Should I get a Macbook?
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@stillwater Should you buy a MacBook? Let's see what the guy who repairs them for a living thinks:
https://youtu.be/AUaJ8pDlxi8
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@magus said in Should I get a Macbook?:
The biggest thing you should remember is that, regardless of everything else, the software will make you rage for a while, and when tired you will make many, many mistakes. Not because of any fault on Apple's part, but because everything is the opposite from what you're used to.
Want to close a window? That'd be on the left. Want to say yes to a dialog? That's the rightmost option.
Your years of muscle memory will work against you for a long time, and even after you adjust, will still get you when you get tired and distracted.
So as long as you're prepared for that, you may be fine, all the other things in this thread notwithstanding.
I didn't have any trouble when I first got my Mac, after decades of DOS/Windows, and continue to have no trouble switching back and forth. But YMMV and all that
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
(for example) dragging a directory from an Explorer window into an Open File dialog of an application.
I would expect it to act like dragging the file from an Explorer window to an Explorer window. If I wanted to open a file with a given application that was already open, I would have instead tried to drag the file from Explorer into the main application window....
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
so I’m still kind of wondering why you feel this way about it. Other than speculating, as above, that it’s because you basically feel that, “It’s not how Windows does things."
Have you seen how he evangelize
sd a certain forum software?
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@hungrier said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@magus said in Should I get a Macbook?:
The biggest thing you should remember is that, regardless of everything else, the software will make you rage for a while, and when tired you will make many, many mistakes. Not because of any fault on Apple's part, but because everything is the opposite from what you're used to.
Want to close a window? That'd be on the left. Want to say yes to a dialog? That's the rightmost option.
Your years of muscle memory will work against you for a long time, and even after you adjust, will still get you when you get tired and distracted.
So as long as you're prepared for that, you may be fine, all the other things in this thread notwithstanding.
I didn't have any trouble when I first got my Mac, after decades of DOS/Windows, and continue to have no trouble switching back and forth. But YMMV and all that
Your intelligence capacity is apparently greater. ;)
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@tsaukpaetra have you seen how everyone else here shits on perfectly good forum software?
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@pie_flavor said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@tsaukpaetra have you seen how everyone else here shits on perfectly good forum software?
No. I have not witnessed such a thing as "perfectly good forum software", so clearly you are delusional.
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@tsaukpaetra there's this thing called discourse
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@pie_flavor said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@tsaukpaetra there's this thing called discourse
.... So? Do you engage in it very often?
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@timebandit said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@pie_flavor Chromebook can play movies just fine.
Don't know about coding on it
It has SSH on it, and I do a lot of coding in vim-over-ssh.
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@pie_flavor said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@ben_lubar said in Should I get a Macbook?:
I do a lot of coding in vim-over-ssh
My condolences.
Eh, it's nice to be able to run Windows so I can play video games and also have the ability to write code in a Linux environment that I can connect to on my laptop remotely without getting out of my chair.
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@ben_lubar said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@pie_flavor said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@ben_lubar said in Should I get a Macbook?:
I do a lot of coding in vim-over-ssh
My condolences.
Eh, it's nice to be able to run Windows so I can play video games and also have the ability to write code in a Linux environment that I can connect to on my laptop remotely without getting out of my chair.
I have a mental disconnect with what you've said in the last few posts.... Your Chromebook runs Windows?
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@deadfast said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@stillwater Should you buy a MacBook? Let's see what the guy who repairs them for a living thinks:
https://youtu.be/AUaJ8pDlxi8Wow. Hmmm..... Okay this means Macs are overpriced AFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
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@ben_lubar said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@timebandit said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@pie_flavor Chromebook can play movies just fine.
Don't know about coding on it
It has SSH on it, and I do a lot of coding in vim-over-ssh.
You must surely be joking!
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@stillwater said in Should I get a Macbook?:
Wow. Hmmm..... Okay this means Macs are overpriced AFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
Nono, Macs aren't overpriced. The intricate craftmanship and attention to detail that goes into the that's prominently displayed on every product is worth every single penny!
