The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes.
I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-charting and wire-framing.
The new Linux subsystem thing is a god-send. It was completely seamless for me to transition from the Mac to Windows pretty much solely because there wasn't really a transition. All our provisioning and development scripts just worked.
It's been fun to do a bit of gaming on it too :)
The touchpad is really the only thing that I think compares poorly. Apple really nails that whole experience. After a few weeks I'm getting better with it, but it's still painful compared to the precision and certainty I had on my Macbook Pro.
I'm sure I'll be back on a Macbook someday (cause hey, change is fun) but no regrets right now.
I'm also considering a switch, but Windows drives me up the wall whenever I touch it. macOS has been getting uglier and more awkward to use the last few years, but Windows is still the king of ugly.
So I've been considering Linux as my first option. I fired up a few VMs and dipped my toes in various Linux desktop environments: Elementary, Fedora 25, and Ubuntu (Unity) so far. These are all GNOME 3 variants. And... oh boy. Linux land really needs some kind of unifying revolution to happen, because this is a mess. Things have gotten a little smoother in the decade or so since I was last exploring Linux desktops, but it's like they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be. GNOME feels like it's stuck between trying to be Windows and OS X, with some super weird details (like the launcher thing) that makes it feel like they had plans to build a touch screen OS for tablets or something. Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to. It also struck me how much competition there is -- there are at least three GNOME forks (two of 3.x, one of 2.x), for example -- a situation which seems to exist partly due to infighting.
Maybe with out tweaking and plugins and customization you can beat it into some shape that lets you work efficiently, but the experience put me off, to be honest. I don't like being that negative, but I was a bit shocked about how bad it was. Mint was next on my list, but I'm not sure I will continue since it's another GNOME 3 fork.
I am experiencing the same thing, but on the reverse side.
At my home, I have a Ubuntu desktop which works perfectly. I use Eclipse, Android Studio and Atom editor. On work, I use MBP and pretty much the same environment.
I know it is not a common opinion but no matter what I do, I still like Ubuntu more than macos. I agree that macos looks more polished, engineered and complete but somehow, I prefer Ubuntu's plastic feeling. It has been 6 months and still my opinions did not change.
There is also the problems of macOS with Eclipse and other GTK applications (Meld) some other stuff about Mac that I couldn't fully adapt yet.
Lastly, FYI, no, I am not hater and I like MBP, especially as a solid metal object.
System76 sells laptops with Linux preloaded. I believe Dell does as well (or at least used to if they don't anymore). I'm not sure how high end you are looking for but a quick glance shows System76's most expensive laptop is well over $2,000.
You can also look at Zareason[1]. I have been interested, but my 2015 MBP still gets things done. I did install Lubuntu on my old 2009 MBP. Runs well, but I have yet to get the keyboard mappings right and a USB mouse makes things easier. I want to minimize GUI bling and use my CPU cycles for number (and image) crunching...
My XPS 13 9350 works perfectly with Fedora 25. Installed Fedora and literally everything works out of the box. That includes things like HiDPI auto scaling, touch screen, suspend, media keys, etc.
When it was first released, there were some issues with suspend and the touch screen, but they were all resolved a few months later in a newer kernel release. Fedora 25 ships with that newer kernel by default.
I've run ubuntu with zero issues on my thinkpads (w520 and w541) at work for the past ~5 years. No trackpad issues, no wifi issues, no audio or bluetooth problems. It just works.
Check out Razer Blade or the Blade Pro, any Alienware, any System86 machine, most of the Dell XPS series. Don't touch HP with Linux (really bad firmware and driver compat issues).
I just bought a Razer blade and it has not been flawless with Ubuntu. Specifically, when I close the laptop lid, and then open it again, I keep getting logged out every ~15 seconds, until I restart the computer. As a work-around, I must manually suspend the laptop before closing the lid.
I have the Blade Stealth and haven't had any problems with it yet apart from an update that caused my fans to keep on spinning. It's been fixed since then.
I do agree that Linux has very variable performance and experiences across machines. I really do like the laptop though. I'm looking at the Razer Blade Pro (that machine is a beast but looks sexy still) and some Dell Precision laptops for an upgrade (will be passing on the Blade to my brother) but the Pro is extremely costly at the moment.
MacOS lost me somewhere around Mavericks and the idea of a tablet that is also my PC was appealing, so I tried a Surface Pro 3 and decided to keep it. Ubuntu Bash for Windows is great, but is Beta and still needs some work. As for my old 2011 MBP, Ubuntu runs very well on it. For a couple of decades I kept trying Linux on the desktop, and today I am happy with it. From managing photos, CAD for my 3D printer, Python development and music with my keyboard, Dropbox support, it really is remarkable how far the desktop has come. I am still using the web client for OneNote though...
Eclipse is just super janky under macOS, and the GUI doesn't even work the same as its Windows counterpart -- which makes teaching classes with Eclipse a study in pain
Had the same thing. Turns out, I'm more of a design snob then I thought I was. Trying to move away from macOS and trying out Windows and a few Linux distro's, my god it's all ugly.
I don't care much about Apple hardware specifically, but they got my hooked because of the OS.
My previous laptop was a windows machine that acted as a web browser, music/video player and VirtualBox host. All of my work was done in linux in virtualbox (and my SSH terminal was also bash running on linux in virtualbox).
My linux environment was very minimal though (mostly living in the terminal, used a tiling WM, vim as my editor). In many ways my mac environment isn't that different except without the tiling WM.
That setup worked quite well, although used more resources than if I hadn't used Virtualbox.
Putty (or Kitty or MobaTerm) is still a thing, but there are other options. The Linux subsystem will give you a *nix shell and ssh that works exactly like you expect it to. There is also msys which will give you an ssh client you can run directly from cmd.exe or power shell. Microsoft have been working on a proper native port of OpenSSH, but while it apparently works pretty well, it's still not feature complete or ready to be shipped as a standard part of Windows (hopefully early next year).
Well it depends on what you consider modern but Openbox is still alive and kicking (albeit it is only a window manager).
On a rant tangental note a slight annoyance I have lately is that all the window managers are getting pushed out / ignored because of Wayland.
With Wayland you basically have to write an entire desktop instead of just a window manager. I used to love that about Linux.. the pick and choose what works best model but now the choices are becoming fewer.
Back in 2009 my dream was to run OSX with a Thinkpad keyboard and trackpoint. Now that I have OSX on a Thinkpad X220 my dream is to run i3-wm with unified application design language and underlying foundations. On OSX Spotlight works well and gives me what I want, and applications look good. There aren't any missing icons and text size isn't all over the place. Amethyst WM on OSX is pretty good, but it's not as good as i3. I'm not sure if it's easier to make applications look good on Linux or to get a WM that looks more like i3 on OSX.
Weirdly enough that's how I spend a lot of my time on my iPad Pro - use Mosh to connect to a Linux box and then use tmux and vim to set up tiles and do my work.
Funny I'm the exact opposite. Only on a MBPr for the hardware, otherwise would prefer Linux to OSX. Lightweight tiling window manager + Vim keybinds for all apps = super efficient. With OSX I actually have to use the mouse. How quaint.
pretty much everything has a vi-mode these days. all shells, tmux, browser via extension (vimperator/vimium/cvim/surfingkeys) or by default (uzbl et al), wm by configuration or default (bspwm/i3/awesome etc.).
intellij even has support for an .ideavimrc which surprisingly works quite well.
I never get these screenshots of desktop backgrounds. It's background-porn. The fact that it's made on Linux and has a Linux menubar and different fonts than Windows or Mac - who cares?
I've used Ubuntu since seven years at work, the mac since 17 years, Windows not anymore since seven years, unless when helping others. I would change to Linux anytime if all would just work, meaning Photoshop and other software that now doesn't work. Plus the mac is still my favorite piece of hardware. When I bought this 2015 Macbook, I've looked for a good Linux laptop, and came out at about the same price. Then the choice was easy.
Don't get it either. Most themes or skins or whatever for Linux desktops (including the default ones) are pretty terrible - the fit and finish is generally poor. If I'm going to be staring at something for 8+ hours a day the inconsistencies really start to grate.
Most of those desktop screenshots remind me of Winamp skins from back in the day - yes it's a great piece of software and endlessly customisable, but most of those customisations are terrible. Like a 14 year old with a copy of Neuromancer and MS Paint.
I'm constantly trying Linux distros and DEs and the answer when I talk about this is 'Well if you spend time tweaking it...'
NO, that's not the right answer. Endless configuration options means there wasn't the will to make a design decision and stick to it. 'Customisation' can be an excuse for a poor job. That's why Elementary OS is the least horrible desktop, even if it still has issues. Their lack of global menus may be a questionable decision, but at least it's a decision.
The problem with your rant is that people have different opinions on what is "good". You would probably hate my setup because it's a tiling WM with nothing. No conky bar, no date/time in the bar, no power monitors, etc. But it works the best for me because I don't like any distractions at all.
Linux gives you the freedom to choose the environment that suits you personally best. Windows doesn't give you ANY choice, and it's still bad! If you like to be told what is good and make no optimizations for your personal workflow, more power to you. But don't go saying that Linux is "not the right answer", that's just silly. Works on my machine :)
Most of those posts have a good deal of theming setup. Usually people include just the background alone because people invariably want the source to use on their own setups :P
I used Plasma 5 for a while and really loved the interface and the ability to customize almost anything, but what got me in the end was trying to sync settings across multiple machines. From what I can tell, there are a bunch of random files with names starting with "k" dumped in ~/.config that store most of the settings, but copying them to different machines didn't seem to work. Of course, it's not much easier to sync settings with something like Gnome, but it takes me a lot less time and effort to set up Gnome with the exact settings I like than Plasma. If I didn't switch around machines/distros a lot, I probably would have stuck with Plasma though.
