Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t believe the situation is as dire as is portrayed? Yes, Apple now requires signed applications to be notarised, but it’s still possible to run applications that are not signed. See also LibreOffice’s post.
I think Catalina incompatibility is way overblown. In practice it’s not much different from other macOS releases, and people treat it as if it was the end of macOS. Even my Steam games actually work, despite Steam’s huge banner saying otherwise (there is 64-bit Wine for macOS since 2014 IIRC).
Notarization is annoying and flaky, like all of Xcode’s code signing has always been, but it’s merely a continuation of Gatekeeper and the general policy that was in place since 10.7. It’s a bit late to be shocked about the block of unsigned binaries that’s been added 7 years ago.
For 32-bit-only apps the writing was on the wall since Apple dropped many Carbon APIs in the introduction of 64-bit PowerPC systems. Yes, PowerPC. Fat binaries and 64-bit apps on macOS are older than x86 support. If Apple switched to Intel a couple of years later, i386 Macs would never even exist. macOS SDKs have dropped support for 32-bit many versions ago. For many years there has been no reason to make 32-bit binaries, and it’s been very hard to do so even if you tried.
Apple dropped many Carbon APIs in the introduction of 64-bit PowerPC systems.
Since when did the G5 cause that? The first G5s came out in the Jaguar era and Carbon was still king (in fact, for quite a while you had to use Carbon for some things that Cocoa did badly or not at all).
As far as your Gatekeeper point, though, I find it disingenuous. Remember everybody complaining this was Apple locking down the Mac and they’re slowly boiling the frogs and the usual apologists saying, no, no, you’re crazy, they’ll never do that? But now that the water is hotter, are you really saying all along we should have expected it?
I mean a bunch of Carbon APIs have never been ported to 64-bit. You could use them in 32-bit executables (that of course ran on G5 just fine), but not if you compiled for 64-bit. That need for (very overdue) rewrite probably remained the last reason for 32-bit-only executables to still exist even after virtually all Macs were 64-bit with 64-bit OS.
The Gatekeeper is boiling the frog, no doubt about it. But in Catalina it’s not a surprise, and as usual, it’s only a tiny bit worse than in the previous OS version. As soon as the “AppStore only” option was added you could guess that’s the goal, and all other options will be gradually stripped away.
Just a minor nit, but as far as I know Apple added support for 64 bit UI processes in 10.5 - after the Intel transition - and at that time made a 64 bit Cocoa without a 64 bit Carbon. This isn’t the same as shipping the G5, which was a 64 bit capable processor running almost entirely 32 bit code. But your point that the writing has been on the wall for a long time stands.
Personally I was always surprised/disappointed about Apple shipping one generation of 32 bit only Intel systems (the Core 2 Duo chips are 64 bit, but the original Core Duo chips were not.) Even in 2005 when they were moving to Intel, AMD was shipping 64 bit chips in volume. It was fairly clear from the start that 32 bit Intel was going to be legacy from the moment it was released, and kind of strange to replace a 64 bit G5 with a 32 bit Core Duo (which was admittedly much faster.)
Linux on a desktop is dirt cheap (something like 4x the performance per dollar).
If you mostly use the laptop in two places (eg work desk and home desk), you can fit both sites with top quality desktop equipment for a fraction the price of a new macbook, and have cash left over for a chromebook or similar (for portable browsing/email).
I only have one work location (home office), so I’m working on the fastest machine I’ve ever had, running ubuntu (24 cores, 64g ram). Best computing environment I’ve had in years.
I miss one or two things from OSX (liceCAP, preview.app and mail.app alternatives are not as good) but having a working package manager etc is pretty great.
I disagree with this. I switched to Mac originally because it was the cheapest way to get a decent spec laptop with a metal case and ssd. I don’t believe that has changed.
I’m not aware of a good linux laptop either. My point is that for the price of a macbook pro, you can get 4 desktop machines, each of which is faster than the macbook.
I haven’t heard anything bad about them, but IME reviews for an expensive niche provider tend strongly positive since the reviewers have looked up that particular niche, so it’s hard to know.
If those are your only requirements, there are other metal laptops (Razer) and otherwise well built ones (Dell XPS) with good specs. Price should be around the same (but I haven’t actually done a good comparison).
My fully specced Dell Precision (Enterprise XPS with Xeon instead of i7) was almost couple thousand Euros cheaper than fully decked MacBook Pro. With addition of having 32gb ram when Macs had only 16gb maximum.
IIRC RAM has least energy draw of all components in computer, so I didn’t give any thought on that when picking configuration. I think that “RAM drastically affects battery life” idea became from Apple marketing as answer why they don’t have more than 16gb in their machines (and nowadays they also have 32gb laptops).
