Ask HN: Mac or PC for Hacking?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8010666

by cyphersanctus • 12 years ago

4 10 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Assuming that you have the necessary budget for both, is a Mac or a PC preferable for coding, app creation, cryptocurrency mining, penetration testing, heavy duty multitasking?

erkose2• 12 years ago

Preserve your freedom and install a PC with Linux.

chuck8088• 12 years ago

^ The ONLY correct answer. You're gonna be running everything in a VM anyway.

erkose2• 12 years ago

Preserve your freedom and run that VM on a PC running Linux.

Someone12342• 12 years ago

Freedom in the metaphorical sense, not practical sense. On Linux you're free to do anything metaphorically, but practically you have the least options relative to Windows or OS X.

But, yes, if your time is worthless utilise Linux. If time is money then something better.

prodigal_erik• 12 years ago

cyphersanctus asked about hacking. They want to solve their own problems through cleverness, not throw money to make problems sort of go away. Time spent in a hobby isn't wasted, and hackers should always favor open tools over locked-down appliances.

rprospero• 12 years ago

I'd qualify that by saying that, if your time without a computer is money, then don't use linux. As an anecdote, my wife purchased a new laptop last week. The windows activation code they sent us was invalid and microsoft and the vendor spent three days pointing fingers before the vendor agreed to fix it. Their fix was for me to ship the computer back and wait two weeks for them to deliver us a new one. One hour of my time is worth more than she can make in two weeks with no computer, so I just installed Linux and we went on our merry way.

Before anyone from the Apple camp chimes in, I had a similar experience with my old laptop, which was a Mac where the file system corrupted itself every time it went to sleep.

I'm not saying that Linux doesn't get ugly. It does. I've had the failed sound cards and bad printers. Hell, I'm old enough to remember screwing around with trying to get a WinModem to run. It just comes down to whether it's cheaper to waste ten hours of your time trying to get things working or to return to the 20th century for a week while support reformats your hard drive. That probably just depends on your occupation.

chrisBob• 12 years ago

money for both and heavy multitasking says to me that you should get a Mac (MBA or MBPr) you can work on, and a big workstation running Linux that you remote into for your serious jobs.

I would always want more computer, and even the biggest i7, SSD, 64GB ram... machine is going to take longer than you want to pull up HN if you are running intensive tasks.

Someone12342• 12 years ago

I wouldn't do cryptocurrency mining or heavy duty multitasking on a Mac just for cost reasons. If your budget was for example $2K you could buy an entire farm of barebones PCs running Linux to do that heavy lifting for you rather than a single high end i7 Mac (Macbook Pro, Mac Pro, etc).

Macs are fine for normal day to day stuff: coding, web-surfing, development, etc. But per dollar they're terrible at raw throughput.

For pen testing you likely want a laptop, not a tower, since you'll be doing things on-site a lot of the time. But a laptop (any laptop) is the opposite of what you want for raw throughput due to heat dissertation issues.

So I'd likely recommend a really barebones tower with high spec (e.g. unbranded/self-built, i7, high end GPUs, etc) and a laptop (e.g. Thinkpad T series) for the user/pen testing stuff.

tptacek• 12 years ago

The only less productive HN thread someone could Ask: for is "Emacs or vi?".

Ask HN: Mac or PC for Hacking?

Related Stories