note to self: post more about Apple Inc, especially things that are obviously baity as all hell, yet self-justifyingly and satisfyingly technical to my audience
Not to be that guy but* that’s probably because your place of work is leasing cheap ass laptops. This is likely because some people treat their work laptops like shit.
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I knew someone was going to reply with this trope.
No. my employer does not use junk laptops. They actually spend good money on them. They have a cycle policy of 3 years on them, Only my latest Lenovo Thinkpad has actually been issue free within the first 2 years of its span.
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Let’s see him slide his hackintosh into his portfolio or bag and head off to the coffee shop. Building cheap large computer is easy. Building a tiny slim computer is difficult and expensive.
For years I used to maintain a guide right here on the netbooks that could be hackintoshed! Netbooks, of course, are a thing of the past, but I still get email asking for advice on how to get El Capitan onto some Intel Atom-powered 2009 Dell fuckslab. The email is increasingly weird.
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Everything in me says “Don’t do it!!!”… but for some reason, here I go anyways:
I work primarily with networking. I’ve worked under the hood with Windows before I went to Linux (Debian)… and ended up with Macs. (Though I’m seriously considering returning to Linux or Windows with the latest Macbook pro’s lack of function keys).
OSX is UNIX. 90% of what I can do on a straight Linux machine, I can do with OSX. And I don’t ever have to worry about if my wireless or 3D will work on OS upgrade or moving to a new laptop.
Speaking of Laptops, I freaking love my 2012 Macbook Pro Retina. LOVE IT. It has lasted forever (for me), working 8-10 hours days for 6 years. 6 YEARS, for a laptop. (That they haven’t created anything newer that I want to pay for points back to possibly leaving the ecosystem)
GVIM, Sublime Text, and Jetbrains tools all work for me, as well as Word and Adobe’s suite. Python and Ruby work as expected, because OSX is UNIX.
Shorter:
To me, as a power user, Apple’s ecosystem is worth the premium. Where it is deficient, I use VMWare, just like I did on Windows machines and Linux machines over the past 15 years. I recognize that it is not a perfect solution for everyone, but it is the closest for me. And their hardware, at least the Macbook Pro Retina w/function keys, is a dream compared to anything else I’ve used.
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Oh yeah: And Hackintoshes weren’t worth the effort for me. My build didn’t have complete fan support, so it was always very loud, and using a third party’s extremely low level shim to get it installed and running with custom drivers left me never trusting the machine, so what is the point?
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And will it fit on an airline tray? (Although that might be moot soon.)
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“Building a tiny slim computer is difficult and expensive.”
Ah, that’s why they have to use slave labor to build their products. After all, you don’t make 79 billion in one quarter without over charging your consumer base and exploiting your third world labor pool.
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Oh, come now. As if you didn’t know… 
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Ebay for obscure highly specific parts (say for repairing a broken laptop). Be prepared to wait while the part comes across the ocean from China. Newegg for generic desktop parts, or ebay again if you’re willing to wait.
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I hate to break it to you, but every other company’s laptops are built the same way. There are lots of legitimate reasons to decide not to buy Apple products. That they assemble their stuff in China using companies that engage in labour practices that are illegal in the US for very good reasons is not one of them, because Dell, Acer, Lenovo, etc, are all as bad or worse on that score.
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It’s definitely the default behavior in IE (which, like you, I don’t personally use if I can possibly avoid it, but being a web dev, sometimes that’s difficult). I may also be mis-remembering, but I distinctly recall Firefox jumping on the “tabs are also windows” bandwagon for a little while when Win7 came out - though the defaults in FF seem to be as ephemeral as the weather sometimes, so it might not have lasted long or only been in a beta channel release. I mostly run Chrome in Win7 at work, so I don’t really have a lot of interaction experience with Edge, but if MS finally came to their senses with their new browser, that’s awesome. I do find it kind of odd that I’m apparently the only one in this thread who’s run into this behavior though, so maybe it was a bad “stupid default” example. (I do wonder if it can be disabled by GPO, and if there aren’t just a lot of IT departments who hate it too so they turn it off for everyone.)
