from Hacker News

Return of the Mac (2005)

by jnieminen on 7/4/21, 10:14 AM with 181 comments

• by nvella on 7/4/21, 10:59 AM

  Before the inevitable comments regarding Apple's moves with macOS and how the hacker 'tide' is supposedly turning back against Apple, I think I'll chime in with my two cents. I switched from my 2015 MBP to a Surface Book 2 at the end of 2019, and switched back to my same, six-year-old MBP just a few months ago. To keep things short, whilst WSL puts Windows miles ahead of where it once was, I find that the same old rough-edges still remain.

  I often dock between standard-DPI displays and portable mode (with the high-DPI/'retina' display.) I first noticed that Windows doesn't correctly handle DPI switching with window borders, Explorer, and notifications back in 2019 (the old 2x scaling level remains when switching from portable to docked), and filed a feedback with the built-in app on Windows. I worked around this by killing dwm.exe and explorer.exe every time I docked my Surface. This issue was still present earlier this year, and deciding I had enough of dealing with all these little Windows 'quirks', wherever they arose, I switched back to my old Mac.

  It turns out that SIP and Gatekeeper aren't nearly as much of a problem as I was led to believe, neither of these features have hampered me once. The Big Sur interface changes, whilst I thought I'd never get used to them, have actually grown on me. Since switching back, I've discovered a lot of quality native apps that simply have no analog on Windows–OmniFocus stands out here. And as always, Homebrew still exists and works just as well as it always has for most of my *nix related tasks.

  Hearing about the M1 performance improvements, I can see myself staying on Mac for quite some time yet–I'll upgrade to an M1 MacBook Air once this 2015 MBP (six years old!) kicks the bucket.

  Edit: For some context, I'm mainly a .NET developer. .NET Core/5 is a game-changer for cross-platform and development is first class on really any system nowadays. I've settled on JetBrains Rider for my IDE and find myself generally happier than I was with VS on Windows.

• by ianai on 7/4/21, 10:58 AM

  Chock full of golden material and contrast/comparable points to today:

  "If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing. "

• by vishnugupta on 7/4/21, 11:59 AM

  > So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these.

  This aged well :-)

• by gogopuppygogo on 7/4/21, 11:32 AM

  MacOS was a breath of fresh air to those of us who wanted Office, Adobe, and a more polished experience than Microsoft or Linux offered at the time.

  My friend bought one of the last G3 iBooks. It ran Mac OS X 10.2 that was arguably the first “stable” release of Mac OS X.

  I had such a great experience I bought a 15” October 2005 PowerBook as my first Apple laptop.

  It was under performant compared to Intel offerings of the day but I badly wanted Mac OS X. I was thrilled when I could buy a 2007 MacBook Pro to replace it with a Core2Duo processor.

  Now, the M1 MacBook Air is so unbelievably fast and power efficient.

• by zabzonk on 7/4/21, 11:09 AM

  Is it just me, or did all these "hackers" that apparently bought Macs back then not really produce all that much hacker software (or non-hacker software, come to that)? It seems to me that Windows and Linux both had much greater funds of developer software than did the Mac ecosystem.

• by peterburkimsher on 7/4/21, 11:23 AM

  "In 1994 my friend Koling wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan, and to save long-distance bills he wrote some software that would convert sound to data packets that could be sent over the Internet. We weren't sure at the time whether this was a proper use of the Internet"

  I also have a girlfriend in Taiwan, and met her while working there for 4 years, at a job partly made possible by PTT BBS (a very old Telnet web forum). I'm so grateful for VoIP, fast Internet connections, and being able to chat to her every night (at 5:20 of course, which sounds like 我愛你 in Mandarin).

  "If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It's not enough to make it 'open.' It has to be open and good."

  Are there any such platforms nowadays, that aren't restricted by a walled garden? (says he, typing this on a 2014 MacBook Pro running 10.13, while charging his iPhone 4S running jailbroken iOS 6.1.3).

• by larusso on 7/4/21, 11:01 AM

  Yes I remember the shift around that time. I had my first contact with a Mac at school in ca 2001. OSX was just released and the school received a new order of iMac G3’s as lab computers. What can I say. I hated the machines. Everything was so weird and ugly. It didn’t help that the teachers had to run OS9 for compatibility reasons with the school software. I had a brand new WinXP desktop machine at home which was miles and leaps ahead of the iMacs ;) well for me anyways. The only thing I really liked was iTunes. That is a story on it own ;). It took a few more years for me to come around. It was with the release of snow leopard that I saw that macOS was way better than windows. I switched in 2011 professionally to mac and use it still as my daily driver. But my love for the system that sparked with snow leopard dwindled. I didn’t want to update to Catalina (was forced in the end due to a new machine I got and well Xcode) and still refuse the UI of BigSur. I switched to Arch Linux on my personal machine but have to stay on macOS professionally as the only other option my company IT can support is Windows. Well macOS is no longer the highland for developers, WSL and Apple itself saw to that. But Windows is still a no go area as a daily driver for me.

