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MacBook Pro (2016) Disappointment Pushes Some Apple Loyalists To Ubuntu Linux (betanews.com)
Linux distributions have emerged as one of the beneficiaries in the aftermath of the MacBook Pros launch. Many people aren't pleased with the offering and prices of Apple's three new laptops and some of them are resorting to Linux-powered laptops. From a report on BetaNews: Immediately after the Apple Keynote, famed Ubuntu laptop and desktop seller, System76, saw a huge jump in traffic from people looking to buy its machines. The traffic was so intense, that it needed to upgrade servers to keep up, it said. "We experienced much more traffic than we had prepared for, the website didn't go hard down but experienced slowness. We had to scale up to return to normal. It was a pretty big surge, I don't have the details in front of me at the moment but I've not really heard of anything like this before. People being so underwhelmed by a product that immediately following a new product release they actively seek out competitor's products," says Ryan Sipes, Community Manager, System76. I decided to compare specifications and pricing on my own, so I headed to both Apple.com and System76.com to compare. Apple's new 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,400. This machine has a Quad-core Sklyake i7, maxes out at 16GB of RAM, has an NVMe 256GB SSD, and a Radeon Pro 450 with a paltry 2GB memory. Alternatively, I headed to System76 and configured its 15-inch Oryx Pro. I closely matched the MacBook Pro specs, with a Quad-core Sklyake i7 and NVMe 256GB SSD. Instead of 16GB of RAM as found on the Apple, I configured with 32GB (you can go up to 64GB if needed). By default, it comes with a 6GB Nvidia GTX 1060. The price? Less than $2,000! In other words, the System76 machine with much better specs is less expensive than Apple's.
The summary sounds like an obvious plug for system76. I'm not saying it's bad, because what the summary says, is in fact true. I've compared them myself. I even have a System76 desktop and am pleased with it. However, and advertisement disguised as an article is still and advertisement.
Linux is fine and all but it is *still* missing a number of high end professional level programs in a number of fields. Until that changes (and it hasn't in how many years now?), Linux on the Laptop will be a fairly niche product. If it meets your requirements that's great. You get lots of options including MacBooks in their limited incantations.
But no Adobe, Autodesk, Maya etc.
Life's a bitch. Then you vote.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I'll just pop on over to System76, grab a machine, and install the Adobe suite that's necessary for doing business.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yeah - being able to buy an equivalently or better specced machine then a MacBook Prop for less money has always been an option - that has not stopped people from buying MacBooks in the past, so I fail to see the news here. Now, I agree that the new MacBook Pros are a bit disappointing, and that there might be other laptops which compete very well. But the laptop mentioned in this slashvertisement fails to impress.
I figured out with Yosemite that Apple was moving in a direction I didn't want to follow anymore. I'm using a Surface Book these days and IMO it's the best computer I've ever used or owned.
Pushes Some Apple Loyalists To Ubuntu Linux
I would think that some will actually be very few. I'm a Linux fan, but I think it will only attract the very few technically aware MacBook users. Though getting better, Linux is does not match the "everything works" Apple philosophy, i.e. you buy a graphics tablet or whatever, plug it in and all your apps will work with it straight off.
So I've been a Linux user since 1994, and it's been my primary development environment, and provided me a job, for 20+ years now, and for that I'm very thankful. I love developing on Linux.
That being said, I owned a succession of Linux laptops that never worked entirely correctly before I got my retina macbook pro in 2012. I'd say 25% of system updates to my Linux distro would break something, maybe a wireless driver would get flaky, maybe X11 would crap out in some new or unusual way, maybe the battery life would be bad because some kind of battery optimization would stop working. There were ALWAYS problems, it was like living with a finicky collector's automobile that you're spending as much time tinkering with to keep it running as you are actually driving it. A major source of problems with Linux was always sleep and hibernate modes, which were clunky to engage, slow to suspend and resume, and, if they worked, almost always had caveats (I don't know how many scripts I wrote that would switch to a virtual console away from X before suspend and then back again after resume, because X would so often just die if you suspended while it controlled the display).
Maybe things have improved, but I doubt it. On the other hand, this 2012 macbook pro has been a complete pleasure to use. EVERYTHING works correctly, I have never had a single problem of any kind with it. Tons of little details all work seamlessly together. I can close the lid and the thing sleeps, open it, and it wakes up. Never had a graphics problem or a driver problem of any kind.
