My experience with Apple computers - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 10, 2017, 02:32:37 am
content: I've talked about this in another thread but I wanted to expand on a recent experience using a room full of brand new Apple iMacs. Those who don't know their iProducts, the iMac is basically an "all in one" machine.I had the (dis)pleasure of using these machines a few weeks ago. Overall, my experience was negative and some of the design decisions made by Apple seem to make absolutely no sense. Admittedly I've been a PC/Windows guy for my entire life but I don't judge before I've experienced something myself. I went in with an open mind, probably more so than I would have in the past as I hate what Microsoft have done to Windows and I am looking at alternatives after Windows 7 goes EOL.I'll start with the positives, because not everything was bad. The iMacs I used had the 4K "Retina" display and it was absolutely amazing, it was just a gorgeous display (I believe they are made by LG). If Apple made just the monitor, I'd buy one. The built in speakers also packed a surprising punch considering their size.The appearance of the OS was polished and refined, more so than anything Microsoft have come up with to-date. It looked good, it wasn't bloated and it was very easy to use.Now onto the bad...The machine is severely limited in what you can upgrade. Most components are soldered directly onto the main board (including the SSD), there is no optical drive and the display/chassis is glued together, rather than secured with screws and clips.All the ports are around the back, which involved spinning the unit around just to plug in a USB thumb drive (which then protruded out the back). On one occasion, this spinning around of the machine caused the power cable to be yanked out. Surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to put at least one port on the side of the machine.On the topic of port placement, the most ridiculous design decision was the placement of the Lightning port on the "Magic Mouse 2"... some "genius" at Apple decided it would be a great idea to place the port on thebaseof the mouse. After a reboot on one machine, the mouse just suddenly stopped working. No low battery alerts or anything, it just stopped working. I couldn't tell whether the mouse was actually on or not because there are no LED indicators anywhere. The machine seemed to detect the mouse was there but when I tried to reconnect it, it just failed. Thinking maybe it was a battery issue, I plugged it in, which meant turning the mouse upside down on the table rending it completely useless until the battery charged.The location of the optical sensor (on the leading edge of the mouse) was also a pain. Numerous times I over-shot the mouse surface just slightly so that the sensor would no longer detect movement. What was wrong with having it in the centre of the device? It was quite frustrating.Then there was the stability of the machines in general (or lack thereof). We weren't pushing them terribly hard or doing anything out of the ordinary, but even then, programs would just randomly crash. No error messages or anything, they would just disappear off the screen and I was left staring at the desktop. On more than one occasion, I was simply browsing the web using Safari and it just crashed. The spinning coloured wheel or beach ball thing made me nervous every time it appeared because it was hard to determine if the system was just busy or it was about to fall over.I even brought these things up with a guy I know who is a PC to Apple convert, he told me I was "using the machine wrong" and somehow it was my fault.For the hefty price you pay for one of these machines, I expected better from Apple. Needless to say, I won't be rushing out to buy one.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2017, 02:50:49 am
content: I also don't like what MS has done with W10....but what are the alternatives, Linux?

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 10, 2017, 02:53:09 am
content: Quote from: schmitt trigger on September 10, 2017, 02:50:49 amI'm thinking so. I've been trying to learn Linux (Mint) over the past month. It's been a very steep learning curve. I still keep a Windows XP machine around which I use regularly for some things, so it's still going to be several years before I'm "forced" to upgrade from Windows 7.I used Windows 10 for about 6 months and hated it.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2017, 02:55:47 am
content: On the subject of the spinning wheel...Safari is certainly fond of crashing. The error messages are there, but you need to know where to look... in Console.app (or type "console" in the Spotlight menu). There you'll see quite a few error messages, a bewildering number.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2017, 06:53:59 pm
content: Virtualise the XP machine, then make a pair of copies of it as well. That way you have a quick backup of the state, and can simply scrap the VM and revert back if something happens.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 10, 2017, 07:12:54 pm
content: I don't like OSX or Macs at all really but they are the most reliable and least time consuming machines I have used ergo I buy 'em. I can sit down, do what I wanted and close the lid and walk away every time.The trick of ownership is buy more than you need up front and use it until it dies. I've got a 2013 15" Retina MBP stacked up with 2.6GHz i7, Nvidia graphics, 16Gb of RAM and 1 TiB of SSD. It's still going strong and it is scary fast to this day.Magic Mouse is shit though. Horrid creation. Using a £10 Logitech Bluetooth one. That just works.

