Power conversion efficiency is at best the 3rd or 4th important factor here.
The first factor would be the hodgepodge of wall dongles one needs to own and maintain (plus the cost of buying a dongle for each device that doesn't have one, or multiple of them per device in case you want to charge your phone/laptop/etc in more than one location at home).
The second factor is the "smoothness" of your DC sources. Most of the common LED lamps have a pretty ugly signal shape, and not at all close to a DC flat line. This is mostly unavoidable as AC->Smooth DC conversion is more expensive than AC-> DC + a ton of 120Hz, 240Hz,... on top of it. So, common LED lights tend to opt for cheaper "electronics". People notice the flickery LED lights to various degrees (some get headaches, some outright see the flickers, some claim to be totally oblivious to the difference). The DC "quality" also affects some fairly sensitive electronic devices, so some AC->DC adaptors are fairly sophisticated. A central high quality AC->DC convertor (combined with DC wiring) has better scalability when you need to care about smoothness (it can be a basic quality of life matter for some people).
The third and fourth factors are power discipation and conversion efficiency. They are the same thing, with two remedies: more $ to remedy the inefficiency (which is really small these days, if you go for switching convertors), and plans for heat to discipate properly (devices end up with pretty hot adaptors).
1. Mac has shit for a window manager. When I focus and get in the flow, Mac's window manager becomes a massive showstopper for me. My productivity lives and dies by my window manager customizations and shortcuts. Mac's is just a joke when it comes to controling 20+ windows. I sometimes have 100+ editor, terminal, and browser windows. Linux has many window managers up to the task (i3, xmonad, openbox, and countless more). Mac has the default one which you CAN'T change. There are Window Manager "Apps" which use the default window manager's APIs to tell it to, say, move this window to this area. As a result, I haven't found a usable third-party window manager on Mac that can operate at a fraction of the speed of the simplest window managers on linux.
2. Mac's official builtin package manager is a joke. The community's effort to fix it (Homebrew) is halfway between the debian maintainers community and the nodejs community, closer to the latter. I wouldn't say Homebrew is a joke, but it's not really comparable (and fair to compare) to the many human-years that has been poured into QA and patches the Debian community does. Also, you can touch all aspects of the system with apt/dpkg, unlike the like of ports or Homebrew. For people who want more control there is also Arch, and many other distros to pick.
3. Laptop build quality: IMHO Mac doesn't really have a contender here. Every year I try to hard-force myself to buy a non-mac laptop and fail. There is really no one serious enough (or, to be fair, with the same order-of-magnitude of cash and operations and hardware expertise) to pull of the same build quality. An anecdote (but very generalizable): A while back my non-mac (yet, a very well-known brand) laptop's fan died. I got a fan and replaced it. My wife's mac laptop's fan also died about the same time. I replace that one, too. At one point I had both laptop's open on my desk beside each other. I never want to buy a laptop with _visibly_ poor engineering ever again. Guess you have to compare the internals of a few laptops to get my point.
4. Software compatibility: I think this is a very fragmented area, to be fair to all OSes. A lot of vendors only produce on Windows. Some are Win+Mac. Some are Win+Mac+Linux+ChromeOS+Android+iOS. Also a very (yet very significant in some sectors) are Win+Linux, or Linux-only. So, one has to check the availability of the critical software they need. My gut feeling, lacking any better measurement, is that Mac has far more compatible Apps than Linux, especially Apps for the general public (not taylored to a high-tech profession).
5. Appeal: Mac has clearly undergone far better UI/UX design and QA processes than all existing linux DEs. This is very visible to some people (if not to most people), and does change the personal choice of people.
6. Stability and similar problems with Linux: I use both Mac and Linux everyday, and for me Linux and Mac has been about the same in terms of stability (with linux maybe a bit more stable). This is obviously hardware dependent, and linux runs on a vast number of hardwares, so it's not easy (or reasonable) to compare all Mac and all Linux instances. Or at least I don't care about such a comparison. Only the Linux configurations that make sense (well supported, without undocumented hardware blobs, etc.) matter (to me at least).
Overall, I prefer my Linux machines (not just because of software freedoms, but also because Mac is unusable for me when I work on large/serious software projects), but I simply can't live with current batch of Linux laptops either. Maybe in a few years some decent ones show up (purism could get somewhere, or system76, etc). Or maybe Apple finally works to scale up their window managers and package managers to make them suitable for special-cases and make it a bit less frustrating for some of us.
> I sometimes have 100+ editor, terminal, and browser windows. Linux has many window managers up to the task (i3, xmonad, openbox, and countless more). Mac has the default one which you CAN'T change.
This is so much my issue. I love i3wm, it's been a revolution for how I work. I never really understood the "desktop" concept with overlapping windows very much, and i3 works at an abstraction that is very close to how I imagine my desktop. I keep stacks of windows open in an arrangement that might be bizarre to anyone except me, but when I look at it it's 90% how I want it to be, a place no other WM/DM has ever gotten.
