MacBook Pro (2016) Disappointment Pushes Some Apple Loyalists To Ubuntu Linux (betanews.com) 535
Linux distributions have emerged as one of the beneficiaries in the aftermath of the MacBook Pros launch. Many people aren't pleased with the offering and prices of Apple's three new laptops and some of them are resorting to Linux-powered laptops. From a report on BetaNews: Immediately after the Apple Keynote, famed Ubuntu laptop and desktop seller, System76, saw a huge jump in traffic from people looking to buy its machines. The traffic was so intense, that it needed to upgrade servers to keep up, it said. "We experienced much more traffic than we had prepared for, the website didn't go hard down but experienced slowness. We had to scale up to return to normal. It was a pretty big surge, I don't have the details in front of me at the moment but I've not really heard of anything like this before. People being so underwhelmed by a product that immediately following a new product release they actively seek out competitor's products," says Ryan Sipes, Community Manager, System76. I decided to compare specifications and pricing on my own, so I headed to both Apple.com and System76.com to compare. Apple's new 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,400. This machine has a Quad-core Sklyake i7, maxes out at 16GB of RAM, has an NVMe 256GB SSD, and a Radeon Pro 450 with a paltry 2GB memory. Alternatively, I headed to System76 and configured its 15-inch Oryx Pro. I closely matched the MacBook Pro specs, with a Quad-core Sklyake i7 and NVMe 256GB SSD. Instead of 16GB of RAM as found on the Apple, I configured with 32GB (you can go up to 64GB if needed). By default, it comes with a 6GB Nvidia GTX 1060. The price? Less than $2,000! In other words, the System76 machine with much better specs is less expensive than Apple's.
Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the jobs bubble exploding. I can see lots of religious Apple fans saying bad things about Apple.for the first time. Heck even arstechnica posts who say the new Mac is crap don't get the autodownvote they used to enjoy every time you didn't praise Apple. Sold all my Apple stock a few days ago.
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple has been on records even with Jobs, on producing a bunch of flops.
That design that was a bit too far out (iMac G4, G4 Cube).
Tried to make something too ahead of its time and expensive (Lisa, Apple ]|[)
Tried to make technology without a good infrastructure (Newton)
Tried to get into markets no one wanted Apple in (Pippen)
Apples Laptop design is essentially the same as G4 Titanium Powerbook. From 2002. Apple is starting to get ThinkPad level of boring.
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, for most of the components like RAM, CPU, Disk, etc, etc, etc, you can order a similarly built laptop. But in no laptop I have seen can you order a separate ARM CPU to power a part of the keyboard, none of them will come with fans that reduce noise by having blades configured with unequal spacing (like the Macbook Pro has), and none of them will of course be licensed to run OS X (if that's your thing). Apple computers are expensive compared to the rest of the market on a spec vs. spec order, but thats OK.
You can of course go to Amazon and order the components and build a desktop, cheaper than an iMac, you can order a Dell laptop cheaper than Apple. Why? Because Apple will price their products to reflect the development costs and engineering expense they invest to design and deliver new parts, services, and experience. System76 does not develop any of the parts they install in their laptops, they design a package using off-the-shelf components sold by Intel, Samsung, Synaptic, and others, then put a label on it. Apple went through the expense of building the touch bar (whatever you may think about it, it wasn't free). They have Touch-ID on the laptop (also not free), and that required the Secure Element (also not free), and to design and deliver those components, of course the price is going to be more expensive, they had the cost of building those components which the other laptops do not account for.
But if you buy a laptop to run Linux, you would be ill-advised to buy a Mac. It's extremely unlikely Apple will release Linux drivers for their touch-bar, touch-id, or other components that require OS X to deliver that integrated experience. Apple do not try to deliver a "me too" laptop, they would be killed in the free market if they attempted that. They deliver a product that has differentiators other manufacturers are unable to "me too", at least at the off-set, and the price will reflect that. So i you are a budget conscious consumer, you should be looking into System-76. Those laptops will cost you less and be just as fast rendering your designs, running your programs, and doing the other things you might use it for.
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the extra stuff you mentioned is enough to make me go 'wow I want to pay for that'.
Bingo.
Yeah, some of the stuff is interesting, but not interesting enough to make me buy it.
I've never found fan noise to be a big deal, and as long as a case is durable I don't care if it's metal or plastic. The touch bar thingy is okay but not a killer "must have" feature for me.
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Hey.. I think my 2013 13" MacBook Pro is awesome.
But all these new "features" the new one has add absolutely 0 value to the 2016 version, and in fact many REDUCE its value while increasing its price.
The new MacBook is simply put: a Balmaresque Joke.
Nadella scores... Cook gets a foul.
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Enjoy your fat, heavy, low battery life, shitty screen, cheap looking System76 then. Personally, I'll take the MBP, (with a much higher resale value) over that pos any day of the week.