author: jh15
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 05:36:28 am
content: Wow a four year old laptop still working.Does it run at rated speed? Would think it has dried out paste, especially in graphics area.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 06:19:52 am
content: I keep laptops for around 7-8 years. I've got a 7 year old and 4 year old thinkpad as well. zero problems.Never had a problem with dried out thermal paste. The consumer laptops seem to suffer for that more than anything else.Incidentally my iMac (2007 Intel) is still going strong at a friend's.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 10:00:03 am
content: Quote from: jh15 on September 11, 2017, 05:36:28 amMy main home/consulting Mac is a 2011 17" MacBook Pro. The "mouse button" on the trackpad is getting a bit finicky, but everything else is perfect. Quad core Sandy Bridge i7-2720QM with turbo to 3.3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, and a 512 GB 6 Gbps SSD, so it's still pretty respectable.I also have for light travel purposes a 2011 11" MacBook Air with I7-2677M, dual core, hyperthreading, and turbo to 2.9 GHz (also Sandy Bridge). Not much good for transcoding video or building AOSP, but feels perfectly up to date for web browsing, office documents, email etc. Not much heavier than an iPad Pro and actually has bash, gcc, emacs etc.To tell the truth, I've *never* had a Mac laptop stop working. They become hopelessly outdated first. The oldest one I still own is a 1998 266 MHz "G3" "Main Street". I boot it from time to time just to check that it still works. It runs OSX 10.2, has ethernet, WIFI (via a card), and all the good old stuff such as ADB and SCSI, and a DVD reader. No USB here!I had a 2007 Core 2 Duo 17" MacBook Pro. One day in September 2008 I accidentally spilled a cup of hot, sweet, milky tea all over it, while it was running. Fuck. Within probably five seconds (maybe less!) I'd pulled the power cord and dropped the battery out. Tea was running out all the ports ... DVD drive, USB, you name it. I took it to the kitchen and ran hot water from the tap INTO every port and hole in the machine for several minutes, until it was coming out clear. A couple of hours later I took it to a friend's place (a Mac tech) and we disassembled it completely. I left all the bits to dry for a week, and then put it back together. It worked!I didn't trust it and bought a new one. But in fact I ended up using it as the server on my home network until 2015, when I moved to another country. The internal hard disk died in 2014 (six years after the cup of tea incident). Everything else still worked perfectly.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 10:02:58 am
content: Quote from: bd139 on September 11, 2017, 06:19:52 amLikewise, I have a HP 6710b which I still use almost every day. It's probably going on 10-11 years old now, still works fine (except for the battery). The only think I've replaced is the hard disk with an SSD.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 10:18:37 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on September 11, 2017, 10:00:03 amLucky you. I had a 6 month old 2010 macbook pro blow up on me after pouring a glass of water in it. Sizzling and everything. Still got £500 for it on ebay and positive feedback with the description "probably doesn't work - smoke came out after a glass of water was poured in it".I poured a whole cup of coffee in my ThinkPad X201 as well. Lost the botton 1/4" of the screen for a couple of days and it was fine after that. It got replaced with a T440 because of the smell, not because it didn't work

