Author Topic: Is a mac book worth it  (Read 20818 times)

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #25 on: 19 December, 2016, 12:21:27 pm »
Some things cost more than others. This fact, I understand, comes as a surprise to a lot of internet users.

ian speaks sense.

Apparently some people spend over £1,000 on a bicycle.  :o
It is simpler than it looks.

citoyen

  • Occasionally rides a bike
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #26 on: 19 December, 2016, 12:48:34 pm »
But fanboys and programmers aside, people don't use operating systems, they use applications.  Which tends to make arguing about the relative merits of one OS or another largely academic. 

By far the most sensible and useful comment in this thread.

I use Macs because they're de rigueur in my line of work. I have a MacBook Air because it syncs seamlessly with my iMac and iPhone. It does get a bit noisy when running processor-intensive apps but that's not often.

If I didn't have specific work reasons for using Apple stuff, I would probably choose a Windows machine for price reasons.
"The future's all yours, you lousy bicycles."

Mr Larrington

  • A bit ov a lyv wyr by slof standirds
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Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #27 on: 19 December, 2016, 04:52:45 pm »
But fanboys and programmers aside, people don't use operating systems, they use applications.

The reason why I have only just got up is because I found myself wondering whether there was an an easy way of deleting all the directories that one of my NAS drives automaticaly generates and fills with thumbnails of any picture files in its parent.  Five hours later I had determined that it could be done using a batch script under the Windows command line (sorry, ian).  Almost.  It still gets mardy if there's  an ampersand or hash character in the path name of the directory it's trying to remove.

Yes, it could probably be done using a proper scripting language but the only proper scripting language I know was never ported to Wintel boxes.
External Transparent Wall Inspection Operative & Mayor of Mortagne-au-Perche
Satisfying the Bloodlust of the Masses in Peacetime

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #28 on: 19 December, 2016, 05:24:57 pm »
Apple were the most valuable company in the world with vast cash reserves more than most countries. They've done well for a small Irish tech firm.  The overall quality is reflected in the price, but the cost of components isn't.





Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #29 on: 19 December, 2016, 05:33:39 pm »
But fanboys and programmers aside, people don't use operating systems, they use applications.

The reason why I have only just got up is because I found myself wondering whether there was an an easy way of deleting all the directories that one of my NAS drives automaticaly generates and fills with thumbnails of any picture files in its parent.  Five hours later I had determined that it could be done using a batch script under the Windows command line (sorry, ian).  Almost.  It still gets mardy if there's  an ampersand or hash character in the path name of the directory it's trying to remove.

Yes, it could probably be done using a proper scripting language but the only proper scripting language I know was never ported to Wintel boxes.
Apples have a command line too...
It is simpler than it looks.

Mr Larrington

  • A bit ov a lyv wyr by slof standirds
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Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #30 on: 19 December, 2016, 05:40:06 pm »
See!  Now that's progress!  And I dare say that any inbuilt scripting capability they have is indistinguishable from Spodnix.

By 2020 we may have persuaded the Mega-Global Fruit Corporation of Cupertino, USAnia that iThings have a file system too.
External Transparent Wall Inspection Operative & Mayor of Mortagne-au-Perche
Satisfying the Bloodlust of the Masses in Peacetime

rogerzilla

  • When n+1 gets out of hand
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #31 on: 19 December, 2016, 06:30:06 pm »
I've had enough experience of trying to connect or fix other people's Apple stuff to steer well clear.  The stuff is designed to lock you into their expensive ecosystem and to make it as hard as possible to do anything not envisaged and approved by the designers.  IME it doesn't even work very well: it's just eye candy.
Hard work sometimes pays off in the end, but laziness ALWAYS pays off NOW.

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #32 on: 19 December, 2016, 07:01:02 pm »
in contrast, I've never worked with anyone with a windows laptop that hasn't had regular crashes / hanging or slow booting compared to my mac (a 5 year old Air).  Brilliant and idiot proof, just what I need.


ian

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #33 on: 19 December, 2016, 07:08:56 pm »
I've had enough experience of trying to connect or fix other people's Apple stuff to steer well clear.  The stuff is designed to lock you into their expensive ecosystem and to make it as hard as possible to do anything not envisaged and approved by the designers.  IME it doesn't even work very well: it's just eye candy.

I'm not entirely clear what this 'expensive ecosystem' is or what it's 'not possible for me to do' because the evil designers forbid it?