Enjoy your delusion that I own an Apple laptop.
I switched my Windows laptop over to Linux Mint months ago and never looked back.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but you seem very tightly wound over this. Are you perhaps having buyer's remorse and lashing out in order to make yourself feel better? Because I've never seen such a dick-headed, partisan response to someone simply saying that the new shiny from Apple doesn't appeal to them.
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I agree with your first sentence but respectfully disagree with the rest; these things are exactly what makes a laptop a premium one and I think it's fair enough. If I had lots of disposable income I'd buy one in a heartbeat. I like macOS too but to be fair I can use any OS, I'm not religious, I dropped religion after the great OS/2 flame wars.
I still have my 2006 Macbook Pro and apart from the battery it's almost like new, after all these years even moving parts like the fans are in perfectly good conditio
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with your first sentence but respectfully disagree with the rest; these things are exactly what makes a laptop a premium one and I think it's fair enough. If I had lots of disposable income I'd buy one in a heartbeat.
You haven't ever looked at (eg.) Thinkpads then? Much better built and specced than anything Apple makes.
Not every non-Apple laptop is a $300 throwaway piece of plastic junk...
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Informative)
You haven't ever looked at (eg.) Thinkpads then? Much better built and specced than anything Apple makes.
Except for the trackpad on ThinkPads, which is utter complete garbage.
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:4, Funny)
"I used to work in a quiet open-plan floor and the guy two seats over had a Mac and I could hear his fan more than mine."
I think he was doing more work than you!
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That testimonial sounds like a commercial for a homeopathic remedy where they aren't allowed to make specific claims.
"Now I sleep better every night, and I know that it's because I take 3 suppositories before bed."
but I tend to keep them twice as long as a cheaper machine
So you're claiming that you buy Macbooks at the same time as cheaper laptops, and you keep the Macbooks twice as long? Or are you saying that "I keep the Macbook for a long time, and I know that it's because it's a high-quality Apple product."
The only time I replace computers is when the current
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I'm a developer, and I don't find OSX a joy to develop on. I'm constantly having trouble sizing windows to fullscreen properly; xcode absolutely refuses to go fullscree
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Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
From 2004- 2012 ish Apple laptops could compete spec for spec and come out reasonably priced. Now their price hasn't changed much but the costs of components have dropped a lot. I actually like OS X. I haven't had to fiddle with OS settings or roll back patches in 13 years since I switched. How ever while I need a new laptop the new Mac pros are just expensive.
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From 2004- 2012 ish Apple laptops could compete spec for spec and come out reasonably priced.
This probably reflects that they've obtained the market that they want, and now want to milk some money out of it. They screwed up on RAM and they screwed up on graphics, and both choices seem to be mostly about avoiding products with higher margins to chip vendors than anything else. SkyLake I would argue is the correct choice, if they have to release in October, Kaby Lake doesn't have anything I would want in a
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Haven't looked very hard, have we?
eg. http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/l... [lenovo.com]
Re: Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is this fiction that the Lenovo trackpad is ok? There is no comparison with the trackpad on the MBP retina.
On planes I bring a mouse with me rather than use the Lenovo track pad. It's that bad.
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I turn off most mouse gestures as I tend to trigger them accidentally, and at the worst possible times.
Overloading an otherwise simple and intuitive control with a bunch of useless features that act like traps for the uninitiated is what I'd call a "UI disaster".
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Bad use of that engineering (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple will price their products to reflect the development costs and engineering expense they invest to design and deliver new parts, services, and experience.
Agreed. The problem is that in the past those costs went into developing useful features like a rugged aluminium body, a fantastic glass trackpad with gesture support, longer battery life etc. With this model that cost has gone into removing multiple important ports (one USB-A and a SD card slot would have been really nice), removing previous innovations (no mag-safe) and removing function keys to replace them with a silly gimick that would require me to divide attention between the keyboard and screen.
On top of this they release it with a CPU that is one year old and a GPU that is one generation old. This is not the Apple of a few years ago that negotiated to get early access to Intel CPUs and used cutting end GPUs in the machines. On top of that they did not refresh their desktop line and are STILL trying to sell a $4k+ Mac Pro machine which is now 3 years old. Apple have not only dropped the ball with the mac they did so so long ago that the competition has run with it and scored and they still don't even seem to realize it. Just compare the new MS Surface Studio to what Apple came up with. I've used macs for over a decade now but this even really was the last straw and reluctantly I'm heading back to Linux and Windows now.
Re: Bad use of that engineering (Score:5, Informative)
Note that's a low-end "2+2" Kaby Lake U CPU. Apple never uses those. Apple uses "2+3e" CPUs in their 13" MBP; those CPUs have a faster GPU component and eDRAM, which is part of what gives MacBooks such great GPU performance (relatively speaking).
