[Solved] MacBook recommendation needed

[NiHaoMike]

You can easily run OS X in a VM, and if you have good hardware it will be faster than running on Apple hardware.

I believe that's not permitted by OSX license. I'm the 1% in population that will read EULA. I think Apple only allows you to run up to 2 OSX VM on an Apple branded computer.

If you can find one of those really old Macs for free or nearly so, do a case modding project! Then you'll be running OSX on an "upgraded" Mac.

[bd139]

Why use OpenOffice, LibreOffice or even MO on a Mac, when the supplied software (Numbers, Pages, Keypoint, iBooks Author) is more than good?? 

Got to agree there. That is until you have to work with other people using Office, at which point it's shit. Really though if you're sending word and excel documents around, something is broken in your workflow.

[tooki]

Why use OpenOffice, LibreOffice or even MO on a Mac, when the supplied software (Numbers, Pages, Keypoint, iBooks Author) is more than good?? 

Got to agree there. That is until you have to work with other people using Office, at which point it's shit. Really though if you're sending word and excel documents around, something is broken in your workflow.

Alas, that seems to be the favorite modus operandi in something like 95% of small and medium businesses. Trying to migrate people away from them is damned near impossible.

(And for some jobs, like actual writers, there's no real alternative to Word. Neither Pages nor OO.o/LO come even distantly close.)

[bd139]

I do a lot of technical writing and there's always LaTeX.

MacTeX is Jesus' sandals as software goes

[tooki]

I do a lot of technical writing and there's always LaTeX.

MacTeX is Jesus' sandals as software goes

Sorry, I need to be clear: I'm not talking about formatting the text for output. What I mean is actually supporting the writing process. Word is actually quite strong at that. (I worked as a technical writer/translator for a couple of years, and Word is simply the most frictionless writing tool I've encountered yet. LaTeX is the polar opposite, it's super strong on final output, but composing in it is just an exercise in frustration.) It's all the little things, the AI built into Word to make it do what you want, even if you actually do something else. It's not that Word is perfect, it's not. But everything else is so much worse, usually in little details that just annoy the living daylights out of you when you just wanna write. Death by 1000 paper cuts...

[Howardlong]

FWIW I started on my OSX career about six years or so ago when a product I'd developed became popular and a very vocal (but it turned out quite small minority, so beware!) wanted to use it on a Mac running OSX.

At first I went the Hackintosh route, but learned pretty quickly that this was not going to be reasonable at the time, so I bought a Mac mini back when they still had a DVD drive. This was the cheapest way in at the time, and you still had third party upgrade options on RAM and hard drives. I upgraded the hard drive to and SSD, and upped the RAM to 8GB (the max it would take).

I liked the hardware then so much that around 2012 I bought into the Apple way, including two Mac mini i7 Ivy Bridge Servers as desktops (that I upgraded RAM, and HDDs to SSDs), a Macbook Air 11", and a fully loaded Macbook Pro Retina 15" when they were first released in 2012. I also upgraded the SSDs on the two Macbooks. But rather than running OSX, apart from the Air, 95%+ of the time they run Windows. The OSX is there just for hardware and software porting, testing, and checking in stuff to the App Store.

Until six months ago the Mac minis were used daily. Now I only use one for my music arranging, and the other sits in a drawer, replaced with an almighty dual Xeon overkill machine I built myself. I still use the two Macbooks daily, particularly the 15" Retina (again in Windows) which still holds its own against today's best laptops with its Ivy Bridge i7 3820QM 4C8T, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD.

Nowadays I would very much doubt I'd go the Apple way again unless I had an overwhelming need to develop in OSX, as the OP does. The dongle dependency I can deal with as I find myself using them regularly anyway on older hardware, but I do wish all laptop manufacturers would put at least four USB ports on their devices! The newer Mac minis are nowhere near as powerful as the 2012 models, so would be a non starter for me. By far the worst part is the almost universal lack of upgrade path for all new models apart from buying a brand new unit. For that alone Apple need to have a long rethink about their supposed green credentials that they espouse.

[Howardlong]

I still use the two Macbooks daily, particularly the 15" Retina (again in Windows) which still holds its own against today's best laptops with its Ivy Bridge i7 3820QM 4C8T, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD.

To be fair, 3820QM scores 13.2k in Geekbench 4, and a modern 15W ULP i7 scores 9.9k with 1/3 the rated TDP, let along the new 14nm chips has actually 10% higher single core scores than the old 22nm chips due to more optimized turbo boost.