Of course I know this is because the deck is stacked in favor of Apple, who own the entire stack from hardware through operating system and up through most software. But I don't care. Because it just works, and works so well.
That being said, I am very disappointed with the newest iteration of the macbook pro and I don't think I'll be buying one despite having assumed that I would, leading up to the actual announcement. I will just chug along with this 2012 rMBP. I will NOT switch back to Linux. I'll take a correctly functioning slower and older laptop over a fast and new machine filled with quirks and bugs.
"We experienced much more traffic than we had prepared for, the website didn't go hard down but experienced slowness." And now it gets posted to Slashdot? Way to go!
"I figured out with Yosemite that Apple was moving in a direction I didn't want to follow anymore." In What way?
Yes, you definitely need a laptop with 4 hard drives and 2 wifi cards.
This is nothing more than an infomercial for system 76 hardware. There's not a single mention of a Mac user considering trying Linux instead of OS X.
I would venture to guess that the majority of Mac owners do not fall under the category of power users, where they would be inclined to experiment with a much less user/noob friendly platform as Linux is vs OS X. If anything they would consider Windows 10, which based on the posts at MacRumors seems to be what's happening, esp after Microsoft's recent Surface product announcements.
I doubt they were really so deluged with orders they had to bring new servers online after the MBP launch, but they certainly need them now that they got such a lovely fluff piece on Slashdot! I've been an Apple user for 27 years, and I'm less happy with them now than ever because they are going too far in the consumer market with the computers. But their market and System76 has a tiny overlap. But kudos to System76 for getting this marketing published on Slashdot!
these comparisons miss the fact that the Retina display is sooo much better for the vast majority of things that most Linux users do with computers. Text-mode consoles and development are infinitely easier with high-dpi text; I've literally more than doubled the amount of time I can use a computer in a day without developing a headache by using higher-quality displays
I have zero problems with my 1080 display. The text looks fine and is not blurry. I do not get headaches and I'm on the computer pretty much all day. If I wanted to see an individual pixel, I'd have to get out a magnifying glass. And this is on a 23" desktop monitor, so the DPI has to be much lower compared to a 15" laptop at 1080.
I suspect most people are drooling over resolution numbers and not actual performance. That's not to say that you aren't helped by it, but my guess is you're in the minority, because I really don't hear about getting headaches as a common complaint from computer users.
Depending on which side of the religious divide you occupy, people buy Apple because:
You've always been able to get more performance for less money, and yet they still sell. So what's the news here?
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
You can get a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with a 3200x1800 display (276 dpi), Intel HD graphics, and i7-7500U with 16 GB of DDR3 @ 1866MHz and a 512 GB PCIE SSD for $1800 and up. It ships with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and most of the devices should be supported under *BSD as well.
I have looked, found nowhere the same form factor as 13" macbook pro. Only big ugly laptop to be found there. I'd go with the Dell XPS 13" Developer edition that is about the same price range as the macbook.
Salut a toi EX Punk anarchiste devenu nouveau mouton conformiste...
Question: how old are you? :). I suspect there are more people with my issues than you give me credit for, although my point continues to be: the $2k for a system76 computer is not apples-to-apples to the $2400 MBP, and that the high-dpi screen, along with the software care that has gone into making it usable and functional across a wide variety of applications and actual "apparent" resolutions is quite valuable.
A few things, but it falls under nearly all of the new features didn't help me as I didn't have an iPhone nor did I want one. On top of that, the user interface overhaul left me unable to have desktop background featuring a photo because the icons lacked edges. Due to the way I perceive things, I had to consciously 'look' for icons because without edges, I just saw blobs of color blended in with everything else.
I can't believe this is on the front page. This is the oldest Apple flamewar ever.
I agree, the new MBP is . . . terrible. But the idea that this Oryx "closely matches" the MBP is ridiculous beyond the CPU. They're wildly different. Apologies, but . . . apples and oranges.
The Oryx:
- is made of plastic
- weighs about 40% more
- has a much lower resolution screen
- lacks that touch bar and expensive ARM hardware (which granted, pretty much no one, including me, wants)
- lacks any thunderbolt, let alone two separate thunderbolt 3 controllers (the big "pro" feature in the new MBP)
- has a smaller battery and way more power hungry components
- an SSD that I'm pretty sure is nowhere near as fast
- doesn't run OS X
These are the things that jack up the price of the MBP. Whether or not they're a sensible cost proposition is very different from "see, practically the same." Apple screwed up and inflated the price with things people don't want.