The Kaby Lake 2+3e won't be available until Q1. Nor is the Kaby Lake 4+2 configuration used in the 15" MBP.
The only way Apple could have offered Kaby Lake in the 13" MBP would be to use a slower chip than what they picked, which would be self-defeating.
Re:Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Interesting)
Trouble is, none of these run on Linux. DaVinci Resolve does have a linux version, but not the FREE version....
I do my artsy stuff on the mac...I'm still refusing to rent my software, so for all the Adobe stuff, I have OS X versions of CS6 suite....so, I was hoping for a nice mac to upgrade to.
I was actually hoping against hope that they'd have an upgraded 5K iMac ready for market that had a boosted GPU and more graphics RAM available....or even an upgraded Mac Pro.
I'm still able to work with what I have, and can hang on a bit longer...but at some point.....well.
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Except,that doesn't often work well with applications that are, for instance, GPU heavy.
I tried this....awhile back trying to run Windows and Photoshop, After Effects, etc...in VMWare on my mac.
I wasn't able to get direct enough access to the hardware to run GPU intensive apps like After Effects.
VMs are great for so many things, but anything t
Re:Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:4, Funny)
Everything sounds like a plug when you think about it.
Except a socket.
Re:Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been holding-off on a laptop because last time I bought a new laptop to put Linux on, it had a problem with how the real time clock was handled and it was essentially not usable as a Linux box. I've put it on used laptops since then (like the Alienware M17R2 that I'm typing this on) but I hadn't seen any good sources for immediately-supported hardware. This fixes that and gives me some thought as to what I am going to do in the future, especially since the Late-2011 Macbook Pro that I'm using has the video-chipset problem that I need to take in for recall-fix, and it's getting long in the tooth anyway.
Re:Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Funny)
Why bother? This place has gone severely downhill in recent years. It's gone from being an actual news source for people in the industry to basically a linux fanboi circle jerk for shitting on Apple or Microsoft as much as possible.
Uh... Slashdot has *always* been a linux circle jerk shitting on everyone else... what are you? New here?
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Further to my other post, if you want reasons why people think Apple have lost their way, think about it like this.
I can drop several grand ($3,000 minimum) on a Mac Pro which hasn't been updated in 3 years, but still had a price increase in the UK last week - however, Apple won't sell me a compatible monitor, because they are "no longer in the standalone monitor business" and their only monitors on their store right now use yet *another* connectivity method beyond all those they introduced, one which isn't
Re:Are linux adverts still bad adverts? (Score:5, Interesting)
We have two MacBooks in our family and both are old, slow, out of date. I was waiting for the "refresh"... however, it's just underwhelming.
I bought a Chromebook a few months ago because my 2010 Macbook was getting to the point where it was unusable. Very happy with the Chromebook at a fraction of the price of the Macbook. It's much more responsive than the Macbook. I've also set up Crouton so I have native Ubuntu with just a tab key screen shift when I need it. This Chromebook also has a touch screen which I like. I'll replace the other Macbook with a Chromebook also.
Sorry Apple.
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Well, here are my reasons.
1. Runs macOS. I used Linux exclusively from 1994 to 2008. I like macOS better.
2. Better hardware for my uses. I move around with my laptop everywhere (rarely use a desk) so battery life and weight are priorities to me. The hidpi display is something I will never give up. The trackpad performs way better (on Linux, I preferred the IBM capacitive tracepoint). Generally, you get better specs and lower price on a Linux machine only if you give up on having a lightweight device.
3. B
Apps, Apps and more Apps (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux is fine and all but it is *still* missing a number of high end professional level programs in a number of fields. Until that changes (and it hasn't in how many years now?), Linux on the Laptop will be a fairly niche product. If it meets your requirements that's great. You get lots of options including MacBooks in their limited incantations.
But no Adobe, Autodesk, Maya etc.
Life's a bitch. Then you vote.
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I am using DraftSight as a replacement for Autocad on Linux. Free as a beer. It is very compatible opening drawings and other Autocad related files and has 95% of features in comparison with full AutoCAD.
Re:Apps, Apps and more Apps (Score:4, Interesting)
A common problem is that being 99.9% compatible is not enough. As soon as a customer gets a drawing or document with messed up formatting the jig is up. If it is a MS Word 201X vs MS Word 201Y issue, management doesn't care. As soon as you mention open source, for "equivalent" or anything of the sort, you get shut down. For business it often is not worth the perceived headache to not be 100% the same as your customers or colleagues, even if the license fees look horrendous to a mere peon.
We recently swapped all our machines from CentOS to Redhat because the vendor would not believe our bug submissions unless we used the officially supported OS. None of our bugs were OS related (we had been keeping one Redhat machine around for bug double checking, but it was becoming a hassle). According to our moles the vendor actually does all of their development on CentOS and then verifies against Redhat, but they will never admit it openly.
