
What Pro Computing Could Be - bouncingsoul
https://al3x.net/2016/10/31/pro-computing.html
======
jwr
> Pros don’t quit because their tools are suboptimal. That’s practically the
> definition of “professional” – a pro gets the damn thing done. A pro user
> might gripe about the new MacBook Pro, but the next time she needs a new
> machine, she’s going to buy one anyway because that’s the path of least
> resistance and she needs to get back to work.

This sums up perfectly my thoughts about Apple hardware right now. I am
annoyed by the fact that I won't be able to connect any of my devices to the
new MacBook Pro, but I'll buy one anyway, because I need to get things done to
earn money.

I also agree that the pro market is ripe for disruption (again). Interestingly
enough, Apple began its rise to stardom from the pro segment, which it is now
abandoning. Foolishly, I think, because it's a relatively easy disruption path
for the next company.

~~~
moftz
There are plenty of MacBook Pro alternatives that have identical hardware but
have a wider range of ports:

Microsoft Surface Book

Razor Stealth

Dell XPS 13

Unless you are sticking with the macOS ecosystem for old time's sake, it's
trivial to switch to a Windows workflow.

~~~
rbanffy
And, with the Windows workflow, you'll have extra breaks whenever the computer
decides it has to reboot because Microsoft wants to install something.

~~~
zanecodes
[https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-
wak...](https://superuser.com/questions/973009/conclusively-stop-wake-timers-
from-waking-windows-10-desktop/973029#973029)

I can confirm that this works on Windows 10 Home edition.

------
buzzybee
Yes, I definitely feel this is in the air. There's groundwork and momentum to
iterate on large chunks of the computing stack, simplify and open up more of
it again, and it could be driven in part by the needs of "pros" who are
frustrated with the current environment, as well as new markets like IoT. Just
think of these three projects and what they add up to:

* RISC-V

* Rust

* WebAssembly

The first, RISC-V, breaks with existing architectures. The spec is open, and
public feedback is largely positive. Money has been committed to real
implementations on silicon. There is common tooling already, and it's expected
to grow more robust.

Rust sits in the middle, iterating on systems-level concerns with a much
higher standard of compiler tech. Everyone praises its community and the
responsiveness of the devs. It isn't the only player in the field for
overturning C and C++, but it has a lot of the momentum.

And, of course, WebAssembly doesn't fix the Web, but it does return us to the
idea of what Java was supposed to be, 20 years ago - a common layer for
sandboxed application code. Of the three this one is probably the least
established, but is also getting an amount of care and cooperation that is
quite above average for Web technologies, and shows early signs of reaching
adoption outside of the browser context. With such a powerful client runtime,
both the existing Web and desktop paradigms become open to disruption, as is
already in nascent form with the current wave of "desktop framework, browser
engine inside" apps.

When you put together all three, you have a much more robust stack, something
that you can really imagine the future of computing on. It has missing parts,
but that might be where you and I come in.

------
dfabulich
> We wrote the beginnings of an operating system

I want better hardware, but as a pro software developer, I can't really adopt
a fundamentally different operating system, even if it is "better."

I don't care how nice your hand-crafted kernel is; if I can't run a JVM,
Node.js, and the Android toolchain on it, I can't do my professional work on
it.

~~~
mamcx
I have dreams about this, and think the bare os must be a kind of hypervisor.

Then, on-top, you can launch "classic" OS like windows, linux, etc. Then
_also_ , the new OS.

~~~
abm2205
i've had the same thoughts. I think the future might be hyper-visors hosting
operating systems of all types, each one serving a singular purpose for which
is configured to serve most optimally.

~~~
inimino
From a UI perspective, how is this any better than just running your preferred
OS and firing up a VM when you need to?

------
marmaduke
Pro computing could also mean moving to a more open hardware platform;
consider Talos workstation with a Power8 CPU instead of x86

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/talos-s...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-
systems/talos-secure-workstation)

I've had a chance to test some Power8 systems, and they perform very well.
Given the choice, I'd take one over a Xeon system, for intensive professional
work.