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@atazhaia said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@stillwater said in Should I get a Macbook?:
Wow. Hmmm..... Okay this means Macs are overpriced AFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.
Nono, Macs aren't overpriced. The intricate craftmanship and attention to detail that goes into the that's prominently displayed on every product is worth every single penny!
So when a Macbook is priced at 2000 USD, I am paying about 1800 USD for a half eaten apple that is not even in fucking color. Understood!
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@tsaukpaetra said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
(for example) dragging a directory from an Explorer window into an Open File dialog of an application.
I would expect it to act like dragging the file from an Explorer window to an Explorer window.
Mac users expect the Open dialog to now display the contents of the dropped directory, not to move the directory to the one being displayed in the dialog. This is a double problem if you do it unthinkingly on a Windows machine, since not only doesn’t it display the directory you want, you also won’t be able to find it anymore where you last saw it.
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@ben_lubar said in Should I get a Macbook?:
It has SSH on it, and I do a lot of coding in vim-over-ssh.
how do you live with the latency??
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@bb36e said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@ben_lubar said in Should I get a Macbook?:
It has SSH on it, and I do a lot of coding in vim-over-ssh.
how do you live with the latency??
Experienced
vim
users don't use the mouse to position the cursor, and also do not rely on holding down arrow keys to get to the right place. Rather, you are jumping around using move commands where you know exactly where the cursor will be after each key press. Search for this string. Go to the definition of that. More 7 words forward. Move 2 lines up.Since the commands get buffered reliably, the fact the cursor you're seeing isn't up to date isn't that relevant.
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@pleegwat I'm surprised at how many people find Vim over SSH exotic. I mean, if you have a bunch of development virtual machines on your LAN, latency isn't going to be a thing to worry about.
Controlling a cheap VPS over the internet, however... but hopefully, by the time you're ready for that, you have configuration management scripts ready and tested and aren't going to be editing anything.
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@captain I do daily development over SSH to a server on the other side of the pond. That's where you learn to get used to latency, and to use input methods which aren't very sensitive to it.
On a LAN link, vim won't be slower than locally. And vim in itself is not slow.
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@pleegwat sure, but insert mode with latency sucks if you make a typo. one wrong (or extra) keypress and all your commands are offset and you won't find out what happens until everything gets updated seconds later.
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- I don't generally work with seconds of latency
- Weirdly, while I do make typos, I generally notice them before I see them on the screen. Even if I'm not looking at the screen. Though I tend to have to look at the screen to resolve them.
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@pleegwat said in Should I get a Macbook?:
I don't generally work with seconds of latency
yeah, I think this is more of a problem for me specifically, I was hexed by a warlock a decade ago and ever since then, every wifi network I've had to use has had unbearable latency and packet loss
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@stillwater said in Should I get a Macbook?:
So when a Macbook is priced at 2000 USD, I am paying about 1800 USD for a half eaten apple that is not even in fucking color.
Funny I never thought about it this way but when I went running and screaming away from the Mac ecosystem was right around the time they switched from their nice colorful logo to the boring silver one.
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@bb36e said in Should I get a Macbook?:
sucks if you make a typo
So learn to not do that. If you find that hard, switch to
ed
; that really persuades you to not do typos.
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@bb36e said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@pleegwat sure, but insert mode with latency sucks if you make a typo. one wrong (or extra) keypress and all your commands are offset and you won't find out what happens until everything gets updated seconds later.
<aside>This is a situation also well-known to anyone using InDesign with a document that cross-references other documents when those are not open. Though I would happily settle for seeing the outcome just seconds later — it can literally be a minute or more. Fucking hell, Adobe!</aside>
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
(for example) dragging a directory from an Explorer window into an Open File dialog of an application.
I would expect it to act like dragging the file from an Explorer window to an Explorer window.
Mac users expect the Open dialog to now display the contents of the dropped directory, not to move the directory to the one being displayed in the dialog. This is a double problem if you do it unthinkingly on a Windows machine, since not only doesn’t it display the directory you want, you also won’t be able to find it anymore where you last saw it.
TIL browsing to a folder is so complex that such workarounds exist... What happens if you drop a file into the open file dialog then?
