Why do Anthony and Jake use Macs?

[zukakog]

Serious question here. Have Anthony or Jake said why they use Mac laptops? Battery life, hardware, specific software, terminal, etc?

 

I've suddenly got more Mac laptops coming into my traditionally Windows environment. The end users aren't choosing these, but are receiving them from their department lead, so they now need lots of training to be functional again. These devices don't seem to offer any compelling features in our setting that justify the extra expenses for hardware or additional support, but it did get me thinking about Anthony and Jake. What usage cases made them choose Macs? Anyone know?

[Ultraforce]

I don't know about why exactly but Anthony has talked a bit on twitter, his Linux system is a daily driver desktop for gaming, messing with VMs and general desktop stuff. He's used a 2011 MacBook Pro for 10 years. So I think it's most likely his computer for writing scripts.

[maplepants]

We can only guess, but I would assume it has to do with their work. If you're managing infrastructure at all, it's just more comfortable to do it from a real unix-y shell with ssh and other important tools.

 

This is basically the entire reason why Microsoft is working so hard on WSL2. 

[SydneyBrokeIt]

Am infrastructure dev; can confirm, doing infra work (or development as a whole) on Windows, is somewhere between "meh" and "can't you just rip my fingernails out?"

[zukakog]

Thanks all. I was kind of guessing it might be she'll related. If I can't use Linux directly or in a responsive VM, I usually just ssh in. I am going to do a Mac challenge and daily drive one for a month to build fluency and see if I can adjust to the DE. Whish me luck!

[Faelbis]

Anthony siad in a recent video that despite all what he doesn't like about Apple and Mac OS, he considers Appel to be the sole laptop builder to actually respect it's client with actually well crafted products.

It was one of the videos of him ranting about new laptops when unboxing them :D.

Might be one the the reasons.

[jde3]

On 3/26/2022 at 9:39 AM, zukakog said:

Serious question here. Have Anthony or Jake said why they use Mac laptops? Battery life, hardware, specific software, terminal, etc?

 

I've suddenly got more Mac laptops coming into my traditionally Windows environment. The end users aren't choosing these, but are receiving them from their department lead, so they now need lots of training to be functional again. These devices don't seem to offer any compelling features in our setting that justify the extra expenses for hardware or additional support, but it did get me thinking about Anthony and Jake. What usage cases made them choose Macs? Anyone know?

Some people like Unix.

 

For me it has nothing to do with Apple per say.. My job is a Unix sysadmin therefore on the desktop one can choose Linux or MacOS and I find MacOS to be better supported / less frustrating than Linux is. - I'm not alone in that.. if you ever go to a Linux or Unix conference.. almost everyone has them. It's far more difficult for me to work on Windows because very little of the software I use is native on it.. but it is on MacOS so you have a full Unix workstation with all the familiar Unix userland tools.

 

Beyond this I find Windows and Linux requires my attention a heck of a lot more than MacOS.. Linux always changes something and it breaks forcing me to fix it and Windows is like a needy child always wanting my attention to focus on it. MacOS doesn't do that.. it gets out of my way and lets me work. After working on systems all day the last thing in the world I want is to work on my desktop.

It's a good OS.. but you'll need a "Mac Guy" to support it.

[wasab]

21 hours ago, jde3 said:

It's far more difficult for me to work on Windows because very little of the software I use is native on it.. but it is on MacOS so you have a full Unix workstation with all the familiar Unix userland tools.

on windows, i used the git bash terminal as a pseudo unix terminal emulator. it has ssh and most unix cli utilities you can expect. that thing is noticbly slow though and doesnt work well with many package managers and sdk I used

[Paul Thexton]

On 4/7/2022 at 5:21 PM, jde3 said:

Some people like Unix.