I have to concur, the latest Fedora 25 with the KDE Plasma is a beauty to use. Put it on a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon, screen is amazing, fonts crystal clear, all very smooth.
What makes it worse is that they change, regroup and rename things each f-ing year. W7 made it hard to select apps (floating groups in taskbar), explorer introduced dumb libraries, control panel is always a mess, as is /Users/Shared (iirc) thing. Now that w10. I try it and understand that I'm unable to do anything again and again.
Biggest questionable change in macos for 6 years was new ui flavor and maximize button became fullscreen. That said, iTunes also experiments too much.
>> So I've been considering Linux as my first option.
Linux re-defines ugly. It works great but it's very kludgy. Like many others I can setup my workflow on any of the three machines and have tried it out on many different machines from Dell to IBM to Apple. Sublime, terminals, Chrome/FireFox, DropBox, it works well enough on anything but I made my current choice on 'niceness', battery life, screen, and form-factor, even if it cost me a couple hundred dollars more. On a machine I use for 3 years it's 30-40 cents a day.
Maybe I'm an old fart, but everything seems to be getting worse. OSX is worse than it was, Windows is worse than it was, Linux is worse than it was. If you just want to browse the web, okay, but anything beyond that and you are off in a maze of twisty passages, none of them like the other.
I never understood why XFCE is not the default for Ubuntu desktop. It was(is?) part of Xubuntu, the lightweight Ubuntu distro, years ago. I had the most basic entry level laptop, but I managed to connect 2 external monitors to it while the tiling would remember the locations of all programs in all three monitors and it was FAST. Nothing I have tried since has touched it. It set me up for a lot of disappointment! I now have a macbook and while it's a great and integrated machine, CMD-tab - which I use to switch screens - doesn't even work properly if an application is in fullscreen mode.
On what Distro though? What should I try if I want something that pretty much works out of the box i.e. has acceptable battery life + WiFi + Sound + Suspend mode on a Macbook / Latitude / Thinkpad without me having to set up config files according to all kinds of internet sources for a day... or even a week?
XFCE is very stable so it should work almost exactly the same on every distro. Just pick the one that you like the most / is easier to install for you / etc.
KDE is a bigger and more complex system so it works a bit differently depending on what distribution you use. Some distros like KDE Neon always have the most recent KDE while other like OpenSUSE Leap prefer to use stable versions of the applications.
When it comes to wifi/sound/etc it has to do with whether the driver for that contains binary blobs. Some distros don't ship blobs due to security and/or software freedom concerns while other distros have a more relaxed policy when it comes to proprietary software.
Thinkpads have a reputation for being very easy to run Linux on. You should expect everything to work out of the box. For the Dell computer you might have to install drivers separately but you can't tell for sure without knowing the exact model you have. You could do a test drive with a Live USB to check out. I wouldn't expect things to work out of the box on the macbook though. Apple isn't very Linux friendly and their macbooks have many specialized components that are only found on Apple products so Linux support is not very good. But even then, some dedicated hackers still try to reverse engineer them so you might have better support if you have an older model instead of the latest macbook.
The following table can help a bit with determining if wifi will work on your computer:
Just works, anyone can use it, and if you wish, you can right-click on anything and have tenthousand config options to make everything exactly as customized as you want it.
And it works. No flashy in your face features trying to impress you with bouncing balls or animations, it's just like an improved version of Windows 2000 interface.
Woha! That's some serious design there. I am heavily, heavily impressed by what the KDE folks are building. I will admit that I don't think I'll switch to KDE anytime soon - I had been using it throughout the 3.x series, and was extremely excited about (and then disappointed by) the 4.x releases, but then switched to MacOS and never looked back.
If I get myself a workstation again (and there are solid reasons for doing so, like CUDA for DNN development when you're tired of working on servers for local development), I'll definitely give KDE another go.
> "Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to."
This is the product of dictatorship style development on one side (Windows, OSX) Vs democracy on the other side (Linux distros).
It's not democracy vs dictatorship. It's individualism/pluralism vs central planning. You can have central planning with democratic legitimacy or without it.
But I don't actually think the horrible state of desktop Linux is down to any of that. Device drivers are Linux's big problem. Desktop environments are a simple matter of getting used to them and learning what to tweak.
As I said, it's driver issues that make the Linux desktop/laptop experience horrible, not the diversity of desktop environments.
I don't think it's a good idea for Linux advocates to deny or downplay the effect that driver issues have on the overall desktop/laptop Linux experience.
I tried Ubuntu and couldn't get over the ugly font and not being able copy paste from anything to anything else. Plus there's no good power management on laptops and no PC ever came out with a quality trackpad that can match macbook.
I remember that ctrl+c and ctrl+v didn't work across applications. I think Terminal was one of them. Couldn't copy and paste into it. Out of the box anyway.
Yea that is a 'feature'. The problem is that ctrl+c already means something else in the terminal. Many (most?) terminals map copy and paste to ctrl+shift+c and ctrl+shift+v to get around this.
Of course most *nix user use the middle mouse button for copy-paste in the terminal as standard and never really notice this.
Either that or select - right click - copy/paste. It all works, but the shortcuts don't align. Ctrl-c is sigint, ctrl+v varies, but in vim it escapes special key press.
> Also the maximise behaviour in macOS is really annoying.
I use hammerspoon to paper over a lot of the annoying parts of macos (after using linux on desktop+laptop for over a decade). Here's a minimal excerpt from my config to get a more-reasonable "maximize" behavior: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/c19506dec17597ab9e4bf02f8d2...
Install Spectacle. [cmd]+[alt]+[f] for actual maximize (NOT fullscreen). Replace the f with left arrow and you get half pane left, same with right, or up... you get the idea.
Switch alt for ctrl with the same commands to send to the top quarters of the screen, add a shift to that to send it to the bottom quarters.
I don't move windows with the mouse on OSX/MacOS anymore.
I wish the various linux WMs/DEs took inspiration from the Mac on this, vs the Windows ctrl-combo method. In addition to avoiding key combo collisions in the terminal, I like how in Mac OS X all the control keys for line editing work everywhere. It messes me up when I go to a Windows machine and find that ctrl-w closes my window when I just wanted to delete a word.
In MATE Terminal, and I think GNOME Terminal, you can chance the keybindings to remove the shift — and if you do this, you can send ^C with shift-control-c.
Try i3 or fluxbox while you're still experimenting (or KDE for that matter if you've only gone with Gnome so far). Diversity is actually a good thing :)
I've standardized on Xubuntu but there are some pretty sweet desktop managers/window managers out there. That being said I feel like I'm fairly close to converting to i3.
I have surfed through distros, desktop environments and window managers for nearly a year.
My equillibrium point is suckless.org's dwm[0] with all defaults except using Terminus as font and Super(windows) instead of Alt key.
~6 months, no irritation, no configuration change.
Tiling window managers which have extensive configuration options are useful as tinkering material, but not actual working environments. If you want a tiling window manager not for eye appeal and beauty but for simplicity and ease of use, look at r/unixporn/ and use whatever they are not using.
I've ended up in a very similar position: stumpwm, st, Adobe Source Code Pro & Super.
For my particular style, being able to extend the WM (not customise endlessly: actually extend) is pretty awesome, but I understand that not everyone's into that.
After getting everything set up the way I like it, I'll never switch.
Hah, I run the exact same config. I used to be a wmii user but moved to Windows for quite a while when work and school required software that only ran there. Now I'm back on the tiling window manager train with dwm, and I realize I had forgotten how much I like this setup.
Right, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. GP said they were considering Linux Mint, and so I replied with a suggestion for a GUI that in my experience pairs well with Mint.
> they're still figuring out what it's supposed to even be
"It" can be any distro. GNU/Linux distros aren't a single entity, and they never will settle on a common interface---that's a good thing. Larger distros like Ubuntu will, but if you're going to adopt this perspective, you'll need to start thinking about the individual distributions and companies/communities behind them rather than "the" GNU/Linux desktop.
Not if you're looking for a macOS alternative. I'm fine with the "distros" doing what they want. However, that is not going to lead to a cohesive experience of the kind that macOS is able to provide.
A bigger problem than the desktop environment may be that apps are written to different UI toolkits (these days mostly GTK+ and Qt), and the different environments provide themes to get a unified look. Most apps aren't targeting a particular desktop environment, and so you get this inherent tension, where it's "unopinioned all the way down" and nobody makes a clear decision about a unified look/feel to anything.
I can see why a certain group of hackers like this jangly mess where a lot of time is spent on customizing stuff to work exactly the way they like it, being able to choose a completely different "window manager" and so on. I was like that in my early years, and today I just want things that work. What I want is consistency and stability with a mind behind it. I want it to boot up and render high-quality, subpixel-aliased fonts, and then I'd like to get right to work.
The KDE community seems more closely aligned with this idea, but they still don't control the apps, and unfortunately they still seem to be stuck in the Windows 2000 copy machine mindset.
> A bigger problem than the desktop environment may be that apps are written to different UI toolkits (these days mostly GTK+ and Qt)
I can agree with this criticism (granted, I don't use many GUI programs)---not that they're different toolkits, but that they often have drastically different theming and UX. Uniformity through common theming/UX APIs would be beneficial.
You know lots of environments are quite configurable both in aethetics and functionality have you explored this. If you just booted up and didn't explore your options you might have missed the better part of your options.