It's cool that System76 is getting a lot more attention. I think I'm about to buy a Puri.sm laptop, the disappointing new MBP put me over. But come on, they are not the same. One might make a lot more sense to a lot of people, but the "see I built the same thing for way less money" victory dance is just tired, and embarrassing for the front page of a site that's supposed to have editors.
Other than size, weight, battery life, wake from sleep that actually works, wifi performance, ssd performance, cross-device integration, speaker quality, macOS... but other than that, what HAVE apple bothered to do for their users?
I have a System76, but honestly I barely use it because it is loud and it has the worst laptop keyboard I've ever encountered (the key spacing is designed for people with HUUUGE hands and any lateral force causes the key to stick and not go down, making typing nearly impossible). And the battery life aint too hot either. The System76 is powerful, but inconvenient. I actually prefer my chromebook, which is much smaller (smaller screen, lower resolution, much less ram, much slower cpu, etc)... but far more usable.
Apple stuff is expensive, but I wonder about people who complain about base specs all the time. 'more' is not necessarily 'better'. My dinky little chromebook has only 4G of ram but I don't even feel it when it pages to/from its SSD. There's no point stuffing 32GB of ram into a laptop, frankly. It's just a waste of power (and money).
I will of course stuff as much ram into a box as is economically feasible, just because I'm me. I have a dual-socket xeon system with 128GB of ram, for example, and I have a broadwell desktop with 64GB of ram. Both are being used as servers and build boxes at the moment.
But the box I currently use for my workstation only has 8GB of ram and I don't feel the paging to/from the SSD even with tons of Chrome windows leaking memory all over the place so I have been in no hurry to replace. In fact, my workstation is just a dinky old Haswell i3 box, and yet it has no problem driving two 4K monitors or playing video. It wouldn't win any prizes playing games, but then again I don't use it to play games.
Update to present-day NVMe SSDs, which have ~3-5x the read performance of a SATA SSD, and I kinda wonder where these complaints come from.
-Matt
I've been using Apple laptop hardware since the 12" PowerBook G4. My most recent purchase was in 2014. This is the first laptop release I am refusing to buy, after having said earlier this year (pre-announcement) that I would be upgrading.
For me, the reasons have little to do with the performance-related specifications, and everything to do with what I perceive to be tremendous arrogance on the part of Apple and the particular design choices that were made that, in my view, clearly reveal their willingness to sacrifice--indeed, completely disregard--function in favor of design.
The first problem is the removal of MagSafe. Ever since it was introduced, they've done multiple iterations of the MagSafe connector, to the point that it was even parodied by CollegeHumor, only to remove it entirely.
The second is the removal of all ports except USB-C / Thunderbolt 3, and then charging $19 - $45 for each optional adapter, rather than including even the most basic USB to USB-C in the box. For a machine that is targeted toward professionals and can cost $3000, this is unacceptable. You need to buy the extra adapter just to have functionality that you currently have with hardware that Apple itself provided (e.g., iPhone/iPad). Then, to say that you made this design choice to improve the portability and weight of the device, is just sophistry: by making people buy and keep track of a whole slew of adapters just to recover the functionality they had before is a step backwards in portability and ease of use. To me, this indicates that Jony Ive only cares about what the machine looks like and doesn't give a fuck about how people in the real world might actually use it.
The third problem is the lack of an included 3-prong extension cable. Yes, for a lot of people, this was optional. But making it optional out of the box means that it's one more hidden cost, especially for an adapter that already costs so much on its own. Why take it out of the box now? Is $3000 too little profit margin for Apple?
The fourth problem, and the most telling of all, is the overall choice to limit the hardware specifications--for example, the maximum allowed RAM--on a device that does not have user-serviceable RAM, no less, simply because it would have impacted battery life. This is an outright lie, because all you should do is make the battery bigger and the device thicker. This tells us that Apple again chooses to put design first and usability and performance last.
Why buy this product? It reeks of hubris, and this is coming from someone who, again, has been a long-time user of Apple products.
There's a difference between "free" and "costs nothing".
My time costs nothing. I don't need to pay anyone. I can take my time and do it my way, at my own convenience and stop when I like.
However, forking out $500 extra is not something I can necessarily do at any point.
But, to be honest, you're assuming that a) they're an existing Mac user, b) they can't cope on Ubuntu and c) things are easier to learn on Mac than on Ubuntu.
