About To Say Farewell To Apple (Mini-Rant)

"TheHondaBro" (wwaveform) 11/15/2014 at 23:12 • Filed to: apple

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We've been dedicated Apple customers for as long as I can remember. Back then, Apple made some splendid products, like those 1st-gen iMacs. The nostalgia is setting in just thinking about it. These days, Apple is nothing more than a horse-drawn carriage with iPhones as the horses. It makes me sad how a once brilliant, innovative company has regressed to something completely terrible.

Let me break it down for you:
My 2013 Retina Macbook Pro looks nice, but it crashes a lot, gets a kernel panic if I rest my elbow on it, one of the USB ports is malfunctioning, it has to be running nothing to get the seven-hour battery life as advertised, the charging cable disconnects if someone drops a feather on it, the casing is easily dented, and THERE"S NO LOCKING PORT. SERIOUSLY, WOULDN'T APPLE THING I'D WANT TO LOCK UP A $2300 LAPTOP?
There's also Mac OS X, which has regressed to the idiotic "playhouse" look of iOS and generally runs poorly compared to previous OS X versions, which were just better.

I'm planning my custom PC right now. I'm building it primarily for Autodesk, but also to begin my transition away from Apple.

Apple, it's been real, but you're a mess.

Here's a Jaguar XJ220 for having to put up with my little rant there.

CB > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:16

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I left Apple a few years ago. Just couldn't deal with the prices and how limited Macbooks felt for my usage. The only good thing my Macbook had was battery life.

SlickMcRick > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:19

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Have you considered a Surface Pro or you plan on getting a general computer/laptop?

TheHondaBro > SlickMcRick 11/15/2014 at 23:22

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I just plan on building a powerful tower PC for engineering stuff, and that's about it.
I still have my Macbook, and plan on keeping it until it goes bad, which most likely wouldn't be for another 4 years.

Funktheduck > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:23

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I actually converted to apple a few years ago after getting fed up with PCs not holding up. Android has gotten better but it's still really fragmented. Overall I've been really pleased.

Denver Is Stuck In The 90s > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:23

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I have this one, I call him Freddy

Edit: the Tangerine one

OSX has gone down the tubes since tiger

SlickMcRick > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:27

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Ahh ok. Well make it epic but keep it in budget. What you think about my first avatar? Keep it or change it?

Tim (Fractal Footwork) > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:30

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I feel like they have become spotty as of recently, and I'm not exactly sure why. My 5 year old iMac is great and runs astoundingly well; I've never really had it crash.

In comparison, my sister bought a slightly newer iMac and it is just a bit slow all the time, not quite sure why. They never really use it, but leave it turned on and never shut it down.

tromoly > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:30

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Mind posting your future build specs? I've been toying with building a machine for personal CFD computation myself.

TheHondaBro > SlickMcRick 11/15/2014 at 23:32

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Speed Racer? Looks good!

Textured Soy Protein > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:33

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Funny, I got a MBPr 13 this summer after about 20 years of nothing but Windows machines dating back over the last 20 years.

I was replacing a big bulky Dell 15" machine from a few years ago. It had a 1920x1080 screen, quad-core i7, etc etc. I wanted something smaller, with a higher resolution screen, good battery life, SSD, and a noticeable bump up in processing power over the old Dell.

I looked at a few ultrabooks, but they all had 15W processors that while good on battery, weren't that much faster than that 4 year-old i7 quad. Plus I hated Windows 8. I've always been totally fine with Windows 7, but 8 pissed me off to no end. You're constantly switching between the Windows Phone-style interface, and a shittier-looking interpretation of Windows 7. Microsoft tried to flatten it out along the lines of what's going on with Android, iOS and OS X, but it just looks like crap.

I found a grand total of 1 Windows machine that had a 28W processor, and the size, screen and other stuff I wanted. But it was a few hundred bucks more than the MBP that I ended up with, and it didn't fix the problem of me hating Windows 8.

OS X Mavericks and Yosemite have both been totally stable for me. No issues. The overall look doesn't bug me. It has its quirks, like Windows 7, but I'm generally fine using it whereas even doing simple stuff in Windows 8 like opening up Control Panel was a piece of shit.

Totally agree with you about the power adapter though.

bryan40oop > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:34

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ITT: Those who enjoy overpaying for stuff and things.