Re:Apps, Apps and more Apps (Score:4, Insightful)
Big-ish (such as Adobe) and niche consumer software vendors have had no reason to support Linux and its paltry 2% usage share, and many reasons not to, including MS platform FUD and the legal understanding of FOSS licenses.
Apple has a reputation for supporting professionals, but this new lineup all but wipes that out. The hardware is too underwhelming to maintain the hype. Apple has finally reached the point where their obsession with aesthetic design is compromising their products' capabilities. Apple has fully abandoned "form follows function" in favor of "function follows form", and in doing so have put themselves on a path to failure.
System76 may have experienced a traffic spike, but unfortunately it won't last once all the disillusioned Apple users realize how spoiled they've been by OSX.
Re:Apps, Apps and more Apps (Score:4, Informative)
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That is the hope, but there is a good chance that they may just drop the offerings altogether and focus solely on consoles, with -maybe- some shoddy port for Windows.
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The only other large group of people I know using MacBooks are developers who wanted a desktop Unix that IT would be willing to support. With the loss of the function keys and the abysmal max memory spec, the new MacBook Pros are worthless for that crowd. They might be pushed towards Linux, but with Microsoft starting to push Linux dev tools into Windows, the "IT supported" requirement probably means they'll hook back to Windows instead.
Its not just IT... Its also commercial software vendors who make things we all sometimes need to use, even if not as our primary tools.
Regardless, I've often felt that this is a surprisingly large/significant market for Apple products that Apple themselves seems willfully ignorant of. I've even felt that the growth of this market was at the significant expense of desktop Linux. Heck, come out to Silicon Valley sometime and just look at how large a percentage of software developers are using Apple laptops
That's excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's excellent! (Score:5, Informative)
GIMP and Blender are probably fine for some web graphics work, and maybe even some in-house print work. But they really do lack a lot of the nuanced or finer-grain tools necessary for commercial projects. They can also be problematic where files need to be worked on by different people in different companies at different points in the project. Since the fall of QuarkXPress, the industry standardized on Adobe for good or ill. You realistically cannot just decide to change tool sets without changing the industry.
You can call Adobe crap if you want, and maybe you're right, but I've never had a project fail to go to press because of an issue with Creative Suite. I have seen projects fail to go to press because some freelancer decided to use something other than Adobe software and a graphic didn't show up on the DI because an EPS had some weird quirk in its code. If you're building a product that's used in the creative industry like a digital press, or platemaker, or anything else; you are building and testing with Adobe.
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Oh please, GIMP is a toy.
When will GIMP have native Layer Effects?
* Gradient Overlay
* Outer Glow
When will it have native support for 16-bit and 32-bit raw importing?
Because GIMP 2.8 is a joke compared to Photoshop.
--
Bose is shit and a bunch of cowards. Where are the technical specs??
Re: That's excellent! (Score:5, Informative)
Does GIMP's UI remain poor even after turning on Windows > Single Window Mode? If so, what are your specific UI annoyances with GIMP and Blender?
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Re: That's excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)
...Inkscape is very good for vector graphics, much better than illustrator.
Better, unless you are planning to take your work to a printing company. Inkscape does not appear support knockouts or overprints which means you would have to rely on auto-trapping software if the printer even has that. Inkscape was clearly not built for color separations. Better if don't need a gradient mesh.
Because it's been years, I looked at the Inkscape web site. They still promote bezier curves as a bullet point. That's like an auto manufacturer touting a steering wheel. Simpler than Adobe Illustrator? Almost certainly. Better than Illustrator? Yeah...no.
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GIMP and Blender already *are* used in professional work. Just because you don't like the UIs and don't know how to use the software properly doesn't make it unprofessional. It's a just different workflow than what you're used to.
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Re: That's excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)
The UI in pretty much every Adobe product isn't any better. The learning curve for new users is atrociously steep.
Interesting example of how words and phrases, through usage, can come to mean the opposite of their original meanings. From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org] "A learning curve is a graphical representation of the increase of learning (vertical axis) with experience (horizontal axis)." and "The familiar expression "a steep learning curve" is intended to mean that the activity is difficult to learn, although a learning curve with a steep start actually represents rapid progress."
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http://lmgtfy.com/?q=companies... [lmgtfy.com]
https://www.linuxjournal.com/a... [linuxjournal.com]
I gave up before the launch (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:I gave up before the launch (Score:4, Interesting)
I figured out with Yosemite that Apple was moving in a direction I didn't want to follow anymore. I'm using a Surface Book these days and IMO it's the best computer I've ever used or owned.