But I also don't want to deal with linux any more. Please don't sealion me with "but linux works fine for me!" here, but using linux feels like death by a thousand frustrations. Most recently I had to alias pulseaudio -k to pk because pulseaudio got out of whack so often I got used to killing it. That, plus I can't live with Ctrl-based shortucts anymore: I get serious pinky and wrist fatigue from a full day's work on linux. I can't be bothered to work around an entire missing staircase, so I switched back to macOS, where even if the WM isn't as good I can live with it.
(Incidentally, have you heard of yabai[1] / amethyst[2]? They're tiling WMs for macOS. I've been thinking of trying both out for a while now but I can't spare the time.)
I keep checking Amethyst every couple of years. Still not remotely comparable to i3 or other linux window managers. For one, it's extremely slow. I think it is about two orders of magnitude slower to say, move to another desktop/Space, than most (all I used, really) Xserver window managers.
The "Caveat" on the yabai's README page has been enough to deter me away (or rather, make it strictly impossible for me to try it). And it's not even yabai's fault that Apple has made the window manager (WindowServer) mandatory.
Ah, the SIP requirement for yabai isn’t that important IMO. They detail it in their wiki [1]. Incidentally, I tried it out since making the comment, and even without SIP disabled I’ve got it close to where I want it to be. It’s still not as great as my custom i3 setup was, but a few more weekends might get it to a much more comfortable place.
This is a great, high effort post, and it matches my experience pretty well. Couple of comments:
> Laptop build quality
You're absolutely right here. When I had to take apart a MBP last year it was way easier than I expected from their reputation for being non-serviceable. I certainly wish parts weren't soldered on to the board, but that's an understandable tradeoff, maybe. I think my biggest point of criticism is the battery bags: pretty every older Macbook seemingly has had them expand somewhat, while I still have no issues with my Dell battery (in a solid plastic case that's externally swapable). The choice of Torx screws for the internals is fantastic as well. I'll never order a Mac for myself, but I am ordering Torx screws and the first thing I'll do with the next laptop I buy is going to be replacing all the internal Phillips screws with Torx for long term serviceability.
The externals are really important too: you're pretty much guaranteed to get a high quality screen with a Mac for example.
> Appeal: Mac has clearly undergone far better UI/UX design
Also agree strongly with this, although it's still messy and the inability to configure many things the way you can in Linux is a pretty unfortunate tradeoff. Tiny UX issues still bite: the global menu bar makes multitasking a pain because macOS desktops have a single application global context - you have to switch which application you're working on before you can do anything with it. Likewise, while you can usually maximize windows in macOS, practically speaking it's assumed you'll never actually do this. For example, the dock will change widths depending on how many apps are open, so "maximizing" is not really meaningful (the window size does not change when this happens).
> Software compatibility
This one's kind of messy, as you say. If you use mostly open source applications, there are a ton of them which are Linux-first or Linux-only. macOS has a weird problem where the norm is to sell every desktop application on a slick React website at about the $40 price point. Obviously, it's mostly closed source too. Though as a Linux user, if you need Photoshop, you've pretty much got to dual boot. That alone is an enormous negative in the compatibility bracket.
It is certainly true that languages designed for simplicity (such as go, clojure, and to some extent python) exhibit far less friction when composed in minimal editors, than [overly?] verbose/complicated languages such as Java.
However, I vehemently disagree with some of your (implied?) points. In particular, some functions offered by IDEs and other codebase management tools are almost equally useful for both simple and complicated languages. For example refactoring tools, or if we really look at the stem, code-base analysis tools that 1. parse the language, and, 2. have APIs for modifications, are some of the "power tools" that could be useful for virtually any programmer.
As an IDE-averse person, I find myself reaching out for the simpler languages far more often, and do actively dislike high-ceremony systems. All the while, I am painfully aware of the limitations of using only a [good] text editor. My main alternative (to mainstream IDEs) is to context-switch between pure code-writing episodes and refactoring/analysis/etc. periods (using other tools, most on the command line or with output to a web-browser).
Also regarding your comparison between written programs and mathematics: I think that comparison is relevant ONLY for low-churn fundamental code (such as core libraries, or generic utility libraries) and rather poor in a LOT of "business logic"/"presentation layer" code. I myself play code-golf and run several _mental_ redesigns/refactorings when working on code that should be solid and not subject to frequent revisions. In such cases, yes, the code should be readable, well designed, and simple to follow (clarity slightly preferred over performance for the core). Nearly formal and exhibiting formal/math-like traits. On the other hand, "business logic" code is inherently unstable and could require numerous revisions purely due to external requirements. Such code usually shouldn't be optimized for tight simplicity. "the first thing that came to my mind"-level clarity with comments can suffice. Common IDEs do help with the latter type of code (while, I think, not much with the former).
