topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Tuesday April 16, 2024, 6:39 pm
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Last post Author Topic: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment  (Read 22131 times)

wraith808

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 11,186
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #25 on: June 23, 2015, 09:36 AM »
Mine actually has a pretty good screen.  If I wasn't keeping it within the parameters of paying what I received for my MBP, there are some really good screens out there for $1200-$1500 or so in the 13" range.

http://store.hp.com/...-1#!&TabName=vao - 13.3" diagonal Quad HD LED-backlit touchscreen (2560 x 1440)
http://www.dell.com/...d=xps-13-9343-laptop - 13.3-inch UltraSharp™ QHD+ (3200 x 1800) InfinityEdge Touch Display

Those were the two I looked at... but there are several others in that same display range.

The thing that really peeved me looking at them was the fact that they were all "new technology", i.e. SSD.  And I just don't trust an SSD as my only HDD, and the fact that you wouldn't get enough space... I want a minimum of 500GB, which in SSD is exorbitantly expensive.

xtabber

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 618
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #26 on: June 23, 2015, 03:14 PM »
The thing that really peeved me looking at them was the fact that they were all "new technology", i.e. SSD.  And I just don't trust an SSD as my only HDD, and the fact that you wouldn't get enough space... I want a minimum of 500GB, which in SSD is exorbitantly expensive.

As I noted here yesterday, SSD capacities are growing and prices are dropping rapidly, leading some analysts to predict the demise of the HDD altogether within a few years.

As of today, you can get a 500GB SSD from Samsung or Crucial for about $175, and Samsung gives you a 5 year warranty. That's still several times the cost of a 500GB HDD, but no manufacturer will give more than a 3 year warranty on any HDD and most won't give more than 1 year. That tells you everything you need to know about the reliability of the current generation of SSDs.  And of course, in a laptop, an SSD has the advantage of being impervious to shocks and magnetic fields.



tomos

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 11,961
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #27 on: June 23, 2015, 04:17 PM »
Mine actually has a pretty good screen.  If I wasn't keeping it within the parameters of paying what I received for my MBP, there are some really good screens out there for $1200-$1500 or so in the 13" range.

http://store.hp.com/...-1#!&TabName=vao - 13.3" diagonal Quad HD LED-backlit touchscreen (2560 x 1440)
http://www.dell.com/...d=xps-13-9343-laptop - 13.3-inch UltraSharp™ QHD+ (3200 x 1800) InfinityEdge Touch Display

I cant help thinking that they are making a *lot* of profit in this corner of the market. We need a bunch more competition at this level to bring the prices down imo.


The one I was looking at last night (Dell Inspiron E5550) - the cheapest offer atm is 930 (you'll have to wait three weeks for that); to buy instantly you will have to pay over 1,000 euros - this is obviously because it got good reviews and is selling well.
It's like bleeding bitcoin without the resale value :-/

If we look at the table below - it's only a rough comparison, but can anyone justify the price difference - which appears to be mainly because of an IPS screen (?)
Both 15.6" models from Dell

Inspiron 15 5558Inspiron 15 5550
i7i5
FHDFHD IPS Matt
8GB8GB
1TB500GB
4GB G.CardOn board
€699~€1,000

Okay, the 5550 could have other improvements, but they're both marketed as 'mid-range' laptops.
(The 5558 is relatively new here so I havent seen any decent reviews yet.)
All I want is that they slap a decent screen on the left there and add at the most 150 euros to the price.
^ That would be fair now :D
Tom
« Last Edit: June 23, 2015, 04:28 PM by tomos »

tomos

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 11,961
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #28 on: June 23, 2015, 04:25 PM »
^that's a sort of a rhetorical question above - there may be other reasons for the price difference - but it does definitely reflect a trend here (.eu), and it's a trend that started with Apple.
Tom

ewemoa

  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 2,922
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #29 on: June 23, 2015, 05:02 PM »
One of the features I appreciate about Macs is (was?) the reliable functionality of booting from external media.  I haven't tried recently, but from what I gather this still works pretty well.  I find this type of thing helpful for trying other operating systems and performing maintenance.

My experience with PCs (at least for notebooks) has been that this functionality doesn't tend to work that reliably if it works at all.  Of course it may just be the hardware I've been using :)

wraith808

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 11,186
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #30 on: September 14, 2015, 07:58 PM »
As for quality of hardware, you can find some wonderfully built laptops that can rival a Macbook, but you won't find Dell selling one and you will pay just as much for it as you did that Macbook Pro.

Dell XPS 13 (2015) is getting good reviews and being called a MacBook Air and Zenbook killer, at much lower price. The other one that's also looking good is the HP Spectre x360.


I gave my Inspiron 7000 to my daughter and wife to share... and got one of these.  It *really* is nice.  I'll post some comparisons of the two.  They're both 13", but it's amazing how much smaller the XPS is.

tomos

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 11,961
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #31 on: September 15, 2015, 03:20 AM »
As for quality of hardware, you can find some wonderfully built laptops that can rival a Macbook, but you won't find Dell selling one and you will pay just as much for it as you did that Macbook Pro.

Dell XPS 13 (2015) is getting good reviews and being called a MacBook Air and Zenbook killer, at much lower price. The other one that's also looking good is the HP Spectre x360.


I gave my Inspiron 7000 to my daughter and wife to share... and got one of these.  It *really* is nice.  I'll post some comparisons of the two.  They're both 13", but it's amazing how much smaller the XPS is.


