We have actually been more inspired by Jetbrains lately than VS Code. Take that for what you will.
We do try to pick simple sane defaults while still allowing enough customization to adapt to different workflows.
Actually working on a startup wizard for first time users if they want to more closely replicate the feel of other RE tools since muscle memory is hard to break.
Last time I used them - Ghidra, and to some extent IDA, had UXes that were very difficult for new users to pick up and frequently deviate from standard expectations for modern desktop apps because they have two decades of baggage. In contrast binary ninja is very easy to explore and has many fewer surprises.
That’s funny cause I feel the opposite: LLMs can automate, in a sloppy fashion, building the first trivial draft. But what remains is still thinking hard about the non trivial parts.
Nothing wrong with the "creating products that prioritize user experience over features" - or more accurately what Jobs said: create products that start with the user experience and the user’s needs first and then work your way to the tech (as far as I remember)
The opposite approach is starting with some tech and then trying to find a use for it, e.g. folding phones, second 1/2 screen on laptop, etc, instead of trying to actually create a usable, quality trackpad for instance.
The critique is still valid: Apple, for their software, seem to not have the same focus on quality as Jobs once insisted on. Their physical products are very much still top notch, and the products on the whole are still developed with this mindset as far as I’m concerned. It’s just the software quality that has taken a hit for some reason.
Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.
It was the first good trackpad that supported gestures that are now common, things like two finger swipe to scroll (inertial scrolling was huge), pinching, two-finger for right click. I still see people using windows laptops with a mouse plugged in because in general windows laptops have touchpads that suck, and it was way more common a decade ago. Innovation in the windows laptop space was adding unusable gimmicks like a scroll stripe or right-click by tapping in a corner. And then apple introduced a haptic trackpad so you can do a tactile click anywhere, none of that bullshit tap to click where you have to keep your hand lifted so you don't accidentally tap on something. And windows laptops are still lagging behind, at least they got rid of buttons and have hinged touchpads, now we wait for them to catch up and add haptics.
Maybe I should try a Thinkpad but otherwise the Macbook trackpad is the only one that really works for me and doesn't feel awkward. The gestures are right and the feel is right. I agree about size. It could be smaller.
While still anecdotal, I'll give you two data points:
The trackpad on my Thinkpad E495 is hanging and has lost the ability to register clicks, and had been like that after only two years of use. I think the reason is that the whole construction with lots of space is collecting dust. You can use the physical buttons above the pad, and some people like this retro design even, but IMO it's just reducing space and adds a border and height distance for your finger to travel, so arguably outdated and objectively worse.
The Elan trackpad on my Thinkpad x13 gen 2 has been defective from the start and registers palm contact where there is none, with the effect that the touchpad stops responding like every 30s; this is a known defect.
The trackpad works extremely great with macos. The acceleration curve, smoothness of scrolling, multi-gesture support that closely matches the UI paradigms, click anywhere and it perfectly registers, etc. It truely is to me the primary pointing device for mac and I immediately bought the external trackpad when trying external keyboards.
But none of that properly transfers to windows, and most of its hardware tweaks become irrelevant. I also didn't mind the Surface laptop trackpads, but vastly prefer a mouse with extra buttons for windows machines TBH (there are a ton of great mice too, so all things considered it's fine that way)
... I'm sorry but I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You might prefer a smaller trackpad, but then why? Just increase the sensitivity to reduce your finger movements.
Anyway, Apple's trackpad is good because it perfectly captures intent, whatever the situation and the number of fingers. It's flawless. You got half your palm on the side of the trackpad while writing? Nope, not picked up. You quickly flick with half your palm on there? Boom, got it. Five finger gesture? No prob fam.
...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.
I'm not familiar with all of the trackpad gestures, but that's part of my big frustration with macOS in general - discoverability absolutely sucks. Half of the stuff I need to do is hidden behind a set of arcane keystrokes that I am apparently supposed to memorize.
> ...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't disbelieve you, I just don't even know what you're trying to do. It must be a feature I've never attempted to use.
I just click with two fingers, anywhere. Boom, right click. Didn't even know there was another way.