author: japasetelagoas
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 10:57:56 am
content: My Mid-2010 Macbook Pro presented the famous GPU kernel issue. Shuts down in a randomly fashion, Louis Rossmann told me that I'd need to replace a specific capacitor, turns out that I never did it. The notebook is a bit more stable now that I've disabled the NVIDIA functionality, for ProTools and other recording software it actually does the job. I ended up buying the 2015 Macbook Pro, no regrets till now.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 11:35:08 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on September 10, 2017, 02:32:37 amFirst of all, thanks for going into it with an open mind - your report actually sounds open-minded.The design decisions you criticize (especially the lightning port on the bottom of the mouse... wtf??) are all legit. (Though I am not sure that the mouse sensor towards the front is bad; I would think that might improve tracking accuracy a bit. Being optical, there normally is no need for a mouse mat. That said, I don't use any Apple mouse any more, having switched to the Magic Trackpad and a Logitech ergo mouse long ago.) Doesn't it have an LED indicator on the bottom? My old Magic Mouse (non-Lightning) for sure does. I think it's multicolor IIRC. I know my Magic Trackpad has a single green LED, and my old Apple wireless keyboard did as well.I'm not sure that the current iMac designs could really accommodate a side USB port (USB-C maybe!), though older iMacs with fatter edges certainly could have and still didn't. That said, as someone whose computer monitor has side USB ports: side USB ports are super handy, but also perilous, insofar as it's so freaking easy to inadvertently bend a plug or thumb drive that's stuck in the side. I've done it before. Given that Apple has always targeted education users, this may well be a contributing factor in the decision to only have rear USB ports. Rear ports just plain offer less chance of damage to the devices. (The ports themselves are very well protected against mechanical damage by the thickness and tolerances of the aluminum housing.) I'm sure that aesthetics are the primary reason, as well as the fact that historically, when the machines shipped with USB keyboards, the keyboards had 2 USB ports on them as well. (Side note: Apple's USB ports have for many years supported higher current than plain old USB did, and later keyboard models used this to provide "full" power USB ports on the keyboard.)As for beachballing and crashing: definitely not supposed to be happening with the frequency you describe. One of the things I like most about using Macs is just how rarely things crash. FWIW, there's a setting somewhere to enable more logging (and a notification) when an app crashes. But for sure, I'd be making sure that any available updates have been applied, and that there aren't weird 3rd party drivers screwing with things. In my experience as a Mac tech in the past, I found that frequent crashing was usually due to either hardware issues (like iffy RAM or a failing CPU), or bad drivers for low-level hardware like expansion cards.Beachballing thatdoesn'tultimately result in a crash is often RAM starvation, where the system has begun to compress RAM and/or swap to disk. (Far less noticeable in SSD systems of course.) FYI, the beachball appears automatically (only when the mouse is actually hovering over it) when a process has ceased to respond to messages for 2 seconds. A really poorly written app can thus routinely beachball when busy, because the developer didn't multithread it sufficiently. A well-written app will beachball rarely.As for the guy who said it was a PEBKAC: 99% bullshit, 1% kernel of truth. I saw the same thing with me when using Windows at my old job: I ran into problems that nobody else did, and I'm fairly confident that most of it was random chance, and some of it had to do with the third-party utilities that I used to make Windows a bit more Mac-like, or me using it the way I use a Mac (e.g. leaving tons of stuff open, and using sleep instead of shutting down). But above all, I'm sure that PC was like a dog and could sense that I didn't like it, and thus it didn't like me!Whatistrue, but totally irrelevant to the reliability/stability of the system, is that PC users who switch to Mac, but expect it to behave exactly like Windows, end up frustrated because the procedures they'd memorized aren't reproducible. In contrast, the switchers who ended up happy were the ones who followed the advice to "pretend you'd never used Windows before, and instead just use the Mac intuitively as if it were the first time using any computer", a phrase I didn't come up with, but actually heard from several PC-to-Mac switchers advising prospective switchers on how to approach it.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 11:52:03 am
content: With respect to beachballing (or SPOD spinning pizza of death) the only time this happened to me was when some dodgy HP printer software went mental and decided to consume all RAM and IO. This was fairly easy to find.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 11:53:24 am
content: Quote from: tooki on September 11, 2017, 11:35:08 amThanks for an equally open-minded response rather than calling me an Apple hater or similar.Quote from: tooki on September 11, 2017, 11:35:08 amNope. No LEDs at all on the Magic Mouse 2. The only indication of "on" is when you slide the power switch to the on position and you see the green sticker. Same on the keyboard, the only LED is the Caps Lock (less of an issue as you can just toggle that to see if it's alive). I actually had to go fetch an old Microsoft USB mouse just so I could use the machine while the Apple mouse re-charged.Quote from: tooki on September 11, 2017, 11:35:08 amI thought maybe I had a dud machine but others were having issues too (but not to the extent that I did).Quote from: tooki on September 11, 2017, 11:35:08 amI tried my very hardest to go in with an open mind. I didn't for one moment expect it to be anything like Windows, although I did find enabling the right-click very handy. I actually found the placement of settings and options similar to Windows 10 (which I hated). Some things were found in logical locations while others were elsewhere (or no where to be seen until you held down the Option or Command keys in a context menu).

