Re:The new MacBook Pro is kind of great for hackers
by coldtea on Sunday November 27, 2016 @02:06AM
(#13048120)
>No, sorry, the new MacBook pro sucks for hackers. It's great for prosumers who like gadgets and benefit from USB-C. Hackers do not benefit from a closed box with non-expandable performance.
You'd be surprised. Linus Torvalds, a hacker one would presume, used to have a MacBook Air as his primary laptop, and praise it as the best laptop ever made, saying that other companies have failed to produced something as good (though after 2014 he moved to a Chromebook). And the reasons he gave for praising it for are exactly what people think Apple has too much emphasis on: thinness, lightness and battery life.
Of course that's a single data point (through for more data points you can go to any software conference, where Apple laptops usually dominate both the speakers and audience, even though they are less expandable and have less performance than some gaming/desktop-replacement laptops).
An Apple laptop can fit well with some hackers, for at least two reasons, I think:
First, tinkerer != hacker. A hacker can be a tinkerer, but it's not the same thing. There are people who love to hack on specific things, create new stuff etc, but could not care less about dealing with the hardware or customizing their window manager. A lot of hackers I know in fact tend to be quite minimalistic in those areas.
Second, a hacker isn't necessarily all about raw performance and 8GB graphics cards. A lot of hacker types and great programmers in C or whatever can do wonders with very little hardware.
Now, other kind of professionals, like 3D artists, number crunchers and such, might definitely want more GPU/RAM. But even for a lot of creative professionals, stable and "what we know" trumps "latest and greatest". Most professional music studios I know, for example, have 2 and 3 generation old setups, and never jump to the latest OS until 1-2 year after its out.
In the photography world, were I dabble (and once did professionally), we have this notion of "measurbators" and "pixel peepers". They are those that are obsessed with ISO performance, megapixel count, sharpness, synthetic tests of camera gear and so on, but seldom create any output of any particular worth. I guess the same would be for PC people obsessed with benchmarks beyond a particular point, especially if their workflows don't need them. A hacker, in this regard, would be the opposite. This guy, is a hacker, photography wise:
You'd be surprised. Linus Torvalds, a hacker one would presume, used to have a MacBook Air as his primary laptop, and praise it as the best laptop ever made, saying that other companies have failed to produced something as good (though after 2014 he moved to a Chromebook). And the reasons he gave for praising it for are exactly what people think Apple has too much emphasis on: thinness, lightness and battery life.
Of course that's a single data point (through for more data points you can go to any software conference, where Apple laptops usually dominate both the speakers and audience, even though they are less expandable and have less performance than some gaming/desktop-replacement laptops).
An Apple laptop can fit well with some hackers, for at least two reasons, I think:
First, tinkerer != hacker. A hacker can be a tinkerer, but it's not the same thing. There are people who love to hack on specific things, create new stuff etc, but could not care less about dealing with the hardware or customizing their window manager. A lot of hackers I know in fact tend to be quite minimalistic in those areas.
Second, a hacker isn't necessarily all about raw performance and 8GB graphics cards. A lot of hacker types and great programmers in C or whatever can do wonders with very little hardware.
Now, other kind of professionals, like 3D artists, number crunchers and such, might definitely want more GPU/RAM. But even for a lot of creative professionals, stable and "what we know" trumps "latest and greatest". Most professional music studios I know, for example, have 2 and 3 generation old setups, and never jump to the latest OS until 1-2 year after its out.
In the photography world, were I dabble (and once did professionally), we have this notion of "measurbators" and "pixel peepers". They are those that are obsessed with ISO performance, megapixel count, sharpness, synthetic tests of camera gear and so on, but seldom create any output of any particular worth. I guess the same would be for PC people obsessed with benchmarks beyond a particular point, especially if their workflows don't need them. A hacker, in this regard, would be the opposite. This guy, is a hacker, photography wise:
http://www.robgalbraith.com/multi_page8c1c.html?cid=7-6468-7...