Security by obscurity is not real.
As someone who has professionally done legal reverse engineering. No. No it isn’t.
The security you get through vetting your code is invaluable. Closing off things makes it more likely for things to not be caught by good actors, and thus not fixed and taken advantage of by bad actors.
And obscurity does nothing to stop bad actors, if there’s money to be had. It will temporarily stop script kiddies though. Until the exploit finds it’s easy into their suite of exploits that no one’s fixed yet.
Lol, Linux literally owns the server space, windows owns the desktop space, what exactly does MacOS Own exactly? If best means most pretentious then sure.
I would concur. You can record high quality encoded audio on your iPhone, audio design on your iPad with your other samples, and add the mixed soundscape into your film on iMac.
I literally know someone in the media industry who’s whole effortless workflow is what makes him a go-to guy for quick and flexible turnaround for audio mastery for films. He works exclusively on apple devices for this exact reason.
I’m not saying it’s impossible another way, but he really likes the ecosystem.
At this point I’d call it more of a legacy approach - they definitely still control the space, but the workflow is quite easily accomplished on other systems.
I’d also add many (SO MANY) of the pro audio and video systems out there are also running Linux, so even with sa mac-focused workflow, many of the pros out there are using Linux (often without any clue that they are).
So to me its similar to Windows on the desktop - its not necessarily the best option in all cases, but its often the path of least resistance. As a result, pretty much all of them buy into an Apple ecosystem from the get-go.
But it would be a stretch to say that support is the result of current macOS. The Mac has always been popular with creatives, since way before it was UNIX-based.
I’d argue the popularity with creatives is largely from being marketed to creatives since its earliest days.
I don’t think it’s just marketing, the early Macs got a lot of performance out of their graphics routines, and then Mac OS had tight integrations with postscript which made it good for graphical design.
I think these days yes a powerful graphics card will get you very far, but overall macOS feels much less hostile to me than windows. I think Linux is kind of a mess for graphics stuff, there are a few good open source tools, but the major design suites aren’t well supported.
The lack of non proprietary art tools is a big reason I didn’t go into digital art / graphic design. GIMP just cannot keep pace and I did not want to shell out $500 a year or more in subscriptions just to be able to do a job with no security that pays pennies.
Its also a big part of why I’m “pro” AI art (I’m actually pretty neutral, I’m not liking that they’re burning down the Amazon to make shitty ads with). I think it’s gonna be a decent tool for artists to automate repetitive tasks like cutting backgrounds out of photos for collages, upscaling / enlarging images, adding background textures to landscapes, touching up acne in portraits, and animating repetitive shots like walking. but right now we’re unethically sourcing the training data and shoving it into anything and everything with 0 regard for how many resources it’s costing to make content that’s shitty anyway.
The other half of my argument “in favor” is that the only thing worse than AI existing is AI only existing in the hands of the bourgeoisie and is plebs not even knowing how it works in addition to them using it to gain an unfair advantage over us. I think we have an opportunity to make sure that the open source tools are decent to begin with instead of letting them have complete control over even more of the creative world.
AI art won’t do shit except boot people out of jobs that would require a real artist but won’t have too many people complaining if it is obvious goo.
As for open-source art tools, krita is fantastic and gets used by a lot of professionals.
Designer here. This is true, but they are also have a seriously good trackpad and good energy use (finally). They work well for design, video and audio, but they are also really nice to operate. It’s a bit like driving a very nice car (which I can’t afford, but have borrowed from a client). Once you get accustomed to it, every other computer—especially laptops—feel like 1980s GM econoboxes.
as someone who switched from a macbook to a g14 with fedora, the trackpad experience is actually surprisingly close on some laptops, I had few issues moving over.
energy efficiency is more something you notice to be better on macs (in most cases) like you pointed out.
for me efficiency is not bad, but macs are clearly ahead
MacOS owns the rich space*
And a lot of rich people are art dilletants or are able to afford putting their children through expensive art programs with no need to have it pay off. And of course they all buy the “top of the line” (which of course is obviously the most expensive right?) brands.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple plays into it so the cycle is recursive.
The problem is that the hardware is fairly underpowered to effectively use for any kind of demanding visuals.