• by jimnotgym on 7/4/21, 11:56 AM

  Anecdata:

  One of our developers had used mac since the pre-Intel days. He used to develop mostly mac native apps. In recent years it has been mostly web dev in linux.

  He ran Linux through vagrant on mac. Now he does the same on pc. He says that the hardest thing about moving is that he lost his browser shortcuts.

  Ps he has a company provided PC, Intel and M1 macs on his home desk so really he can use whatever he wants.

• by user3939382 on 7/4/21, 4:19 PM

  I wonder if the title is an homage to the Mark Morrison song https://youtu.be/uB1D9wWxd2w

• by analog31 on 7/4/21, 8:32 PM

  Oddly enough it was around 2005 that I was using one platform at my workplace (Windows) and another at home (Linux). And I've used Apple II, MS-DOS, 68k Mac, etc. I decided two things:

  1. Any time spent learning the "innards" of an OS, would be spent on Linux. Most of that learning has resulted from tinkering with the Raspberry Pi.

  2. All of the software that I use on a daily basis would be platform independent, especially my programming tools.

  As a result, right now I have the luxury of being ambivalent about platforms. I actually spend remarkably little time interacting with the platform, mainly setting up networking when I get a new machine. I can choose a new computer based on ergonomics and cost. Windows happens to have the best touch screen support right now, and refurb'd computers are not intolerably expensive.

• by pvtmert on 7/4/21, 12:31 PM

  What motivates hackers like me is not the freedom. Quite opposite actually. Hacking the device require some kind of lock-in.

  So, when you achieve something, it will worth the effort.

• by GameOfKnowing on 7/4/21, 8:58 PM

  Correct me if I’m misreading the article, but it’s interesting that the differentiators Graham is citing are relatively low-level, (ie keenel stuff, cpu architecture, and OS hacking), whereas almost everyone in these comments is making statements about GUI elements and even display switching. Kinda goes to show just how abstracted away the concerns of even 16 years ago have become to today’s ~devs~

• by atlgator on 7/4/21, 6:54 PM

  Great. Now I have that song stuck in my head https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1D9wWxd2w

• by gmmeyer on 7/5/21, 3:26 PM

  Really love this footnote: "[1] These horrible stickers are much like the intrusive ads popular on pre-Google search engines. They say to the customer: you are unimportant. We care about Intel and Microsoft, not you."

• by kensai on 7/4/21, 2:23 PM

  "Though unprecedented, I predict this situation is also temporary."

  Funny enough, the situation was not temporary, the change in trend was real and sustained.

• by robomartin on 7/4/21, 3:30 PM

  While I have no issues with Apple/MacOS (we own several) or Windows (I think the nit-picking is silly) I still remember what Apple did in the PowerPC transition. That left a level of distrust for the company and how it makes decisions.

  Context is important here. I wasn't running my own business at the time. I was working for a company that had somewhere around 250 Macs and maybe 10 or 20 PC's.

  What happened?

  Apple made the transition and, as a result, all software and hardware this company had invested in became obsolete, virtually overnight. We are talking about a non-trivial amount of money and resources.

  I saw and experienced the pain that caused first hand. From that point forward I always had this in the back of my mind. As I moved to run my own business with limited funds, the last thing I wanted to face was making any investment that could be subject to that kind of a pole-shift effect. Macs, for the most part, were out.

  It's interesting to see the level of nit-picking people on HN tend to apply to a PC running Windows. I think things change when you are responsible for your own bottom line and have to get practical. There's nothing wrong with the hardware or software. At least nothing wrong enough to be a deal-breaker. The proof? Probably tens to hundreds of millions of companies running all kids of businesses just fine using PC's. Compatibility, long term viability, cost and cost of ownership (repairs!) are far more important than being able to right-click an icon to get a convenient function to work.

  Microsoft/Windows has always been about long term compatibility. That means things evolve slowly. That's OK.

  Aside from that, at least in our case, the engineering software we run won't work on anything else. In some industries you have no other options.

  The Linux question and WSL. I don't understand the complaints. I run multiple Linux virtual machines on any of our powerful Windows desktop or laptops. No issues whatsoever. Some of us dual-boot. Other than Linux hardware and other issues, no problems at all. In fact, we carefully select our hardware during builds (or when buying laptops) in order to ensure the greatest level of compatibility with both Windows and Linux software we use.

  If there is a solid justification for using an Apple machine, I am all for it. That's why we have several of them. No issues at all. I just don't think the nit-picking is valid or useful any more. If you are in business you just want to get shit done. There's nothing seriously wrong with quality PC hardware and the software ecosystem that runs on it, Linux or Windows.

• by quijoteuniv on 7/4/21, 12:22 PM

  For me is more: Exodus from the Mac Or even better: Return of the Linux converted Mac. Great machines that can be use many years if transformed. The software filoshopy does not relate to the (end of)world we are living. People that can afford them is an elite and this is not the way to go. Is Tim Cook planning to go to space just for fun too? We have a responsibility to the planet!

• by willswire on 7/4/21, 11:41 AM

  The timing of this article is interesting - I feel that the same thing is happening again with the advent of Apple Silicon.