 

For me it has nothing to do with Apple per say.. My job is a Unix sysadmin therefore on the desktop one can choose Linux or MacOS and I find MacOS to be better supported / less frustrating than Linux is. - I'm not alone in that.. if you ever go to a Linux or Unix conference.. almost everyone has them. It's far more difficult for me to work on Windows because very little of the software I use is native on it.. but it is on MacOS so you have a full Unix workstation with all the familiar Unix userland tools.

 

Beyond this I find Windows and Linux requires my attention a heck of a lot more than MacOS.. Linux always changes something and it breaks forcing me to fix it and Windows is like a needy child always wanting my attention to focus on it. MacOS doesn't do that.. it gets out of my way and lets me work. After working on systems all day the last thing in the world I want is to work on my desktop.

It's a good OS.. but you'll need a "Mac Guy" to support it.

Fundamentally the exact same reasons I switched to using Macs.  I know people like to talk about Apple's design being the reason why people want Macs etc, and in the normal general consumer market that's probably true, but for me it's 100% about the OS and the fact I got bored of rolling the dice on whether I'd need to spend time "fixing" a Hackintosh whenever there'd been an OS update.

 

Really, at heart, I'm a Linux guy. I use it frequently on servers (especially low power devices such as RPi and ARM based NAS boxes). But using Linux as Desktop OS absolutely sucked at the time (and continues to suck each time I re-evaluate it, the next re-evaluation is long overdue I'll admit).  A caveat to that is if what you're doing requires almost exclusively terminal work, which one of my previous jobs entailed, then Linux is perfect for that.

 

My hope is that by the time Apple stop supporting my current M1Max laptop, Asahi Linux will be fully mature and I'll be able to find a distro that I don't hate.

[jde3]

Apple use to promote it's Unix'ness but does not anymore. Still all true tho, it is the best desktop Unix you can get.. it's just not free.

 

Things like NFS mounts, Cron, rsync, PF, X11 apps, ssh forwarding, Bash or bourne shells all work as expected.. It's pretty much got the same userland as FreeBSD (tho it's a bit out of date from FreeBSD) - you can also install the GNU userland if you.. like that... sort.. of thing.. with random bizarre flags and switches on every command, idk maybe that is your thing. (MacOS also has DTrace so you can actually know what the f'in thing is doing when it goes sideways, unlike Linux)

 

[FUIT1985]

Mac OS is a favorite system for developers. Even Linus Torvalds used the macbook air. Personally, I think it is overpriced.

[Donut417]

On 3/26/2022 at 12:39 PM, zukakog said:

Serious question here. Have Anthony or Jake said why they use Mac laptops? Battery life, hardware, specific software, terminal, etc?

 

I've suddenly got more Mac laptops coming into my traditionally Windows environment. The end users aren't choosing these, but are receiving them from their department lead, so they now need lots of training to be functional again. These devices don't seem to offer any compelling features in our setting that justify the extra expenses for hardware or additional support, but it did get me thinking about Anthony and Jake. What usage cases made them choose Macs? Anyone know?

The M1 chip is pretty impressive from what we have all read. It could be that mixed with the battery life it provides. I bought a Mac because I got pissed at Microsoft and Windows 10. While the issue I had were not necessarily Microsoft fault, mainly some driver level issues, though the forcing updates and restarts is their fault. I had 3 WIndows 10 machines have strokes within the same week. Then a few months later the US goverment started handing out $1,200 stimulus checks, so my 2020 Intel Macbook Pro only set me back $800, pretty good deal if you ask me. For the record I built in new gaming machine in 2019 and most if not all the issues I had went away. My old gaming machine just didnt like WIndows 10 (1903) for some odd reason. 

 

Mac OS has some cool things going for it. It has a built in VNC Client. Which is very useful for when I need to remote control my Windows gaming or my Plex server. Also while many people cried about only having Thunderbolt ports, thunderbolt is very very useful. While you need dongles, you can adapt that port to serve as what ever you need. While I dont use my Mac for any type of work, I do know there are some Mac specific software that people tend to use for both video and audio production. 