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A few things, but it falls under nearly all of the new features didn't help me as I didn't have an iPhone nor did I want one. On top of that, the user interface overhaul left me unable to have desktop background featuring a photo because the icons lacked edges. Due to the way I perceive things, I had to consciously 'look' for icons because without edges, I just saw blobs of color blended in with everything else.
Touch ID power button (Score:2, Funny)
Who is the genius at Apple that thought of making the Power Button and Touch ID the same? It's comedic. Give that guy his own show on Comedy Central. How many people will inadvertently shut off their Mac?
They will need a software fix. But can they make it work properly when stuff is frozen?
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Who is the genius at Apple that thought of making the Power Button and Touch ID the same? It's comedic. Give that guy his own show on Comedy Central. How many people will inadvertently shut off their Mac?
They will need a software fix. But can they make it work properly when stuff is frozen?
You get a nag screen if you push the off button on a Mac much like you get in Windows and most Linuxes today. I'd be pretty surprised if inadvertently shutting the thing down via Touch ID would cause it to shut down without warning and nix all your work.
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When you push the power button now it doesn't turn the laptop off. You need to hold it down to take effect. So I assume it will work the same and it will be difficult to accidentally turn off your computer.
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They need a software fix for a button nobody outside of Apple (and a few tech media) has pressed?
My MBP Replacement (Score:2)
When Apple stopped making their 17" laptops I jumped to Dell.
My current machine is a M6700 with a 3940XM [cpubenchmark.net], 32GB of RAM, 4 hard drives, 2 wifi cards, IEEE1394, 5x USB, eSata, Display Port, VGA, and HDMI. I've tested it with Windows, Linux and BSD and all work just fine.
Then again it's the antithesis of what most Apple laptops are, the battery life sucks but it's a mobile workstation and I need that.
With all those specs, new, it cost ~$5k.
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Because you know my usage cycle best?
With ZFS that gives me a mirrored 1TB pool for redundancy working anywhere. 2 SSD drives are 2 OS drives or an OS drive and scratch SSD drive.
2 Wifi cards allows you to connect to separate networks or turn one into an access point. (For those hotels that only allow 1 device on their network at a time.)
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Then you come here to bitch and moan about bog-standard consumer laptops being a bad fit for you and how Apple is a crap company
[Citation Needed].
I pointed out it was exactly the type of machine Apple didn't make but that I was one of the people that needed it. Please point out my 'bitching and moaning' or specifically where I said apple was a "crap company".
Pushes Some Apple Loyalists To Ubuntu Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Pushes Some Apple Loyalists To Ubuntu Linux
I would think that some will actually be very few. I'm a Linux fan, but I think it will only attract the very few technically aware MacBook users. Though getting better, Linux is does not match the "everything works" Apple philosophy, i.e. you buy a graphics tablet or whatever, plug it in and all your apps will work with it straight off.
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That was my thought too... They're on opposite ends of the spectrum.
You have Expensive, lots of hand-holding with Apple to Free (OS) and comparatively cheap hardware with no handholding with Linux. Microsoft windows sits between Apple and Linux on the spectrum. Or is, owning Apple a prescription to hating MS so willing to skip over them completely.
Not me (Score:5, Informative)
So I've been a Linux user since 1994, and it's been my primary development environment, and provided me a job, for 20+ years now, and for that I'm very thankful. I love developing on Linux.
That being said, I owned a succession of Linux laptops that never worked entirely correctly before I got my retina macbook pro in 2012. I'd say 25% of system updates to my Linux distro would break something, maybe a wireless driver would get flaky, maybe X11 would crap out in some new or unusual way, maybe the battery life would be bad because some kind of battery optimization would stop working. There were ALWAYS problems, it was like living with a finicky collector's automobile that you're spending as much time tinkering with to keep it running as you are actually driving it. A major source of problems with Linux was always sleep and hibernate modes, which were clunky to engage, slow to suspend and resume, and, if they worked, almost always had caveats (I don't know how many scripts I wrote that would switch to a virtual console away from X before suspend and then back again after resume, because X would so often just die if you suspended while it controlled the display).
Maybe things have improved, but I doubt it. On the other hand, this 2012 macbook pro has been a complete pleasure to use. EVERYTHING works correctly, I have never had a single problem of any kind with it. Tons of little details all work seamlessly together. I can close the lid and the thing sleeps, open it, and it wakes up. Never had a graphics problem or a driver problem of any kind.
Of course I know this is because the deck is stacked in favor of Apple, who own the entire stack from hardware through operating system and up through most software. But I don't care. Because it just works, and works so well.
That being said, I am very disappointed with the newest iteration of the macbook pro and I don't think I'll be buying one despite having assumed that I would, leading up to the actual announcement. I will just chug along with this 2012 rMBP. I will NOT switch back to Linux. I'll take a correctly functioning slower and older laptop over a fast and new machine filled with quirks and bugs.