author: BradC
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 01:49:50 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on September 11, 2017, 11:53:24 amWhich is rare.Quote from: Halcyon on September 11, 2017, 11:53:24 amWhich is rarer again.I've been using a Mac now full time since 2006. I've been using Linux on the desktop since 1996. The last Apple OS I used in anger was DOS 3.3 (I never liked ProDOS).The *hardware* I've found fabulous. I've only upgraded when things ran out of puff and the physical abuse I've carelessly heaped on my 2015 Macbook would have killed 2 or 3 VAIOs (which were the Macbooks predecessors). My first Mac desktop was a 2006 Core solo Mac Mini. I used that (upgraded to a Core Duo, 4GB of RAM and an SSD) until 2011 when I upgraded to my current desktop (an i7-2600 27" iMac). That too got upgraded with a pair of SSD and I've just (in the last 3 months) replaced both of them as I wore one out.My father liked my Macbook so much, as soon as he heard about Bootcamp (he's a dyed in the wool Windows bunny), he bought one too and is comfortable with saying it is the best laptop he's ever owned. His first laptop was a Z80 Bondwell back in the 80's and the latest pre-Mac was a Vaio Z (really nice machine).I bought the Mini, and then the iMac because I was sick of big boxes on the desk with audible fans. Unless I'm compiling, they're almost completely inaudible and take up very little space. You do get used to the position of the USB sockets and in my case I had a nice D-Link USB extender with a firm base for a wireless stick. That has been fixed to the base of the iMac to give me a nice easy to manage front port. It still takes up far less room on the desk than a box and a monitor (or 3 monitors).I love the hardware. I like the OS, but not enough to live with it. Horses for courses. The Apple hardware does a credible job with non-Apple OS if you are that way inclined.On the other hand, my wife went from a Windows 7 laptop to a 21" iMac and loves it. I don't make her use Linux (which she loves even more).

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 03:12:27 pm
content: I started with Macs in about 2010, with a Mac Mini and then a Macbook air. My experience then led me to completely switch to Apple hardware for the next six years, running Windows the vast majority of the time. The only reason I started on Apple hardware was because I had a requirement to have my products compatible with OS X, but I admit to becoming smitten.I did try running Windows in a VM but it was too much of a compromise, and I found many software packages with licensing checks frequently broke when run in a VM.Although I still run a Macbook Pro 15" retina from 2012 as my main laptop, I've pensioned off two of the three Mac minis I accumulated. The one remaining Mac Mini is used only for music arranging in OS X. The Macbook Air, after an SSD upgrade, remains active for casual browsing only.I firmly believe that the best time for Apple hardware was 2012, with the advent of the Macbook Pro retina, and the Mac Mini servers (run as desktops). The 2012 MBPr you could still upgrade the SSD, and with the Mac Mini 2012 had quad core i7 and you can upgrade the hard drives and RAM.The Mac Minis since 2014 are distinctly lacklustre in terms of performance, and together with the MBPr, the upgrade options are limited to non-existent in comparison.Without reasonable (or any) upgrade options, I'm no longer interested in Apple hardware, and have gone back to building my own machines, but keeping the Apple machines around for very occasional and sporadic requirements to do OS X and some IOS development.Now, a quick note about Thunderbolt... this is one of those lovechild technologies that could be so good, but fails in terms of flakey compatibility. It reminds me of the early days of USB, which was another plug-and-pray technology in its first couple of years. The difference is that Thunderbolt has been around since 2012, and still fails to deliver in terms of reliability and interoperability. It's also outrageously expensive, and the recently reborn AMD don't seem to be interested at all. As such I believe adoption will remain limited.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 03:23:18 pm
content: Some of the new Apple hardware is pretty good and hits a sweet spot between crazy expensive enterprise kit and reasonable desktop workstations. I've got an HP Z620 running CentOS that does the meat and two veg work at the moment. I really want to get rid of it and virtualize the workload. As I mainly sit at a desk with 2/3 laptops fired up on it, which isn't great for you, and they're all pointed at the Z620 and AWS, I'm going to get rid of the lot and buy one of these when they hit the shelves:https://www.apple.com/uk/imac-pro/Can't consider building my own kit these days. Risk of failure is too high and the time is too much. I have better things to do with my time, like herding old oscilloscopesAs for thunderbolt, I have precisely zero things connected to it. Not a sausage. I've got a NAS on the WiFi and that's it. It's the apple desktop bus but faster.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 04:56:41 pm
content: Quote from: bd139 on September 11, 2017, 03:23:18 pmYes, that will be very nice. Pricey though.I expect my next machine will have one of those CPUs, but in an ugly tower box and using my existing lovely 4K 32" screen.I can build them myself from components (and did with my Athlon 700, Athlon XP 3200+, and Core i7 860 machines) but I also have better things to do with my time. So the last couple of machines (Core i7 4790K and Core i7 6700K) I've spec'd the components and taken the kind offers of component vendors to assemble and test the components of my choice for $50 or so. That's $50 well invested, especially as it avoids any hassles or finger pointing in the event of some component being DOA (and if you don't have any spares to swap in then you don't know *which* part is DOA).