I looked at reviews and YT videos about the XPS13 a while back, it's a lovely looking machine :-*
Tom

f0dder

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 9,153
  • [Well, THAT escalated quickly!]
    • View Profile
    • f0dder's place
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #32 on: September 16, 2015, 02:38 PM »
I've been using an Apple PC yes, it's a PC, not some mythological maaaaac with OSX as my work laptop since October last year.

It's way overpriced and I'd never cash out for one myself, but the hardware is pretty good. The screen is amazing, and the build quality is pretty good - it's ~1kg lighter than my old laptop, the way the lid lines up is nice, and the magsafe power cord is wonderful (shame on Apple for patenting something that obvious, bastards!). It's extremely silent most of the time, but if you put a bit of CPU+GPU stress on it, it gets veeeery hot and sounds like a jet engine.

There's a few nice things about OSX. Like, iTerm2 just works a bit better than conEmu or console2. Native *u*x shell just works better than CygWin or MingW - which is an advantage for the software development we do. Homebrew is great. I kinda like the whole app bundle simplicity over Windows installers.

But there's a lot of suckage as well. The kernel is less stable than Windows, for instance - they still seem to run too large parts of the graphics stack in kernel mode. I could reliable grey-screen kernelpanic the machine by trying to make a FireFox window overlap the laptop screen and an external monitor... something that fanboys obviously won't do, if for the simple reason that windows are clipped to a single monitor...  :huh: :huh: :huh:

The minimize/maximize/restore functionality sucks, there's no built-in shortcuts to move windows between monitors (even Windows has had that since, what, Vista in 2007?), it doesn't ship with a image editor (and there's nothing like Paint.NET available for free - either you have to suffer The GiMP, or you pay up), dialogs generally aren't very keyboard friendly, and there's extremely low "discoverability". If something isn't readily available from the dumbed-down menus and dialogs, you'll have to visit Google and drop down to a terminal.

Oh, and it creates these annoying .DS_Store files other dot-files all over the bloody place, which you can't turn off without resorting to OS-destabilizing hackery - just how arrogant is that? Especially considering that OSX only lets you mount NTFS volumes as read-only, but still infects the volumes with those dotfiles.

Un- and replugging external monitors is also quirky. For instance, it seems like the window manager doesn't flag windows as "maximized", just maximizes them... which has funny results when combined with the DPI scaling stuff ("retina", blargh, stop with the stupid marketing BS!). So I spent a couple of minutes moving & resizing windows around the laptop screen and two external monitors every morning.

That's off top of my head, from the comfort of my Windows workstation at home :)
- carpe noctem

wraith808

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 11,186
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #33 on: September 16, 2015, 04:05 PM »
Oh, and it creates these annoying .DS_Store files other dot-files all over the bloody place, which you can't turn off without resorting to OS-destabilizing hackery - just how arrogant is that? Especially considering that OSX only lets you mount NTFS volumes as read-only, but still infects the volumes with those dotfiles.

Un- and replugging external monitors is also quirky. For instance, it seems like the window manager doesn't flag windows as "maximized", just maximizes them... which has funny results when combined with the DPI scaling stuff ("retina", blargh, stop with the stupid marketing BS!). So I spent a couple of minutes moving & resizing windows around the laptop screen and two external monitors every morning.

These two really suck.  And the fact that you can't get a window over a certain size on your main screen unless you go full screen.  That dock isn't all it's cracked up to be.  And what are those .DS_Store files for anyway?

mwb1100

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 1,645
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #34 on: September 16, 2015, 06:03 PM »
And what are those .DS_Store files for anyway?

They're basically Apple's version of desktop.ini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store

f0dder

  • Charter Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 9,153
  • [Well, THAT escalated quickly!]
    • View Profile
    • f0dder's place
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #35 on: September 17, 2015, 04:48 AM »
That dock isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Hence why I have it set to auto-hide :)

Can't really recall when I've used it, I always use the <Apple>+<Space> thingy to launch stuff.
- carpe noctem

Deozaan

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Points: 1
  • Posts: 9,748
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #36 on: September 17, 2015, 04:35 PM »
Through a long and arduous process I managed to get OSX working in a VM so I could test some stuff with Unity "on a Mac."

One thing that was really ridiculous to me was something that I can't remember the exact details about anymore, but it was something like... I thought I had copied/installed my game onto the VM, but apparently it had just created a shortcut/link to a temporary folder, and I had to drag and drop the icon onto my hard drive in order to really install it. Or something really weird like that. As I said, I can't remember the specifics, but I have no idea how someone is supposed to know to do that weird thing to get things to work. You just have to intuit it or something.

ewemoa

  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 2,922
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #37 on: September 17, 2015, 05:39 PM »
Trial and error and talking to other folks too perhaps :)

wraith808

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • default avatar
  • Posts: 11,186
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Re: The End of my Macbook Pro Experiment
« Reply #38 on: September 17, 2015, 08:03 PM »
Through a long and arduous process I managed to get OSX working in a VM so I could test some stuff with Unity "on a Mac."

One thing that was really ridiculous to me was something that I can't remember the exact details about anymore, but it was something like... I thought I had copied/installed my game onto the VM, but apparently it had just created a shortcut/link to a temporary folder, and I had to drag and drop the icon onto my hard drive in order to really install it. Or something really weird like that. As I said, I can't remember the specifics, but I have no idea how someone is supposed to know to do that weird thing to get things to work. You just have to intuit it or something.

Yup.  That's pretty standard installation.  I stopped trying to figure it out, and just did it.