Functionally I think there a lot to be said for tiling window managers and I think they look great with Compton plus semi transparent windows, selectively obviously.
I would love to use Windows all the time at home but as my Windows 10 installation believes it is up to date (but is clearly an old build number, irritatingly/stupidly only visible in the settings app and not my computer > Properties), it really is not up to date and I have no idea when Microsoft will decide that it is.
It's rubbish. And the lack of consistency throughout the OS (icons different everywhere, duplication of settings app despite same underlying COM snap-ins, settings app titlebar isn't really a titlebar, 3 different right-click menus - one for the Start menu, one for Edge, one for everywhere else) it is driving me insane. You have to learn all of these edge cases on how to interact with core OS windows.
That shouldn't be the case!!
Windows 3.11 came with a manual (I have it) that informed you how to interact with the desktop and windows. Just imagine the mess they'd have to write for Windows 10 - "drag the blue bar at the top, unless it is the settings app, where there is no blue bar and you can't tell where the titlebar ends and the toolbar begins"; "single click on buttons, unless you are presented with the 'open with which app?' dialog where you will be able to double-click on the button that has the name of the application you wish to use" etc etc etc
EDIT: And I say all this where I use my PC all day at work as a C++ Windows dev and Windows at home when I need to cross-compile. Don't get me started on the lack of future for the MFC codebase we have at work.
Yeah the design issues really get to me too. I'm a Windows guy through and through. I've been on Windows since 3.11. I'm not moving to any other OS, but wow is the design fucking horrible. With MS's budget, how bloody hard could it be to actually get a design grad to unify the design? It's seriously 2 months of work for a handful of people. It drives me up the wall.
I wholeheartedly disagree. When you have that many products and that much user testing to do, unifying a design like that could take even an entire year unless it's something they've been working on already (which, in this scenario, we're assuming they aren't).
Just to chime in that my windows 10 also still does not want to go to the Anniversary version. I have tried the auto update and the manual installer to no avail. Reinstalling the whole system did nothing as well. I have a standard 2014 mbp so the configuration is all but banal. Everybody is raving about the Linux subsystem but as far as I am concerned it does not exist.
Yep that's the problem I am faced with too. My work PC is also on Windows 10 but not on the anniversary update, so I have no idea what wonderful new delights everyone is partying about.
How can I be sure I am running a secure up to date system if the "am I up to date check" essentially lies to me?
What is so special about the anniversary update that I would have to do that though? Colleagues with the exact same hardware did get the update, is it some sinister A/B testing?
Honestly, I haven't had much luck with it as it is still lacking serious features. It has improved in beta versions, but I think it is going to be a while 'till it is stable enough to use instead of a Linux VM, at least on standard builds of Windows 10.
My understanding is that if your computer tries and fails to upgrade, it will only retry a certain number of times before giving up. Your best bet is probably to do an upgrade install with an Anniversary Edition ISO, which I believe you can download from Microsoft directly. Upgrading with install media is a totally different mechanism, more akin to a clean install + data and app migration, than Windows Update and should get you back on the update train again as well.
You don't really get the Metro UI as a start menu in Windows 10, although the metro apps forced on you are irritating. E.g. Calculator now has a pointless splash screen, delaying your use of it.
Same here. My employer, who is almost exclusively Mac, were reluctant to get me the new MBP.
I got a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (Kaby Lake) and so far, so good. Am very happy. Like you say, I wish it had the Apple touchpad (but not the new one - that's getting _too_ big).
Everything else is great. The Infinity Edge screen, beautiful keyboard...
Been considering getting one. They come with option of Ubuntu. But I read too many complaints on things like coil whine, HiDPI, and low uptime on battery.
Oddly enough I find the track pad on the Surface Pro 4 keyboard to be the absolute BEST track pad I've ever used on a PC (even better than the one I played with on the Surface Book) which is...just absurd and odd. But hey I thought it was interesting just how much I liked it compared to everything else.
I found that the gestures were odd, coming from a MacBook. I also notice that my MacBook's touchpad (whilst great in macOS) being absurdly dumb when I reboot to Windows on the same hardware.
To the touch experience you describe, I would add that the terminal support is also rather "meh".
I use WSL a lot during the day; and the stock terminal is way not good and third party options such as conemu are OK, but still comes with annoying issues. My emacs quality time gets messed up because of some of these issues... there may be no way around some of that and it may simply be the reality of a system that maps certain keys one way and a subsystem that would like them another.
Otherwise, I own a Surface Book for travel and tablet like usage and I use a Lenovo workstation for my day-to-day stuff. All Win 10. Very happy overall.
Could you elaborate on its impact on how you do development? One reason I still have a mac is because it's so developer friendly. Linux is very time-consuming to make things work with and is incompatible with various hardware. Also some mac software is great.
Windows for development isn't nearly as convinent as OSX. Yes there's lots of customization you can do to make it bearable. Powershell isn't as awful as CMD, but projects aren't supporting Powershell as much as bash any time this decade AFAIK.
The Linux subsystem works, but the flow between Windows and Linux is lacking.
I tried Linux. Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it. I know that sounds silly, but my monitors are a huge part of how I work. Not supporting my workspace is pretty much a non-starter. But to seal the deal it also crashed going to sleep a few times.
So I installed OSX... on my Zenbook. Because somehow OS X managed to handle my hardware better than Ubuntu had (bar the stock wireless card), and it was developer friendly.
I prefer brew to apt-get. Yes, apt-get is vastly more powerful, but I never had brew fail on me because a previous install had messed up.
OS X also has a lot of mindshare. Tooling tends tend to progress from Linux and OS X in ease of use before entering a gulf and reaching Windows eventually.
I got my copy of OSX legitimately, but to me it's telling I essentially had to go to "bootleg OSX" to get my hardware and software experiences in sync. OS X even supports the touchscreen as a mouse, not that I ever used the touchscreen on a laptop that only supports the laptop form factor and no others...
Problem is that each software upgrade from Apple contains important security and reliability fixes. You get those even on old Mac hardware (my MBP is 6 years old now). On a Hackintosh, you don't know whether those software upgrades are going to work, or if they will break or brick your system. On top of that, when I looked around, I couldn't find some kind of good guide advising me which ultrabook to buy as Hackintosh. There's no clear comparisons and just a lot of homebrew mentality. I'm not interested in that; I want something which works well, and stays working well.
> OS X also has a lot of mindshare.
Sure, but I expect that to go down now. IMNSHO, YMMV.
I didn't get the Zenbook ever dreaming I'd Hackintosh it, it was more a move of desperation than anything.
And I definitely wouldn't recommend buying a laptop just to Hackintosh it, its more of a fun hack than anything with a few specific exceptions where there's strong overlap between an Apple product and an existing PCs hardware (and at that point you might as well just buy the official product if you're only going to Hackintosh it, bar cost)
I'd have just gotten another MBP if I wanted OS X for the start for the reasons you list (and the fact that while in many areas OSX was handling the hardware better, it still didn't support the stock wifi or the Optimus setup).
I think the MBP issues are overblown. The 2015 is still around and still fully capable. I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users.
There's some backlash because people wanted a MBP refresh and it isn't want they wanted, but I don't see OSX losing that much developer mindshare in the long term. I don't agree with the fear lingering about it being the "end of days" for "Pro MBPs", I think this MBP was an interesting experiment that came at a very poor time (when people were already anxious for a progression of the MBP 2015-2011 in a new form factor, with a bigger battery most likely)
> I find it strange that people are complaining about the 2016, but then comparing it to laptops that were out for months, and in some cases years, when the 2015 was out, but weren't being chosen over the 2015 by the same users.
Well given that the 2016 is more expensive, has shorter battery life, and is missing a bunch of ports, one could argue that it's worse (at least for some use cases) than the 2015.
It did not lower in price, so you're working with hardware of between 1 and 2 years old which on top of being old did not become cheaper.
One small advantage the 2016 version seems to have is being able to get power from either side of the laptop while the 2015 has 1x Magsafe (why on earth did they replace that) and 2 USB-C.
> Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it.
This, this, this. I have been trying off and on for a couple years to move from MacOS to Linux and the HiDPI situation is a mess. Apparently it's not much better in Windows, so maybe if someone is coming from Windows they are used to problems. But, coming from MacOS where I have a rMBP and a mix of HiDPI and HD monitors and they all 'just work' I had assumed that was the state of the industry for a long time. Once I started reading up on the issue it became apparent in the HiDPI world it is MacOS >>>>>>> Windows > Linux.
The last time I brought this up on HN, someone responded saying I didn't need HiDPI :/
Windows support it pretty well. Some/Most applications don't. I am running windows on a MBP at 150% and a second monitor at 100% somethings are zoomed on the second, some are very small.
The only times when apt-get fails is when your disk is full (!) or when you're including foreign repositories. (Debian has a LOT more in official repos than Ubuntu).
Windows 10 have built a very impressive Linux compatibility layer. It's not a VM, they are executing native ELF binaries using the windows kernel. They run a version of Ubuntu 14.04 on top of it that most notably includes package management. It's currently missing upstart, so some things don't work nicely, but MOST things work just fine. I believe upstart is available on some preview versions now. Everything on our development stack (largely python) worked straight out of the box.
So on windows I have a real bash shell. I have dpkg. I effectively have Ubuntu. I can provision my machine using the ansible scripts we use to provision our production machines (took only minor updates to make them work).