TheHondaBro > tromoly 11/15/2014 at 23:34

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I'm planning on a 4.0Ghz Intel quad-core i7 Haswell processor (with integrated Intel HD 4600 graphics), 2TB SATA HDD, and 16GB RAM.

TheHondaBro > Denver Is Stuck In The 90s 11/15/2014 at 23:34

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Leopard was OS X's high pint, in my opinion.

Denver Is Stuck In The 90s > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:37

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Snow leopard IMO, but not for compatibility. But if we are talking best OS, 10.4.11 all the way. Lion kinda made me go "WTF is this?"

bob and john > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:47

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dude....your graphics is going to be such a bottle neck....

tromoly > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:55

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That's a solid component group, add a decently sized SSD into the mix and it sounds near identical to what I've spec'd out. The only part my knowledge is lacking in is the integrated graphics, can't give any useful input on that.

Best of luck with your build, I'm personally avoiding Newegg so I don't get tempted to do the same.

mazdaspeed2 > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:56

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Id go for dedicated graphics and get an ssd to boot from/running most used applications.

BlurpleToyotaDishwasher > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:58

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I wouldn't be inclined to rely on the integrated graphics if you're planning on doing CAD type stuff. Beefy GPUs would come in handy for all that sort of thing I'd think.

Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy > TheHondaBro 11/15/2014 at 23:58

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Get a Nvidia Geforce 780 with that, should be quite powerful.

titsinmymitts > TheHondaBro 11/16/2014 at 00:00

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My MacBook has run like a champ since I received it for college five years ago.

That being said, the OS is limiting. The gestures are nice and I like the touchpad, but I find it fairly irritating to navigate.

I'd consider another one, but I'd probably go with a high end Lenovo or Asus instead.

All Motor Is Best Motor > tromoly 11/16/2014 at 01:24

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The integrated graphics is good only for being able to watch HD video. It can't really handle anything more. Assuming you don't care about gaming, that's fine as long as you don't intend to do any kind of 3D rendering. If you DO want to do 3D rendering then you need an add-in graphics card, particularly a workstation video card. These are specially designed to be better at rendering 3D video FX, lighting, 3D models, etc.

JDIGGS > TheHondaBro 11/16/2014 at 01:48

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Special tool to remove battery

Special tool to remove hard drive

No Operating System discs carried in store

gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee > Denver Is Stuck In The 90s 11/16/2014 at 04:34

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Lion was once described to me as Apple's Vista. My mid-2011 iMac was shipped with it. It was pretty buggy, even in the limited use I gave it (anything serious was done on whatever version of Windows 8 I had dual booted at the time... Mac-compatible engineering software is very limited). Going to Mavericks fixed some wifi issues that I didn't even realize were on my end and not my roommate's shitty router. Lion also was a major implentation of the slowly developing trend of adding a bunch of crap that was very obviously designed to cater to Windows users, but was imo buggy, poorly implemented, obnoxious, and unwanted in the first place. If I'd wanted a Windows PC, I would have got one. In fact, I guess I kinda did. I haven't messed with it much, but so far what I've seen of Yosemite is a much sleeker design, but with only touches of classic apple stuff. It's not quite starting a trend in a new direction, but like with Lion, it's a huge departure from what was there.

I grew up mostly with versions of OS 6 and 7, and used 9.2 on an Indigo G3 iMac almost exclusively from 2001 to 2008, when a slight HD blip caused my mom to stop trusting it and finally answer our cries and get something less obsolete (it couldn't run the lastest flash games...). My mom had ordered it with both 9.2 and what I think may have been a very early beta version of OSX, installed but OSX was buggy enough she uninstalled it. It didn't come with the install disks for OSX, so we would have had to pay $130 for a new version to reinstall it and it wasn't worth it to my mom. She's still running that iMac, with Leopard, although she's thinking she may want to upgrade again because she's becoming familiar enough with the internet (beyond basic email) that not being able to support the latest flash is bugging her.

I do occasionally have nostalgic moments for OS9 again, and in fact while I was running Lion, I had SheepShaver installed with OS9.2.2 so I could play a bunch of classic games I grew up with... Ingemar's skiing game, Classic Tetris in black and white (with Soviet-era Russian styled graphics and title screens, and large Glorious Soviet Projects as wallpapers... I didn't realize it was Soviet as a kid, I didn't know enough about it), Solitaire Till Dawn, Prince of Persia, AppleWorks (okay, not a game, but the drawing part was useful for illustrating reports) and a couple old versions of Carmen Sandiego, among other things. I was also using iCab and/or Mozilla for basic browsing, mostly to see what websites were still accommodating obsolete browsers on obsolete systems. Unfortunately Lion had some issues that lead to me doing a complete clean-slate reinstall without having much of anything backed up, and I never bothered getting back SheepShaver.