------
pavelludiq
My list of essentials for a pro computer at this point would be:

* Robustness

* Upgradeability

* longevity

* reasonable performance

Having the latest and greatest isn't essential, since I've had my current pair
of thinkpad and custom build desktop for a few years now and after a some
upgrades(new SSDs, maybe a new GPU and extra RAM for the desktop, etc.) I
expect to use them for a few more, maybe even until 2020, if nothing blows
out. They perform reasonably well for my needs and are very versatile
machines. Right now I can replace the HDD, upgrade the M2 SSD, put a new
screen on my laptop and replace the battery myself. That is worth a lot to me
and I'm willing to pay more for a machine that isn't a sealed monolith, that
is the biggest anti-feature for me. I grew up back when you could just open up
your PC case and swap components out and I'm absolutely unwilling to give that
up. I don't really want to buy a new laptop every two years, if I do now it
will be because I want one, not because I need one.

~~~
ikurei
> put a new screen on my laptop

What laptop do you have where the screen is upgradeable? Or are you talking
about doing it with a standard laptop, opening it up and replacing the panel?
Is that usually viable with laptops?

The main reason I prefer my current MBP to my previous Toshiba Portege is,
tbh, that the screen is not a shitty 1360x768. I never even thought about
replacing it.

------
vomitcuddle
The "pros" aren't simply pissed off at the latest MBP. We're pissed off at the
continuing trend over the last 5 years of Apple products becoming more
difficult or nearly impossible to disassemble, upgrade and repair. We're tired
of form over function. Sales targets over user experience.

~~~
jonathankoren
I haven't had a need to open a computer in like 16 years. Well that's not
entirely true. I one time upgraded the HDD on my old MacBook Pro maybe 6 years
ago.

There just isn't a need to do this stuff anymore. Even making your own
computer anymore in expensive, confusing, and generally not fun anymore.

~~~
sliken
For every phone where I could replace the battery, I did. I talked to friends
with the same phones, and they often did as well. Comments along the lines of
"Wow, battery life as good as new, I'll keep it for another 6 months".

Similar for laptops. Replacing batteries, upgrading ram, and upgrading storage
are very common.

You really think that if you blow $2 or $3k on a new laptop that somewhere
during it's life you might not want a larger SSD or more than 16GB ram?

Sure it might have made it a mm or two thicker, definitely a price I'd pay for
something that's easier to fix (or have fixed) or upgrade.

~~~
Freak_NL
> Similar for laptops. Replacing batteries, upgrading ram, and upgrading
> storage are very common.

Don't forget cleaning! Until we get to the point where all components are
passively cooled in a sealed container, cleaning a laptop's CPU fan is simply
one of those maintenance tasks that will keep a laptop running quiet and cool
for years.

And yeah, getting a a bit of extra RAM or the next generation of fast hard
disk is a great and cheap way to give a performance boost to an ageing laptop.

------
captainmuon
So, what would a pro laptop look like in my opinion? Not too different from
todays top laptops, but a few things would be improved:

\- Easier to repair / upgrade. Dont glue or solder in parts if it is not
absolutely neccessary. If the device gets a few mm thicker, its not the end of
the world.

\- Specifically, make the battery switchable. There is a battery capacity
limit for flights in the US, and I've heard this is one reason the new MacBook
Pro has the specs it has. A switchable battery would be a way around it.

\- Be completely honest about your incentives, and then side with the
customer. Say: "We would like to glue down everything, so you can't repair it
and have to buy a new one when the battery fails - but we won't." This is a
business disadvantage in the short term, but you gain trust and can charge
more to customers who know what's important.

\- Give it a matte, high-dpi touchscreen. Note, I don't mean mattED, where you
stick a matting foil on top of a regular glass screen. I mean native matte,
like good business desktop LCD screens.

\- Here is an important, overlooked point: Make it "just work". In the sense
of "software eats the world", you can do a lot by getting the software right.
Have a dedicated team make sure that all popular OSes (Linuxes, Windows) work
properly.

\- A good keyboard is really important. Let the keys have enough travel, make
sure that they have standard sizes, that cursor and home/end keys are easily
reachable.