There are some missing pieces. Docker doesn't work from within the linux subsystem. Upstart doesn't work. There is some weirdness related to how you interact with the windows environment from the linux subsystem. For instance I had to install a hack to allow me to open files in sublime from within the linux subsystem.
It's a mixed bag. You have a real Ubuntu environment with real package management, which is awesome (as opposed to homebrew). Yet some things that work on OS X don't work quite as seamlessly on Windows.
I think for most developers, it's probably going to work pretty damn nicely tho.
One painfully missing thing is FUSE support. My workflow involves coding on an sftp-mounted directory, which doesn't work in the Windows version. Alas, it seems the only remote mounting Windows will ever have is WebDAV.
Dokan provides FUSE support going back to Windows 7. There are also paid solutions with ExpanDrive and Mountain Duck, but in my experience Dokan+WinSSHFS [0] is easy to setup and works great.
Last time I used Windows, there were several commercial (but cheap) products that supported mounting remote file systems, including SFTP. Tried any of them? Quick Google gives me NetDrive (free) and ExpanDrive.
I wish it could access hardware. Currently want to play around with machine learning, I only have one graphics card that I regularly use for gaming, so I have to dual boot to get anything like TensorFlow working.
I'm a developer and spend most of my time in a terminal, usually in vim. I recently switched from OSX to Linux and have not looked back. OSX/macOS has been getting too goofy for my tastes.
I spent roughly $300 (reusing my current Apple Cinema LED monitor) to build a desktop replacement for my mac pro. Can't be happier.
Then I spent about $600 on a laptop (Thinkpad T460) to replace my Macbook Pro Retina. Also fantastic.
Everything's been great. The keyboard on the T460 is awesome. The battery life thus far is about 16 hours.
I don't see myself ever going back to macOS again. I'm running Arch, using i3 as a window manager, and feel right at home. Basically this feels like a computer again.
I'm curious about that keyboard, because i'm considering getting a Thinkpad T420 or T460, but the T460 keyboard looks like one of those horrible mushy and wholly unacceptable laptop keyboards to me, whereas the T420 at least seems reminiscent of the old revered Thinkpad keyboards. Can you comment?
Hmm, I have the new 2016 MBP, 2014 MBP and T460s and the keyboard on T460s beats the other two by a significant margin. I don't think it has the same feel of the older thinkpads, but it still gives a very clear feedback and give in comparison to even the 2014 MacBook one.
The 2016 MacBook keyboard is just downright horrible. You kinda get used to it but returning to others keeps reminding me that it's just worse in every regard.
After researching a bit more i might end up getting the T420. Solid keyboard, and with an i5 and a fancy SSD it'll be fine for my needs (plus a cd-bay battery, yay!). Blazing even, considering that i'm still on a C2D as my daily driver. Frustratingly my first-gen unibody (2008?) MacBook with Arch Linux just won't die, which would give me an excuse to drop a few hundred on a 2nd-hand Thinkpad.
When I've switched back and forth (to Thinkpads), I don't miss the touchpad as I love the trackpoint. I do miss trackpoint a few months when I've switched to Mac, despite the excellent touchpad.
Latest Macbook Pro drove me to finally switch to Ubuntu for my main dev machine. It sucks not having some of the mac apps I'm used to but I've had nearly 0 problems since switching.
I am shocked how often I use my touchscreen on my Dell XPS laptop. I started off never using it, now find myself using it regularly when I'm on the go (not docked obviously).
Takes a bit of time to get acquainted, but I really enjoy it.
Ditto. Last year, I made the mistake of buying a non-touch laptop thinking I didn't care that much. Had to take it back to the shop and swap it for a touch-screen machine....
If you want touch on your laptop and you're not ready to upgrade yet, you should check out the AirBar. You do need to buy the right bar for your screen size though. It's obviously not as good as a real touch screen, but it seems like a decent substitute until you can get one.
But, yes, I transition from a Mac (home) to Windows (work) daily and while I can choose not to, I find that working on different OS and learning its nuances has taught me a lot about how my Python programs execute, for instance.
The only painful bit is that they don't yet support the nvidia drivers, I'm doing rnn under the linux subsystem and it works great except I'm hurting for gpu access. If you plan on using windows subsystem for linux for machine learning don't bother spending money on a GPU https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-con...
Yup, and to my (and many others' surprise), this thing works actually very well. Not every single app will run but all of the basics for what we need here (mainly gcc) seem to be fine. And it runs graphical apps as well: run an X server on Windows (Moba XTerm or so), export DISPLAY=:0 and of you go. Only tried it with SublimeText so far and that worked out so no complaints yet.
I just bought an xps 15 running arch linux to replace my mba 13. The build quality is poorer for sure.
My main complains.
Keyboard:
- Cheap plastic that doesn't feel nice to type for long hours
- Oh I miss the mac keyboard layout, the control and alt keys on are hard to adjust on windows and linux especially when copy and paste puts your fingers in awkward positions
Touchpad:
- Good, but still a ways to go compared to macs. I am buying a MX Master to compensate for this.
Battery Life:
- Over exaggeration of duration in advertisement
Its aesthetically pleasing but the general everyday use just doesn't physically feel great. With a macbook, its very easy to focus cause every command is almost second nature. With the xps, I have look back at the keyboard all the time to see what's going on.
I need a linux machine so I don't have much choice. Or I can pay almost triple the price for a macbook pro for the same specs and even slower vm on top.
What's the problem with the XPS keyboards? I have an XPS 13 skylake (early 2016) and I absolutely love the keyboard. I'm saying this as a touch typist who actually used a Model M keyboard (best keyboard ever made, period; fingers just fly over it) back in the day. I found the XPS keyboards way better than that of Mac notebooks, especially the newer ones found in last year's 12" Macbook, and now in the Macbook Pros.
If not buying the new MBP is scary enough for Apple to make them really work on their laptops, I will stay a bit longer on my 2013 MBP.
What's reassuring is that we need a Mac to work/compile iOS apps. Until they port the toolchain to iOS, not taking care of the Mac could be dangerous to their ecosystem.
Actively taking my Mac environment into a Linux one. Have been for a couple of weeks now. [1]
I use PCs for most of my development work, and Macs when I can (when I'm doing the more ops-like bits of devops, and for personal use). The MacOS environment is really nice, and the Windows tools for writing native code are really good, but the writing is on the wall: Own your computing environment or you will working at someone's sufferance.
I'm not going to go full bull-goose Stallman, but it seems like a worthwhile thing to do.
[1] It's rocky. Device support is spotty, and user interfaces are often staggeringly bad. Maybe with more people piling on things will get better.
It's been several years now that I've been wondering if my current Macbook might be my last one. I love the one I have (it's a late 2011 17" Macbook Pro with a ton of custom upgrades), but they don't make anything like it anymore, it's harder to do your own upgrades, and new versions of their beautiful OS are getting uglier.
Windows is a no go for me. I want a unix underneath, and Windows has its own share of ugly (though I do keep hearing nice things about Surface). I haven't looked at Linux distros lately, but I'm hoping there's one that's as nice and pretty as OS X in its better days.
I've honestly tried hard trying to use the Linux subsystem but I always end up hitting a roadblock because of some feature they don't support yet. Recently I tried installing postgres 9.5 and failed. There is also no sync between Windows files and those in Linux. Additionally so far I haven't seen a single good terminal emulator in Windows with the looks and features of Pantheon or iterm.
You known this is optional, right? You can turn it off during and after installation of Windows.
Also, Android and iOS + most of the popular apps you use, including the desktop ones, use some kind of tracking/telemetry and you don't even have the option to disable.
I wouldn't recommend it as it fails in pretty much any test I've seen. However, there are plenty of good, free antivirus software for Windows. I use Avast (free).
Our company is sticking with our current stockpile of 2012-2014 Macbooks. They have a lot of life left in them anyway, but when it comes to an office, having to reinvest in new, HUGE displays, new cabling, new laptops? Apple needs to come up with something more compelling than a stupid bar.
And agree, at home, Windows 10's unix capabilities are amazing. Apple needs to dedicate some real resources to the Mac line and turn them back from being overpriced toys and back to useful tools.
I just bought a new mid 2015 mbp for that reason. Beyond the $300 price increase, there's an additional $400 backdoor price increase for additional chargers and a pile of dongles to replace all the functionality that currently works. Not throwing in a single usb-A port was the final fuck you that tipped me over the edge to the older generation.
It becomes a case of do you disconnect and bring the TB 3 dock with you, buy a second 'traveling' dock or get just what you need for travel and hope for the best.
Honestly, I think a docking situation like that looks awesome. I like the idea of just usb-c, but Apple was probably a bit ahead of the curve here. In a year no one will be talking about it, and places like monoprice will have cheap dongles.
I also get what Apple is trying to do. My current MBP has the sd-card reader. I use it because I have a d7100, but everyone else I know with a mbp has literally never used that reader. For them it's a complete waste of space/weight. It is easy to get caught up in what we (as in HNers) need, and miss the fact that many people probably never using anything beyond the power port.
It's a similar situation with the removal of the headphone jack. Apple has stats and those show that the majority of people either use the headphones that come with the phone or have bought BT ones. Apple got ripped hard, but the rumors are most of the flagships coming out next year will also not have a headphone jack.
Two additional chargers, one that stays in my backpack and one for the other room in my house where I work: $180. $150-ish worth of dock for my desk so various stuff works including Logitech wireless mouse, monitor, external drives -- I didn't choose one yet but that's the price range. DVI for projectors and HDMI for various stuff: $100. Three $10 usb-A dongles, one each of which would probably be tied to the power adapters because I personally and professionally have a dozen devices that use usb-A. And the above is well over $400.
