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I bought a Mac

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237 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 14 Apr 25 01:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.462s | source
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dijit ◴[14 Apr 25 01:39 UTC] No.43677319[source]▶
Had a lot of fun reading that.

I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to technology, truth be told there's a certain rose tinted nostalgia that I get from thinking about early 00's technology.

It was still the era where UI's felt immediate and snappy- that anything related to actual computation or internet was jank and slow, but it had a whiff of a hopeful future about it. Every PC upgrade made things more snappy back then... Now I dread upgrades.

Hey ho.

It's endearing to know that one more bit of early 00's technology has been given a new lease on life. Would be cool to write some native software for it!

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cosmic_cheese ◴[14 Apr 25 02:09 UTC] No.43677458[source]▶
I’m sure that snappiness is possible in modern software, but nobody really seems to pursue it outside of hyper-minimal Linux desktops which aren’t everybody’s cup of tea.

Not that GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc on modern machines are bad exactly, but you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4, which drags the experience down. I’m sure some of degree of latency increase is unavoidable thanks to all of the layers involved in the Linux stack as well as compositing and all that, but I’d bet that there’s a considerable amount that could be optimized away if there were a concerted effort to do so.

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1. lproven ◴[14 Apr 25 11:13 UTC] No.43680050[source]▶
> you definitely feel a considerable amount of extra latency everywhere vs. e.g. a 500Mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 or OS X 10.2-10.4

Odd thing...

While I agree regarding the snappiness of older OSes, the Mac was for me always a bit of an odd exception.

I started on Macs in the 680x0 era and Mac System 6, and I worked on them through 7.x, 8.x, 9.x and into OS X.

For me, no PowerPC edition of either Classic or OS X ever felt as responsive as Classic on a 680x0 Mac. I narrowly missed out on a Quadra 840 on Freecycle over 15 years ago and still regret it -- that was the fastest 68040 Mac ever made.

NeXTstep was of course originally built on and shipped on 68030 -- it's a CISC native OS. PowerPC Classic was always mostly running emulated 680x0 code.

I read analyses of Mach API calls that explained that calls on RISC were less efficient in register usage or something.

But then, Intel Macs came along. Mac OS X returned to x86 from PowerPC. And suddenly Mac OS X felt snappy again in a way it never did for me on PowerPC.

As an old-time Motorola user I was conflicted about Intel Macs. Macs weren't meant to be PCs. I didn't want Windows on a Mac. But the feeling of using 10.4 on Intel converted me: it felt snappy and responsive in a way Windows NT never did on Intel.

(NT was built on RISC and ported to Intel, the reverse of NeXTstep.)

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2. dijit ◴[14 Apr 25 13:35 UTC] No.43681107[source]▶
this matches my experience actually.

I thought I didn't like Apple computers, but in hindsight I remember feeling that the eMac/G5's that I was using at school were clunky and slow compared to the contemporary Windows XP machines.

This was 2005- so XP on period correct hardware was extremely lean in comparison.

I think the latency was a pretty substantial reason for this in retrospect. I did not have nearly the same experience in 2012 when I bought my first Macbook Pro. (which I purchased because it was a UNIX that could run Microsoft Office and our VPN software... and I've been a MacOS user on/off ever since).

3. philistine ◴[14 Apr 25 14:36 UTC] No.43681789[source]▶
I never used a PowerPC Mac, I bought the first new computer they unveiled after the iPhone. But I did go through the Apple Silicon transition, and let me tell you computing is great!

That M1 Macbook Air killed any sort of desire to get an iPad or any other computer for that matter. I'm looking forward to upgrading this year or next year, but somehow even that feels superfluous. Except for RAM. Damn low RAM.