If you think "app store spam" is a real thing, you've spent way too much time on app store.
I install apps that I need -- news, banking, podcast, email, Uber etc, usually from well known companies. A small amount of apps are lesser known but they have good reviews.
I don't think there is any fundamental difference from the Apple app store. Maybe do a check of yourself first.
Reading many of the sibling comments just makes me laugh.
Android has allowed everything from the beginning, and overall it looks... fine? Of course there are all kinds of malicious actors who manage to publish malware on Play Store or trick people into sideloading, but if my mom, a basic Android user who knows very little about how computers and phones work, never got herself into trouble, that says something. You must be either dumb enough or really understand exactly what you are doing to go way out of the safe zone to download a shady app.
And anyone concerned about browser's safety -- if that were a real thing we'd have already been screwed on Windows and Mac. The reality is that most people use Chrome and it is generally safe enough for everyday use. Some people use Firefox, Brave and whatever but most of those are well maintained. If you install a browser that nobody knows, that's your problem.
Reading many of the sibling comments just makes me laugh.
Android has allowed everything from the beginning, and overall it looks... fine? Of course there are all kinds of malicious actors who manage to publish malware on Play Store or trick people into sideloading, but if my mom, a basic Android user who knows very little about how computers and phones work, never got herself into trouble, that says something. You must be either dumb enough or really understand exactly what you are doing to go way out of the safe zone to download a shady app.
And anyone concerned about browser's safety -- if that were a real thing we'd have already been screwed on Windows and Mac. The reality is that most people use Chrome and it is generally safe enough for everyday use. Some people use Firefox, Brave and whatever but most of those are well maintained. If you install a browser that nobody knows, that's your problem.
I'm pretty sure there is no such "guarantee". You can definitely Apple has a track record of supporting 7 years and I have absolutely no problem with that. Samsung and Google actually say they are committed to 7 years of support for the latest phones in their official document.
Also the rest of the industry is not 2. 3 years is very common these days for phones, 5 getting more common. And for computers... Many business computers are supported for a long time, and Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility and support (Windows 10 is supported till 2025, 10 years from its release).
Yes, I speculate and draw my conclusions based on my most recent experience (2017-2019) with Android. I'm glad it's improving, but I'm not in a hurry to "experience" Android again.
I do myself a favor by not doing this, install ohmyzsh and start working. Seeing what other people have done with shell, vim and all sorts of things, I know this is a rabbit hole and I could spend endless time on it. That's why I use ohmyzsh, VSCode and other tools and only tweak settings when necessary. And I can be actually productive even when I get a new machine.
Performance? If you are talking about the startup performance, no it doesn't bother me. Again, nothing is slowly enough to cause noticeable delays in basic typing/editing and the bottleneck is almost never on them. (I regularly work on codebase of hundreds to thousands of files or more.) So I don't spend time worrying about saving a few seconds in total per day when I can use my brain elsewhere.
You don’t have to follow a rabbit hole, these tweaks take no time at all and you can stop whenever. I used Oh My Zsh until I got fed up with the startup slowness. I open a bunch of terminal windows during the day and every one of them had a second or two of delay before I could do anything. I decided to do myself a favour and no longer put up with it. It took me a handful of minutes to figure out which plugins I actually cared about (three) and get rid of Oh My Zsh entirely. Everything about this change is better for me: it’s easier and faster to redo the setup when I do a clean install, and it’s instant in everyday use which means it’s no longer frustrating.
If you add more than a handful of plugins in any of these IDE layers for Neovim, like LunarVim, LazyVim, AstroNvim, &c., it can slow things down to an unacceptable level quickly.
No need to rely on your terminal to provide performance. LunarVim is very slow even though I use Alacritty, it was the main reason I stopped using it and switched to LazyVim.
If I'm being quite honest, I think LazyVim is the more polished project. I may end up switching to that; I've been impressed by what I've seen so far (as well as using the lazy.nvim package manager).
While I love p10k and use it myself, note that p10k is just a theme, while ohmyzsh is a theme manager (that comes with default themes) + plugin manager + a collection of aliases + other QoL stuff.
p10k is not just a theme, it implements a whole prompt to realize features like instant and transient prompt. For example showing your current Kubernetes namespace while you are typing a kubectl command.
Yup, and if kids can take a bus, then so can adults. I realize this isn't the case for everyone, but in the case of the tech professionals that likely make up the bulk of the HN audience, living in a place that's a 30+ minute drive to work was a choice that person made.
Looks like "...validate UTF-8 strings in Node.js" is a more accurate title, as valid8 runs on Node.js and the other uses a Node.js std library function. The TextDecoder method should work in the browser, but I don't see why you want to do this kind of validation in the browser.
My guess: Flash required installing a native host and browser plugins, while this runs in the browser sandbox which is generally considered very safe (much safer than Flash)
Serious question: how far can you go with base model's 8GB RAM?
Doing VM workflows is one reason I didn't bother with recent Macbooks, as nice as they are. It is simply much cheaper to get a machine with removable RAM and then upgrade them later. Without going there, I can also build a decent ThinkPad T14 with 32GB for around $1,100 even though RAM is soldered.
If you want to do VM workflows, I definitely would recommend to upgrade the RAM (and probably the SSD) when buying the machine. Yes, it is not cheap with Apple, but still no reason not to get an Apple machine, if you are in the market for one in the first place.
The big bonus you get is not only the nice hardware overall, but the ability to run Linux on a very fast ARM-Machine.
> I can edit video in Final Cut Pro on my 8GB M1 Mac Mini while doing other things.
I can't use IntelliJ or vscode with autocompletion on a 2023 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM with a bunch of my projects.
The same projects run like a breeze on a cheap and very crappy Beelink minipc with 16GB of RAM whose total cost is lower than a RAM upgrade on a MacBook Air.
Still, I'd absolutely recommend that devs and other creators spend the extra $200 for 16GB. And yes, it's outrageously priced in comparison to buying matched sticks for your PC.
> Still, I'd absolutely recommend that devs and other creators spend the extra $200 for 16GB.
Nowadays a Beelink SEi12 i7-12650H sells for around $550, and it ships with 32GB of RAM by default. Beelink is ultra crappy, but it goes to show how absurd is the $200 markup demanded by Apple to turn one of their laptops into a decent working machine.
I've used both IntelliJ and vscode on significantly sized projects on an 8GB MBA with no issues. It's not as fast as with 16GB, but it's definitely not unusable.
> It's not as fast as with 16GB, but it's definitely not unusable.
I'm sure it varies with how large your projects are. To me the impact was serious enough to force me to shift my development work to a crappy minipc from Beelink.
Bbedit is a a lightweight editor compared to Intellij IDE. It is hard to compare both as they are on the same foot. But yes, if you can work with BBedit on a project go for it.
On the same note, sublime will still win editor performance competition on Mac and probably all platforms.