I rarely use my work laptop (which that machine is) without peripherals, so I haven’t got too clear idea about battery life while working. But it does manage half work day (so around 3.5 - 4 hours) without problems. OTOH system I mostly develop is half a dozen “microservices” and I dev against integration tests which:
run non-trivial test interactions in browser (average suite transfers 0.5 - 2.5gb data with caches enabled).
there is also have heavy calculations happening in postgres and backend servers
So the load during those battery times haven’t been exactly light.
IIRC RAM has least energy draw of all components in computer, so I didn’t give any thought on that when picking configuration. I think that “RAM drastically affects battery life” idea became from Apple marketing as answer why they don’t have more than 16gb in their machines (and nowadays they also have 32gb laptops).
By my understanding, RAM has almost no energy draw. Available motherboard chipsets capable of running more than 16gb (even if you only install 16gb in them), however…
Half a day is pretty good; it means you can sit in the park in good weather.
You’re right and wrong. On a high end desktop computer a CPU can use 150+ watts. But a MacBook processor running at full power only uses ~35W, and only a couple watts idle. RAM on the other hand uses a constant amount of power, constantly refreshing memory cells as long as it’s powered on.
I don’t know about RAM in MacBooks, but IIRC full size DDR4 DIMMs use about 0.375W per GB. So 6W for 16GB, 12W for 32GB.
Assuming some casual use drawing 10W CPU power, 10+6W vs 10+12W makes a pretty big difference in battery life, that’s 37% more power. Assuming 3W / 16GB, that’s still a 23% increase in power consumption to power 32GB RAM.
These numbers are all approximate / from memory, but nevertheless you can see the huge difference between desktops and laptops when it comes to power economy.
I wonder if folks would have this same reaction if a developer license was $10 a year? Is it a purely financial decision or is it just that they’re being asked to quantify their hobby at all?
Own a mac (recent enough to run a supported OS) in order to run the signing tools,
Spend your hobby time packaging your work for apple to review (rather than just distributing a zipfile which extracts the app, you need the whole signing workflow on each release),
Send apple your work for review, and be subject to arbitrary rejection (for the app store).
To this first-world-living, employed, healthy programmer, the $100/year is an irrelevance. Stealing my hobby time to make me jump through banal hoops is not (to be clear: I would be more OK with doing this if it weren’t such a hassle; signature verification isn’t without its merits).
I have quite a few apps that will stop working in Catalina. I just don’t care enough; this MacBook Air will go in the collection room when 10.14 is no longer supported.
Just add a FAQ entry telling your macOS users to run:
sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine path/to/Game.appPerhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t believe the situation is as dire as is portrayed? Yes, Apple now requires signed applications to be notarised, but it’s still possible to run applications that are not signed. See also LibreOffice’s post.
I think Catalina incompatibility is way overblown. In practice it’s not much different from other macOS releases, and people treat it as if it was the end of macOS. Even my Steam games actually work, despite Steam’s huge banner saying otherwise (there is 64-bit Wine for macOS since 2014 IIRC).
Notarization is annoying and flaky, like all of Xcode’s code signing has always been, but it’s merely a continuation of Gatekeeper and the general policy that was in place since 10.7. It’s a bit late to be shocked about the block of unsigned binaries that’s been added 7 years ago.
For 32-bit-only apps the writing was on the wall since Apple dropped many Carbon APIs in the introduction of 64-bit PowerPC systems. Yes, PowerPC. Fat binaries and 64-bit apps on macOS are older than x86 support. If Apple switched to Intel a couple of years later, i386 Macs would never even exist. macOS SDKs have dropped support for 32-bit many versions ago. For many years there has been no reason to make 32-bit binaries, and it’s been very hard to do so even if you tried.
Since when did the G5 cause that? The first G5s came out in the Jaguar era and Carbon was still king (in fact, for quite a while you had to use Carbon for some things that Cocoa did badly or not at all).
As far as your Gatekeeper point, though, I find it disingenuous. Remember everybody complaining this was Apple locking down the Mac and they’re slowly boiling the frogs and the usual apologists saying, no, no, you’re crazy, they’ll never do that? But now that the water is hotter, are you really saying all along we should have expected it?
I mean a bunch of Carbon APIs have never been ported to 64-bit. You could use them in 32-bit executables (that of course ran on G5 just fine), but not if you compiled for 64-bit. That need for (very overdue) rewrite probably remained the last reason for 32-bit-only executables to still exist even after virtually all Macs were 64-bit with 64-bit OS.
The Gatekeeper is boiling the frog, no doubt about it. But in Catalina it’s not a surprise, and as usual, it’s only a tiny bit worse than in the previous OS version. As soon as the “AppStore only” option was added you could guess that’s the goal, and all other options will be gradually stripped away.