I still keep saying "ach" every time someone says "wrong side" and it saddens me that no one else gets the reference to Ingemar's Skiing outside of my immediate family and a couple friends. It was such a huge part of my childhood...

It's definitely true that with the popularity of the iPhone (and eventually MacBook), Apple's hardware production has seemed more dependent on Quantity than Quality. My brother's been through two MacBooks in the last four years.

Denver Is Stuck In The 90s > gogmorgo - rowing gears in a Grand Cherokee 11/16/2014 at 04:53

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I keep a few PPC macs around for OS9, but OS6 is where its at. I run that on my SE/30. My current mac is a Mid 2010 13" MBP that Ive had since the model was recently released. So, April 2010. I also Have a lampshade iMac, tangerine trayloading iMac G3, 1989 SE/30, a G3 Minitower, a PowerMac G4, a 2005 iMac G5, and an iPhone 2G. I use them all periodically for different reasons. They all have a different OS loaded on them

Alex B > Funktheduck 11/16/2014 at 07:39

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Same here!

PyramidHat > TheHondaBro 11/16/2014 at 09:41

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All fair points. A friend of mine has been on the Apple platform for some years now. A couple of years ago when she bought a new MacBookPro, she sold me her old one (Mid-2009)...and...it's nice. Not thrilling...but nice. Up until about 6 weeks ago, I liked it because it was well-built (aluminum case) but now the screen is starting to separate from the case (which apparently plagues these machines) and the battery likes to get nice and hot. So I am pondering staying on the Mac platform when this machine dies, or switching back to PC.

I never fully got the iProduct love that folks have: Yes, I have an iPhone (also nice/not thrilling) and like everything else, I'm not sure why it's considered to be so much better.

I Do It For Miatas, NC Owner > TheHondaBro 11/16/2014 at 10:01

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I've actually been really satisfied with Apple, personally. I bought my first (and only Mac so far), a MacBook Pro when they just switched to core i-series processors in 2010. I have since upgraded it to 8 GBs of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD, and it's still fast! And I'd be lying if I said I've had any problems with it. It's been dead reliable, and 4 years later, I cam still get 5 hours of battery life without trying. Now my iPhone 4S is a different story, but I love my Mac and I have no desire to turn back!

davesaddiction @ opposite-lock.com > TheHondaBro 11/16/2014 at 14:05

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This is a sad story.

I've been a Mac user for over a decade, and love my rMBP (early 2013, bought with a heavy discount once the newer versions dropped). And my early '08 is also running strong, after updating it for the wife and kids with an SSD.

Best of luck in the Windows world.

Eazy-O > tromoly 11/16/2014 at 17:25

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Ooooh, CFD. I've been meaning to try dabbling for a while, but I have no idea where to start. Any tips on software and what not? Thanks in advance.

tromoly > Eazy-O 11/16/2014 at 18:58

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Take college courses in Fluids, Aerodynamics, and CFD. Honestly, there's no easy way to learn it, nomatter what there's still a very high chance that whatever results you get are junk.

Eazy-O > tromoly 11/16/2014 at 22:18

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Well, I do have a friend working on a masters in physics and another that's almost a bachelor of mechanical engineering, whereas I'm working on my architecture masters. We were meaning to play around with car designs a bit in our free time. Was just wondering what software you would recommend as a starting point...

tromoly > Eazy-O 11/16/2014 at 23:18

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I have my BS in ME, and there's a LOT I still need to learn before anything in CFD is almost correct. Honestly, get books on fluids, vehicle aerodynamics, cfd, and read all of them cover to cover, then pick up the software.

Eazy-O > tromoly 11/16/2014 at 23:23

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And here I was thinking I was just gonna plop some 3d models into software and it would provide me with at least a rough estimate or a semblance of useful info. Joking, of course. Well, half joking anyway. Thanks for the heads up. :)

tromoly > Eazy-O 11/16/2014 at 23:25

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No worries, the old saying "garbage-in, garbage-out" applies very heavily in the CFD world, do your homework early and your results will be much better. Best of luck, I'm slowly learning as well, it's a long, slow road that eventually gives a nice reward.