Everybody has different trackpad habits and they can be hard to put into words. For example, trackpads used to have buttons at the bottom, and you'd naturally use your fingers for pointing, and the thumb for clicking. Now the buttons are gone, and new users click with their index fingers, which can be tiring and inaccurate on some trackpads (especially older/cheaper mechanical ones).
Right-clicking also has a history. Because Mac trackpads only had one button (unlike PC touchpads), the way to right-click was to point with either your index or middle finger (high precision), then put down the other of these two fingers on the trackpad while doing the thumb-click. It will not move the cursor, so there is no loss of precision. At least that's what I did for a long time. (Although I don't lose precision if I hold down two fingers and press with one of them either.)
And it gets more confusing when Apple changes the defaults. They've flip-flopped between touch-to-click and press-to-click at least once. I'm not sure if using the bottom right corner was ever the default for right-clicks? And then they also removed the video clips that taught you some gestures in the system settings. And I think the whole "deep press" gesture is an anti-feature that only confuses people, the dictionary lookup used to be a three-finger tap and that was fine. But the Magic Trackpad 2 needed a headline feature, sigh.
I think people give up too easily when they have to unlearn old habits. I've been using the macbook trackpads for over a decade now and it's more comfortable than a mouse. Just the fact that I can zoom in and freely scroll left and right makes all the difference compared to a mouse, so even when I use an external mouse with the laptop on a stand I reach for the trackpad for the gestures. It's like an extension of my mind at this point. And one technique that is not immediately clear is that to drag things you can click with one finger and drag with another, eg click on the icon with the index finger and then move it with the middle finger, easier than pushing the index finger around while keeping it depressed.
Regarding dragging, macOS also has an "accessibility" option to drag with three fingers. (It used to be a regular trackpad setting.)
It is a rather obscure feature, and yet it has such a dedicated following (me included) that a re-implementation of it was recently merged into libinput. The downside is that tap-and-drag is disabled when three-finger dragging is enabled, which makes it a bit harder to go back and forth across operating systems.
You can also enable tapping (for left and right clicks). If you’re not pushing the trackpad maybe you’ll have less issues with the cursor moving while you do it?
Exactly. They’re complaining about the defaults, yet you’re on Hacker News where most people on here probably have the most cursed settings you can think of.
Worth the purchase price seems wild to me, but I guess things are all relative, have never owned an iPhone either, partly due to price and partly due to inferiority of software. That said, despite flagship folding phones seeming insanely expensive for what they are, they do seem like good and potentially better physical products than the standard static rectangle.
Ya everyone derives different value from their stuff. Is that how you're judging value for price or just the quality of the folding bit? I do quite like the Galaxy Fold, but I think my needs from any kind of smartphone pretty much could top out at a Pixel 2, rocking a 7 atm.
Yeah I guess I don't really know how to translate the value of the folding feature into dollars, except that I don't feel any need for an ebook reader anymore, so I guess it's at least base phone price + price of a Kindle or similar.
> except that I don't feel any need for an ebook reader anymore
Is that just because you get a little more space due to folding? Personally I just loathe how much time my phone steals from me, and value the ebook reader on the basis that it has its specific purpose; no colour, barely does anything, I can't be messaged on it or watch videos, it's not as viable to use as anything but a reading device. But now that I think of it, I don't necessarily value those features in a way that makes me want to spent more than I did on it.
The way I think of the value I can derive from my phone is similar to how I assess how much value I could hypothetically get from an iPad Pro. Although it's nicer, faster, etc.. than my old as hell iPad, it doesn't do anything substantially different or that much better in terms of what I'd likely do with the device, and it seems like I only ever need one of them, since it's kind of just consumption technology, but if I was marking up A4 PDFs regularly, it might offer more utility.
Yeah it means I don't need to carry about two devices instead of one, and it fits in my pocket due to the folding. In practice I often want to read things when I'm on the move or in bed or otherwise not necessarily near my other device, so having one device that does it all is useful. A case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
That's my biggest issue with it. I didn't even have twitter to begin with, but after trying out Bluesky I've barely had the patience to use it. Most people on there seem to be ultra-left wing virtue signalling phychopaths. It's obnoxiously progressive with no space for nuanced thought.