More generally, as a professional web dev and (extremely) hobbyist game dev, my experience has been similar to @Bondo’s, though without the detour through Linux. We even have the same laptop model. I rarely run into something I can’t do in OS X (especially nowadays; my Bootcamp partition is basically relegated to “I want to play this game but there isn’t a Mac version” and “I need to figure out why this website doesn’t work in IE”), and there are actually things I can do in OS X that would be much more cumbersome or complicated for me to set up in other OSes. I know “real” programmers scoff at Automator as a useless “baby’s first scripting tool”, but I’ve used it to create a number of time-saving utilities for myself, like automatically moving certain downloads into folders based on their origin, or using Automator’s shell access to automatically hit a website’s API to pull and assign tags to any files that I download from it, which is great for organizing reference materials. Can you do that stuff in Windows or Linux? Probably. Is it as easy as creating an Automator workflow and assigning it to a folder action? Not in my experience. That doesn’t make those OSes worthless or incompetent, though. Mostly it comes down to what I’m used to and my level of comfort with the available tools. The OS obviously isn’t perfect - none is (though for all its other quirks and faults, you can pry Finder’s column view from my cold, dead hands) - but the frustrations are ones I can live with much more easily than Linux’s bare-metal experience for power users (I prefer GUIs to command lines, and long ago ran out of patience for the ocean of configuration checkboxes and terrible UI decisions in most open source software), or Windows’s patronizing insistence that it knows best when to install updates and reboot my machine.
My laptop is also still going strong, and just about the only thing that would drive me to replace it at this point (other than eventually wearing out the battery, which I’m nowhere near doing even after 5 years) is needing a more powerful graphics card. My machine can otherwise still handle whatever loads I throw at it, but games are starting to out-pace it. I’m hoping that High Sierra’s eGPU support will be compatible back to Thunderbolt 1 ports, but I’m not exactly counting on it. Even if it isn’t, there are some hack-ier solutions I can look into that would still be cheaper than replacing the entire laptop.
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do you go for the “top end” model each time? Does your imac have a ssd?
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I do not. I try to stay in the mid range, buying a few things that are worth while up front (upgraded vid card for example) and not paying for a larger hdd or more ram.
my iMac has the ssd slot, but I did not get one in it.
I’ll stop using Apple products when someone else comes up with a reliable way for me to turn on the Apple TV(which turns on the TV), wake up the Apple MacBook Pro (which is always fully backed up over wifi to the Apple AirPort Extreme Time Capsule) and start streaming my toddler’s favorite show or cat video, all from my Apple iPhone without having to interrupt our lap time. I know, first world problems but seriously…Apple stuff just works together for the average layperson without the headaches and troubleshooting every couple weeks. That’s how I got hooked. They are evil geniuses, but geniuses nonetheless.
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You know, in a previous life I was an IT director for a university, and most of our servers were Dell.
Dell amazed me. Counter-intuitively, their service was very good, sales were utter shit. Seriously, they were a company that made it almost impossible to buy things, but once you had, they made it very easy to get them fixed.
Very strange business plan.
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The SATA SSD is also a bit slower (4x) than the MacBook’s NVMe SSD. In everyday use, the average user won’t likely notice.
He would probably benefit from more RAM, I wouldn’t recommend any user try to get by on less than 8 GB, but the OS RAM compression and SSD are probably good enough to hide some of the slowdowns.
Edit: He might have been able to use a SATA or Molex 4-pin to PCIe adapter adapter for GPU power, depending on the GPU power requirements and the power supplied to the drive connectors.
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I just bought an off-lease spotlessly new looking Dell Latitude E6520 laptop from eBay. It cost me $65 and it’s 4 years old. It’s got an I5, 8gb of RAM and a 1 tb drive. It’s faster than the brand new HP intel I3 machine my niece just bought from Walmart. I’ll eventually get around to replacing the I5 with a eBay’ed quad core I7 and the spinning platters with an SSD. I’ve set it up to boot Windows 7, 10 and Linux Mint. The former two existing primarily for compatibility with some vintage peripherals and programs. It’s replacing a similar Dell E4310 that I bought for a like amount 4 years ago which in turn replaced a Dell Precision M6300 that I bought used in 2008. Before that was a Dell Latitude c640. All of these were purchased off-lease for pennies. All upgradeable.
My current “desktop” machine is a Dell Inspiron 560 that’s been pin-modded to accept a Xeon X5460 (quad core, 12 mb cache at 3.16 ghz) It was free, my only cost was the ex-server processor for $12 and the pin-mod sticker for $2. With a couple of cast off 1tb hard drives, it runs the network for my house, streams video to my kid’s machines and is our server.
All of these I’m sure cost less than 1/4 of your 2001 Mac Pro and they are more modern machines, which that 16 year old one is not.
I understand the attraction of things that supposedly “just work” but if you have even a little bit of technical know how, and you’re willing to settle for cast-offs. Incidentally, my niece had to buy a new laptop because her 4 year old Macbook’s logic board failed.
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Used equipment cheaper than buying new. News at 11.
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