Like if I were rendering out a big 3d scene, I’d want something with a fairly beefy GPU to crunch through the renders relatively quickly.
Everything that is professionally rendered is offloaded to purpose built hardware. This part of the workflow would not be any different no matter what the creative is using for their workstation.
Yeah, I have some anecdotal evidence to that as well.
Everyone likes to shit on AAPL for being a walled garden, but it’s really hard for some to admit that they are pretty good at what they’re doing.
I mean, they kind of have to be pretty good to entice you into the walled garden to begin with. Get people in the door with a smooth, super-polished experience, and then you’ve already got plenty of them pretty well won over. You’ll lose some users with previous experience with another OS to “It doesn’t work the way it did on $ancient_version of $OS, I hate it,” that go back, some just get tired of the same thing and want to try something new, and others that hit the walls of the garden and decide they want out. If it was straight garbage and restrictive, on top of being expensive, nobody would hang around until they got comfortable enough that overcoming the friction of changing was a real obstacle to switching.
There’s just a disproportionate representation of folks like myself in tech communities versus the general population who are opposed to any walled garden, no matter how polished, when there exist a free alternative.
it’s very popular with developers due to being a turnkey posix environment. given the choice between mac and windows for development, i would go with mac every time. it’s not my personal first choice but it’s tolerable.
WSL is very workable as a dev environment. I just wish it wasn’t so janky with networking.
what exactly does MacOS Own exactly?
It certainly isn’t the enterprise space, ALL their business features and integrations are half-assed at best and downright painful to use at worst (ESPECIALLY iOS device management, fuck what a shit show that is)
I came up with the phrase “Windows is an enterprise OS with consumer features, MacOS is a consumer OS with (half-assed) enterprise features” to describe it perfectly.
Have you used windows lately? I swear it’s become half-assed as an OS. Might still have the enterprise management features, but it’s incredibly painful in a mixed enterprise environment that is not standardized office boxes. (e.g. science equipment). I avoid it like the plague if at all possible due to it’s now quirky nature.
I’m dating myself, but at least NT didn’t crash all the damn time when you access a share on a NetApp or install a new version of the evil Java… Etc.
As an enterprise admin, I concur.
Windows seems to be turning into some kind of weird botnet that exists only to waste wattage and bandwidth on updating itself and looking for security risks. I have weirdly fond memories of NT… but I don’t miss updating JRE on 1k+ machines though…
Yes, our environment is 50/50 MacOS/windows atm
I do agree that windows is getting shittier by the day and it’s bleeding into the enterprise side of things. But, it’s nowhere near as bad as MacOS is in an enterprise environment. At least Windows meets you (an enterprise/org, def not as a consumer) half way and has a high bar to fall from. Apple’s offerings…were never good, always felt forced and an after thought. The “Apple Magic” only applies to regular consumers ig lol
And then those “enterprise features” get borked on the next major macOS release.
Oh you wanted to ensure your remote assist tool could be granted the proper permissions to work? Well screw you! We took away the ability to grant Screen Recording permissions through a MDM profile. Suck it!
In case you didn’t know the Screen Recording permission is needed to be able to view the display/screen in applications like Zoom when screen sharing or for remote assist through Screen connect.
Apple’s “reason” was essentially “… Think of the users! It’s for their security”.
damn that sucks, but on the other hand, Management then also cant smuggle in screen capturing software to snoop on their devs/users.
Yep, we have about 30% macOS clients. It’s clear from Apple decisions that they favor the user as being an individual rather than an organization. The amount of third-party junk stapled onto the OS to enable a semblance of management is very un-Apple-esque.
Organizations can absolutely be the user or consumer of a product. In my Windows 11 Home edition, I definitely feel who they see as the user, and it isn’t me.
I’m old enough to remember when people thought OSX Server was a competitive option because it was technically “unix”. Needless to say, once people figured out Apple was using Linux for their own servers, despite numerous attempts to switch over to OSX Server. OSX Server went tits up. Apparently OSX Server hung around as an addon to OSX for casual use.
The “luxury” space. It’s overpriced hardware with an honestly relatively pretty aesthetic and the OS has so many guardrails they’re hard to really mess up, and when someone does mess it up, apple stores are ubiquitous enough that its a pretty quick trip to get it fixed. Perfect for people with a bit more money than sense who don’t want to or have the time/ability to figure out how to properly use a more flexible OS that requires a bit more knowhow to use and not break.