Beside serious analysis and modification tools, there is an extra set of features provided by many IDEs, such as lookups (lookup function/library/etc. initiated while looking at code), autocompletion (based on parsed code or just string matching), etc. These are certainly nice, but I don't think they change the landscape much between IDEs and plain text editors (or rather, editor-and-a-documentation-lookup-web–browser-on-the-side).
So, for me, IDEs are certainly valuable even if I don't use them frequently. In a more ideal setup, I would write my code in my preferred editor without much hand-holding and with just the simplest of IDE-like features. And then, separately, do codebase "polishing" with dedicated analysis tools that may or may not look like conventional IDEs.
I'm not sure about the genetics of it (none of my family members seem to agree with me), but I also perform computer tasks far better in a dim light. A friend of me, who is also a night-owl, has the theory that when we get exposed to daylight, our cavemen heritage's natural reaction is to feel like going hunting/food gathering. While I don't buy the argument verbatim, I feel more like doing outdoor/physical activities on sunny days.
I kept seeing the following problem with several different LED lights we were installing until I found one that was better:
Take your phone and take a video of the lights when on (normal framerate should be enough, try slow-motion for further investing). Most lights I got from the local hardware store were flickering quite visibly. And I'm pretty sure it's a design insufficiency of the adaptor electronics attached to it, not the LEDs themselves. If I were to guess I'd say most of them probably go the simple path of cutting off the negative half of the AC cycle and feeding the rest directly, without a decent low-pass filter to the LEDs.
What worked reasonably well for me, was getting a normal DC power supply and a few LED strips (with fairly dense and higher power LEDs) and installed that in a room. That light feels pretty satisfying to me.
All that being said, I don't like anything even remotely close to daylight level ambience when I am working on a computer screen; the custom lighting I set up is for other living areas.
Not really surprising to some of us. Definers Public Affairs and a couple of other firms have been working hard for it. At some point the hacker news community might become more immune to paid-for opinion shaping, but that time is not now.
So, I couldn't understand what "exposed" means in that article. Was any user's data obtained by someone not authorized to do so, or merely access to the data was possible?
> We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks. That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug. However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API. We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any Profile data was misused.
Just possible. Similarly, the recent FB hack didn't actually penetrate 50 million accounts -- that was just an upper bound estimate based how many accounts were "exposed to the risk" of being compromised, probably because they were noted as being touched by the buggy "view as" function.
Update: It looks like on October 2nd, Facebook clarified that 50 million users actually had their login credentials stolen, and an additional 40 million were unconfirmed but known to have been touched by the buggy "view as" feature:
Compared to tilting my head to the second monitor, it is measurably faster to type ^3 (Control + 3) to switch to the space/virtual-desktop where my email window is open (~1.5sec vs ~0.7sec).
If one has to Alt+Tab or Command+Tab through programs, yes, that would suck the life out of productivity.
The only real benefit larger screen spaces (larger than a ~30 inch monitor) provide me with, are when I need about 4-6 open windows (maximized vertically) to switch between when dealing with large merges/patches. I haven't experienced any practical benefits beyond two ~30inch monitors.
FWIW, I can easily shift my gaze from the upper left corner of my left monitor to the lower right corner of my right monitor in significantly less than half a second on my triple monitor setup (my measurements ranged from 0.2s-0.5s), so I'd dispute that part of your comment.
I also maintain that this is significantly more intuitive than having to memorize keyboard shortcuts for each of my more frequently used programs.
I suppose everyone's workflow is different though. If you're comfortable with just one monitor then good for you. I for one will be a lot happier once I can arrange my workspace into a neat grid of windows arrayed across my desk.
The first factor would be the hodgepodge of wall dongles one needs to own and maintain (plus the cost of buying a dongle for each device that doesn't have one, or multiple of them per device in case you want to charge your phone/laptop/etc in more than one location at home).
The second factor is the "smoothness" of your DC sources. Most of the common LED lamps have a pretty ugly signal shape, and not at all close to a DC flat line. This is mostly unavoidable as AC->Smooth DC conversion is more expensive than AC-> DC + a ton of 120Hz, 240Hz,... on top of it. So, common LED lights tend to opt for cheaper "electronics". People notice the flickery LED lights to various degrees (some get headaches, some outright see the flickers, some claim to be totally oblivious to the difference). The DC "quality" also affects some fairly sensitive electronic devices, so some AC->DC adaptors are fairly sophisticated. A central high quality AC->DC convertor (combined with DC wiring) has better scalability when you need to care about smoothness (it can be a basic quality of life matter for some people).
The third and fourth factors are power discipation and conversion efficiency. They are the same thing, with two remedies: more $ to remedy the inefficiency (which is really small these days, if you go for switching convertors), and plans for heat to discipate properly (devices end up with pretty hot adaptors).