Just a minor nit, but as far as I know Apple added support for 64 bit UI processes in 10.5 - after the Intel transition - and at that time made a 64 bit Cocoa without a 64 bit Carbon. This isn’t the same as shipping the G5, which was a 64 bit capable processor running almost entirely 32 bit code. But your point that the writing has been on the wall for a long time stands.
Personally I was always surprised/disappointed about Apple shipping one generation of 32 bit only Intel systems (the Core 2 Duo chips are 64 bit, but the original Core Duo chips were not.) Even in 2005 when they were moving to Intel, AMD was shipping 64 bit chips in volume. It was fairly clear from the start that 32 bit Intel was going to be legacy from the moment it was released, and kind of strange to replace a 64 bit G5 with a 32 bit Core Duo (which was admittedly much faster.)
Soo… Where the hell do I go next, once Mojave is out of support? Linux laptops just don’t compare, and don’t get me started on Windows.
Linux on a desktop is dirt cheap (something like 4x the performance per dollar).
If you mostly use the laptop in two places (eg work desk and home desk), you can fit both sites with top quality desktop equipment for a fraction the price of a new macbook, and have cash left over for a chromebook or similar (for portable browsing/email).
I only have one work location (home office), so I’m working on the fastest machine I’ve ever had, running ubuntu (24 cores, 64g ram). Best computing environment I’ve had in years.
I miss one or two things from OSX (liceCAP, preview.app and mail.app alternatives are not as good) but having a working package manager etc is pretty great.
I disagree with this. I switched to Mac originally because it was the cheapest way to get a decent spec laptop with a metal case and ssd. I don’t believe that has changed.
Word 4 of my response: “Desktop”.
I’m not aware of a good linux laptop either. My point is that for the price of a macbook pro, you can get 4 desktop machines, each of which is faster than the macbook.
What about https://system76.com/ ? I’ve heard positive reviews, but am not a customer (still running an old 2013 macbook pro).
I haven’t heard anything bad about them, but IME reviews for an expensive niche provider tend strongly positive since the reviewers have looked up that particular niche, so it’s hard to know.
If those are your only requirements, there are other metal laptops (Razer) and otherwise well built ones (Dell XPS) with good specs. Price should be around the same (but I haven’t actually done a good comparison).
My fully specced Dell Precision (Enterprise XPS with Xeon instead of i7) was almost couple thousand Euros cheaper than fully decked MacBook Pro. With addition of having 32gb ram when Macs had only 16gb maximum.
Hows the battery life? IIRC power consumption was one of the key arguments in favor of choosing laptop hardware that could only run 16gb.
Two part answer:
IIRC RAM has least energy draw of all components in computer, so I didn’t give any thought on that when picking configuration. I think that “RAM drastically affects battery life” idea became from Apple marketing as answer why they don’t have more than 16gb in their machines (and nowadays they also have 32gb laptops).
I rarely use my work laptop (which that machine is) without peripherals, so I haven’t got too clear idea about battery life while working. But it does manage half work day (so around 3.5 - 4 hours) without problems. OTOH system I mostly develop is half a dozen “microservices” and I dev against integration tests which:
So the load during those battery times haven’t been exactly light.
By my understanding, RAM has almost no energy draw. Available motherboard chipsets capable of running more than 16gb (even if you only install 16gb in them), however…
Half a day is pretty good; it means you can sit in the park in good weather.
You’re right and wrong. On a high end desktop computer a CPU can use 150+ watts. But a MacBook processor running at full power only uses ~35W, and only a couple watts idle. RAM on the other hand uses a constant amount of power, constantly refreshing memory cells as long as it’s powered on.
I don’t know about RAM in MacBooks, but IIRC full size DDR4 DIMMs use about 0.375W per GB. So 6W for 16GB, 12W for 32GB.
Assuming some casual use drawing 10W CPU power, 10+6W vs 10+12W makes a pretty big difference in battery life, that’s 37% more power. Assuming 3W / 16GB, that’s still a 23% increase in power consumption to power 32GB RAM.
These numbers are all approximate / from memory, but nevertheless you can see the huge difference between desktops and laptops when it comes to power economy.
Exactly what I’m thinking :( Probably just install Linux
I wonder if folks would have this same reaction if a developer license was $10 a year? Is it a purely financial decision or is it just that they’re being asked to quantify their hobby at all?
It’s not just the developer license; you have to:
To this first-world-living, employed, healthy programmer, the $100/year is an irrelevance. Stealing my hobby time to make me jump through banal hoops is not (to be clear: I would be more OK with doing this if it weren’t such a hassle; signature verification isn’t without its merits).
Yes. I haven’t owned a Mac since 2011, but I’m getting requests for a small open source project I haven’t really worked on since 2012 to be updated.
It’s no great tragedy that I probably won’t ever update it for Catalina, but it is a bit of a shame.
I have quite a few apps that will stop working in Catalina. I just don’t care enough; this MacBook Air will go in the collection room when 10.14 is no longer supported.