[skuhn]

It was something that I struggled with while writing the article -- you don't want to introduce your solution as "well, this sucks in various ways, but keep reading...". It does boil down to viewing things pragmatically though. The Macs present challenges, but by our math, they're worth it relative to the cost of doing something else and the benefits they provide.

And we actually run a lot of them in production, so I've figured out how to do it and not pull my hair out constantly. That's something I'd like to write on as well, but it would be in a different medium. More technical depth, less pretty pictures.

[scott_s]

You do want to introduce your solution with "this has problems A, B and C, but we went with it because of X, Y and Z." It becomes much more interesting, because you're explaining not just your solution, but the problem space. Just the solution is usually less interesting than why the solution, even with its downsides, solves your problem.

By the way, thanks for clearly, completely and patiently responding to people in this thread.

[skuhn]

Agreed, I didn't want to sugar coat things either. I think there is a bit of time given over to the downsides, but finding the right balance is tricky, and perhaps I erred by focusing too strongly on the "this is awesome!" side of things.

I want to explore the design decisions around the chassis in a follow-up, and we have one interview in the can already with the industrial designer. Hopefully that article will be a little faster to get out; this one was written about 3 months ago.

The other angle that I'd love to explore in a more in-depth article is how we actually do this stuff in production, and what we've learned about it. This would delve more into the ugly OS X stuff that we painted over to get things nice and pretty in production.