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 06:41:07 pm
content: My experience with Macintoshes is strange, because I would consider my self a beginning old Mac collector, but here is my take:OS/XIt's confusing to use for me. Everything is in a stupid place, and it just looks like it's trying too hard to be user friendly. This is a personal thing, but I seriously didn't like where a lot of stuff is placed. I of course can get used to it, but that's beside the point. It is running off a BSD base, as it's basically a VERY doctored up NeXTStep, but this really doesn't give many condolences to me. I am one of those strange breeds of people who actually liked OS9, and OS/X just felt like they took the UI of OS9 (one people complained was very complicated) and just further complicated it. The one advantage is that it's immensely lightweight, as most BSD and *nix/nux operating systems are (Windows is just a bloated mess)I do not like the insistence of Apple's ecosystem. It's fine if you like Apple's services, but not being able to use a lot of features (a bit better on a Mac than on an iOS device) without selling my soul to Apple SUCKS. At least with Android, you can just not sign into google, ignore all the google services, and get every single thing you may want a different way. Just a small gripe.The hardware is my least favourite aspect. It's built with planned obsolescence in mind, with near 0 upgrade options, which sucks as Apple tends to sell woefully outdated hardware years after it's prime for the exact same price they did when it launched (Mac Pro). Even new hardware is often disappointing ESPECIALLY for the price and ESPECIALLY for workstation applications. The lack of choice is mind mindbogglingly shite, and the fact that they don't want you to step outside their box makes it even worse.My opinion of Apple is this. They are a company that sells to idiots. I don't mean you are stupid because you made a bad decision to buy an Apple product, the sell to people too stupid to use anything else. That was their entire goal from the get-go with the Apple Lisa. They are machines that are designed for any person who has the IQ to add 2+2 to pick up and use without difficulty. This means that if I want more advanced features, or god forbid I DARE to want my own custom applications to install, that I am just going to have to sit there eating my own snot as far as Apple is concerned.

author: glarsson
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 07:21:55 pm
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on September 11, 2017, 06:41:07 pmPlease don't call people idiots because there is something that you don't understand.