Re:Not me (Score:5, Insightful)
This. I had the exact same experience with Linux, and made the exact same switch when the Retina MacBook Pros were first released. I still use Linux whenever possible on servers, but I don't have time to screw around with my desktop and laptop machines. I need them to just work, which Apple mostly accomplishes (aside from a few relatively minor and very occasional issues).
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That still doesn't buy you a lot if you need stuff that runs specifically on OSX, although I think that most commercial stuff should at least have a windows port. I might end up feeling differently abou
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I can fix everything that comes my way in Linux with enough time and effort. I can go all the way down to modifying kernel source and recompiling if necessary.
The thing is, I don't want to spend my time doing that. There was a time in the 90's when that was fun because it was a liberating feeling of having a level of control not afforded by other operating systems. But pretty quickly, it became a chore, when I had to keep fixing the same sorts of problems over and over again.
I agree that not being able t
Pour salt in the wound... (Score:5, Funny)
"We experienced much more traffic than we had prepared for, the website didn't go hard down but experienced slowness." And now it gets posted to Slashdot? Way to go!
Should be marked "Sponsored Post" (Score:5, Interesting)
2017 the year of the Linux Laptop (Score:2)
Reusing an old slogan, it does work however just without the fanfare.
Slashdotted? (Score:2)
it needed to upgrade servers to keep up
500 Internal Server Error. Apparently not enough of an upgrade. Hopefully they are better at building computers than they are at running websites. =)
System76 can't do what I need (Score:2)
They fail to offer the one thing I need for a computer to actually be functional for me - Run macOS. (legally, without fighting drivers and hacking kexts)
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What application does macOS run that neither Windows nor X11/Linux also runs? The only important one I can think of is Xcode, if you happen to be employed as a developer of applications for Apple platforms.
Doesn't make much sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Brilliant Marketing! (Score:2)
I doubt they were really so deluged with orders they had to bring new servers online after the MBP launch, but they certainly need them now that they got such a lovely fluff piece on Slashdot! I've been an Apple user for 27 years, and I'm less happy with them now than ever because they are going too far in the consumer market with the computers. But their market and System76 has a tiny overlap. But kudos to System76 for getting this marketing published on Slashdot!
What does Linux have to do with Apple hardware? (Score:2)
The conclusions of this article make no sense outside of the context of an advertorial.
Welcome to the Dark Side (Score:2)
Since when has Apple been about bang/buck? (Score:5, Interesting)
Depending on which side of the religious divide you occupy, people buy Apple because:
You've always been able to get more performance for less money, and yet they still sell. So what's the news here?
Bump in Upgrades? (Score:2)
I'd be more curious about any bump in upgrades for existing MacBooks.
My 2012-era MacBook Air and MacBook Pro both work fine, save for the battery in the Air and the drives in both. I was waiting to see if it'd be worth getting a new one or just spending the money on upgrades. Verdict? Upgrades for the win. Rather than spending $3-4k on new computers (and a few hundred more on all the adapters I'd need to get my peripherals working), I'll spend around $600 and have both running fine for the next few years.
I
Press Ctrl-Alt-Cmd-Fn-OpenApple-SadEmoji to exit. (Score:2)
Immediately after the Apple Keynote, famed Ubuntu laptop and desktop seller, System76, saw a huge jump in traffic from people looking to buy its machines.
Pfft. Idiots. Good luck trying to compete when you're spending all your time escaping out of applications and powering off the machine with errant key presses and picking your emojis from a list like a bunch of animals.
Grow up and get serious, you dinosaurs.
Reality distortion field (Score:2)
Don't forget the magic pixie dust they sprinkle in every build. That's gotta be worth a lot, right?
Did you look at the system 76's laptop (Score:2)
I have looked, found nowhere the same form factor as 13" macbook pro. Only big ugly laptop to be found there. I'd go with the Dell XPS 13" Developer edition that is about the same price range as the macbook.
"closely matched" specs (Score:5, Informative)
I can't believe this is on the front page. This is the oldest Apple flamewar ever.
I agree, the new MBP is . . . terrible. But the idea that this Oryx "closely matches" the MBP is ridiculous beyond the CPU. They're wildly different. Apologies, but . . . apples and oranges.
The Oryx:
- is made of plastic
- weighs about 40% more
- has a much lower resolution screen
- lacks that touch bar and expensive ARM hardware (which granted, pretty much no one, including me, wants)
- lacks any thunderbolt, let alone two separate thunderbolt 3 controllers (the big "pro" feature in the new MBP)
- has a smaller battery and way more power hungry components
- an SSD that I'm pretty sure is nowhere near as fast
- doesn't run OS X
These are the things that jack up the price of the MBP. Whether or not they're a sensible cost proposition is very different from "see, practically the same." Apple screwed up and inflated the price with things people don't want.