I'm still sticking with the 2012 pre-retina because it's apparently the last MBP you can get if you don't want the damn glossy screen, which somehow is standard even though it makes the problem of reflected lighting/glare worse.
Unauthorized, not much, I think we're well ... hmm ... supervised ...
(Authorized, not much either, it impedes unicorn hunting. Incidentally that's why jwz hates this place - slept under his desk for the delicious unicorn meat, has strong feelings about campers.)
What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of HID devices, and pick up exactly where I left off. And, of course, one possible set of HID devices would be something like a present-day laptop so that I can continue working while en-route. But there is no reason why the business end of a computer needs to be in the same enclosure as the HID, and a lot of reasons why it should not be.
I can do much of this now with a USB3 SSD, but the problem is that there is no way to "sleep" such a configuration. To change locations I need to shut down in one place and reboot in another.
I would go a bit further: I want my state to be inside a seamless hardware agnostic VM, that I can access anywhere through public terminals that I only partially trust. I would have the option of either having my storage with me that I plug in, or in the cloud and I just provide 2fa. My device would have a cpu/gpu/etc befitting a mobile device, and the most barebones / untrusted terminals would just be screen/inputs/charger, but in better environments the terminal can optionally provide extra oomph if permitted.
It's all niche ptoducts with no reach, though. I'd like something mass-consumer-oriented and ubiquous, so I can actually get (roughly) the same experience everywhere from bus stops and coffee shops to my office. The current situation is like pre-ipod mp3 players: the tech is all there, the ux and marketing effort is not.
Amazon WorkSpaces is just VNC/Remote Desktop-type tech. You get a desktop computer in the cloud, which you connect to as a thin client. Performance is exactly what you expect -- pretty bad, but probably okay if you're doing simple things like word processing or order management or call center stuff.
Presumably in the case of a public terminal, you would have to trust that your keyboard inputs and screen outputs weren't being recorded. But then you also have to trust that the VM container wasn't being malicious too, which the VM itself wouldn't be able to protect against...
Even if there's a keylogger on the machine, it should not be enough to access your accounts without you present. The trick is the USB key should use a crypto method so that when it's unplugged, the public computer can't access your data anymore.
Could that be done with a Linux pen drive? When I was in college I used to carry around a usb stick with a QEMU image of tiny core linux. With some trickery, that could boot on public, school computers. Back at my house I had a server running and could rsync files back and forth.
It sorta worked as a mobile work station but I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing you had in mind. A vnc or gnu screen could help too but neither have 100% perfect usability (especially on slow networks).
There's another project that does the same[0] but using a usb stick isn't a BYO cpu/gpu solution.
Sun did something similar with their Sun Ray hardware and software.
You could close a session with a number of apps open, go to some other location, and login with a different Sun Ray located there, and your session just as you left it would be there, no rebooting or loss of state (assuming that the Sun Ray was somehow connected or federated to the same server that had your login details and apps).
Sun Ray was pretty nice, but I want the opposite. I carry a ok processor, storage, and some memory that can hook to a dock which gives me more processing, storage, and memory.
I get the feeling we need to look back to things like Newton Soups for the storage and then applying those concepts to the others.
I guess you want something akin to what Razer Core is for Razer Blade, but then you don't want more graphics power. Apparently it uses USB-C to achieve this. Does that give confidence we may see this feature more commonly?
I consider the current group of GPUs to be more processing power, but yes, something like what USB-C is supposed to offer. I would expect it will need to go beyond the use external memory and CPU.
You could keep a virtual machine on the SSD, with each docking host having the same VM software installed. Then you'd literally be able to hibernate the VM and physically move it.
I literally thought about doing this today. Have Ubuntu + VirtualBox on multiple computers and any OS in a virtual machine and use a USB 3 SSD (you can get either a specialized one or a generic SATA SSD and a USB 3 enclosure) as the storage medium. I'm going to try it now, might even make a blog post if it works out.
I ran VMs on a Thunderbolt HDD, and had issues with VirtualBox being frustrating to setup regarding file-paths. There might be a better way of handling that now, at least!
Having a VM in picture decimates video and storage performance.
I've tried this exact approach not a week ago. There's an NVMe drive with ~700MBps read speed and a GFX 10xx hooked up to a 4K display. The best I could squeeze from VM was 245 MBps in read and I couldn't get rid of a lag in cursor movement when running Visual Studio full screen. Going up and down one a page was OK, but when you get to the edge, there was a very noticeable hiccup before it started scrolling. CPU and memory throughputs were largely unaffected though. That's using VMware Workstation 12.5 with Win 8.1 as both guest and host.
I ended up with just sticking all data onto an encrypted USB3.1 SSD and setting up the desktop and the laptop identically. Not as elegant as a VM would've been, but works really well so far.
You are ignoring the context, which is that of a portable VM.
1. You obviously can't direct map local fixed drives, and direct access to USB drives yields the same 200-300 MBps read performance, which also has a lot of jitter.
2. To pass-through a GPU you need to be running an ESXi with all the consequences. In particular, moving a VM, while doable through export/import, becomes a royal pain in the ass.
PS. And try and express your thoughts in a bit more civil manner next time.
>1. You obviously can't direct map local fixed drives, and direct access to USB drives yields the same 200-300 MBps read performance, which also has a lot of jitter.
Of course you can, and if you want to access the "host" OS just boot the drive in a VM and hope for the best.
USB will be just as bad as it'd be without VMs.
>2. To pass-through a GPU you need to be running an ESXi with all the consequences. In particular, moving a VM, while doable through export/import, becomes a royal pain in the ass.
I think for this you'd probably just want to use a live distro with KVM rather than messing with ESXi. But yeah, it'll be significantly harder. It's a strange problem so you'll need something more configurable than vmware player.
>PS. And try and express your thoughts in a bit more civil manner next time.
I don't see anything offensive in my comment, unless I'm supposed to be offended by your "pain in the ass" wording.
The OQO was mentioned elsewhere, I too wanted it for this years ago, along with a Pico projector and virtual/projection keyboard. Now that I've been disappointed by both the new MBP and the price of the current gen Google/Android phones, I've started wondering if I can spend $1000 on a new "phone" and use it for everything (with peripherals left at each site). I briefly investigated this approach just a few days and found Debian noroot and AndromiumOS (see also their related Superbook kickstarter, which did really well -- though personally, I don't want a laptop if I go this route). Quite a bit needs testing, but it seems promising, maybe one generation away still (USB-C/3.1gen2 everything, with power).
Yes, that's what I do too. But if I could detach the keyboard and display then I could fit what remains in my pocket instead of having to shlep it around in my backpack.
This is want I have been dreaming about. While sitting by the desk, I want to use desktop class CPU since there's no need to save power. However I don't want to drag a workstation class laptop while traveling.
I've tried having two different computers. Dropbox makes it easier, but still you have the problem that you need to maintain two separate systems.
I think technically this is not so far fetched. With the portable USB3 memory you could almost achieve it. This would just require that the operating system supports waking up in a bit different hardware (at least different CPU, possibly also different amount of RAM).
Surface Pro comes close to this - it's very small and easy to carry around, and you could use the Surface docking stations for easier transitions I suppose. The only difference from your dream is that the display doesn't come off, but sometimes it can be an advantage.
What I want is to have docking stations with extra computing power/GPU/RAM/HDD etc built in, so that I can keep the small Surface with its limited battery for the road but have an absurdly powerful desktop PC when I dock it.
Absolutely. I actually feel like the Mac Mini form factor could be good enough for this. It's not pocket sized, but it's better than a laptop, I could happily schlep it from the office to home again. The one thing it's missing is being able to turn it into a laptop somehow when I do actually need that, i.e. when travelling.
Can't say I agree with that. The mini is awfully fat, and most of that space is power supply, fan, and a rotating hard drive. (Seriously, Apple, don't you know it's 2016?) So I still need a bag to carry it. I'd much rather have an MBP than a Mini. (Also, a mini can't sleep unplugged.)
I had a camera bag that exactly fit my Mac mini and accessories and carried that from home to work to my parents for visits. It was quite nice loaded up.
Apple currently already does this very well via their iCloud sync.
You stick 1TB of your files in your Documents directory (or app-specific data folders..), and you can access them in any device that supports iCloud, including iPhones & iPads.
Try it, you'll like it, and you don't have to deal with physical storage devices.
I haven't. After using iCloud for my photos it's going to be an awfully long time before I trust any Apple cloud service. It's was shambolic and is still deeply dysfunctional.
If they could do this with a phone (x86/x64), or at least something with a cellular radio, they would hit it out of the park. I want a laptop that is just a dock with a phone slot in it. A desktop as well. Slide the phone in and instant form factor change with ports, GPU, extra HDD/SDD, etc.
I'm sceptical a phone can emulate high-performance x86 software at the speed of a Core i7 but is Photoshop-on-a-phone the use case for most office workers?
Office runs natively ARM but businesses have a few productivity apps tied to x86 (e.g. requiring a P3 or higher) that shouldn't tax the CPU too much.
It's a good question if a CPU should be included or not. On the one hand, I want a desktop class CPU in some situations and a laptop class CPU in other situations. And it would be nice to upgrade your entire computer without even having to shutdown the OS.
On the other hand, an Skylake or Kabby lake laptop class processor is actually the same silicon as the desktop class processor, just but with some cores disabled, clocked at a lower speed and binned for low power usage instead of performance.
So theoretically, you could have CPU which can be a quad core desktop processor when plugged into a beefy power source and cooling solution, but disables cores and downclocks when power and cooling is more limited.