[Ultraforce]

1 hour ago, Donut417 said:

The M1 chip is pretty impressive from what we have all read. It could be that mixed with the battery life it provides. I bought a Mac because I got pissed at Microsoft and Windows 10. While the issue I had were not necessarily Microsoft fault, mainly some driver level issues, though the forcing updates and restarts is their fault. I had 3 WIndows 10 machines have strokes within the same week. Then a few months later the US goverment started handing out $1,200 stimulus checks, so my 2020 Intel Macbook Pro only set me back $800, pretty good deal if you ask me. For the record I built in new gaming machine in 2019 and most if not all the issues I had went away. My old gaming machine just didnt like WIndows 10 (1903) for some odd reason. 

 

Mac OS has some cool things going for it. It has a built in VNC Client. Which is very useful for when I need to remote control my Windows gaming or my Plex server. Also while many people cried about only having Thunderbolt ports, thunderbolt is very very useful. While you need dongles, you can adapt that port to serve as what ever you need. While I dont use my Mac for any type of work, I do know there are some Mac specific software that people tend to use for both video and audio production. 

I'm not sure but I think Jake and Anthony actually use older MacBooks. So they might be taking advantage og the VNC aspect but probably not the M1 chip.

[GoodBytes]

On 4/21/2022 at 2:55 PM, FUIT1985 said:

Mac OS is a favorite system for developers. Even Linus Torvalds used the macbook air. Personally, I think it is overpriced.

As a developer, no. That is not the reason.

The reason is that there is no Linux based laptops... well, they come and go... and typically either an ultra budget system, or this over the top system.

Mix with the fact that IT doesn't like to manage Linux based system as it doesn't have any easy to use tools and it likes to be its own thing that wants everything special, AND the fact that businesses who issue laptops to employees like to show how trendy they are, they just opt to an Apple system, plus its underline is Unix, so devs are happy.

 

This is changing big time with WSL2/WSLg, with Surface-line slowly becoming the new 'trendy device" to have (that said, powerful Surface isn't really an option, which prevents IT from getting it... as it would just lead to dev complaining about lack of performance... so startups, small company still opt for Apple, larger companies that want to be seen as trendy, will have a mix of Lenovo's/HP/Dell for devs, and Surface for other roles at the company that is more consumer or investor facing).

 

That said, most devs who had the opportunity to run Linux distro (typically Ubuntu) natively on their system, before WSL2/WSLg got used to their environment, have everything setup, and won't switch over unless required by IT. Newer devs or those who just could never stand Linux based OSs, switching to WSL2 under Windows 10. WSLg might be a requirements for developer for GUI support, but that means they need Windows 11, and for many companies IT is slow to adapt. If Intel 12th gen CPU didn't perform better under Windows 11, then you can bet IT would refuse even new machine to run Windows 11 and put Windows 10 instead, and only start to consider Windows 11 after 3 years in. As no IT  staff wants to get finger pointed if they are issues. So they play it safe as they always do with every version of Windows. 

[FUIT1985]

9 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

As a developer, no. That is not the reason.

The reason is that there is no Linux based laptops... well, they come and go... and typically either an ultra budget system, or this over the top system.

Mix with the fact that IT doesn't like to manage Linux based system as it doesn't have any easy to use tools and it likes to be its own thing that wants everything special, AND the fact that businesses who issue laptops to employees like to show how trendy they are, they just opt to an Apple system, as its underline is Unix.

 

This is changing big time with WSL2/WSLg, with Surface-line slowly becoming the new 'trendy device" to have (that said, powerful Surface isn't really an option, which prevents IT from getting it... as it would just lead to dev complaining about lack of performance... so startups, small company still opt for Apple, larger companies that want to be seen as trendy, will have a mix of Lenovo's/HP/Dell for devs, and Surface for other roles at the company that is more consumer or investor facing).

