of bonds. (Might be wrong) I am ignorant on much. It used to be lack of interest in a particular area. Now it is that, plus the fact that the more I learn about how the world works..and I mean really works, the less I want to know.

Ignorence is bliss, as the saying goes. But this Apple thing was getting on my tits.

 

Up until the last 3-5 years or so their build quality was outstanding; you had to look hard to find good build quality with PCs (EDIT: I should point out that I'm referring to mass-market consumer stuff here, not the kind of builds that the average bit-tech reader would be going for), and you'd often pay just as much as you would for Apple computers. That's gone totally out of the window in recent years though, they're obsessed with thin, light, and quiet - even in their "pro" ranges. I've recently been issued with a 13" MacBook Pro (late 2016, non-TouchBar) by work - wanna see the heatsink Apple uses? Here's an iFixit teardown:



That tiny litle bit of copper, that's it. Damn thing doesn't even run the fan that fast either: I've seen my laptop running at ~80°C and the fan barely gets over 4,000RPM, yet the max possible fan speed reported by the SMC (firmware) is 7,200RPM!

It uses a POSIX-compliant kernel and has a bash terminal, but that's about it. To me it's different enough to Linux to cause me significant headaches. I wrote a bash script at work that usually runs in a Linux environment and makes use of "getopt" instead of "getopts" to accept parameters - when it didn't work on my MacBook I scratched my head for ages until I realised that getopt isn't implemented in macOS because getopt is not POSIX-compliant. (Yes, I know, I've since learned that I should never have used getopts in the first place... I just haven't had time to refactor my script...)

TBH Windows is closing the gap fast. Windows Subsystem for Linux was hugely useful for me at work. I've used Linux systems on and off for over 20 years, so I know my way around a terminal pretty well, but Windows "CMD" absolutely sucks in comparison and I've never been enough of a sysadmin to warrant the mental gymnastics involved in learning PowerShell. As long as you don't need a GUI - and don't futz around with your Linux rootfs in Windows Explorer - you can accomplish a hell of a lot in WSL, I've been thoroughly impressed with it. (If I had my way in work I'd be running a pure Linux desktop, but I couldn't get that past our desktop support people.)

 

Using a Macbook is more like paying thousands extra for the console...

 

G, destroyer of myths, has spoken.

Anyway, this new refresh has not brought me closer to replace my 2011 13" MB Pro (bought refurbished because I wanted something that will last me ages and guess what... it's lasted me 7 years, build quality on these babies was amazing) with a new MB Pro. It has actually pushed me further away and in the direction of the Huawei MateBook X Pro.

 

That's a very nice looking machine...

 

Also whatsapp is owned by facebook who have their own advertising system, so google would never under any circumstances have the ability to influence what ads someone sees in whatsapp.

Also also whenever you visit a website (say for example look at a product to double check you got the spelling of the product name correct) that website can request facebook to target you with an ad for it as explained here:

https://en-gb.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=10151697384894188

 

It is. Still trying to get access to employee prices, but they are tight at Huawei when it comes to giving access to notebooks. Phones and accessories, no problem as a former employee. Back to sending mails.

 

It always amuses me when someone tells me Windows isn't a true dev environment. Uh... does it have a compiler system? Does it have notepad or similar? Then it's a dev environment.

OK, so I don't write huge monolithic programs (when I do code something, it's usually as small as possible for a very specific task) but 99% of the coding I do is in Vi (if in Linux) or Notepad++ (in Windows).

Someone else might be more comfortable in Eclipse, or Visual Studio or XCode or whatever, but as hard as I've tried to get used to a large "do it all" IDE, I usually end up getting frustrated and going back to Vi/gcc...

Scientific kit in general has major problems in this respect.

You've got something that costs £2mil+ and has to have close to 100% uptime, and when given the option between the workstation OS being CentOS or Windows, why oh why would you pick Windows? Answer: because "it's more familiar". But then it sits on an open, internet facing network with several other major security no-no's with Windows Update turned off because when you're acquiring 46 days of non-stop data, the last thing you want is the console system to decide to install an update and reboot.

A super common one in Linux (not just with scientific kit) is "SELinux needs to be turned off". WTF? OK, setting up contexts might take a little time if you don't know what they are, but seriously? A useful security feature and your answer is "turn it off"?

Or how about a controller card that is still ISA based? When the console computer for that kit died, we were lucky enough to find a Pentium 4 motherboard that has ISA slots on eBay for 99p.

I got asked (about mid-2015) to fix a Windows 3 box that was controlling some truly archaic kit. At least it wasn't networked. Small mercies.

I've seen some even dumber choices too, but won't go into them.

A GUI is totally doable in WSL, provided you don't mind cheating slightly by firing up something like Xming. I've got some terminal software that comes with an (optional) GUI working quite happily that way. Even with MPI support. Sadly CUDA still doesn't work, although Microsoft are apparently working on that, because it seems to be one of the most requested things for WSL.

My only real grump with WSL is how it makes the antimalware service kick into overdrive. I can get 100% CPU utilisation on a quad core (with HT) just running 5 threads on something in WSL because Windows Defender gulps the rest.

OSX is a tweaked BSD. As hard as I've tried, there are some things which just do not translate between the two.

And that heatsink is ridiculous.

Does he have Swiftkey installed? I'd normally be happy to blame Whatsapp (because Facebook) but I dunno... there are way too many vectors with modern phones. Even with the improvements to permissions Google made with Android 8, it's still pretty broad-scope.

The $1500 version is actually workable. Looks nice. Pity the GPU is a little anaemic, but can't have everything. Especially when trying to get high-end kit in a thin 'n' light...

 

For the between 9.5W and 15W it needs to dissipate, that's pretty adequate. 80°C may be toasty for fingers by the time it has conducted its way to the outer surface of the chassis, but it's fine for the CPU itself. More Power to the Engines Fan would be an exchange of battery life for a small increase in comfort.

It's actually pretty interesting how this is implemented: the website who wants to show the ad has no idea who you are, it's all done on Facebook's end using the 'Like button' embedded images as webbugs. By knowing what URL the bug is being displayed on, and knowing the IP of the client that requests the image (as the image is hosted by Facebook) they know what user visited what page and can subsequently serve the ad. The company wanting to display an advert can request "show this advert to people who visited our webpage", but they don't get back a list of users who saw it, or get to do any of the targeting themselves.