The Surface Book is a step in that direction, particularly with the GPU going in the base. You can keep one or more Surface Docks connected to monitors, keyboards and what-have-you in the places where you work, and carry around either the laptop-sized unit (with keyboard, GPU, and a chunk of battery) or even just the large-tablet-sized screen piece. And you can keep your programs running the whole time.
A 13" tablet is still a bit big to be carrying around - I'm hoping they'll eventually manage to make an x86 phone with enough oomph to operate as a development workstation - but it's getting there.
Yeah, I really like that idea. Here's a writeup I had quite a while ago. Not sure if it's in any way similar to yours, but I guess we're trying to address a similar problem here
Not quite what I'm after because (AFAICT) it can't sleep while unplugged. But this still looks like a pretty awesome little machine. I may just have to get me one :-)
I kind of feel like, once you're talking publicly about things like if you are committed or not, you probably aren't and are trying to keep people from fleeing while you figure out what to do or while some long-term strategy kicks in.
Agreed, I have the exact same feeling for this case as well.
"We have so many amazing things in store that I am so excited about" <-- recycled and beaten to death CEO lingo. I mean, he might be telling the truth (I am not gonna argue what I don't know!) but the wording is just awful and comes off as corny and forced by your PR department.
Actions speak louder than words. The new MBPs are the most meh Apple laptops ever. The iPhone 7/Plus are the laziest iPhones ever made, too. Rehashes losing legacy ports and trying to impose new ones (although USB Type-C is the best decision they've made in the last several years; I think they should've went with the same port for the iPhone as well). And losing battery life. Damn.
I was never an active Apple user. I bought my first iPhone and Macbook at March 2016 (the 12" Macbook and the 6S Plus; I sold the iPhone only 4 months later but that's a separate topic). But I did consider Apple because part of the Windows ecosystem -- and the entire Android ecosystem -- are disappointing me a lot lately. I was really curious what will Apple bring with the iPhone 7/Plus and the new MBPs.
Severe disappointment followed. I'll give them until the next iPhone release. If they can't excite me, oh well, guess it's time to sift again through the trash yard that Android has become lately.
Only answering this because of the ecosystem comment.
I wish manufacturers would make products that work well with anything. Like Apple watches with Android phones and vice versa, Apple TV running Amazon's Prime TV app, Amazon's Prime TV box running Apple's TV app, etc.
All of these ecosystem-exclusive things are annoying and in some ways I believe holding technology back a little.
We all wish that and they are not just holding back things "a little" but by massive amounts. But alas companies are usually not in it to advance technology, but to make shedloads of money. Lock-in, incompatible ports, moats are all by design to reduce customer attrition from inferior products by some margin.
Peter Thiel's "From 0 to 1" opened my mind to this. SV VCs also don't care about your tech too much - but they are insanely focused on what your "moat" is. I.e. lock-in, patents, network effects etc.
While lock-in might be a motivating factor and benefit, it's also just that it's really hard to make something that works with a competitor's something-else without your competitor sharing all their details. It's much easier for a company to guarantee the experience of the end-user when they only have to worry about things they have control over. You can't just make that kind of simplification as if it's proven fact.
I don't mean to offend you, but that's such a naive comment. Look at how many problems Windows has with all the hardware that it needs to support. The entire reason you get ecosystem-exclusive things is because it's nearly impossible to make things cross-compatible to such a degree that it doesn't turn into a giant game of finger-pointing.
If your Apple Watch series 4 doesn't work with your Nexus 20 phone, whose fault is it? Who needs to fix it? It might be holding technology back a little but until we get away from capitalism and there's a financial risk/reward system to making sure everything works and nothing is shared, we'll have to deal with this exclusivity.
On one of my previous jobs we had a video conference with the boss of our department. We did not knew what it was supposed to be about. He said that the rumors spreading that our office will be closed are not true. Nobody heard those rumors before in our office (maybe we expected this to happen in a Dillbert kind of a way). Guess what happened few months later...
This was a private comm internal to Apple, not a public communication.
Also, in this situation, denial is the lesser of two evils. Because if there are rumors that "X is going to be killed", and you don't squash them, that's even more suspicious.
> This was a private comm internal to Apple, not a public communication
PR departments (and governments) concoct and intentionally "leak" internal docs to the press all the time as a back-channel. This particular Apple missive reads like a press release[1].
I recently read an interesting article on how governments benefit from unsanctioned leaks as they provide cover for planned leaks. The same dynamic applies to companies, planned leaks are a mechanism for good PR that they do not want to be officially recognized as PR. I wish I could find the link, I can't find it in my history :-(
1. "The current generation iMac is the best desktop we have ever made, and its beautiful Retina 5K display is the best desktop display in the world."
“I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore?" Tim Cook told the paper during a trip to visit Apple's flagship store in London for the debut of its powerful big-screen tablet, the new iPad Pro. "No really," he said, "why would you buy one?”
No offense, but this is like one of those false stories in politics that keeps spreading no matter what the fact checkers say. I've seen that quote posted on HN like five times now. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Tim Cook isn't actually so undisciplined that he would call an entire product line of his company useless in an interview.
In Apple's world, "PC" means Windows PC; the Mac is not a "PC". As Gruber noted[1], remember the ad campaign - "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC..."
Yes, Apple definitely wants the iPad to work as a computer replacement, but they also recognize it's not good enough as a replacement for most power users (yet). In fact, in the same article as the "why would you" quote, Tim Cook goes on to say the iPad Pro can replace "a notebook or a desktop for many, many people". "A notebook or a desktop", unlike "a PC", does include Macs, but saying the iPad Pro can replace them for "many, many people" implies it can't for others.
Yes, but "PC" has a very specific meaning in almost every context, and Apple never refer to their machines as PCs. Which is why Apple was able to run those "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads.
I think people put too much significance into the name change. They often referred to themselves as just “Apple” since at least the early 1980's. They dropped “Computer” from their name just weeks before they announced the deal with Apple Corps Ltd to get permanent rights to the trademark.
Exactly. There is a good line from game of Thrones that goes, "The King doesn't have to tell people he is the King." Or something similar. This is puddle deep marketing spin.
What Apple is committed to is its iPhone-powered firehose of cash. (Maybe volcano of cash? Atomic bomb? No hyperbole is too strong, here.)
I pine for great computer hardware from Apple as much as anyone else, I'm sad about the current state of their computers. But can you really blame them? The numbers generated from their iPhone business is bonkers. It's off the map/beyond the pale and it has made them arguably the biggest most successful enterprise in the history of the world. What are they to do?
Except that Cook is cited as giving an explicit assurance. A manager can lie only once before they get a certain reputation, and I doubt that Tim Cook would spend his one lie on this.
A manager can lie many times.in their career. There's, usually, a declining (with a each lie) degree of reliance put in each statement after a first lie, but that's very different from only being able to lie once.
Personally, luxury laptop lines don't make sense for me at this point. There was a time when it was the only way to get decent hardware, but those days are long gone.
Four years ago I spilled water on my 2009 17" MBP (RIP) and Apple wanted $1200 for the repair. Instead, I spent ~$1300, including three-year accident-protection insurance where they show up at your house THE NEXT DAY, on a Thinkpad T530 and I couldn't be happier with it. Quad-core i7, discrete Nvidia GPU, 15" 1080p display, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, ethernet, displayport, firewire, DVD drive, 300GB HDD. I've since upgraded to a 500GB SSD (and put the old HDD where the DVD drive was) and to 16GB of RAM. Due to the internal metal frame, I'm sure I could drop the thing repeatedly without consequence.
Yeah, it's not thin and weighs 1.5 pounds more than a 15" MBP. The extra-capacity battery I ordered it with is losing some capacity, but good thing I can just pop it out for a new one with the flick of a switch. This computer will still be kicking ass in four more years.
EDIT: I dug up the invoice: http://imgur.com/a/cT55A . $1380 including the three-year warranty/accident-insurance. Apparently I can put a mobile broadband card in this thing, cool!
Further edit: Perhaps I overstated in my first sentence. I really don't mean to put down Macs. I loved my 17" MBP and the 13" company-issued MBP I used at an internship in 2013. Their screens, even pre-retina, are beautiful. The OS and hardware worked perfectly together, e.g. smooth touchpad actions like scrolling and zooming. Though I haven't used the new machines everyone is complaining about, my experiences with Apple hardware have only been great. But what I value in a computer just doesn't align with the value that premium ultra-thin laptops provide.
I used to think every one of my friends with a MBP was a fisher price-loving brainless slave to Steve Jobs.
Then I actually had to use one for work.
I'll never go back.
It's the little things that are not so little:
1) The wake speed
2) The battery life
3) The overall comfort and feel of the keys and the trackpad compared to ANYTHING I've ever used before from Lenovo or Dell.
I can live in Mac mode and build almost anything targeted to a *nix platform natively.
And if I need to do anything for Windows, I just use Boot Camp.
> And if I need to do anything for Windows, I just use Boot Camp.
In my head I imagine 90% of Mac users that use Boot Camp just need it to play PC games. :) Then again, I suppose there's still really specific obscure software out there that is Windows only (or Win/IIS devs that prefer Mac hardware). Which reminds me, I wonder if I'll ever see 3ds Max on MacOS.
My reason to have Bootcamp is literally to get Elgato Game capture, used to capture the presenter's screen real time, support in OBS so that I can livestream a Bsides conference once a year. I use an old Canopus firewire SD video to live transcode the camcorder in that setup.
