New Hardware - New Hardships

[circuitbomb]

My last PC was a pre-assembled Compaq AMD64 with 2GB RAM and that sucker was good to me for years, eventually I ended up retiring it because the hardware was getting outdated, this was a machine that only had 2 SATA ports internally and relied on IDE drives primarily. But I loved that Compaq. The only non-stock hardware in it was the graphics card where I bought a decent Nvidia GeForce dual-dvi from a chap on craigslist.com when I started dual screening.

My current build I went from the ground up. I'm pushing an AMD Phenom II 1055T 8GB RAM, a 6000 series Radeon Graphic card, and around 2.5TB of HDD, water cooled cpu (of which I bought an after market cooler the size of a brick at the start it was a sub-par unit and I started having heat issues so I had to upgrade. My new screens came about a month ago, updating from 2x 19in widescreens to 2x 23in HD widescreens.

As for Apple, I've never really been a fan because of the lock-in, which is something I've always noticed about their products. But I guess when you consider the average person, perhaps one not so saavy when it comes to hardware, likely doesn't think about lock-in like we do.

[maboa]

I actually read this post all the way through :) It brought back a lot of memories for me - it doesn't seem that long ago that I was assembling a PC around a K6 CPU - and yet clearly it was. Poor old AMD, seems Intel weren't quite as scrupulous as they might have been, there were some antitrust rumblings, but it's always the stable-door being shut after dobbin has well and truly crushed the competition and established a cushy monopoly - isn't it?

After many years of buying Apple (although I've always had a Linux setup within bootable reach) I decided that it was time to try and break the oh so shiny Apple lock-in and bought a ThinkPad W520. I haven't customised yet so I'm on the standard 160GB SSD and 4GB of RAM. Next stop a crucial 320GB and tempted to max out the RAM to 32GB - cos I can and I don't want to be opening that baby too often. My Linux desktop at this point will be decommissioned and good riddance - it consumes far too much space under my desk, requires a separate uninterruptable PSU and generates altogether too much noise and heat, so much so that in remains off during most of the Italian summer. The other thing that will change when I upgrade the ThinkPad is a move from Ubuntu to Arch Linux and instead of having Windows bootable I'll probably put it in a VirtualBox.

I think that despite the shininess of Mac - unless they make a specific dev OS, Linux is going to look very tempting for developers. With Apple selling more devices running iOS than OSX, OSX is becoming more like iOS which is both convenient for the majority of users but also increasingly limiting. The feeling many people report when they come from Android to iOS that is 'toy-like' strikes a loud chord with me.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what Apple have achieved and they do what they do very well but like all corporations their primary mission is to make as much money as possible and I'm guessing that by the time the anti-trust kicks in the damage will have been well and truly done. Also the amount of Apple laptops I see at conferences triggers a fear in me - a very real fear of uniform and mono-culture. If your dev machine is an extension of your personality what does that say about us if we're all using the same piece of uni-body hardware?

[auroranockert]

Throughout my life, I have visited all camps and currently I own two custom-built servers, a custom-built desktop, a Macbook Pro etc.

I haven't really had any big problems with incompatible hardware, but it might be related to not upgrading a lot. Most of the time it just works, used to having to play around with drivers from my early days of Windows and Linux.

To some extent I am also worried about the Apple monoculture (even .Net devs use Apple hardware these days), but isn't the reason quite simple?

1. The developers (we) have created this situation, the development situation is just much better on OS X. In many cases easier to setup and with access to better tools and frameworks. Leading to most developers developing for OS X and iOS (I would not be surprised if there are more useful applications being developed now than for Windows.)
2. Most PC manufacturers produce crap, for example, when I got my netbook, HP had filled it with so much crap that it took over 30 minutes to boot the first time, not counting the time it took to charge. A new Macbook is charged and it takes just a few minutes to setup an account and register with Apple, and the only bloatware installed is iLife (which arguably is useful.)

Can we force other manufacturers to stop produce crap? Probably… Can we create great software for GNU/BSD (or even Windows?) Probably…

Are we doing it? Mostly not…

[circuitbomb]

@JensNockert I agree about the bloatware - its horrendous, that "everything has to look OEM" thinking is quite shit, and it isn't even with the pre-installed software, you get any device and it comes with a disc with a bunch of useless crap on it you end-up installing because you just need the driver. An example I think of the conundrum you mentioned (great software probably - mostly not doing it) is, at least from my perspective, the lacking of a great UI git client on Windows. You see a lot of sexy git apps for OS X but wheres the hotness in Win32/64...Tortoise, MyGit with Cygwin - cmon I love cli but if im using an OS with a desktop give me a sexy app.

@maboa I guess one could argue that what a dev develops should be an extension of their personality - not the hardware it was developed on. However, we all remember when computers were beige - and if you wanted a different color you had to paint the damn box yourself. I'll probably never get an Apple, but not because I loathe the high price, or the lock-in, or the aspect of a uniform look - but rather I just don't have an interest or need to. To me, its like high school all over again - everyone itching to fit in somewhere, you have the Apple fan boys at one lunch table, the PC enthusiasts at another, embedded mobile geeks over yonder, Windows users mixing around trying to be cool, Linux users floating around in jet packs, and iOS/OS X users rattling their cages...

[jussi-kalliokoski]

@JensNockert spot on. The reason I didn't get a laptop until recently was that I didn't want something that came pre-installed with Windows, because I've seen friends have those and they've always been troublesome for them: the drivers are pre-installed, but with a load of crap like some OEM toolbar where you can set the volume instead of the taskbar... Yay. Also laptop manufacturers are often bound to Microsoft in a level that they offer no / very little cooperation with Linux driver developers, leading to an ultimately inferior experience on Linux. And that's not even speaking of the hardware yet. Thinkpad may be the only manufacturer that doesn't make the laptops eventually break if you open the lid often enough, and the overall design of non-Apple laptops is often crappy, with batteries close to heat generating parts, ventilation being blocked if you keep the laptop on a table, etc. Luckily @nddrylliog pointed me to Sager that offered a sort of a modular design and no OEM. I was able to pick the things I wanted and where I wanted them, and the laptop didn't ship with Windows. I did probably pay the Windows tax anyway, because they have a "Works Best With Windows7" banner on their website, but at least it wasn't pre-installed. If I didn't know better, I'd think some PC manufacturers are trying to get you to use Apple. Or do I know better...

But of course vendor lock-in applies to Windows on some level as well. Getting vendor lock-in is as simple as having the user pay for software that is designed for that platform (see why I don't believe Facebook will last). I once stopped using Linux for a period of time, because I was locked in to Windows, having bought a lot of games for it.