The Iris Plus 640 seen in top of the line 14nm 15W i7 chips, such as 7660u, scores 1443 points in Fire Strike Gfx at 1080p, while a GTX650M scores 1422 under the same condition.

So, it's fair to say that a 2012 MBP, with its 90W total CPU+GPU power consumption, is not performing better than a 15W 2017 latest chip.

A modern gaming ultrabook, say, with i7 7700hq and GTX1060, is 8x faster than the top 2012 MBP in terms of Gfx at 78% higher power consumption and 15% faster in CPU, while the CPU consuming 22% lower power. This makes a modern gaming ultrabook (lighter than a 15'' MBP) 41% more energy efficient in CPU and 350% more energy efficient in GPU.

Horse for courses: I'm not sure what you're using the GPU for but I don't understand the fixation on it? I'm not using it for gaming, video or mining, I'm using it for productivity, I am not number crunching on the GPU. Yes, I'd like 4k 60Hz on the miniscule number of occasions I have it hooked up to a 4k monitor (that was a key reason for moving from the Mac mini server as my daily desktop, they would do 4k 30Hz, not 60Hz).

You can of course juggle the figures how you see fit, for example you could say that the newer PCIe SSDs are perhaps 5 times faster than the SATA one in my current MBP, but is it a bottleneck in practical terms? I swapped out a Samsung 950 NVMe 256GB for a 2TB 850 Evo SATA yesterday on a Ryzen build, and don't see any appreciable difference in practical use, despite the 850 Evo being a quarter of the speed of the 950 depending which test you reference. Sure, there are going to be some edge cases where there's going to be a dramatic improvement, but for aggregate typical use I can't say it's particularly a bottleneck.

While battery longevity is of course a benefit of the newer low power devices, many of these lower power mobile devices only run two cores. I've long taken the power consumption/battery life claims of all vendors with a large pinch of salt, it's the same territory as mileage claims for cars, no one ever achieves their claims in real life. Three hours in real use is more than sufficient for me in every case I can think of, and I take an AC adapter if required.

In reality long ago I organised my life around battery limitations and have become used to it to such an extend it no longer bothers me, but it is a mindset. The exception is standby time where some laptops are truly appalling. I have a Surface 3 here, it barely lasts three days on S3 sleep, so I shut it down or hibernate after use unless I know I'm going to be using it very soon afterwards. That same mindset now extends to other laptops, I am more likely to shutdown or hibernate rather than accept S3 sleep as an alternative.

In short, I currently have no realistic and justifiable reason to update the five year old MBP I use daily, I don't notice my productivity reduced in any way except in very large project rebuilds where a few more cores wouldn't go amiss, seeing the same projects compile on a 24C48T dual Xeon puts a 4C8T into perspective! That doesn't stop me yearning over an XPS 15 though.

I would certainly agree with your OP though, a Hackintosh isn't the way to go IME, unless you have a lot of time on your hands. I'm not even sure if it's possible to publish apps in the App Store if you don't have a "proper" Mac anyway.

[tooki]

I cheaped out on AppleCare since with tax, the bottom line is just a few cents below $2000. I don't want to add $229+tax and trigger Wells Fargo fraud protection, which will waste my another half an hour.

FYI, you can add the AppleCare+ within 60 days of original purchase, so it can be on a separate transaction.

[bd139]

I buy AppleCare because it covers me destroying the thing which has happened on two separate occasions. Killed my iPhone 6s, walked into Apple store, stumped up the £79 and walked away with a new handset in under 30 minutes. Then again this is a business critical device (I run my business off it).

[tooki]

I cheaped out on AppleCare since with tax, the bottom line is just a few cents below $2000. I don't want to add $229+tax and trigger Wells Fargo fraud protection, which will waste my another half an hour.

FYI, you can add the AppleCare+ within 60 days of original purchase, so it can be on a separate transaction.

Don't know if it's worth it, but I think I can add AppleCare until 1 year after initial purchase (essentially before warranty runs out).
I searched on Google and some say a Mac will reveal most of its problems in one year, so I don't know if the extra 2 years of warranty makes a difference.
Also, even without AppleCare, I'm risking $425 in case something craps out (I think that's Louis' motherboard repair flat rate), so unless my chance of having something blows up from year 2 to year 3 is fifty percent, AppleCare is not worth it.
I can see pros using AppleCare simply because they want faster service and replacement units because they will lose their business if they are off their computer, but I'm a PC guy, I only use a Mac for this particular project. When it's done, I have no professional use of it.
My OSX development is likely to be concluded in a year, so the rest years of its lifetime it will become just a glorified netbook. So even if something craps out and I can't get it fixed immediately, I'm still not losing my job. I can afford the mail-in repair turnaround time.