So, to be clear, the GP was stating that their issue is a lack of free speech. You agree that that’s your biggest issue with Bluesky too.
But you’re unhappy with people expressing their personal opinions, primarily because you don’t agree with them?
What version of free-speech is it that you want? I assume it’s just like all ‘free speech absolutioniats’: free speech as long as it’s your own or from people you agree with.
Who said any of this nonsense you're coming out with?
Where did I say I was unhappy with people expressing their opinions? What sort of surreal strawman are you attempting to build here?
My issue was, quite simply, with the predominantly ultra-left phycho's that have taken a foothold there dominating the discourse. Theres no conversations there, as expected, there's just abuse. It's like twitter but in reverse. Probably why the out-of-touch celebrity mass has transfered there, with the assumption that's what real people in real life are actually like...
Those are your words. They literally agree with the OP’s position on free speech. You then go on to state that you don’t like what people say, even though you are lamenting the lack of free speech. You’re a contradiction with a hyper aggressive view of others: calling others “psychos” says more about you and your small minded attitude to others than it does about the people on Bluesky.
So you don’t like what people say. Who cares? Either put up with it because you believe in free speech or stop lamenting the lack of free speech on Bluesky.
And then maybe consider how you view others. Having an opinion of people being psychos just because they don’t align with your worldview is the mindset of the extremist
Awesome, as usual, put me in that box with all the right wingers. Is there space for a normal liberal nowadays or do I have to fully subscribe to this modern day lunacy? Suppose I better fall in line then. Thanks for the help!
Since the move to Apple Silicon you are realistically never more than 12-18 months away from a new chip generation in a MacBook. An M1 is still plenty good for the vast majority of workloads, especially if it's an M1 Pro/Max/Ultra.
Actually probably the best thing to do is wait until the M4 machines launch then bag a good deal on a clearance M3.
That’s actually a nice side effect of all the *rumors pages. The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products. I keep on using my previous products while saving money and planet and being excited about what future holds.
On the contrary, I think that the reliable update cadence in modern electronics means that people should generally all but ignore future product roadmaps.
When you actually need to get a new device, just get whatever the up-to-date thing is.
OK, ok, I suppose that it's reasonable to check the rumor sites to see if you should delay by a month or two. But not any longer than that.
It's much harder with PCs, where you can get, for instance, new Thinkpad's with anything from 11th gen Core i all the way to new Core Ultras. And, now, ARMs as well...
I was inline to buy a 128GB M3 MAX, know that I know the M4 exists and already shipped in the iPad, it lets me know that the whole M4 pipeline has already started and what the perf numbers are, absolutely means I will be waiting. I survived yesterday without it, I can survive tomorrow. And now I can budget in the AMD Epyc bridge that covers that span.
I think Apple has been pretty good about hitting the right cadence with processor perf increases. They are making up for lost Intel time. The M6 is going to make us loose our minds. Apple is going to bring back "this is a munition" ads.
Both the M3 and the EPYC will be useful for far longer than the time it takes Apple to have the M4 on their next-gen laptops. Computers last a lot longer than they used to. I have a 10 year old Mac Mini that’s still comfortable to use, and, while an M3 Mac is a beast, it’s not that much faster than an M2 (or an i7) to create a qualitative change in my workflows. What is possible now was already possible last year. It’s just faster now. I get a higher return on investment with better keyboards and screens.
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
For myself, I like to think of it as applied procrastination. I could buy that new thing I want today.. but something better will come along in time, so I can afford to put it off a while longer yet..
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
Spot on!
Back in the nineties, Intel managed to push competing RISC architectures (UltraSparc, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC) out of the market using nothing but promises that Itanium was going to blow them all out of the water.
And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.
>And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.
sales of what
i actually can't think of a single competing product. admittedly i don't keep up with laptop news but still, i haven't heard of anything yet that can meaningfully compete with the m1 from four years ago
Microsoft just announced some lackluster arm laptops that they claim can compete with M-series chips. The question is what windows programs are gonna run on them...