 

That said, most devs who had the opportunity to run Linux distro (typically Ubuntu) natively on their system, before WSL2/WSLg got used to their environment, have everything setup, and won't switch over unless required by IT. Newer devs or those who just could never stand Linux based OSs, switching to WSL2 under Windows 10. WSLg might be a requirements for developer for GUI support, but that means they need Windows 11, and for many companies IT is slow to adapt. If Intel 12th gen CPU didn't perform better under Windows 11, then you can bet IT would refuse even new machine to run Windows 11 and put Windows 10 instead, and only start to consider Windows 11 after 3 years in. As no IT  staff wants to get finger pointed. So they play it safe as they always do with every version of Windows. 

I know the IT department's complaints about wrong purchases of "trendy" products, planned through business plans, at the expense of security.

I also understand that a professional wants a ready-to-use deployment.

[Ultraforce]

5 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

This is changing big time with WSL2/WSLg, with Surface-line slowly becoming the new 'trendy device" to have (that said, powerful Surface isn't really an option, which prevents IT from getting it... as it would just lead to dev complaining about lack of performance... so startups, small company still opt for Apple, larger companies that want to be seen as trendy, will have a mix of Lenovo's/HP/Dell for devs, and Surface for other roles at the company that is more consumer or investor facing).

 

That said, most devs who had the opportunity to run Linux distro (typically Ubuntu) natively on their system, before WSL2/WSLg got used to their environment, have everything setup, and won't switch over unless required by IT. Newer devs or those who just could never stand Linux based OSs, switching to WSL2 under Windows 10. WSLg might be a requirements for developer for GUI support, but that means they need Windows 11, and for many companies IT is slow to adapt. If Intel 12th gen CPU didn't perform better under Windows 11, then you can bet IT would refuse even new machine to run Windows 11 and put Windows 10 instead, and only start to consider Windows 11 after 3 years in. As no IT  staff wants to get finger pointed. So they play it safe as they always do with every version of Windows. 

I'm kind of curious what are the types of demands for IT professionals that make something like the top model of the Surface Pro 7 with an i7-1065G7 and 16 GB of RAM from being sufficient. I'm just finishing uni in comp sys eng and it felt like that would have been enough for basically everything I had to do. Of course a student doesn't have the same demands as someone actually working and the only times I used Linux was in a security class and a course focused on operating systems so I don't have the best perspective.

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, Ultraforce said:

I'm kind of curious what are the types of demands for IT professionals that make something like the top model of the Surface Pro 7 with an i7-1065G7 and 16 GB of RAM from being sufficient. I'm just finishing uni in comp sys eng and it felt like that would have been enough for basically everything I had to do. Of course a student doesn't have the same demands as someone actually working and the only times I used Linux was in a security class and a course focused on operating systems so I don't have the best perspective.

It really depends what you are making/working on in the field.

 

Gaming or some visual simulator.. well obviously you need a powerful GPU of some kind.

If you are doing AI, Machine Learning, doing stuff with CUDA well, you may need an Nvidia GPU. You are working on a large backend with many components (application services) that you need to run locally, that might make you need more than 16GB of RAM (depending on the language, framework being used, and the requirement of each service, and numbers of them. etc.). If you are a front-end developer, or a full stack developer, you may need also more RAM for running a large framework, various development and debugging tools, making your 16GB of RAM be tight or not enough.

 

Another example, say, you work at Doorbell X company who has those IoT/ Smart Home  things... and maybe the company is advance enough, that they might has a emulator for their devices. You pick the right SoC they use for the product, feed it a firmware version, and off you go interacting with the device without physically having the device in question, running locally on your system, all at the same time, have the rest of the back-end component can interact with it. Depending on how the emulator is made, hardware specs, optimized or not (probably not much, if it were my guess), it might need a more powerful CPU, or more cores so that your dev tools and IDE can run smoothly, while you develop/debug something with it running on the back.

 

Typically, the system provided by the company should be sufficient for your needs. Unless they like having their developers turn their thumbs because they are so inexpensive, or the company is cheap. Or it doesn't really matter as, sadly (in my opinion), you are expected to remote everything, and no local dev permitted or limited, so you have a Chromebook or Atom based Netbook or whatever.