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 08:02:06 pm
content: I am about to dump my virtually unused 6th generation iPod Touch. I hate pretty much everything about it.* The user interface truncates valuable text (title of the song, etc.) to make space for a tiny (nearly useless) replica of the cover art which conveys no useful information. It even manages to do this in landscape orientation!* It provides for no hierarchical organization of content. It is a big flat file. It only allows for search which is effective only if the content was properly tagged and organized.* The upload management (iTunes) is abysmal. Even Mac users dislike it, and, of course, the Windows version simply sucks. Even 3rd party substitutes are fiddly and must follow the outdated Apple protocols.* Even with latest microprocessor on-board, iPod is too stupid to dynamically index, it depends on the upload mechanism (iTunes) to do all the indexing. This may have been necessary 10 years ago but maybe it isn't 2017 yet in Cupertino.* Something in the byzantine Apple economy decides that certain songs I loaded should be played "from the cloud" using data bandwidth that I pay for. I loaded the content on there so that I could use it AWAY from the interweb. Apparently the designers never venture anywhere out of range of the cloud. It just arbitrarily deletes things that I sat there watching the upload process.OTOH, I just got a new Moto G5 plus phone. I stuck a 64G micro-SD card in it and have 4x as much space as I did on the iPod (which cost more than my phone) I have a choice of dozens of different music playing apps. The one I am trying now (jetAudio Plus) INSTANTLY indexes any new files I upload onto the phone. And I don't need any goofy software (iTunes or even 3rd party substitutes) to simply drag-n-drop files directly onto the SD card volume using Windows Explorer. Maintaining my organization into sub-directories, etc. I have to agree with @TwoOfFive that Apple seems to be both malevolent (or at least arrogant) AND behind the curve at the same time.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 09:02:50 pm
content: Enjoy your Moto G5 for the few months before Moto pull the support for it, when it hits the "android wall" and needs reinstalling, gets infested with something nasty, the hardware fails (this is HELL) or the next Android version drops and it starts crawling. I had Moto G, G2, G3, G4 before the iPhone. I had a Nexus for two weeks before it died of a hardware failure and though "fuck this" and bought an iPhone 6S. I would never own another Android handset.As for music, the oldest two kids have iPhones, the wife has one so screw it, £15/month for Apple Music family sub is worth it for the sheer amount of time I was spending moving files around and downloading mp3s of whichever service of the hour sells the correct mp3. My time is worth more than £3/hour which is what it was costing before a month.I'm no fanboy. I'd switch to another ecosystem if it came along but for the moment it wins on three things: TCO, time expenditure, friction.As for idiots, that's a bit far. If I'm paid to fix computer I'll use and suggest Android and Windows. If I'm paid to get work done, I'll use OSX, iOS and Linux.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 09:48:12 pm
content: Android is trying to solve the upgrade problem with something called "Treble", basically a standardized HAL for phones to support generic builds.You can also upgrade any old phone yourself, but certain apps don't work if they think the phone has been rooted.

author: WA1ICI
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 10:10:26 pm
content: I agree with the OP on the iMac design problems. It seems Apple's goal for their desktop machine is to make it thinner, have razor-sharp edges, aesthetically "clean", and un-upgradeable. None of these, except perhaps the aesthetics, is meaningful, and they seriously compromise the usability. Similar comments apply to the "trashcan" MacPro. Eliminating most of the ports on the laptops is stupid.I have three computers at my desk: A 2008 MacPro running Snow Leopard, a 2012 MacMini running the latest OS, and a home-built PC (with Xeon E3-1245 CPU) running Windows 7. All are running essentially all the time, and have had zero problems. The MacPro is my "production" machine where I do most of my work. Snow Leopard is a great OS and allows me to run some older programs. Since it is not kept updated, I limit my internet access on it, which is where the MacMini comes into play - it is my main machine to access the internet. The web browser is Firefox, and is very stable. I used to run Windows XP on the MacPro using bootcamp, but Win 7 wouldn't work with Snow Leopard. Also, I didn't like having to reboot the machine to switch systems, so I put together a server-type PC to run my Windows app, such as Altium. I have two NEC monitors that allow me to switch between the three machines. I've also got a home-built FreeNAS server for my bulk disk storage.By the way, I've tried running Windows on the MacPro using both Parallels and VMware, and neither were truly compatible, especially with Adobe Illustrator, which I use a lot. Bootcamp (running Windows on the Mac in native mode) works well, and I use this on my MacBookPro laptop.I still like Apple better than Microsoft, but there is definitely "rot" setting in, especially after Steve Jobs died. The MacOS, in particular, has been really going downhill, which is why I like my Snow Leopard MacPro.- John Atwood

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 11, 2017, 10:54:43 pm
content: I'm using vagrant and virtualbox for virtualisation. I don't run windows on the mac at all though;Unix or GTFO. I have a thinkpad for windows.

author: bitseeker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 12:01:40 am
content: Interesting, your experience with a modern iMac. I haven't had an opportunity to try one. My most modern Mac is a 2010 MacBook Pro that still runs nicely although the battery capacity has declined from approximately 5.5 hours to 3.5 hours. In seven years it has crashed on me at most four times. Otherwise, the only time I reboot it is when upgrading the OS. However, I've had co-workers who had various hardware and software problems with MacBook Pros.I regularly use Windows, various distros of Linux, OS X, iOS, and Android. Every platform (hardware or software) has its good things and bad, which can vary drastically from one model or version to another. One could say that they all suck, just in different ways.One thing I still don't understand is why shortcut key combinations in the menus in OS X have symbols that don't exist on their keyboards. I guess only old gray Mac users use keyboard shortcuts and know what the symbols mean from a long time ago?