It's cool that System76 is getting a lot more attention. I think I'm about to buy a Puri.sm laptop, the disappointing new MBP put me over. But come on, they are not the same. One might make a lot more sense to a lot of people, but the "see I built the same thing for way less money" victory dance is just tired, and embarrassing for the front page of a site that's supposed to have editors.
Silly spec comparison, and System76 (Score:3)
I have a System76, but honestly I barely use it because it is loud and it has the worst laptop keyboard I've ever encountered (the key spacing is designed for people with HUUUGE hands and any lateral force causes the key to stick and not go down, making typing nearly impossible). And the battery life aint too hot either. The System76 is powerful, but inconvenient. I actually prefer my chromebook, which is much smaller (smaller screen, lower resolution, much less ram, much slower cpu, etc)... but far more usable.
Apple stuff is expensive, but I wonder about people who complain about base specs all the time. 'more' is not necessarily 'better'. My dinky little chromebook has only 4G of ram but I don't even feel it when it pages to/from its SSD. There's no point stuffing 32GB of ram into a laptop, frankly. It's just a waste of power (and money).
I will of course stuff as much ram into a box as is economically feasible, just because I'm me. I have a dual-socket xeon system with 128GB of ram, for example, and I have a broadwell desktop with 64GB of ram. Both are being used as servers and build boxes at the moment.
But the box I currently use for my workstation only has 8GB of ram and I don't feel the paging to/from the SSD even with tons of Chrome windows leaking memory all over the place so I have been in no hurry to replace. In fact, my workstation is just a dinky old Haswell i3 box, and yet it has no problem driving two 4K monitors or playing video. It wouldn't win any prizes playing games, but then again I don't use it to play games.
Update to present-day NVMe SSDs, which have ~3-5x the read performance of a SATA SSD, and I kinda wonder where these complaints come from.
-Matt
Why I'm not upgrading (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Apple laptop hardware since the 12" PowerBook G4. My most recent purchase was in 2014. This is the first laptop release I am refusing to buy, after having said earlier this year (pre-announcement) that I would be upgrading.
For me, the reasons have little to do with the performance-related specifications, and everything to do with what I perceive to be tremendous arrogance on the part of Apple and the particular design choices that were made that, in my view, clearly reveal their willingness to sacrifice--indeed, completely disregard--function in favor of design.
The first problem is the removal of MagSafe. Ever since it was introduced, they've done multiple iterations of the MagSafe connector, to the point that it was even parodied by CollegeHumor, only to remove it entirely.
The second is the removal of all ports except USB-C / Thunderbolt 3, and then charging $19 - $45 for each optional adapter, rather than including even the most basic USB to USB-C in the box. For a machine that is targeted toward professionals and can cost $3000, this is unacceptable. You need to buy the extra adapter just to have functionality that you currently have with hardware that Apple itself provided (e.g., iPhone/iPad). Then, to say that you made this design choice to improve the portability and weight of the device, is just sophistry: by making people buy and keep track of a whole slew of adapters just to recover the functionality they had before is a step backwards in portability and ease of use. To me, this indicates that Jony Ive only cares about what the machine looks like and doesn't give a fuck about how people in the real world might actually use it.
The third problem is the lack of an included 3-prong extension cable. Yes, for a lot of people, this was optional. But making it optional out of the box means that it's one more hidden cost, especially for an adapter that already costs so much on its own. Why take it out of the box now? Is $3000 too little profit margin for Apple?
The fourth problem, and the most telling of all, is the overall choice to limit the hardware specifications--for example, the maximum allowed RAM--on a device that does not have user-serviceable RAM, no less, simply because it would have impacted battery life. This is an outright lie, because all you should do is make the battery bigger and the device thicker. This tells us that Apple again chooses to put design first and usability and performance last.
Why buy this product? It reeks of hubris, and this is coming from someone who, again, has been a long-time user of Apple products.
Gaaaaak! The early 2000's called back! (Score:3)
Linux Mint for Me (Score:4, Informative)
Yup. Linux has mostly caught up. I am considering moving to Linux Mint. Tim Cook and Jony Ive have ruined Apple.
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Yeah - being able to buy an equivalently or better specced machine then a MacBook Prop for less money has always been an option - that has not stopped people from buying MacBooks in the past, so I fail to see the news here. Now, I agree that the new MacBook Pros are a bit disappointing, and that there might be other laptops which compete very well. But the laptop mentioned in this slashvertisement fails to impress.