There was a year to add AppleCare (without a plus), and in countries without AppleCare+, that's still the case.

In countries where AppleCare+ (with the plus) is available, then you can't get AppleCare (without the plus) and you have 60 days to add AppleCare+. (Except Japan, where it's 30 days.)

[BrianHG]

A few years ago, I got lucky and bought a 6 month old MacBook Pro for 400$ which was destroyed by Ice Tea.  Apple wouldn't fix it for the original owner...  After going online to youtube to see how to properly open it, a firm tooth brush with heavy duty flux remover & a lot a brushing and rinsing, + the eventually the replacement of the battery, and LCD back light inverter, it worked perfectly.  Gave it to my niece who still uses it today.

Being a student, you might be able to find a similar lucky deal.

[cdev]

If I were you, I would get Apple Care. Ive had multiple Macbooks, Power Macs and other Apples going back to the late 1980s, and Ive found it invaluable several times.

They are not as generous as they once were. Sometimes they have a defect they don't want to admit, Applecare can potentially save you a lot of time and money.

Another alternative, don't get a Mac! I gave up trying to stay current on everything several years ago. Its too expensive.

But now you already have. So, I would invest in it if you can afford it and need zero downtime or close to it.

[bd139]

You only regret it if you don't use it. If you don't have it and you do have to use it then the regret is larger. I killed a 2 month old 2010 MBP with a glass of water and didn't have it. It still burns.

[cdev]

Two words..

"pink dots"  or "water indicators" which basically contain a chemical that turns pink in high humidity situations. (This is an issue, they can be tripped by normal weather in some areas, high humidity!)

In short, if you accidentally or not, spill water into your computer, Apple Care would not have saved you in that situation.

However, often spilling water into them is fixable by you. Apple Care is useful however when the fragile laptop starts falling apart on you. Or similar, and its just past the year they give you without it. Make sure that you get them to fix all the things that go wrong that it does cover, as soon as they show up.  They have replaced cases for me that started falling apart, multiple power supply issues.. DVDROM drives, batteries.. once the graphics card died.. screen hinges, laptop backlight, the list goes on and on.



Quote from: bd139 on Yesterday at 03:25:32

You only regret it if you don't use it. If you don't have it and you do have to use it then the regret is larger. I killed a 2 month old 2010 MBP with a glass of water and didn't have it. It still burns.

[bd139]

Yes my recent purchases are AppleCare+ and that does cover it. You can chuck the thing in a pond, go to the Apple store, pay the excess and walk away with a new machine in 30 minutes.

Although I did knock my 6s in a sink of water and it had absolutely no effect other than make me very nervous.

[tooki]

Although I did knock my 6s in a sink of water and it had absolutely no effect other than make me very nervous.

iPhones are not IP rated due to liability considerations, but they are designed to be waterproof to certain degree.

FYI, though the iPhone 6S has some water-resistance built in but is not rated, the iPhone 7 is actually officially IP67 rated: https://www.apple.com/iphone-7/specs/

[bd139]

I think the 6s was a test phone. Fortunately for me anyway!

As for Android and Sony, I'm not sure I could cope with that combination. Sony make pretty things that just don't work very well using the Japanese ethic of "shiny happy hardware, oops we forgot the software". I also got fed of Android about 6 months ago and bought an iPhone. I find Android like a slightly mental, needy girlfriend. You know the one that wakes you up at 3AM to make sure you're not being unfaithful in your dreams. The one that knows what you ate for lunch just by the look on your face. The one you find has been stalking you for the last 3 months.  The iPhone has a "STFU and leave me alone" switch on the side and requires little attention from me. I don't even have to stick it on flight mode overnight to leave me alone. I sleep better now. Not once have I considered throwing it at the wall which was the fate of my Nexus followed by shouting "I'm going to the apple store you dick" at it.

[tooki]

"pink dots"  or "water indicators" which basically contain a chemical that turns pink in high humidity situations. (This is an issue, they can be tripped by normal weather in some areas, high humidity!)

I always assumed that the technology of the moisture indicators is basically the same as the color in Kool-Aid powder: powdered dye making up a small portion of the total powder volume. As dry granules, the dye isn't very dark, but once dissolved, highly visible. I assumed that powdered dye (and probably fillers) were glued to a substrate using a waterless adhesive, with some kind of porous, water-permeable film or paper on top, which the dissolved dye would then flow into and become visible.

Does anyone know? (Just random curiosity here.)

[tooki]

I think the 6s was a test phone. Fortunately for me anyway!