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 12:58:42 am
content: Quote from: bitseeker on September 12, 2017, 12:01:40 amThe option key symbol (the one that looks like a high-to-low scope trigger) was never printed on US keyboards, but it has always been used in menus to show the accelerator. It was printed on some international keyboards (where "Option" would have been a foreign word). Same deal with "Shift".

author: shteii01
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 01:42:02 am
content: I bought used iBook G3 several years ago, still working.My sister gave me her's PowerBook G4, still works.Interestingly enough, there is dedicated community that releases browser for G3 and G4 cpu. Which means I can do Google Docs (their online office suit) and be sort of productive even though Apple dropped support for G3 and G4 cpu several years ago.

author: mathsquid
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 02:18:04 am
content: Quote from: jh15 on September 11, 2017, 05:36:28 amIs that at all surprising? I've had three laptops since 2003, and every one has run for over four years. My current laptop is a late 2011 Macbook Pro. I ordered it as a stock build (core i5, 4GB RAM). It gets heavy use every day, and it's still going strong and meets all my needs. For maintenance I had to replace one rubber foot, tighten the hinge once, and last year I replaced the HD with an SSD. Apart from that it's all original equipment, including the battery. I figure I'll use it at least another year or two before I upgrade.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 02:24:34 am
content: Quote from: shteii01 on September 12, 2017, 01:42:02 amLast OS that ran on PowerPC was the OS X "Leopard" update 10.5.8 in August 2009.

author: sarel.wagner
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 05:47:30 am
content: In my professional life I have been working on and using PCs, Apple Mac's Linux, CPM and UNIX machines for way longer than I cared o remember. First Computer was a clone Apple that I had to assemble myself.On to today, I work for Vmware as pre sales Engineer and Architect, but here I speak for myself and not the company. I have used most Apple machines and maintained them for clients, same with PC's and NIX machines. Modern computers are marvels. In the Apple World, Jony Ive dictates everything, (function follows form) versus the PC World where form mostly follows function. For Apple its all about the look and feel, down to the O/S. Hence those design choices that hides the ports at the back or underneath the mouse. When I received my latest Mac, just shook my head, then moved on. The mouse battery lasts quite a while, so only a minor issue to turn on its side for the duration of the short charge.The OS is mostly stable on my Mac's and PC's, Linux and Mac being about the same relative up times. Some applications are less stable than others. I do also run for myself quite a number of Virtual machines with Linux, Mac O/S and Window$. Windows requires a lot more O/S restarts than Linux/Mac at about the same.PC's are designed to be upgradable, a case of philosophy I guess vs Apple where you replace. Some of my personal PCs are 10 years old, still running. My 2 Windows Laptops, Sony (6 years) and Toshiba (10 years) are still running just fine. My 2012 Macbook Air also the same. Works Macbook Air(brand new also just fine, no issues at all.Me, I am happy to use X86 PC and MAC depending on what I need to do, and where the Apps are available. Some I prefer to use on the Mac, some on the PC.Rgrds

