Scientists love MacBooks (true) – but what about you?

Re: Not my experience

So for practical reasons, simple, no more explanation required. That is why for you the tech made sense at the time you used it. When you actually stand back from it, Trevor has spent two pages wondering how it is there are people out there who don't think like him. There are two groups, zealots and these scientist people, and he can't help but admit this second group tend to be rather clever, and he goes through all sorts of mental contortions trying to reconcile his world view in which these two groups exist and buy Macs. Of course if he just threw out the prejudice inherent to a reductionist world view that tries to discriminate people into Trevor Pott labelled buckets "zealot Mac user", "scientist Mac user" then he would be more able to see the difficulty he is having and his reasoning on the subject establishes nothing because it is no more than a struggle with his own prejudices.

Re: Can't agree more

I used to work in academia on a Dell, dual-booting to Linux whenever I wanted to code. Academic software is generally compiled with GCC, probably because UNIX has ruled in universities for so long.

When I got a mac, and I realised I could have both the UNIX environment and functioning drivers! I'm aware Linux has gone a long way since, but I still had driver problems on my Linux desktop less than three years ago.

I did receive emails from students asking how my academic code can be run on Windows machine, and in general I answer to try Cygwin, but other than that they're on their own. I have no idea why a university would only offer Windows computers to their CS students, but I'm not going to spend my time supporting that decision.

Re: Can't agree more

Been an Apple fan since 1979. Not a diehard, evangelical, "Winblows is evil" fanatic but someone who has always used Apple/Mac to code with because I am used to using it.There were some highpoints I can recall, such 7.1.1, 7.61 and 8.6 while 7.5.3 and 9 were definitely not.

Unfortunately Docker then came along and (kitematic notwithstanding) now I do just about everything on Ubuntu.

Re: Can't agree more

"The software I use best runs under a Unix-like environment" this is ironic since OS X is actually certified as Unix whereas Linux is not LOL

-NT4: Great, snappy, fast, reliable. No USB, no drives over 8GB, no DirectX

-98: Crashed a lot.

-2000: Stable enough, but did some weird shit with Zip drives.

- XP: Had ShadowCopy, but no built in application for actually making system images.

-Vista: Would restart itself whether the user wanted it to or not, in order to install updates. No good then for any long render, calculation or simulation.

- 7: I'm liking 7. A few niggles.

I use Windows because I use CAD software - and the reason engineers don't historically use Macs was covered by the first poster on this thread. When I have played with Linux distros, I did notice how much scientific software was available.

Really, if you need a program, then the OS is merely to launch that program. If I was a musician or a graphic designer, I would use OSX.

Time machine?

I figure one of the most important things aspiring boffins do is write reports.

We all read, and laugh at, stories about PhD students losing their life's work due to a disk failure etc. Some have even lost stuff because they overwrote a good version of a thesis/report with a crap version.

Apple's Time Machine backup system is easy enough to use (even for social scientists) and does the backups even if you forget. That has got to be a winner.

Many of them are on grants, so they're spending other people's money.

Yea my web server/file server (it does dual roles) which runs XP is so unusable that the last time it went down was when there was a power outage, and the time before was another power outage (something like 1 year prior).

My current PC with windows 7 I think has crashed 1-2 times in the past 3 years, and that was strictly due to the software having issues that I was using at the time.

Windows 8 I'll give you that sorta works as it's a royal PITA to get to do anything.

Your IT support sounds mediocre, and needs replacing.

Haha

Macs "just work"? Clearly you haven't ever had to support Apple devices. True, they may have SLIGHTLY less issues than Windows devices, but they are a LOT worse to deal with when they do fail.

If you want to use Linux, just install (totally free!) Linux on whatever remotely compatible device you want to! I am into Mint these days as distros go, but pick your poison and save a few bucks on hardware. (Apple does build beautiful hardware, but after 10+ years of trying to coax machines to behave, there is no mystique for me.)

I grew up using both Macs and PCs in my late teens. In those days, the Windows "blue screen of death" was a common occurrence. Not only did the Mac "just work", but it had a beautifully-designed UI with literally a whole book of user interface guidelines for developers to follow, to ensure applications work consistently. You spend less time swearing at the machine because it just does what you expect.

That was in the days of System 6. At System 7, the Mac became just as unreliable as the PC, and I abandoned it.

Meanwhile Windows was getting better but still rubbish. I remember one of my expert sysadmin colleagues being pleased that the company had upgraded the RAM in his Windows NT workstation, as it meant he only had to reboot it once a week instead of once every 2-3 days.

Once I discovered Linux which "just worked", I jumped in. When OSX came along, I knew I would eventually be tempted back to Mac. I made the shift when I was in an environment which required me to share Powerpoint and Word documents. (Libreoffice was, and still is, useless for editing Powerpoint without corrupting it)

The fact that Macbooks have good hardware design is a minor issue for me. It's entirely about the OS. If I could run OSX on a normal PC, I would. (I know it's possible, but I can't be bothered with "Hackintosh" and mucking around with compiling kernels and the like).

Given the way OSX is going with forcing your data into the cloud without your permission, I can see myself swinging back to Linux at some point.

But one thing is for sure: I'm not tolerating Windows ever again. Occasionally I'm forced to touch it and if it weren't for Google it would be completely unusable. Example: tried resizing a PowerShell window? Thought you could just drag the corner of the window? Think again. Oh yes, you have to right-click on the icon in top left hand corner, then select "Properties", then select the "Layout" tab, and under the "Window size" heading edit a text box which gives the width, then click "OK". Obvious. These people have no CLUE about user interface design.

Finally, I thought this comment from the article was illuminating:

"scientists tend to operate in environments where they have a freer choice regarding the selection of their computers, and the result is Mac usage that is disproportionately high when compared to your average enterprise"

Put it another way: many/most people would prefer a Mac if they had the choice. More simply again: many/most people hate Windows.

Could this also explain why Windows phones and tablets have such a tiny market share? The name "Windows" chimes with everyone as meaning "horrible user experience"

"Because Macs generally (for most values of generally) just work; a feat that Windows hasn't been capable of since Windows 2000.

What an absolute crock! I don't know anyone who would complain that Windows doesn't 'just work'.

It may not look or behave quite the way they are used to or like, but to say that it's not functional really goes too far.

That you prefer to replace a machine and hope for the best speaks more about your lack of knowledge and ability and points to abject laziness and apathy than it does about the operating system and the chances are, it's down to some third party weirdness anyway, not the OS.

I would beg to differ - I use both a macbook and pc at work for different tasks and I have the same amount of issues with both. With windows I have to go through some arcane paths to get software to work that on the mac does just work. But the mac sometimes does things for no apparent reasons that can take days to fix. My recent one was the network printer disappearing and being impossible to get back - a week later it magically reappeared (no system or printer updates in that time).

Funny you mention IT simply swapping windows laptops if things don't work - my colleague has just had their macbook replaced twice because it had weirdness that couldn't be solved by a reboot or simple flowchart-based support. The latest one seems to be behaving so far - no idea why the others weren't.

TLDR; all systems have quirks and don't "just work" for all situations so use what's appropriate and don't judge people for using something you don't agree with if they have valid reasons.

Then your IT department .....

is just crap and lazy to boot. They don't know anything about Windows.