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #34 on: 19 December, 2016, 07:45:02 pm »
If you store your photos in iphoto or photo, they made it very difficult to export your photos to another photo management system.

ian

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #35 on: 19 December, 2016, 07:50:00 pm »
You mean other than click 'File > Export > Export Unmodified Originals'? Or if you don't like Photos, you could use any number of other Photo Management applications. Or just dump them into folders of your choosing.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #36 on: 19 December, 2016, 07:51:04 pm »
Apple's lock-in isn't actually about being evil.  It's an attempt to make shiny stuff that works.  And it mostly does, albeit using paradigms that I - as someone who knows too much about computers - often find unintuitive.

But it's no worse than what you get if you do a by-the-book installation of Debian without any of the non-free packages.  That's pretty reliable too, but then you wonder why you can't play MP3s...

Windows, on the other hand, is designed to work with your existing stuff.  The amount of effort Microsoft put into backwards-compatibility with third-party binaries, while keeping up with new technology, is astounding.  That's what allows it to be the planet's default desktop OS.  TBH, it's impressive that it works as well as it does.


Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #37 on: 19 December, 2016, 07:57:11 pm »
AFAIA for the HQ i7 in a Dell it needs to be the Alienware gaming laptops.  Personally I really dislike shiny, reflective screens - Dell does the "anti-glare display" on the Dell Inspiron 17" range, which I have seen on a display model - looks good.
Cycle and recycle.   SS Wilson

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #38 on: 19 December, 2016, 08:14:40 pm »
You mean other than click 'File > Export > Export Unmodified Originals'? Or if you don't like Photos, you could use any number of other Photo Management applications. Or just dump them into folders of your choosing.

It's the meta data that you add to the photos in your photo archive, geographic tags, descriptions of places, people etc.  When I left the Apple ecosystem in 2013, I left a lot of data behind, that I inputted, but couldn't be exported.

ian

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #39 on: 19 December, 2016, 08:33:23 pm »
These days it's File > Export > Photo and tick the two boxes to include any comments, keywords etc. and location.

caerau

  • SR x 3 - PBP fail but 1090 km - hey - not too bad
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #40 on: 19 December, 2016, 11:15:03 pm »
But fanboys and programmers aside, people don't use operating systems, they use applications.  Which tends to make arguing about the relative merits of one OS or another largely academic. 

By far the most sensible and useful comment in this thread.

I use Macs because they're de rigueur in my line of work. I have a MacBook Air because it syncs seamlessly with my iMac and iPhone. It does get a bit noisy when running processor-intensive apps but that's not often.

If I didn't have specific work reasons for using Apple stuff, I would probably choose a Windows machine for price reasons.


I'd go with this too. I'm no fanboi but I have to use Macs for work so I've been forcibly converted.  I do spent far less time fucking about with settings than I ever did with PCs but that's about the only true difference I've ever noticed - except the lurid prices of course.


Having said that, fanboi's do abound and something noone has mentioned (that I notice) is that they have a significant resale value  - so depreciation is not what it is with a PC - you can factor this into the purchase price if you have a penchant for ebay et al.  I must sell some of my old Macs and iphones one of these days thinking about it...
It's a reverse Elvis thing.

Zipperhead

  • The cyclist formerly known as Big Helga
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #41 on: 19 December, 2016, 11:45:08 pm »
Apples have a command line too...

Yes, only Apple in there infinite wisdom seem to have decided that they know more about unix than the rest of the world. Why not, said some bright spark at apple, change the way that cp works so that it's different to every other unix in the last 30 years.

I have a macbook at work. It's kept handy because I know that I'll have to add native binaries for products into ours and Apple needs different to the rest of them - I don't have a problem with that, but any scripts that we write have to be very carefully tested to pick up all the places where Cupertino decides it knows best.
Won't somebody think of the hamsters!

ian

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #42 on: 20 December, 2016, 07:28:49 am »
I was around a friend's house the other night, she was showing me her new bike. It was a bit shit to be honest, I used to have one and I hated it. Awful to ride, she could have got one a lot better. Like mine. I told her this and she claimed she liked her new bike and enjoyed riding it anyway.

Anyway, I guess we had to disagree about the bike, even though she's wrong. There's no sense arguing about these things. We went inside for a cup of tea. She's got one of those stupid LG fridges. Nowhere near as good as my Samsung. I told her Samsung made better fridges and precisely why in considerable detail but she still bought the LG. She just sighs when I tell her this. I think she just bought it because she liked the colour. What a stupid reason.

So her new boyfriend turns up. Frankly, she could have done a lot better. He could be taller. There's plenty of taller men out there, you don't even have to look too hard. I tell her this why he's in the loo. I don't even know why she's bothering with men. Women are a lot better. I prefer them. She'd be better off as lesbian.