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 07:14:01 am
content: C has no place in desktop dev in 2017. It's dangerous, insecure, inflexible and expensive to write and maintain. Really about 90% of the CVEs in the last decade are because of C.Apple are doing right here.The unix underneath it quite happily does everything POSIX and C that you need for other work.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 07:21:20 am
content: Since it is Unixy underneath, the only one of those faults that really matters is "inflexible" (there are no shortage of MacOS exploits and their OO interface does not provide security nor was it designed to). But they are using a strange concept of flexibility: only the initial thread of an application can perform any GUI operations. There are many other architectural problems.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 07:50:44 am
content: Carbon was macOS classic in disguise. It was a crock of shit that was explicitly there for compatibility to aid porting. C is just wrong on so many levels. C++(11) is better but building on a legacy of poo. They both need to go away. We had better techniques in 1970!C# is a glorious language. I hope they sort out the problems with fragmentation at the moment.One of the reasons Apple invested heavily in LLVM and clang is because of the end game (swift). OSX is really not an OS but a layer of UI that sits on top of any CPU and operating system. Watch apple in the next few years - this will become apparent.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 12, 2017, 09:02:43 am
content: In fact, ages ago when it was still NeXT, there was a compatibility layer for Windows, called the Yellow Box. It wouldn't surprise me if that has been kept alive to some degree. But I don't see Apple releasing it again.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2017, 10:19:39 am
content: Quote from: bd139 on September 12, 2017, 07:50:44 amAn addendum on Carbon: Apple really, really didn't want it holding back the platform. They actually took a bold, future-facing decision that was really hard in the short term: killing 64-bit Carbon. Killing it forced Apple to rewrite its old pro apps (especially Final Cut Pro) from scratch, and delayed major third party apps (notably Adobe Creative Suite) from going 64-bit by years.The kicker: 64-bit Carbon wasn't vaporware. It was finished and working, and present in developer betas. They pulled it kinda at the last minute, to force devs to move to Cocoa frameworks, which are where all the new technologies, and optimization, are happening. Long term it was the right strategy, but man were some devs pissed off for a while!(In contrast, Microsoft historically keeps ancient API support going forever, which is great for old apps, but harmed the platform as a whole, as devs stuck with old technologies that couldn't access the advanced frameworks that are present in newer versions of Windows. I saw this firsthand when working at a Windows software company.)

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2017, 11:30:40 am
content: Yes Microsoft's API deprecation is horrible. It's one of the reasons the platform is in the state is is now.The canonical example of this is the firewall control via server management on windows 2012 Server:1. Server manager fires up a process (think it is ATL) that has a tree and a web browser in it.2. The web browser talks to an Active X object in the browser that talks to the internals of the server manager, which are written as COM components loaded inproc.3. server manager fires up a powershell process inside itself, connects to the host machine with WinRM (over HTTP!) and sends a powershell command down it.4. Powershell fires up in a CLR process as a network server.5. This uses DCOM to talk to a COM object.6. The COM object implemented in ATL talks to the public kernel API.7. The public kernel API talks to the private kernel API.8. The private kernel API talks to the filter driver.Kill me.

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2017, 12:32:28 pm
content: I'd also add that the lack of API deprecation in Windows can turn out to be a very big benefit from a systems integration perspective. While I too suffer at the hands of similarly unnecessarily fragmented and bizarre concoctions that you have, the point is that complex distributed systems are generally speaking less likely to have to be re-invented or re-engineered at the drop of a hat in Windows.One of the constant frustrations I have, particularly with Linux-based solutions, is that so much documentation becomes out of date so quickly: recipes and how-tos have a lifetime of barely a few weeks, and then only work on certain versions of certain distros, leaving you to spend endless hours inside numerous rabbit holes. To be fair, you get that in Windows and OS X too, but in my experience nowhere near the same extent.

author: bd139
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2017, 01:06:47 pm
content: I disagree. The ABI and APIs are very stable on Linux. We're running stuff that hasn't been recompiled in a decade and survived three major OS releases fine. The trick is to not fight the OS and to use the package manager to pull in your dependencies, in our case YUM/RPM on CentOS We have a yum/rpm repository that we build to and all the machines point to that. Most of our targets on Linux are Go based so you literally put two files on disk (systemd unit and binary) and start the service and it's done.Most of the documentation out there is crap, I'll give you that but if you look at the commercially supported distributions the documentation is VERY good, arguably better than the templated junk MSFT pushes out. For example, RHEL (works with CentOS too):https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en/red-hat-enterprise-linux/... then there's the manpages which are good too.If you want to glue several things together on Linux, things get difficult, for example a virtual mail server or a full development stack. This comes only from experience. The same trouble occurs with windows. Have you ever started at a new company, been sat at a desk and had to work out how to get the pile of crap they have built on top of Commerce Server, Sharepoint and all sorts that is only stored in people's heads? That's far worse!The killer thing I find though with windows is click this click that click this click that even for distributed server installs. Everything we do is code and/or automated or it doesn't happen.