In the recent 2 years I have grown accustomed to apple hardware. I understand, for the most part, how it works and what all I can do with it. Its clean, slow, and unix. Yes reader, these are aged machines running operating systems finely tuned for Spotify and Pages that are cornered towards the rich piece of shit from your english class you want to bludgeon with your HP Spectre or whatever the hell you have....
Or are they?
I create this post in seeing a lot of videos popping up in recent times about people hating apples and mac computers; how they are anti-consumer and terrible and a waste of time and how the slow burn of the downfall of apple will drive them insane as they stare longingly at the Classic 512 they are now using as their desktop (people actually do this, its not just a meme, I saw it 2 days ago swear to jeebus). I have a counter argument to apple users: you're all fucking stupid, and I can prove it.
What apple-ers want to use a macbook for: writing, gaming, art, tumblr, blogs, video editing, maybe some code, the app store.
What apple wants in their macbook, as well as other macs: for it to run (for a while), someone to buy it, to sell another one to some dumbshit later on
What the engineers want it to do: Be attachable to its family of hardware, be a tight unix system, be modifiable, run like a clock, do art, do music, do code, do everything a developing environment needs to do to be functional.
Writing, gaming, tumblr and whatever the kids are into these days are easy to do with just a phone, a flip phone at that if you know what you're doing. At the moment I write this on a macbook, but just as easily I could be using my y40-70 or be at my desk half asleep at 4 in the morning. Nae reader, a mac may be a common computer at this point, but I will argue that a mac is not a commoners computer. No offense to people who utilize what these machines are capable of, but most people are stupid and want the credit apple gives as a name brand rather than the really awesome tie-ins that automatically come with a mac.
A mac may be over priced, but with that 1470 you pay for your tiny macbook you get some of the best support on the planet automatically. You get an environment that can talk to your phone, desktop, store files, and can go wherever the hell you want with good battery, not to mention do all your phone tasks right on the desktop! And while the hardware is old, its tested. I think we can all look at the 7700k and really agree, yeah, theres no god damn point to that. So, with that, I think that we can hold off on the CPU fighting. If I had it my way we'd be using RISC right now.
Now before we go in any further I know you're yelling "Aremis you stupid fanboy powerpc based git, what the hell are you on about good support!? Do you even use the support? Its shit!!" And to that I say indeed! It is! If you call and say your phone is dead they don't want to talk to someone for 2 hours about a dead phone! I don't either and I can't blame them to be honest. Though yes sometimes it is some lazy git who doesn't want to do anything today, a few weeks ago I discovered a bug in iCloud itself pertaining to me not being able to use Messages on my desktop, called apple, and after ten minutes of some idgit who was to busy to bother with me a technician cut in on the line, never talked to the other guy, and instantly said I was going to be passed to a developer to attack this head on. Is my icloud fixed? No! But I know WHY it isn't fixed! Turns out I found a bug that has to do with how you do your initial setup. At the time I set up icloud I had been in a rush for some interviews I had at a job center. I didn't get anything back except that hook into the radio station, but I needed to get through my phone setup asap to be ready. Over 5 days I slowly setup my phone and had to redo it twice. Because this was a staggered setup it had literally broken my icloud database and without shutting the server I was on down and putting millions of clients down for a few hours to implement a new system, I will just have to deal with only having icloud storage. The system is getting reworked as we speak. I learned this the last few days as the dev I was talking to pung back and let me know what was happening.
Is that not fucking awesome. I DID THAT. BY ACCIDENT. Obviously.
But they were willing to go through it and figure it out. They removed the issue person, as far as I am aware anyways, and are on their way anew now.
After that whole ramble list, I want to bring up the user space. There is much bitching about gaming. As I covered price, for the most part, I want to talk about the mainstay of gaming and other user tasks on mac. See, macs aren't second in gaming because they have a smaller userbase. League of Legends has a healthy mac user base. No, part of the problem is Unix, and the other part is OpenGL and how it interacts with the graphics system of OSX. Without digging too deep (because it is 4 AM), essentially apple wanted to be a business company and not Atari, the other one, and in 1988 or 87 they decided to be a business company again and remove games as a main thing macs did. For a long time games were gone from the mac until after 1995 when some major releases started coming out en masse. Yes there were games released, but not at the absolutely ridiculous scale as before. The mac market was big enough to have its own video game crash. Come to now and we have a laptop with a 460 that apparently isn't wired very well to run something like besieged. I don't know why everyone uses besieged as a benchmark but apparently it is now for mac people. But, that mac is not meant to game, not even minecraft and TF2, the game to play on a mac is "What can I do with a box of Legos" and it plays that game well. It is meant to make and create as Jobs always said, but only now do I get what he meant.
These machines are built on hardware that, yes is aged a bit, but is shoved towards the people like me that use a terminal every day. Thats why me have bash and not some retarded thing like ~PowerShell!~ that no one cares about. Thats why we have an easy to navigate environment. Thats why its unix based in the workspace. Its walled in so that you can't absolutely fuck everything and it contains everything that I need no hack a sparc machine in userland. But I can access everything else if I really really want to. But how often am I going to play with the kernel? 7 times a year on a legit machine? Its a workspace that, yes, is child proofed, but thats because some dumbass is going to come along and spout the same bullshit that the "delete system32" joke came from. And on a macbook that someone may not know how to actually use that may be an issue indeed.
Lastly, macs are set for the artsy fartsy people that annoy me so much, but are built for me and people like me. I want to work in a fast reactive environment that won't break. If I have a fleet of macbook 3,1's all doing the same uh-oh, I can call apple support, say the error code, and fix the issue uniformilly and keep track of it. NOTHING has that amount of uniformity. No, absolutly NO, fleet of netbooks at a school running win7 will have the same issue 99% of the time. It just won't. Most of the time if one mac throws an error, the error the others will throw will be the same. Thats when you fix it and keep it rock solid.
Now, macs do have problems. I won't say they don't, but I really do believe that the advertising part of apple wants a mac to be an art piece when the tech people want their dream work environments. Its a beautiful in company battle watching the techs try to make the stupid public and advertising agency shut the hell up about gimmicky pointless touchscreen rubbish that no one will use in 80% of their solid work day and the 20% that do use a touchscreen have a tablet doing the touch work. Yes, the touch bar is gimmicky, but its a gimmick to make people shut up for a bit while the hardware devs decide if they don't or do want to be the single best they can be, or just another tablet company. Do they want the unix they have dreamed of since they were kids cracking Apple ][ roms, or do they want an immitation surface which is an imitation ipad which is a rip off of some chinese thing that copied an IBM tablet from 1994... And its not that they don't want a tablet inclusive OS, its that the big stupid "HIT ME" buttons take up the whole space, are bothersome, and waste the space you could be using for actual work!
All in all, macs are gods of the workplace. They are not meant to be some toy for the kids of Bigby and Timmy Ho's, but because the hype train has not stopped since 1984, it keeps rolling through. Its a beautiful balance of the kids of the old generation of computers getting what they have always wanted and devs like me getting a holy shit load of speed in their dev environments, and then the marketing fesh bullshit that comes from the fanboys and fangirls, insert AMD NVIDIA. Its fun to watch this all happen, truely. A company that wants to be business is getting dragged by force into something it, at heart, doesn't want. And while that saddens me, I still do my works.
No fanboys, apple doesn't care, but not because they are better than you, you REALLY just don't get it.
And I mean that in as not-douche of a tone and meaning as possible.