Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tolmasky | Hacker News Reader

I am an owner of the "latest" Mac Pro, and I had the liquid cooled PowerMac G5 before that. I don't really know what to feel when it comes to the Mac Pro anymore. I used to compile WebKit a lot, and it takes forever (change one .h file and go get some lunch while you wait). When I got my Mac Pro 2 years ago it compiled it in under a minute I think. It was incredible. The best part was, back then, Xcode had the distributed builds feature, so I could go anywhere in my apartment with my Macbook Air and compiling was still crazy fast since the work was offloaded to the Mac Pro's 12 cores on my home network. Then they removed that feature from Xcode. I also had a two monitor workflow, but then they broke (for me) dual display support with Lion. The Mac Pro also doesn't support the latest and greatest graphics cards, so its not worth it in my opinion to upgrade them for Cinema 4D or games.

I don't even know if I mind really. The reality is that for the last 3 or 4 years, it feels like Apple has more and more been pushing me to not really love the computer experience anymore. When I think about my next "big" purchase, I will probably build a PC. I have never done that before in my life. I've exclusviely owned Mac. But "leaving" Mac OS X doesn't seem like a big deal to me anymore. I'll just be trading one set of frustrations (Messages, Notification Center, 5 minute long sleep wake up times, endless WiFi issues, etc) for another. At least I'll actually have fast graphics.

And Xcode will suck on my Macbook Air the same way it sucks on my Mac Pro today, so no real loss there, since I don't compile WebKit anymore. Again, its mainly just indifference now. I don't know if I miss the days when this stuff was fun, but Apple has certainly finally succeeded in making me see their computers as just tools.

>When I think about my next "big" purchase, I will probably build a PC.

I did precisely that. Instead of upgrading my MBP, I built an i5, 16GB RAM, and a gtx650ti for well under $700. I've had some teething issues with regard to my workflow but VirtualBox has been a life saver.

Years ago (but not as long as tolmasky's "exclusive"), I would have given everything to get a Mac (I was living in a place where Apple's product were neither available nor affordable).

I spend most of my time on my computer programming (or at least I did this until very recently).

What I've noticed in the last 2 years is that except maybe the Xcode environment, Apple has started to ignore every other dev environments. People have been working a lot on keeping things going (Fink, MacPort, homebrew), but by the day my feeling is that Apple doesn't care at all about this.

Basically the target audience shifted from geeks to mass audience (click to buy this app, watch a movie on this great display, etc.) and AppStore developers. Business-wise it's clear they can ignore the small segment of developers. Karma-wise I'm not convinced that's wise.

The only way I could agree with you more is if you didn't think they were catering to App Store developers. Xcode is terrible, the provisioning profiles are irritating, their requirements can be inscrutable. It seems like a bad experience compared to what few hoops Android developers have to jump through.

But I digress. With Lion and Mountain Lion is it becoming clear that they don't want any people that know how to use computers in their target demographic, they just want iPad users to have a unified experience.

I used to urge my friends and family to get OS X computers, but I have reversed that opinion and now urge them to get anything else.

My comments about Xcode were uninformed, based only on the fact that I don't run into tons of complains about it. The only time I fired Xcode to compile a project, it took me quite a bit of time to figure out where it places the compiled files. But I categorized that as "I'm a newbie. I don't know where to look"

I think it's definitely not you that is the problem :) Even the latest releases love to hog all the memory (even when idle) and mine creates zombie processes every time I run the simulator. It's the single crashiest piece of software my computer runs (multiple times daily).

Sometimes it cannot even copy files right; drag and drop, oops it failed, drag and drop again, oops it already copied the files to the folder but didn't add them to the project, now it will neither copy nor add them, you have to go delete them yourself.

I am in the same. I used to build all my PCs, then sonys, then dells, then the best *nix desktop experience and intel came along in Macs and my Mac Pros (iMacs are nice but I need more). Mac Pros and the power with that was a winner, it could continue... I think it is a bad move not to continue it. Where else can you run OSX on a beast? well a Hackintosh but that sucks. Please Apple, don't abandon the high-end, if you do let me run OSX on other hardware. I recall a time in the past when Apple got to this point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone), Jobs ended it when he got back. But they turned to it because they didn't deliver to the high end well enough.

"[Apple] turned to [licensing Apple clones] because they didn't deliver to the high end well enough."

No, the inverse was true. Apple allowed licensing because they thought clone manufacturers would be satisfied building low profit margin entry level Mac clones. Apple wanted to stick to products with higher profit margins.

What ended up happening was that companies like DayStar and PowerComputing started building way faster, more extensible tower workstations than Apple's PowerMacs. Power users loved it and Apple's high end sales suffered for it.

On the low end workstation side, Apple's Power Macintosh 4400 was actually quite price competitive with the clone offerings of the day.

The 4400 was one of the first CHRP-type boxes. They used a Motorola made motherboard and usually had board headers for parallel and PS/2. The same board (or at least a variant) was used in Motorola StarMax machines, which were quite powerful for their price, except for the 40mhz system bus. I had a "PowerCity" which was an illegal clone made from leftover Motorola parts after the Jobs decision. It was a great machine, and it was nice to have a PS/2 port on mac at the time!

I remember it well. There was a lot of talk about CHRP, but in the end, Apple released no Macs that were fully based on it. The 4400 had the same Apple designed Tanzania motherboards [1] as Motorola used in some of their StarMax machines [2]. Those boards had support for commodity PC ports like PS/2 and parallel, as well as Apple's ports. The Power Macintosh 4400 did not have parallel or PS/2 connectors. It had ADB and GeoPort serial ports [3].

I considered getting a 4400, but I ended up spending a little more on a 7300, which was a way better computer.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20010726184243/http://www.macuser...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_StarMax

[3] http://www.forevermac.com/1997/02/performa-4400160mhz-comput...

On graphics: I use a GeForce 670 in mine. Works great! No boot screen, but I have an older card for that.

It's sad all of the negatives you brought up started with the Lions. Is the pendulum swinging back? I'm even writing this comment on a MS Surface Pro which I'm completely loving.

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