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@tsaukpaetra What happens is that the dialog will also switch to the directory the file is in. It’s not hard to navigate using the dialog, but if you already have a Finder window open with the folder you want, IME it’s often faster to drag and drop something from there. Of course, with all the hip kids seemingly wanting to work in full-screen windows these days, navigating in the dialog is probably going to be quicker for them.
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
navigating in the dialog is probably going to be quicker for them.
I guess that's just the difference then. See, I wouldn't have ever used the dialog in the first place, because I could have just dragged the file into the program (though perhaps avoiding the document part) and skipped all of that to begin with.
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
What happens is that the dialog will also switch to the directory the file is in. It’s not hard to navigate using the dialog, but if you already have a Finder window open with the folder you want, IME it’s often faster to drag and drop something from there.
A real Mac user would just drag and drop the icon into the window or onto the program's icon. Open dialog? What's that?
Real Mac users have drag & drop in the blood.
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@blakeyrat Okay, Save dialogs, then.
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@blakeyrat said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
What happens is that the dialog will also switch to the directory the file is in. It’s not hard to navigate using the dialog, but if you already have a Finder window open with the folder you want, IME it’s often faster to drag and drop something from there.
A real Mac user would just drag and drop the icon into the window or onto the program's icon. Open dialog? What's that?
Real Mac users have drag & drop in the blood.
Oh, so I wasn't so off the mark in my Windows-like expectation. Fancy that...
@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@blakeyrat Okay, Save dialogs, then.
That makes more sense. Though I do wish there would be an intuitive drag-n-drop operation for save-as too...
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@tsaukpaetra said in Should I get a Macbook?:
That makes more sense. Though I do wish there would be an intuitive drag-n-drop operation for save-as too...
IIRC there was an OS (BeOS?) that let you drag the little icon of a window in the top left to a filesystem folder to Save As to that location.
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@blakeyrat said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Should I get a Macbook?:
That makes more sense. Though I do wish there would be an intuitive drag-n-drop operation for save-as too...
IIRC there was an OS (BeOS?) that let you drag the little icon of a window in the top left to a filesystem folder to Save As to that location.
I was thinking the same, but that wouldn't be nearly so discoverable...
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@tsaukpaetra said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@blakeyrat Okay, Save dialogs, then.
That makes more sense.
You know the annoying thing about people on this forum? The way they on the one hand tend to not need any explanations at all to understand your meaning, and at the exact same time, take everything as exactly what you type without deviating from what’s written even a little bit — even if you precede it with words like “for example” to indicate you’re referring to more than just what you actually say.
</rant>Though I do wish there would be an intuitive drag-n-drop operation for save-as too...
There is, sort of, on macOS — but it’s not very discoverable unless you know it can be done. Namely: the title bar of a document window displays the filename with the file’s icon; you can drag the icon to anywhere you like in the Finder to move it there, and by having Option pressed when you release the mouse button, it copies the file instead.
Most people, I think, don’t know you can do anything at all with that icon, though, because it’s not exactly made obvious anywhere. (Other stuff it does: right-click the icon to see the full path to the file, in a drop-down menu where clicking a folder name opens that in the Finder; and allow renaming, assigning tags, and/or moving of the file by clicking the downward arrow to the right of the filename.)
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@blakeyrat said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@stillwater From what I understand literally everybody everywhere hates the new Apple keyboard, to the extent that there's HackerNews posts saying they should recall the thing. I have no personal experience with it myself. EDIT: article so you don't think I'm blowing smoke: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2018/04/26/apple-macbook-pro-keyboard-fault-oline-opinion/#5493c75877c7
It's true that Apple used to have really nice hardware, but I think that era's long past now. I'll stick by my Acers, personally.
Longtime (pre MACOS 7 ) Mac user.
The new line of macbook pros with the touchbar are a complete POS. (I have one, and its the worst laptop I've had for ages)- The Keyboard is so loud that everyone knows when you are typing, even three rooms over (especially fun in a quiet morning commuter train)
- Touchbar is at the wrong place for two reasons:
- if your finger slips from the numbers (and remember it is lower than the keyboard, so slipping is common) you touch some key that you do not want e.g. ESC; and due to lack of tactile feedback, a touch is a keypress.