I tried to do this in Parallels, but it just didn't work. Turns out live video composition and broadcasting needs the bare metal.
I know for me the big take away for having bootcamp is PowerShell. I work in Office 365, so the modules aren't built to work with it yet, even though there is a working version of PowerShell. Other than that, a couple interactions with Active Directory always cause me problems, so it is easier to just have a Windows Installation hanging out.
The trackpads on Macs are amazing (though I hear good things about the Surface Book and some newer Dells). But I've fallen in love with the trackpoint (red nub) on the Thinkpad.
This was me too and it's so funny to see people saying the same things as I did - "You can get the same specs for so much cheaper!", "You're wasting your money!", "You can't game on a Mac". Now I have the best of both worlds. My Mac gets used for everything and my PC is my gaming machine when I can't game on the Mac. It's not the same specs unless specs only include the processor, RAM, and HDD and the experience is light years better to me.
I'm glad people have a choice. I just don't understand why I get crucified every time I state my preference.
So isn't $1500 still within the "luxury" category? You can get a perfectly fine laptop for $500.
You mention 1080p. I believe the high-res displays (think 4k-ish/Retina) are still super expensive, even for non-Apple machines and they make a huge difference for me. For professionals working with print, it's an absolute bliss to "not see pixels" anymore and I generally love it for just reading super crisp text. Then there's the "little things" that even fewer high end laptops get right and Apple tends to nail (like the glass-surface trackpad).
I don't get the "open ended" pricing (>$2500), either. I don't get why versions of the same base model with $200 worth of better hardware cost $500 more, that's the Apple idiot-tax. But the existence of high-end laptops alone? Dude, I spend like half my day in front of that thing, for years. People don't raise an eye brow on you spending +/- 25% on a car yet I'd argue for many people, you get way more use out of a laptop. It's worth paying a little extra, IMO.
> For professionals working with print, it's an absolute bliss to "not see pixels" anymore and I generally love it for just reading super crisp text.
Yea, i do nothing with graphics/print but the crisp text is very important to me. All day in the Terminal screen, the crisp letters really help reduce eye fatigue, which is at a premium these days.
> I believe the high-res displays (think 4k-ish/Retina) are still super expensive
It's not so bad these days. If you want a comparison, you can look at Dell displays. On the 5510 and probably a couple other models, you can upgrade from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160 for $299.
Comparatively, this is a better screen to the one provided by Apple. Apple's 13" MBP comes in at a lower 2560x1600 resolution, or 4.1m pixels to Dell's 8.3m, or for the 15" MBP you get 2880x1800 at 5.2m.
Some people literally get joy out of using things that are well designed and don't feel cheap. When it is a device you are going to use constantly for work and other things then it becomes very easy to justify buying a "luxury" laptop. I used the same iMac for 5 years (only added an SSD) and have used the same MBP for 4 years and it still has a lot of life left.
I disagree. They used to be heavy duty and well designed, now they just look heavy duty (and well designed if you squint). The best example of the slide downhill is their heavy-duty metal hinge... covers. Inside it's the same hinge everything else has. At my last job we had a recent thinkpad of some sort in the shop, and the media keys rattled around under their wavy bezel, and the bottom of the LCD bezel could be flexed considerably with a light press from your finger. It looked like a thinkpad. But it was not a thinkpad. And post-superfish, I haven't bothered to see if they've improved. They do not deserve my money.
I don't have a macbook either, fwiw. My work laptop is a Dell Precision M4800 (provided by IT), and it seems decent. My home laptop is an old toughbook, which is ugly and the trackpad sucks, but I could use it to bludgeon someone while looking them up on linkedin, so I think it's pretty neat.
Perhaps the ThinkPad you're talking about isn't one of the flagship series (X, T, W mostly). There are a variety of other models Lenovo brands as ThinkPads that are build to look similar to these ThinkPads.
I can add, though, that the hinge in my T450s is by no means as cheap and flexible as those in a rMBP or any slew of other Windows laptops. I can open it to 180 degrees or anywhere in-between and it stays there even while I shake the laptop (far better than the rMBP I had for work and previous laptops I've owned). The outer casing of my (AFAIK carbon fiber/fiberglass) T450s also feels firmer and stronger than that of a rMBP where the metal outer shell flexes, probably due to the lack of a solid skeleton support system inside. These little things just inspire confidence in me that few other products can, personally.
You might be right, and my memory is fuzzy, but I'm pretty certain it was a T-series laptop. It had the five trackpad buttons, trackpoint, square edges and rubberized lid, keyboard light, etc. We also had a T40 that was beat up from shop use, and I remember the difference in quality between the two was painfully obvious. The new machine felt like an imitation.
This is what happens when a US company that built it's reputation on bulletproof reliability sells the division to a Chinese company that built it's reputation on high-quality knockoffs. Just saying...
Unfortunately the new Macbook Pro Ret is terribly designed, imo.
The trackpad may be good quality, but it is massive. Seriously, my hands naturally rest on the pad while i type, which causes all sorts of weird behavior because my palms are mashing all over the "mouse". Furthermore, Apple reduces the "action" of the keys and trackpad press to near zero, what!? The new non-button-bottons of the Macbook Pro Retina are annoying as hell.
I'm frustrated because i don't want to deal with bad Linux laptop drivers, so i want to buy another Macbook Pro Ret, but the damn thing is just crap (to me personally). I'm very frustrated at the UX of that new book.
And lets not even talk about removing the magnetic charge port for a grand total of two usb c ports. I have no clue what Apple is doing these days.
For what it's worth, I got a new MacBook pro(15", touch bar) from work last week. The keyboard stinks for me as a touch typer at around ~115 wpm. My previous laptop was a thinkpad t430, and it's the lack of travel I think that makes it so painful to use. I end up using the "normal" amount of force to touch a key on any keyboard, which seems to be way too much for the MBP's new keyboard.
The trackpad I haven't noticed any problems with while typing...but it does make a really annoying and hollow sounding "pong" sound with each click. I thought it was just me, but apparently the sound is something all the other users experience also. Maybe I'm picky, but I expect really expensive kit to not feel cheap.
The ports are a pain, but work bought me the usual type-a-to-c adapters, and an LG monitor that uses usb type C by default.
All in all..I want my thinkpad back, but some people might like this new machine, who knows? I think if they buy it with their own money, they are a lot more likely to tell themselves they like it, even if they do not.
I have never once experienced the palm rejection problems you're having while typing on the new MBP, nor have any of my friends that have one. And I've been using it nearly 12 hours a day for a month now.
I love how thinkpads feel. They only feel cheap if you think anything that isn't Apple feels cheap. No, they're not shiny, but they don't feel cheaply made. If anything the added sturdiness, to me, feels so much less cheap than super-delicate Apple products.
A bit like the difference between driving a 30 year old Porsche that needs constant maintenance and is delicate as can be. No one would call that car cheap, but I'd opt for the Tesla Model S and ignore the brand loyalists.
Three or four years ago I'm pretty sure I spent around $1300 on my 13" MacBook Pro, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD. Not as many ports as yours, but 2 USB 3.0, two thunderbolt, and an SD card slot is plenty for me. "Retina" screen, great trackpad. Pretty small and thin and well-built.
Got it refurbished from Apple saved a couple hundred bucks. It did have a fan problem right before the warranty expired -- when I sent it in for repair, they ended up replacing (with no charge) huge amounts of it, in addition to the fan problem I specified (replaced the entire graphics board and logic board, as well as entirely new display, because their diagnostics found problems I have no idea what but I'm not complaining -- I think the moral is always take a macbook into the apple store for a checkup right before the warranty expires, come up with something small to say there's a problem with, have them run all their diagnostics, be friendly and polite to the apple desk person).
I'm pretty darn happy with it. It's still plenty fast enough 3-4 years later. (Looking it up, it's dual core i5, but I've never really wanted for more cpu; I'm not a gamer though it must be said). I think when I bought it a newer model had _just_ been released, and price reductions on the model I got.
So I dunno, it seems pretty comparable (some things better, some things worse, but a pretty similar machine) to the thinkpad you purchased for a comparable price, really, doesn't it? Not neccesarily better, not neccesarily worse, depends on what you're looking for, similar price.
I am not sure I like the direction macbooks have gone since then, in price-to-features, it's true. I'm not alone, which is why Apple is trying to assuage mac owners.
> I don't get the attraction of luxury laptop lines at this point.
I'd love a luxury laptop: a machine I could upgrade and maintain with minimum hassle, a machine with a properly designed cooling system that would last years without breaking down.
Apple doesn't make those anymore. It makes machines with parts glued together, and drives soldered to the board, whose GPUs overheat and die after a few months.
Venturing into car analogy territory, luxury cars are notorious for needing a lot of (expensive) maintenance and not having user-accessible repairs.
You want either a daily driver car or a ricer.
(I don't disagree - Apple used to manage to make computers that were a rare a meld of all kinds - the eminently upgradeable PowerMac G4 with the hinged door! - but not any longer)
My metaphor is leaking! My point is that I would be quite happy to buy a $3000 machine if it were stelar quality, and I could rely on it for the next five years. Some people will always pay top dollar for pro gear. If you use and rely on a piece of equipment enough, it's worth it.
My 15 inch MBP is still kicking ass four years later and I haven't had to replace much of anything yet. For me, honestly, when I get home from a long day of fighting with software dev on Windows and *Nix, I kind of want something that holds my hand. I don't want to think about anything. I also side load Windows to tinker when I want. I find that I may just be a lover of ecosystems.