Yes, even at the time, when teardowns of the 6S found the gaskets and whatnot, but without a public claim of water resistance, people hypothesized that it might be a testbed, with a future iPhone actually being IP rated. They turned out to be right!

As for Android and Sony, I'm not sure I could cope with that combination. Sony make pretty things that just don't work very well using the Japanese ethic of "shiny happy hardware, oops we forgot the software". I also got fed of Android about 6 months ago and bought an iPhone. I find Android like a slightly mental, needy girlfriend. You know the one that wakes you up at 3AM to make sure you're not being unfaithful in your dreams. The one that knows what you ate for lunch just by the look on your face. The one you find has been stalking you for the last 3 months.  The iPhone has a "STFU and leave me alone" switch on the side and requires little attention from me. I don't even have to stick it on flight mode overnight to leave me alone. I sleep better now. Not once have I considered throwing it at the wall which was the fate of my Nexus followed by shouting "I'm going to the apple store you dick" at it.

[tech history excursion]
You know what I said for many years? "If only Apple could have Sony's hardware engineers."

Now, in the many, many years since I first said that, Apple's hardware engineering has gotten extremely good and has probably fully caught up with Sony.

But for example, in the iPod days, I think Sony probably could have gotten two or three times the battery life, and still made the devices smaller. Power efficiency and miniaturization were always Sony's fortes. For example, they made a high-end cassette Walkman in the 90s that was barely larger than a cassette case, and ran for 37 hours of a single AA alkaline cell. And that thing had to run a tape transport the whole time, whereas an iPod was running from a RAM buffer 99% of the time! (The first iPods got 10h on one charge, and it wasn't until 2007 that Apple caught up with that Sony Walkman's 37h -- and even then, only in the jumbo-size 60GB iPod.) For context, by 2001 when the first iPod was released, Sony had already released MiniDisc players that got 60h of playback on a single AA in standard-play mode (and 80 in long-play mode), and even Discmans that got over 30h of playback from two AAs -- and that's CD, which was not originally designed with portability in mind. (I believe that one thing Sony did in late Discmans to save power was to use a higher-speed CD mechanism, like 4 or 8x or something, combined with a large RAM buffer and audio compression, to basically rip a song to RAM at much faster than real-time, then shut off the drive and play from RAM. I wish I remember what I did with my last Discman!)

Anyway, an Apple-Sony collaboration wouldn't even have been unheard of: Sony was the original supplier of 3.5" floppy drives for Apple, as well as the OEM of many Apple CRT displays (the ones with Trinitrons, of course), and as a LiIon cell supplier. But most interesting of all was the PowerBook 100: Apple literally approached Sony with the schematics of the Mac Portable*, and asked them "can you shrink this down"? Sony succeeded magnificently, producing the PowerBook 100, arguably one of the first subnotebooks ever made. (I do not know whether Sony also manufactured the PowerBook 100 for Apple, but they definitely did the engineering.)

*The Mac Portable was a luggable with a beautiful active-matrix TFT LCD, but with a large sealed lead-acid battery, desktop-size 3.5" floppy and hard disk drives and a desktop-style mechanical keyboard, weighing in at 17lbs, the same as a Mac SE, just battery powered.

[/excursion]

[bd139]

Nothing wrong with a tech history excursion

Sony did some good. I had a MiniDisc (MZ-R90) which i paid a slightly crazy amount of money to be imported at the time (student loan FTW). Worth every penny I spent on it. You're right about the battery life; it lasted hours on a single AA or the integrated rechargeable. My wife used it from 2002 to 2007. The mp3 players on the market at the time this came out were 64Mb-ish Diamond Rio etc. That's where Apple came and killed everything. I never owned a hard disk based iPod but the moment the shuffle came out (the original white stick one), I grabbed that, then jumped through a couple of Flash based iPods (nano).

Then I saw this and had to have it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W880i

By that time Sony's engineering had gone to shit. The buttons were like pressing razor blades and the headphones had an iffy right angle connector that was unreliable which lead me to blasting out "Buried Alive" by "Front Line Assembly" on the bus a bit too loud from the integrated speaker and annoying everyone.

Feck it so I bought a Nokia N91. That thing had a hard disk in it. A phone with a hard disk?!?

It was a mess, so iPod nano and dumbphone again. Then the Lumia 710 (which was TBH great at the time), then android handsets, now a 6s.

The 6s is by far the best engineering and experience so far out of all of the above. I suspect that's what most of the cost goes into: non superficial quality improvements.

