Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ratww 1643 days ago
> Professionals who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a live setup are not going to be using the internal I/O of their Macbook/Mac Pro

Why not? The internal I/O is pretty good! Except for this issue, obviously.

1 comments

Because professionals can't take the chance that an in-app notification (from another app) or a menu bar or something else will end up in their output. We're not just talking about an external monitor here.
This is not really an issue with a machine prepared for live performances or presentations. Until now.

Portability is essential for some people, and MacBooks have pretty reliable IO.

Yes it is. Notifications can pop-up if someone forgets to disable them. Any OS prompts can pop-up on the display. You don't leave those types of things to chance.
Well, this is a “no true Scotsman” fallacy. In practice they do. It's not frequent but I've seen that a few times and it it's always “fun” to watch.

So it shows that there's a lot of professionals out there not following best practices (which isn't surprising to be honest, it's the case in every industry, including super critical ones…).

Maybe the orange dot will actually help these people start using best practices in the end… (note that I'm not defending Apple's move when saying so, I really hate their tendency to think there customers are wrong and because they are Apple they know better)

It's not a "No True Scotsman" because I'm using their definition of "Scottsman". If someone wants to be able to have full control of what goes on the display, outside of the OS, then they have to have a hardware I/O controller on a Mac. Their only argument is that they were OK with what the OS was putting on there because it didn't affect their specific use case. It's only an issue because they don't like what the OS is doing now. It's great if people got lucky in the past and never ran into an OS prompt or an alert from an app (looking at you, Steam) but that doesn't change the fact that the situation is currently the same as it was before Monterey. Anyone who's saying that a dot in the corner makes it "unusable" has to admit that anything else would have also made it unusable yet they chose to continue without managing the I/O of the device and didn't care.
You're all over this thread trying to gaslight people into believing a constant dot is somehow the same a rare chance at an OS notification that you forgot to disable. People plug there mac directly into shit and that worked fine; now it doesn't end of story.
> looking at you, Steam

I really don't believe anyone running Steam on their video computer is worried enough or even serious about reliability to use a dedicated video playback card. Sure it would be nice if everyone used a dedicated card, but it's 100x more important that those people stop running Steam... unless maybe if they're pro game streamers or something.

Also, even Steam requires extra permissions on Mac to display the overlays you mention.

The "prepared" in my post implies that notifications are disabled.

Also notifications won't really be an issue for anyone but people using the machine both for personal and professional stuff. In the worse case, you can have different user accounts. A professional machine used for VJing or even audio recording will have zero notifications.

Ok, but OS prompts will. If something crashes, you're going to get a notification on-screen if you're not using dedicate I/O hardware.
Not a problem in practice. On macOS, OS crashes show up on the first monitor, and so do other crash alerts. Also, again, if this is not an amateur thing, the only programs that will be running will be those directly related to the presentation.

Also I wonder if we're talking about different scales here. I'm not talking about the 150 inch monitor, I'm talking about video art, VJing, and small scale stuff. macOS works fine for those things.

You can afford a separate laptop for VJing, but don't want to spend $200 to get 100% protection from unexpected notifications, error messages, calls, and orange dot?
What separate laptop? macOS supports multiple accounts, no need for separate laptop. And people don't want to buy a completely unnecessary $200 dongle (it's actually cheaper) for something that worked 100% perfectly before. Is that really hard to understand?

If I could have audio inputs/outputs that were good enough for my audio work I would also prefer not using an external audio interface. I often compose on earbuds, and that's fine. For mixing I need something else. Some people might not. Who am I to judge?

Also, it's not an "or" option. Pros turn off notifications/internet, and don't leave Steam running when working, like the other poster is saying.