\- Give customers the ports they need, or at least make the dongles cheap.
Offer a docking station, or recommend one.

(- And if you want to create a Myth, source your components (graphics, WiFi
card, touchpad) cleverly, and people will be able to make Hackintoshes out of
your machines. Just be careful never to advertise this, or to give
instructions :-D.)

I believe a smaller vendor could pull this off nowadays. Even if you don't
have the economies of scale, you are selling to a pro segement who is willing
to pay more for a "no-comprimizes" device.

(Edit: cleaned up)

~~~
matt4077
The reason for glued-down batteries is not planned obsolesces. You can get the
battery replaced for 150$, which is about as much as Lenovo's batteries cost.

The reason is that a removable battery needs twice as much enclosures as a
non-removable one, adding something like 1/5 of an inch to the thickness. The
second reason is that Apple has switched to shaped batteries basically filling
any available space, which makes removability as good as impossible.

A third reason is that nobody actually wants removable batteries. An MBP gets
10 hours of battery life, 13 if you're on a plane and turn off the wireless.
Add an hour of food service to it and you're good to go around the world.

If that's not enough, you can just get an external battery.

~~~
closeparen
All rechargeable batteries reach end of life and need replacement, usually
before other components have gone out.

Swapping day-to-day isn't the use case, avoiding a day in the shop when it's
time to replace the degraded battery is.

------
gulpahum
Interesting that he mentions Bret Victor. He was actually one of the designers
of the much criticised touch bar [1][2]. He is also working on some other
changes for Apple.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848](https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/793501918790242304](https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/793501918790242304)

------
matt4077
"In conversation over two years ago, we converged on an assumption: Apple and
Microsoft will taper off their investments in pro hardware and software"

If it took you two years to get that far, you may want to find some less
stressful topics to ponder. Also, please enlighten me: what exactly is
Microsoft's previous investment in "pro hardware"? And what "pro software" has
Microsoft been investing in in the past that targets "video editors, 3D
modelers, audio engineers, data scientists"?

WTF? This article is almost literally "The MacBook sucks, my friend agrees and
we've been throwing around buzzwords and then we stopped"

Seriously: there's no coherent thought in this "article". I don't even know
what these so-called "professionals" are missing in the author's view.

" fast machines with plenty of memory and myriad ways of moving data in, out,
and around them." – Well, yeah, fast is great. But it's not Apple's fault that
CPU speeds are stagnating. It's simply approaching physical limits, as well as
CPUs having reached a level of performance where people prefer to invest
resources into power efficiency.

AS one of those so-called "data scientists" I'll also let you in on a trade
secret: the stuff I do on a notebook could comfortably run on a phone. It's a
text editor, a browser, and ssh. That's because we don't do number crunching
on a notebook. It's a cluster, or sometimes a workstation with a couple of
GPUs.

Everybody also seems to miss that we've seen an actual leap in notebook
performance: SSDs had a huge impact because HDDs were (by far) the limiting
factor for almost all workloads.

Regarding the "myriad ways to move data around" – no thanks. Now I'd consider
it quite failure to ever have actual data on a notebook. But I'd guess even if
you're working on local data, USB 3.1 and thunderbolt are probably what you'd
want to use?

"Pros don’t quit because their tools are suboptimal."

Yeah, they do. Give someone a shovel and ask them to dig a tunnel.

"That’s practically the definition of “professional” – a pro gets the damn
thing done."

No, the definition of a professional is "getting paid", which, by the way,
separates them from your little thought experiment. Alternatively,
"professional" is slang for a prostitute, which actually does fit your
definition of "getting the damn thing done", so maybe I've been reading this
wrong.

"That cycle of dependence, along with the need for stability and
predictability in one’s tools, makes product incrementalism the norm in pro
computing."

I still don't know what "pro computing" is, but surely "pros" are today using
the same operating systems as "non-pro" are? So the non-professional computing
is also moving incrementally, right? Then I don't get why you're trying to
derive some sort of causality ("need for stability...") that's specific for
one of the two segments when they move in parallel.

"It should be no surprise as to why nobody has attempted the sort of ground-up
overhauling of pro computing that we mapped out: it’s expensive, slow, and
risky to do something big, new, and different."