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Re: Too Bad the Screen is Crap (Score:5, Informative)
these comparisons miss the fact that the Retina display is sooo much better for the vast majority of things that most Linux users do with computers. Text-mode consoles and development are infinitely easier with high-dpi text; I've literally more than doubled the amount of time I can use a computer in a day without developing a headache by using higher-quality displays
I have zero problems with my 1080 display. The text looks fine and is not blurry. I do not get headaches and I'm on the computer pretty much all day. If I wanted to see an individual pixel, I'd have to get out a magnifying glass. And this is on a 23" desktop monitor, so the DPI has to be much lower compared to a 15" laptop at 1080.
I suspect most people are drooling over resolution numbers and not actual performance. That's not to say that you aren't helped by it, but my guess is you're in the minority, because I really don't hear about getting headaches as a common complaint from computer users.
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Me too. I bought my 13.3 laptop used, and it has a QHD screen, switched it to 1080p and it looks the same, even up close. No headaches either. Battery lasts much longer as well.
Re: Too Bad the Screen is Crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Question: how old are you? :). I suspect there are more people with my issues than you give me credit for, although my point continues to be: the $2k for a system76 computer is not apples-to-apples to the $2400 MBP, and that the high-dpi screen, along with the software care that has gone into making it usable and functional across a wide variety of applications and actual "apparent" resolutions is quite valuable.
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Assume that he pays himself $10/hr. OS X only needs to save him 50 hours over the course of owning it for him to break even.
Assume that he pays himself $50/hr. OS X only needs to same him 10 hours over the course of owning it for him to break even.
Why do people always assume their time is free?
Re:is he really saving money? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a difference between "free" and "costs nothing".
My time costs nothing. I don't need to pay anyone. I can take my time and do it my way, at my own convenience and stop when I like.
However, forking out $500 extra is not something I can necessarily do at any point.
But, to be honest, you're assuming that a) they're an existing Mac user, b) they can't cope on Ubuntu and c) things are easier to learn on Mac than on Ubuntu.
Not all of those are going to be true. And when they're not, the time factor is common to both machines, or specific to your particular workload.
For instance, after 20 years in the industry, I still feel a productivity drop the second I hit a Mac workstation. I literally feel held back on what I want to achieve. When it works, sure, it's fine like anything else. But when it doesn't, it's a damn nightmare and finding service and support is not cheap if you don't like the answer "We'll just reinstall". And I'm not just talking Mac desktops but Mac "servers" as well (P.S. a bog-standard Mac with a software upgrade from the App Store isn't a "server").
Take, for instance, when I needed to renew a certificate. On one Mac Mini server we were using, I clicked Renew, it said it was successful, done. On another, identical, purchased at the same time, same spec, redundant Mac Mini performing the same functions, the Renew failed. Two hours later, after basically using a terminal and what amounted to OpenSSL commands, I got it to renew without breaking the certificate chain. UI options to do that after failure? ZERO. And guess where the Renew button is, go on... I dare you. It changes between OS versions and is tucked away in an obscure place half the time.
Sure, it's not every day, but that's the instances I use them. And in the every day stuff, I avoid them precisely because of stuff like this. We have suites of Macs... the users avoid them and can get into all kinds of trouble especially where keychains or App Store apps are involved. Simple fixes but "only if you know how".
Macs are nice WHILE THEY WORK and you use them to do simple things. The time and effort when they don't is multiplied enormously compared to competitors. I can google and in five seconds find an Ubuntu page for basically anything I want to do. With Macs, I can spend hours searching forums (central knowledgebase is bog-useless, a bit like MS KB, but at least most general PC forums can help you on a Windows PC) and end up at the answer "You can't" or "Nobody knows."
Yes, I manage them. I manage hundreds of iPads and dozens of Macs, and some servers. And they consume more time than hundreds of Chromebooks, hundreds of PCs and dozens of Windows servers. Over my lifetime I've managed hundreds of them, thousands of iPads and thousand and thousands of other machines. And I still choose not to use them whenever possible because of the time-suck that finding out how to do something simple can be.
Think of it this way: The Mac is more expensive and makes some functions easier. The Ubuntu is cheaper, and takes more legwork. Windows is the middle ground, not cheap but not simple either.
However, when things go wrong, that flips completely on its head.
P.S. I had a 2-week argument with Apple only recently because we can't create iTunes accounts for a school. Doesn't matter what they get me to sign up to, etc. they have no support for it, the systems they have in place (including Apple School Manager which is still in Beta over here), etc. does not provide me with the simplest of functionality to lock down an iPad, even with £100k of Cisco Meraki MDM kit. Their ultimate solution was to relax a security restriction so I could manually create iTunes accounts so that kids with iPads could sign in and use them. That's their solution for A SCHOOL with hundreds of these things.
When things go wrong, or outside of their intended use-case, Apple honestly could not care less. I'd rather not pay for that attitude, and avoid having to d
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Other than size, weight, battery life, wake from sleep that actually works, wifi performance, ssd performance, cross-device integration, speaker quality, macOS... but other than that, what HAVE apple bothered to do for their users?