[riklaunim]

On 4/24/2022 at 7:31 PM, GoodBytes said:

This is changing big time with WSL2/WSLg,

I'm not so sure. They do put a lot effort into it but still it has some rough edges. If they fix that then maybe... You pretty much have to learn how to use a new full set of tools just to configure and manage WSL. The ext4 partitions support could be elevated more to some sort of /home for WSL and easy access from Windows (they have some now, uncertain how far it goes). And then microcontroller boards with UARTs - not sure if that USB over network hax handles them, not to mention some machine vision cameras.

 

[hishnash]

A lot of it comes down to the OS, and apples willingness to not be dragged backwards into the endless hellhole of backwards compatibility.  

MS have chosen to basically always support everything that has every been for ever on the surface this looks good but as a developer let me tell you it ends up as a nightmare. MS code base must be so so so full of conditional branches and checks and extra pathways to deal with the cumulative technical debt of needing to ensure tools written for window 95 run on windows 11! 

But the key issue is the difference in how they handle deprecating older apis when they release a new one to replace it.

Apple:  In 5 to 7 years the new os release will no longer support this API here is a new one. Also if you want to use this new api (or any other new apis we announced this year) you cant use any of the apis we deprecated in the last few years even if the os will support them for another 5+ years

 

MS: Here is a new api.. we understand you might not get around to using it and many of our critical customers use applications that no longer have any active dev on them so we are not getting rid of the old api this new one is just here if you want to use it but you can still use that old one whoever you like.

At the surface the MS approach sounds great.. it is less work for developers and that means in general we just never update, new code we write might use the new api (if we bother to learn it..) but in the end every single project out there ends up with a mixture of 3 to 5 generations worth of apis all doing the same sort of job. This means when you pull in a third party dependancy it also might well depend on a multitude of api generations.

 

Apples approach uses the carrot to push us devs to do the work to move off the depicated apis well before they become supper old, they use the natural fact that devs want to play with something new and shiny and requiring us every year to clean up a few little older things so we can play with the new toys means the amount of work each year (if a team is doing this) is minimal.  But for apple this means when the hard deadline of 5 to 7 years later they said something was depicted arrives almost all software and practically all third party libs we depend upon have been updated to no longer depend on that api. This means apple can cleanly cut support for those old apis from thier code base making thier work internal simpler and easer.

I don't know how it is inside MS but I expect for any non-trivial change they need to do 10x to 100x the work that apple need to do for the effect due to this technical debt situation MS are in.

[jde3]

On 4/24/2022 at 3:53 PM, Ultraforce said:

I'm kind of curious what are the types of demands for IT professionals that make something like the top model of the Surface Pro 7 with an i7-1065G7 and 16 GB of RAM from being sufficient. I'm just finishing uni in comp sys eng and it felt like that would have been enough for basically everything I had to do. Of course a student doesn't have the same demands as someone actually working and the only times I used Linux was in a security class and a course focused on operating systems so I don't have the best perspective.

This is OT some but how do you get a degree in systems engineering without learning Linux? - That feels strange to me and understand it's not a critique on you but on your school.. I'd set this as a #1 priority for you in self learning.

[Ultraforce]

6 hours ago, jde3 said:

This is OT some but how do you get a degree in systems engineering without learning Linux? - That feels strange to me and understand it's not a critique on you but on your school.. I'd set this as a #1 priority for you in self learning.

Computer Systems Engineering had for the first year pretty much just courses that all engineering students would have to take, with the programming languages used being Python and I believe a bit of C but all the labs were here's what you do and go follow it. Second year there was a Java course as well as courses on the basics of circuits from a physical perspective and some basic logic using programs like Logism. Third year we had to do a project using a Raspberry Pi and Python. Another Java class and some hardware description languages. As well of course with Mathematics. 4th Year we have an Introductory course focused on operating systems where Fedora was utilized and also in fourth year I took a security class that used Ubuntu SEEDLabs the operating systems I took it the semester of the pandemic so even though I had a lot of trouble with the labs and the C that focused on the operating system involved I was able to pass the course and for the security class I was barely passing all the assignments but I paid attention in class and I like the subject so was able to do well enough on the tests to pass. To be perfectly honest there was more System on Chip related courses then there was Linux related ones and Engineers Canada seems to think that's fine.