Not all of those are going to be true. And when they're not, the time factor is common to both machines, or specific to your particular workload.
For instance, after 20 years in the industry, I still feel a productivity drop the second I hit a Mac workstation. I literally feel held back on what I want to achieve. When it works, sure, it's fine like anything else. But when it doesn't, it's a damn nightmare and finding service and support is not cheap if you don't like the answer "We'll just reinstall". And I'm not just talking Mac desktops but Mac "servers" as well (P.S. a bog-standard Mac with a software upgrade from the App Store isn't a "server").
Take, for instance, when I needed to renew a certificate. On one Mac Mini server we were using, I clicked Renew, it said it was successful, done. On another, identical, purchased at the same time, same spec, redundant Mac Mini performing the same functions, the Renew failed. Two hours later, after basically using a terminal and what amounted to OpenSSL commands, I got it to renew without breaking the certificate chain. UI options to do that after failure? ZERO. And guess where the Renew button is, go on... I dare you. It changes between OS versions and is tucked away in an obscure place half the time.
Sure, it's not every day, but that's the instances I use them. And in the every day stuff, I avoid them precisely because of stuff like this. We have suites of Macs... the users avoid them and can get into all kinds of trouble especially where keychains or App Store apps are involved. Simple fixes but "only if you know how".
Macs are nice WHILE THEY WORK and you use them to do simple things. The time and effort when they don't is multiplied enormously compared to competitors. I can google and in five seconds find an Ubuntu page for basically anything I want to do. With Macs, I can spend hours searching forums (central knowledgebase is bog-useless, a bit like MS KB, but at least most general PC forums can help you on a Windows PC) and end up at the answer "You can't" or "Nobody knows."
Yes, I manage them. I manage hundreds of iPads and dozens of Macs, and some servers. And they consume more time than hundreds of Chromebooks, hundreds of PCs and dozens of Windows servers. Over my lifetime I've managed hundreds of them, thousands of iPads and thousand and thousands of other machines. And I still choose not to use them whenever possible because of the time-suck that finding out how to do something simple can be.
Think of it this way: The Mac is more expensive and makes some functions easier. The Ubuntu is cheaper, and takes more legwork. Windows is the middle ground, not cheap but not simple either.
However, when things go wrong, that flips completely on its head.
P.S. I had a 2-week argument with Apple only recently because we can't create iTunes accounts for a school. Doesn't matter what they get me to sign up to, etc. they have no support for it, the systems they have in place (including Apple School Manager which is still in Beta over here), etc. does not provide me with the simplest of functionality to lock down an iPad, even with £100k of Cisco Meraki MDM kit. Their ultimate solution was to relax a security restriction so I could manually create iTunes accounts so that kids with iPads could sign in and use them. That's their solution for A SCHOOL with hundreds of these things.
When things go wrong, or outside of their intended use-case, Apple honestly could not care less. I'd rather not pay for that attitude, and avoid having to d
Er what? You realize you can install Linux on a Mac just like you can install Windows on a Mac.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Apple will price their products to reflect the development costs and engineering expense they invest to design and deliver new parts, services, and experience.
Agreed. The problem is that in the past those costs went into developing useful features like a rugged aluminium body, a fantastic glass trackpad with gesture support, longer battery life etc. With this model that cost has gone into removing multiple important ports (one USB-A and a SD card slot would have been really nice), removing previous innovations (no mag-safe) and removing function keys to replace them with a silly gimick that would require me to divide attention between the keyboard and screen.
On top of this they release it with a CPU that is one year old and a GPU that is one generation old. This is not the Apple of a few years ago that negotiated to get early access to Intel CPUs and used cutting end GPUs in the machines. On top of that they did not refresh their desktop line and are STILL trying to sell a $4k+ Mac Pro machine which is now 3 years old. Apple have not only dropped the ball with the mac they did so so long ago that the competition has run with it and scored and they still don't even seem to realize it. Just compare the new MS Surface Studio to what Apple came up with. I've used macs for over a decade now but this even really was the last straw and reluctantly I'm heading back to Linux and Windows now.
Gosh, these are not attractive laptops at all. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Also: specs leave something to be desired. 1080p displays? Come on, we are in 2016 almost 2017. If the MS Surface 4 can have 3000x2000 and cost less... Sorry, but I will keep paying the Apple tax.
Yup. Linux has mostly caught up. I am considering moving to Linux Mint. Tim Cook and Jony Ive have ruined Apple.