It’s overpriced hardware
Have you seen the M4 benchmarks?
If you’re memory bound then sure, you can get way more bang for your buck with Intel/AMD. But for pretty amazing CPU performance I think the “Apple is overpriced” trope isn’t really true any more.
CPU isn’t the only specs I’m looking for, supporting a beefy graphic card for 3d rendering is also a must, at least for me to quickly get renders done, and dollar for dollar, getting a customized computer running windows will take me much farther and faster than any Mac will.
Sure the CPU might be amazing but CPU isn’t the only important part of a computer.
I would say thats mostly because of Company policies since devs would use the same tools you would use in a linux box. As an Android Developer and CICD Manager I really hate that I have to use a MacBook Pro when a good ol Thinkpad would be more than sufficient.
I would say thats mostly because of Company policies since devs would use the same tools you would use in a linux box.
Not at all the case for me and for other devs where I work. We can freely choose to run Linux, and some people do (mostly backend devs). M-series MacBooks dominate though because of the simple fact that they are just so much more powerful than the alternatives.
Since you’re doing Android development, you’re probably saving some very significant amount of compile time, if you’re running an M-series MacBook Pro.
When the M1 was released there were actually stories of companies sidestepping normal device replacement policies and upgrading all mobile devs to M1s because of the time savings involved, which should tell you something about the power in these machines.
Since the release of the M-series, the MacBook Pros have gone from being primarily a fashion item to becoming primarily a tool for work - someone made the apt comparison that the previous MacBooks were trying to be Lamborghinis - pretty to look at at the expense of functionality, while the M-series are tractors - tools to accomplish jobs.
Same. We have an iOS build, and it turns out you can only debug iOS apps on macOS.
Other than that, none of my job needs macOS, and I honestly hate macOS, but it’s what we standardized on due to iOS support, though we really only need one or two macOS devices because 99% of our app is the same across platforms.
Let’s be real here, the vast majority of developers are not the type of person to want to dig into the depths of their computer. Then just want something that works so they can write their code.
They may have started that way, but doing a hobby as your job will kill almost all interest you have in it.
Unix certification.
Would be great if true. My company (a quite big one in the health sector) runs on MacBooks.
Linux owns more than server/web space. It’s everywhere. A lot of IoT is Linux too. Also drones, router, switches, NASs, smart white goods, cars, etc, often have Linux in somewhere too. TVs were Linux, but are now Android, which is Linux but not GNU/Linux. Basically user facing Linux is often Android, though not the Steam Deck.
IoT is 80% Linux. Linux owns every space except Game Console and Desktop, at least that I can think of.
BSD and other permissively licenced code is used a load in games. PS4-PS5 are FreeBSD based I think. GCC is often the compiler used for these platforms. Though maybe Clang + LVM now. So loads of FOSS is used, but these is little community participation. That what non-copyleft allows. Maybe it’s better now. I left games over 12 years ago now and not really following.
Mine was like 2005 for home and 2012 for work. Windows and Mac are a distant memory. Thankfully.
Obscurity is not security. Obscurity is the fake sensation of privacy, you are on the hands of the creator.
Joke’s on you: GNU/Linux isn’t Unix to begin with (that’s literally what GNU means: “GNU’s Not Unix”)!
Therefore, MacOS is “the best Unix” only because it managed to squeeze by the BSDs and some dead proprietary Unixes (“Unices?” “Unixen?”) – hardly an impressive feat.
BSDs aren’t even Unix AFAIK because they didn’t bother to pay for the official recognition, despite literally being derived from UNIX. MacOS is pretty much the only UNIX that the average user will actually directly interact with.
Although for both Linux and (especially) BSD, isn’t there a “Unix of Theseus” issue here, if you understand my meaning?
Maybe for BSD? They have a lot of the original code though, and BSD moves a lot slower than Linux. Modern BSDs have a lot more in common with original UNIX than macOS does, but macOS paid for the certification and the BSDs didn’t.
Linux never was UNIX though. It does loosely follow the UNIX philosophy though.