[PartialDischarge]

I had this walkman, the Sony WM-701. I'm not sure it even made it to Europe. It had the "best" quality of music of any portable device I ever had, and I don't think I've ever owned a device so crammed in electronics/mechanics. Custom sound connector, custom rectangular battery, just A M A Z I N G

[bd139]

I had the Sanyo version of that. it was smaller but crapper. Ignore the plastic red bit - that was where you put the AA when you couldn't get a replacement rechargeable in the UK



It gave up eventually because the poor little motor just couldn't do it any more.

[tooki]

Nothing wrong with a tech history excursion

Sony did some good. I had a MiniDisc (MZ-R90) which i paid a slightly crazy amount of money to be imported at the time (student loan FTW). Worth every penny I spent on it. You're right about the battery life; it lasted hours on a single AA or the integrated rechargeable. My wife used it from 2002 to 2007. The mp3 players on the market at the time this came out were 64Mb-ish Diamond Rio etc. That's where Apple came and killed everything. I never owned a hard disk based iPod but the moment the shuffle came out (the original white stick one), I grabbed that, then jumped through a couple of Flash based iPods (nano).

Then I saw this and had to have it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W880i

By that time Sony's engineering had gone to shit. The buttons were like pressing razor blades and the headphones had an iffy right angle connector that was unreliable which lead me to blasting out "Buried Alive" by "Front Line Assembly" on the bus a bit too loud from the integrated speaker and annoying everyone.

Feck it so I bought a Nokia N91. That thing had a hard disk in it. A phone with a hard disk?!?

It was a mess, so iPod nano and dumbphone again. Then the Lumia 710 (which was TBH great at the time), then android handsets, now a 6s.

The 6s is by far the best engineering and experience so far out of all of the above. I suspect that's what most of the cost goes into: non superficial quality improvements.

Imported the MD player? Wasn't it available in the UK? As I understand it, MD was as popular in the UK as in continental Europe, which is to say far more popular than in USA, but not as popular as in Japan. As such, the UK would have gotten most of the Sony and Sharp models. Am I wrong?

(FWIW, I got into MD in about 1996, and stuck with it until about 2002 when my crappy Sharp MD portable died. I went without a portable player for that time, since I was listening at home and in the car, until getting an iPod in 2003 and then iPhone in 2007. But I still have my home MD deck, an MDS-JB930, and have since picked up a second-hand Hi-MD portable. I'm now on the lookout for a late-model Sony home CD player, one that supports CD-RW, CD-TEXT and Control AII, so that I can burn discs to CD-RW with iTunes and then copy them to MD with titles automatically transferred. )

As for the W880: This is speculation, but isn't that more to do with the fact that Sony-Ericsson was basically Ericsson? All of the pre-Sony-Ericsson-merger Sony cellphone models were axed, and the Ericsson models of the time were rebranded to the new name. My suspicion is that despite the name, it was more Ericsson than Sony.

[tooki]

I had this walkman, the Sony WM-701. I'm not sure it even made it to Europe. It had the "best" quality of music of any portable device I ever had, and I don't think I've ever owned a device so crammed in electronics/mechanics. Custom sound connector, custom rectangular battery, just A M A Z I N G

So sexy!

Does it actually use a custom battery, or is it just one of the regular "gumstick" NiMH or NiCd batteries that were used widely in higher-end 1990s-early 2000s portable music players? (I've got three Sony Walkmans right now that use those: one Hi-MD, two cassette.)

Edit: Looks like it's the standard gumstick. Would have been one of the first Sony products to use it. That Walkman is one of the exceedingly few that supported Dolby C. Man, I woulda killed for that when I was a kid! (I had a home stereo with Dolby C, but since I couldn't afford a Walkman with it, I had to record my mixtapes with Dolby B instead! )

[bd139]

Imported the MD player? Wasn't it available in the UK? As I understand it, MD was as popular in the UK as in continental Europe, which is to say far more popular than in USA, but not as popular as in Japan. As such, the UK would have gotten most of the Sony and Sharp models. Am I wrong?

They were available in the UK but there was a 6 month lead time before new models appeared. There was a company in North London that did direct imports from Japans so I got one from there. I think I probably paid about 25% more on the import price than the retail but it was worth it at the time.

As for the W880: This is speculation, but isn't that more to do with the fact that Sony-Ericsson was basically Ericsson? All of the pre-Sony-Ericsson-merger Sony cellphone models were axed, and the Ericsson models of the time were rebranded to the new name. My suspicion is that despite the name, it was more Ericsson than Sony.

It felt like it was engineered by Sony rather than Ericsson. You are possibly right though