Or maybe it's just stupid. Because our tools are pretty good (being the
product of actual professionals "getting the job done") and there's no reason
to throw them out for unnamed pie-in-the-sky fantasies.

~~~
enqk
There was once a time where you had a workstation running a professional OS
you could trust not to mess with your data and privacy. I think we lost
something there.

~~~
chrisdew
Yes, we lost something as soon as applications could start doing things
without explicit instruction from the machine's owner.

Limited technology (pre-HDD) accidentally gave us privacy (data on
disconnected floppy disks) and security (OSs on ROMs).

------
imtringued
The next innovation is going to be non volatile RAM. Right now we can get away
with putting a flash chip on a DIMM and using super capacitors to write out
changes during power loss but it's a ugly and expensive solution. Maybe
NVDIMMs with 3D XPoint will change this but it's far off and it will take a
while until it reaches the consumer market.

------
donatj
Now is the time for a Plan 9 based upstart!

------
mark_l_watson
Everyone has different needs. My 95 year old father is really into videography
and 3D animation so he uses a max-out Mac Pro desktop. For me, I sometimes
need large memory and a lot of cores, so I keep a beefy VPS handy. The actual
computer I use is less important.

------
hulahoof
I do most of my work on a cheap, light Toshiba because the battery last me all
day and carrying my metabox everywhere was hurting my back.

------
montj2
I feel this and believe it to be spot on. Looking to be an early defector, a
thorough survey of the hardware landscape has left me in awe of the amazing
hardware companies are willing to cram into such a cut-rate shit of a package.
On the software front, macOS is such a 'get shit done' OS, but I believe that
may be solely due to the having the lions share of the development community's
mind-share. It is for that reason I've decided to fund a multitude of
'hopefuls' and fully immerse myself into a foreign OS platform. If it's going
to get better we must all embrace the suck as it is today and begin to develop
the future.

------
dognotdog
> What’s more, we lack the innovative institutions that previously provided
> cover for the future to take shape: PARC, Bell Labs, et. al.

We may not have as large corporate sponsored basic research, but we do have
the Internet. We should be able to leverage that advantage to some effect :)

------
kluck
Here is an easy alternative to a MacBook Pro (easy for a professional anyway):
Buy a standard Laptop with matte display. Install Arch Linux (learn one thing
or another on the way). Use Gnome 3 (maybe install some software from Pantheon
as well, like the file manager pantheon-files). Get work done.

~~~
inimino
I think it's unfortunate you're being downvoted, but here's the thing: you go
to the Apple store, buy a laptop, bring it home and plug it in and it works
beautifully from day one. That's Apple's value proposition. (Subtract
"beautifully" for Microsoft's.)

Your plan means I'm signing up for a period of pain of unknown duration. It
could be four hours or two weeks. And for the next three years I might have a
laptop that doesn't sleep properly when I close the lid, or that can't talk to
the printer at the office but there's a forum thread somewhere where somebody
thinks they solved it.

One of the characteristics of any "pro" market is that these are people who
simply aren't going to waste their time messing around with something when
there's an alternative that just works and lets them go back to doing whatever
it is they do that earns money.

~~~
captainmuon
> it works beautifully from day one

It depends on what kind of work you are doing, but for me this is not true. I
need to do a lot of unix-ish development, so that means installing XCode (OK),
installing Homebrew (or MacPorts or Fink and finding out which one is better),
Sublime (or emacs or vi), a bunch of other tools. I need a week or so until I
get it where I want it. This is not too different from my experience on Linux
or Windows. Installing Linux is the easiest part - in fact, in most
workplaces, you just give it to the IT department and they do it for you in a
couple of hours.

~~~
niteshade
A week or so sounds a bit ridiculous. The only thing you need to do is install
Xcode, then run a script which installs Homebrew. You can even use Homebrew
Cask to install macOS apps, and MAS to install anything else from the App
Store. All-in-all from installation to scripts completion, maybe an hour?

Source: Our IT department is a bit of a nightmare with Macs so I have to set
them up for all our devs.