I am planning on sending an email to the security class prof and grab the SEEDLabs ISO to try and learn and actually complete the tasks as I'd like to do security engineering type stuff and feel that I'm not ready for asking for a chance at learning graduate level stuff.

[ToboRobot]

Apple offers a very nice and working *NIX portable with excellent battery life.  If you are working via CLI on remote machines it is hard to find a linux laptop that beats the Mac experience.

I want my laptop to just work on the go so a Macbook is perfect, and I run windows/Linux for games and work.

[jde3]

Linux at one time was a clone of Unix, however in the past 10 years it's been drifting further away from that. Hopefully they will get back on track at some point and remember.. like Apple has, that being true to Unix's methods is a good thing and it offers easier interoperability across Unix systems. I don't hold a lot of hope for them though.

 

Example: ifconfig has existed since 1983 and was released in 4.2 BSD -- Yet, Linux (actually it's the GNU) has abandoned this with ip (a command name that makes no sense because not all networks are ip based) -- Every other flavor of Unix that wanted to add changes or extensions to ifconfig have fixed ifconfig, (such as FreeBSD and MacOS that have wifi in ifconfig) where as Linux replaced it. It's not a good sign.. There are dozens of examples like this.

It's a sad day when Apple, the maker of cell phones, has a more Unix like OS than Linux.

[This_guy1998]

From my experience after growing up with Windows and tinkering with some Linux, once you try MacOS as a daily driver it "just works."

 

I say that because even though I had used MacOS a few times in school growing up (some classrooms had the old Macbooks (like 08ish) instead of Windows laptops when I was in middle and Jr High and then in college there were a few Mac labs I had used), I didn't care for using MacOS.

 

Then last Summer I had some extra money and bought a Macbook Air M1 to see what it was about and while there are some complaints I have about the M1 software capability the rest of it just works due to the closed end system and it being one of the last Unix-based OSes. I have had less crashes than I did with Windows in the same time period. I liked it so much I even bought a M1 Mac Mini for my new HTPC.

 

Another thing I like is the integration Apples other services and devices (with makes Airplay and connecting to things like Airpods much easier). Also iMessage and Facetime is a big deal too.

 

Edit: I also forgot to point out that doing dev work also works more seamlessly on a Mac compared to Windows.

Edited May 3, 2022 by This_guy1998

[FliP0x]

I've been daily driving my M1 MacBook Pro for the past month and have barely touched my desktop since.

 

As the person above said, "it just works". Even if it didn't, like it's often the case in Windows, resolving an issue on MacOS is seemless and easy.

 

The M1 Pro SoC is a powerhouse that barely uses any energy and only slightly heats up during long CPU intensive work sessions. During normal use, you wonder if it's even turned on.

It's silent, it's cool, the screen is probably one of the best screens I've seen, the speakers are on a whole other level.

 

When you ask yourself the question, why would I take a X equivalent Windows laptop instead of a MacBook Pro for the same price, when the Windows equivalent will likely run much louder, hotter and slower? I can safely say that a current gen MacBook Pro is a desktop replacement. At least it is for me.

 

Most industry standard applications have gotten M1 native versions by now, but it's still a bummer that some functionality just isn't there yet.

A common quote says "You don't game on a Mac", even though the new M1 Macs are more than capable, if they had appropriate support to actually run the software. The few AAA games that run, run fairly well considering they don't run natively.

 

Now, if the "gaming problem" were to be resolved, I would never look at Windows again, which says a lot considering I've been using Windows all my life, since Windows 95.