- in order for touchbar to be useful, you have to look at it. I tend to type while looking at the screen, not the keyboard. (if it were on the bottom of the screen instead of the black rim, that would make sense.
Rest of the Hardware is ok; Windows with VMware works fine, Battery is ok.
So if you go mac, get a macbook air.
I've heard good things about the surfacebooks
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@blakeyrat Okay, Save dialogs, then.
While you can't drag-and-drop to jump to the folder you want, you can copy its path and paste it into the "File name" box of either standard file dialog (and press Return) to go there. Another legacy of typed DOS paths vs. visual Finder navigation.
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@deadfast said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@stillwater Should you buy a MacBook? Let's see what the guy who repairs them for a living thinks:
I like Rossman, but he has the repairman's bias. He focuses on the stuff that's important to him, like the way the insides are put together, what's repairable what's not, how difficult the equipment is to deal with, etc. While this is of some vague value to actual users, for most people it's way down on the list, beneath usability, design and a hundred other features.
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@kurt-c-pause said in Should I get a Macbook?:
So if you go mac, get a macbook air.
Problem with Air is that it's not retina. IMO you shouldn't buy a laptop in 2018 that's not UHD.
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@kurt-c-pause said in Should I get a Macbook?:
Longtime (pre MACOS 7 ) Mac user.
No longtime Mac user would type "MAC". It's never been an acronym.
And I don't trust anybody who experienced Mac Classic and uses OS X. OS X is exactly as garbage as Windows. The rational thing to have done when Mac Classic went away is to switch to Windows; it's garbage, yes, but garbage with many times the software selection.
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@cartman82 said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@deadfast said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@stillwater Should you buy a MacBook? Let's see what the guy who repairs them for a living thinks:
I like Rossman, but he has the repairman's bias. He focuses on the stuff that's important to him, like the way the insides are put together, what's repairable what's not, how difficult the equipment is to deal with, etc. While this is of some vague value to actual users, for most people it's way down on the list, beneath usability, design and a hundred other features.
Have you actually watched this video? While what you say may be true for his other videos, in this one he focused solely on stupid design that directly affects the user. Even the shoe rubber and barbequed board deserve a mention as they directly affect longevity.
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@blakeyrat said in Should I get a Macbook?:
No longtime Mac user would type "MAC".
And no true Scotsman would put sugar on his porridge...
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@deadfast said in Should I get a Macbook?:
Have you actually watched this video? While what you say may be true for his other videos, in this one he focused solely on stupid design that directly affects the user. Even the shoe rubber and barbequed board deserve a mention as they directly affect longevity.
I did watch it. I don't see how anything I said is contradicted by that video.
He focuses on reliability issues from the POV of a repair technician (what kind of failure mode he's seen come to his shop) and Apple's shady business practices. That's all fine. However, most buyers will never experience a hardware malfunction in their device and will never get to be on the wrong end of Apple's policies. Therefore, videos like this are useful but low priority when deciding what to buy.
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
right-click
You can do that? I thought you may had to hold some other key on the keyboard while clicking to get that effect?
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@tsaukpaetra said in Should I get a Macbook?:
@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
right-click
You can do that? I thought you may had to hold some other key on the keyboard while clicking to get that effect?
Yes, and you can also only plug in accessories that have been ritually blessed by Apple with Steve Jobs’ water.
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@parody said in Should I get a Macbook?:
While you can't drag-and-drop to jump to the folder you want, you can copy its path and paste it into the "File name" box of either standard file dialog (and press Return) to go there. Another legacy of typed DOS paths vs. visual Finder navigation.
On Windows, you mean?
Anyway, the original point of this whole discussion about Open/Save/whatever dialogs was that there are subtle differences between the ways OSes work that can catch you out if you’re doing what you’re used to, and this can be useful information to someone who asks, “Should I get a <whatever>?”
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@gurth said in Should I get a Macbook?:
this can be useful information to someone who asks, “Should I get a <whatever>?”
"On Windows, the default mouse cursor is white on black. On Mac, the default cursor is black on white."
Useful.