Some people have been running Windows 11 for Arm on a VM in Apple Silicon. It has an automatic transcoder that translates most x86 code at start. It seems to run many apps well. Microsoft claims these new machines have a better transcoder. This might work.
For me at least, the best possible outcome of this is that Windows handheld gaming devices become more power-efficient. That might be an advantage over Linux-based handhelds for a while, unless Valve decide that Proton needs to also be an architecture emulator. The chip efficiency wins must surely be tempting in this form factor.
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
You may have heard of the 5-minute rule - "Will doing this take me less than 5 minutes? If the answer is yes, do it now." An adaption of that to reduce impulse purchases is - "Do I really need this product right now? If the answer is no, don't buy it."
And on the flip side I am generally hesitant to buy first-release Apple hardware. Over the 20 years I've been buying Apple kit I've generally found it to be exceptionally robust but newly released hardware has had enough bugs (either hardware or OS) that I just sit back and let other users find the issues first. But I do simultaneously have the same issue: if WWDC is coming up within a month or two I'm not going to be buying any hardware because there's a good chance that something new will be released or the hardware I was going to buy is going to get a refresh or a price drop.
I do this technique too, and it's a great time for it. The OLED screen on the new iPad signals that Apple devices are moving to a better panel. If you've been waiting for the right time to move off an Intel Mac and onto a SoC Mac, it's now. Pick up a refurbished M2 MacBook. They're in the sweet spot for support, power, and cost.
The next one will probably have an OLED screen; so if you wait til then, your refurb M1/2/3 will be on Apple's short list of devices they don't want to support. (And you might have panel FOMO.) Or you'll have to pay the premium price for the latest model.
These machines are great. I still use my 2015 rMBP as a secondary. It's a little slow now but a couple years ago I was still running Solidworks (in Bootcamp) on it with minimal issues.
My wife is still using her 2012 MBP. We maxed out RAM and gave it an SSD in 2016. She uses it for video editing and music production. The thing look like new. Completely ridiculous. Only downside: no OSX updates since I don’t know when.
You might find OpenCore Legacy Patcher[1] worth a look. In many cases, it allows later-that-supported Mac OS versions to be installed on older Macs.
As a data point, I still use a 2013 Mac Pro as my primary desktop, and I've been using Sonoma on it for several months, have been able to install all Sonoma patches over-the-air on release without incident, and have only experienced a single, trivial problem: the right side of the menu bar occasionally appears shaded red, in a way that doesn't affect usability; switching applications immediately resolves the problem (the problem appears to be correlated with video playback).
video encoder/decoder support and performance has order of magnitude improvement in M series, I am surprised that didnt sway you.
Not just that, for high res stuff or modern codecs like AV1 or h265 is probably not supported at all in a 2012 device without updates for so long?
Even if support was possible it would be software encoding and even short clip it can take hours to render ?
I would happily use an older device for development a lot of dev work especially if not frontend or UI usually i can use any laptop just as a terminal, but UI or video editing I wouldn’t be able to.
I can't help but reply every time this thread comes up. I'd still probably be using my 2010 if it wasn't for a series mechanical failures. Paid to replace the keyboard once (85 screws, didn't need to do that to myself), but third battery crapping out, trackpad not clicking (probably due to swollen battery) and the MagSafe connector getting loose and glitchy was the end of it. Though I did just boot it up because my phone is somehow still supposed to sync music from it.
If the battery is swollen, get rid of it as soon as possible. Swollen battery == ticking time bomb, and I'm not joking about the bomb part. These things can, do and will explode randomly.
Overall, my 2020 M1 MBP is infinitely better than the 2015 MBP I had before, it's not even close. Battery life, thermal output, speed, noise, neural engine (for ML workloads). It's an utter workhorse that just marches on, no matter what I throw at it. I haven't even considered upgrading to another more current Mx version because this one just.. works. Best laptop I ever owned.