So, yeah, I spent the rest of the evening in A&E having a spoon removed from my skull. Apparently she'd used an impressive degree of force. They had to remove it with pliers. I was telling the doctors and nurses that I've got a much better pair of pliers...

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #43 on: 20 December, 2016, 07:49:59 am »
One factor to consider (if relevant) is that Microsoft office on Mac is a bit shit, and mixing versions of the same file on Mac & PC can lead to unpredictable results.

I  don't have strong feelings either way, but I would be loathe to lose the upteen years of experience on PC for Teh Shiny. In my case, every now and again I need to reach back to STUFF I've done and programs I've got, or out to open source, so sticking with PC is the one true way for me.

At work, %Megacorp have recently added Mac as an option alongside Lenovo MS laptops. Observing users who have reached out to grab, I'd say that the average Mac user is no more productive, that the issues like screen display, file and app compatibility often bite deep, but they do look pretty. Oh, and when I see people who know how to use them doing things like using their iPad as a two screen setup I am occasionally jealous.

These days, performance and usability appear to be roughly on a par. There's no knocking the quality of the Mac, but with W10 and SSD it no longer holds the high ground the way it used to. You pays yer money and takes yer choice.

ian

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #44 on: 20 December, 2016, 08:01:56 am »
I've never had an issue with moving files between Office on the two platforms (and I'm a Mac user in a PC world, and share some quite complicated and heavily formatted documents). But Microsoft Office for Mac is generally shitter – it's a bit better in 2016, but performance is still sub-par compared with the Windows version. But that's for huge formula riddled workbooks (not really an issue for casual use). It's lucky dip with macros. On the plus side this is pushing me towards using a better tool for my data churning needs.

I'd very doubt a choice of Mac or PC would affect staff productivity. If they're anything like our mothership, they'll spend three quarters of their day on Facebook regardless and the other quarter formatting Word documents with just the tab key.

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #45 on: 20 December, 2016, 08:07:51 am »
For the 2 laptops you originally suggested, I'd say It's paying £400 more for something that looks a bit better when turned off.

The movie editor in Windows is pretty good.

If someone else was paying, then get a MacBook, but with your own money I'd say get the Dell and 200 x £2 lottery scratch cards.


Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #46 on: 20 December, 2016, 08:08:49 am »
Microsoft Orifice is a bit shit on both platforms. It's a shame that people are given a 40ft artic to do tasks that a Mini would easily accomplish. OK there is  a need for Power Use stuff, but not for 90% of users.

I don't tend to dig deep into Orifice, but the most frustrating things are Wrods absolute inability to do formatting in any sensible way.

Excel's utter rigid sheet of nothing but cells is intensely frustrating. Unless you want to overlay a chart. (Those of you that use Numbers will know what I mean).

Both applications suffer from the odd way that Windows handles fonts. A sheet or document on one platform quite often plays format buggeration when opened on the other platform. You get used to allowing extra space in cells and expecting Word to have widow and orphan filled pages added.
It is simpler than it looks.

caerau

  • SR x 3 - PBP fail but 1090 km - hey - not too bad
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #47 on: 20 December, 2016, 09:22:17 am »
One factor to consider (if relevant) is that Microsoft office on Mac is a bit shit, and mixing versions of the same file on Mac & PC can lead to unpredictable results.




And there be the exact reason I have to use Macs.  Because the boss is a fanboi and he's like a child who just dropped his ice cream if someone dares send him a Word file where the symbol fonts have all changed to a random character and the diagrams all have a suspicious grainy quality now...


I resisted for the longest time but eventually some years ago he just lent me an old macbook of his (when they were green and looked a bit like a spaceship or George Foreman grill).  After that my PC became more or less redundant-  used for t'internet and Nethack and not much else.
It's a reverse Elvis thing.

Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #48 on: 20 December, 2016, 09:29:12 am »
I don't tend to dig deep into Orifice, but the most frustrating things are Wrods absolute inability to do formatting in any sensible way.

As someone who makes a living out of producing documents (and I use many tools to do so), I have to point out that the failure to produce reasonable formatting out of Word, or the formatting going wrong is usually user failure.

I'm currently working in a company where people churn out multi-hundred page documents filled with tables, graphics and pictures, produced in Word.

It's not the ideal tool for the job, but saying it can't do the job is nonsense.
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Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Is a mac book worth it
« Reply #49 on: 20 December, 2016, 09:42:34 am »
I didn't say it cannot so it, I said that it cannot do it in a sensible way.
It is simpler than it looks.