I just want to echo this experience and sentiment. I absolutely adore my 2020 13” M1 mbp, for all the reasons you list. I do ML workloads and Linux builds and I’m starting to think they forgot to put fans in mine because I’ve never heard them! Despite the annoying limitation of 1 external screen, it’s up there with my 2007 13” mb (rest in peace) as being the best laptop I’ve ever owned.
I recently upgraded from a 2019 Intel Mac to a similarly-specced M3 Mac, and it really is night and day. My battery life is more than doubled - I can run IntelliJ and multiple Docker containers on battery for more than my whole work day, when before it would barely last a couple hours with that load and be slow while doing so. The fan hardly ever runs while on my Intel Mac it would run constantly.
I can definitely say there's a downside. I sometimes take the bus home, but it can get chilly at night. Previously, I would fire up a little python script that saturate all the cores, to warm my lap. My old Intel was plenty warm to keep me from getting too uncomfortable. I can't even feel my M2 through my pants, and sticking it into my shirt makes me look like an idiot.
Battery life is insanely better. If you have not used one of the M series laptops it cannot be overstated how much better the battery life is. It is worth it for battery alone.
But beyond that they are also incredibly fast and run cool. In the MacBook Air there is no fan and on the Pros they barely ever spin up in an audible way.
The fans literally never come on for my personal M2 MBP 14" or on my work 16" M1 (it helps that the heavy lifting of running stuff and compiling happens on a dev server)
During work from home during Covid I was still using an Intel MBP and video conferences invariably caused the fans to kick up to the point where using noise cancelling headphones and not the built in speakers was necessary for sanity.
I went from the last Intel i9 16" MBP to an M3 Pro in the last month at work.
I think it's saving me an hour a day and the fan has never come on, the the laptop has never felt warm, and the battery life is just mind blowing.
I run docker & compilers all day. The i9 would run the fan 75% of the time and had to throttle down any time it was on battery power and it was lucky to last 3 hours on battery.
The way to exit that loop is to convince yourself that the next one will bring a truly lasting difference. Which is why I'm still waiting for GDDR7 GPUs with my 4GB RX 480.
It entirely depends how long you keep your devices. I try to keep my iPhones until release year + 6, so I would need the price of a previous version to be reduced by more than 1/6th on a new version release, which is usually not the case.
Similar to cars, most depreciation happens in the first year.
So owning a device for 6 years between age 1 and 7 will generally have a lower cost than owning a device between age 0 and 6.
For Apple products it’s generally feasible to effectively buy first hand devices aged 1+ because they’re still available for sale (at least in some retailers) after a new edition is released.
That’s a good strategy with most things that aren’t prone to mfg variability . For cars having a launch version there are a lot of initial manufacturing defects that need to be worked out.
Maybe it uses the camera for gesture recognition so you can air-write each letter one at a time? Air-quotes will be fun... air-tabs, not so much. "Space, but <widens arms> BIGGER!"
If anything, they'll probably use the "studio" branding (or more likely just have it under the iPad line, since they have desktop chips in them now anyways)
I just bought a second hand M2 Air in perfect condition and it feels faster than my M1 Max in a really beautiful body for travel. I’m not certain it matters that much anymore to be honest. What are you using it for?
So if you can 'limp' along towards the autumn/winter/Christmas, then it's probably worth the wait to get the M4 (or pickup an M3 when the price presumably drops to clear inventory).
I just bought a refurbished 16in M3 pro, no regrets at all. There's always a new one around the corner, it's really just about whether your setup achieves what you need it to.
Look at real world differences between M2 and M3, it's not a massive jump at all.
I do cross platform app development and the machine is excellent for that. Glad to have it now rather than waiting months for a slightly better system
Same here. Once worked with a guy who was a huge Microsoft fan, calling Macs and Linux-based workstations “nothing but toys”. Naturally I couldn’t help but laugh when he couldn’t work for 20 minutes due to a forced windows update and then a blue screen after booting up again.
The Candy crush and other crappy apps/games in combination to being a full fledged spyware OS with adware on top is already enough to make me run away screaming.