In my daily home life outside of work, having an i7 over an i5 doesn't add value for me because I'm just messing around. I think it all comes down to need. I didn't get a MBP as a status symbol, I got one because I wanted a machine that ran macOS alongside Windows without building a Hackintosh. I do think plenty of college students get MBP's because everyone else has them when in reality, they won't need something like a MBP for their coursework likely ever.
That said, this is my last MBP. The changes Apple are making aren't exactly things I align with. I can only buy the pioneer argument so much. I think my next purchase is going to be a Thinkpad or a Surface Book Pro.
Don't forget Thinkpad T-series also has keyboard drain channels; go ahead and spill :)
[my friend also does a demonstration where he shuts down the lid of his running Thinkpad and walks on it, then opens up the lid and keeps working... yay exoskeleton :]
>Yeah, it's not thin and weighs 1.5 pounds more than a 15" MBP.
It also doesn't run OS X, and lots of other stuff. If you try to understand it as "value for money", then there are far better computers for number crunching that are way cheaper than a Mac. Instead with Mac you get lots of marginal returns, that, if you have the money can appreciate, and they are all focused on things other than raw performance per dollar.
Weight, size, construction, design, no crap ware, magsafe (rip), great trackpad, first to get hi-dpi screens, first to get modern more powerful ports, first to ditch legacy stuff, and good battery life (despite some recent problems it has been traditionally better than the PC competition, even for units 2x the size). Plus a whole ecosystem that has the same values, of smartphone, tablet, watch, desktop, Cloud services, etc. And a great resale value.
Also Apple traditionally uses it bargaining/money to order the best parts of what it orders (quality assurance wise). They don't get the most powerful Nvidia, for example, but for the model of Nvidia they do get, they get the most careful produced units. Same for less/no stuck pixels on the monitors, etc. Don't have an exact reference now, but I've read that from 2 different people working for other OEMs/suppliers. Of course its also inevitable for every product run that runs in the millions that they also get some duds as they had in the past. The screens on MBPr's or iMacs have for example, have consistently been top of the crop, with respect to color, brightness, etc compared to other (cheaper or not) laptops. Compared to dedicated pro screens that cost the same as the whole MBPr just for the screen, no, but that's not the point. The point is in the balance.
Even not having to bother with 200 customization options is a feature for some.
About the "it's not thin and weights 1.5 pounds more". This might seem like OK tradeoff to you, but is enough to drive some people crazy, like this guy:
I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky* things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.
I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement for “small and silent”. It’s not just laptops, btw – Intel sometimes gives me pre-release hardware, and the people inside Intel I work with have learnt that being whisper-quiet is one of my primary requirements for desktops too. I am sometimes surprised at what leaf-blowers some people seem to put up with under their desks. I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit).* (Linus Torvalds)
It's not a feature right up to the moment you need something that is not part of the core offerings. Which I think is one of the major reasons for the screaming with the new macbooks. I can relatively quickly par down the ranges that interest me, but in the PC world I can be relatively sure that if my requirements change, somebody will make something that does what I need (both desktop and laptops).
What's really bad is that none of the big manufacturers is able to have useful website, so figuring out what you might be interested in is needlessly painful and involves external communities.
I've never had a stuck pixel on any of the macs I've had but my iPhone 7 has 2 pixels stuck on. If like to see if Apple will fix/replace even though it is nearly unnoticeable unless looking at pure black with the brightness high.
Yeah; I think this is the other problem. I've had my first-ever mbp at work for almost three years. Each OS release is buggier than the last (and all of them fail on resume every once in a while). Example from el capitan: The ctrl and alt keys sometimes get 'stuck' when switching to and from a full screen vnc session (with the builtin client). So, a dozen times a day, I start typing into vnc, and hilarity ensues. It turns out ctrl and alt handling in vnc is surprisingly complicated, but the point is that this is a regression. It never happened before el capitan.
VNC, you ask? As our product has matured, the build has gotten slower, so my local vmware vm is useless. The remote xeon is pretty iffy too (and it is not three years out of date like apple's comparable offering).
Writing on macos and shipping the code is a non-starter, and I like to be able to cut and paste urls / download things into my linux working directory directly from firefox.
Worse, it is not like some things improved while others regressed. Take the mail and calendar clients (the other programs I actually use) for example. Other than waiting, there is no way to dismiss the "you've got mail" notifications without opening the email (thus borking my vnc session again). Since apple is deep into the minimalism cult, I know they are organizationally incapable of putting an X on the popup.
That is the story of my $2800 VNC client with buggy keyboard, crashy kernel and iffy mail client. At least it has an escape key, reasonable keyboard play, and good battery life.
In apple's defense, I don't know of and better options that work out of the box. Microsoft and google perform way too much user surveillance, and Ubuntu Unity (i.e. Dell XPS developer edition) broke the alt key. When did desktop/laptop software start sucking so badly?
It's actually kind of amazing to see the discourse shift against Apple and the new MacBook Pro to the point where it seems almost self-reinforcing. Like someone turned the reality distortion field on backwards or something.
I've been wanting a mac laptop the size and weight of a MacBook Air 13" but with a retina display for years, and the ability to connect usb, power and external display with just a single cable is just icing on the cake. The TouchBar - meh, but using TouchID to unlock 1Password is handy if not revolutionary. But the point is, by most standards the new MBPs are great laptops for most professionals, especially software developers - solid build quality, fast, great screens, long battery life and lightweight. Sure, there are undoubtedly some people who really need to plug a ton of USB-A devices every day or need more than 16gb to run a ton of VMs or something, and for those it must be an unwelcome regression. But honestly, I have a hard time believing that can make up more than 5-10% of the market of the previous models.
I can't really see how that can explain the public opinion turning against them to quite the extent that it has. I'm guessing it's a combination of several other factors: 1) Apple hasn't made a really revolutionary product since Jobs died. (Apple Watch was an honest try, but the product category was as dead a fish as the nay-sayers predicted). We expect these people to produce magic every x years, and they are long over-due with their next miracle. They put out an evolutionary product but it gets judged against the revolution that we were longing for. 2) Microsoft's entry into the laptop market has been with some surprisingly solid, and even innovative products (e.g. the Surface Book). They might not quite be revolutionary, but they are at least more so than the new MBP is. And their willingness on taking on niche markets (e.g. a Cintiq-killer for graphic designers) is contrasting with Apple's 'regression to the mean' where niche audiences are increasingly being neglected in favor of the less demanding mainstream consumer. Those 5-10% Apple just pissed off might not make a big difference on the bottomline themselves, but they are part of the hip trendsetters that used to be the poster child for the mac platform.
I do not agree. It is not about magic, it's about neglecting the user group that made them rich in the first place.
Apple actually stopped making pro hardware. They're unpredictable when it comes to upgrades(15 Retina ethernal Haswell, 2013 Mac Pro, even iMacs), they do not seem to have an idea how the platform should evolve and they're obsessed with thinness, while in the pro market performance and battery life are vastly more important.
Last but not least, their recent idea of progress is gimmicky touch bar and emoticons everywhere. Sorry, it just does not fit. Add to it degrading software quality (iOS10 sucks, MacOS just got rid of battery prediction, because they couldn't work with new processors - come on!), frozen progress on software front in general and there is not much left.
Currently Apple is a company sitting on an extremely large pile of cash and they have not idea what to do with it. Not sexy at all.
It was not the pro users who made Apple rich. It was the consumers buying iPods, and later iPhones.
Pro users are at the same time extremely demanding and extremely conservative. Apple has never done much to cater to that market, and the fact that they have so many pro users these days is a happy accident which has more to do with how awful these people used to be treated when they were Windows users, and not a lot to do with anything Apple did specifically for their sake.
Apple doesn't care about pro users, whom they rightly consider demanding and ungrateful. Apple cares about ordinary people, the ones lots of pro users talk about often in the most condescending of manners. Apple's mission has always been to make computing accessible to the masses (remember the slogan: "The computer for the rest of us"?), not to make it better for the elite few who already know how to use one.
I said that pro users made them rich, I didn't say that they had done it by buying stuff.
Apple has been reaping rewards from the pro market for years. It's been those pro users who have been advocating the platform among friends and family. It's been those pro users who have been the perfect subject for those marketing campaigns showing how awesome new products are. It's been those pro users who write tech blogs and make the noise about Apple. It's been those pro users who made the brand what it is.
I'm not saying that pro users directly bring cash to Apple (they do that too - look at the number of computers IBM is buying and tell me it's not because of those pro users who made mac the ultimate development plaftorm). The point is, Apple was using the pro users as their market driver, creating positive buzz and actually telling people about the alternative (out of US Macs never been that popular). Also, basically any pro user is better for making an ad than normal user - normal users use stuff that's available in the browser everywhere.
Pro market does not have to be the main one for Apple. It has probably never been. The problem is that with pro users you lose a ton of market influence and its going to happen. The proof is in the article - Tim Cook would not bother to comment on the subject unless it was actually important. And it is important. Apple was always about the ecosystem. If they break the ecosystem, they will fail. Right now it does not look to good for them in the long run.
If you believe pro users have that kind of clout, you are delusional. The iPod most certainly didn't succeed because it was endorsed by pro users, nor did the iPhone. In fact the reaction from the pro market to those products when they were introduced, was one of dismissal ('No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame'). These products succeeded on their own merits by being fantastic products and -- to a lesser extend -- on the strength of Apple's brand and marketing. The halo effect from these two products is largely responsible for the success the Mac has enjoyed in recent history.
> If you believe pro users have that kind
> of clout, you are delusional.
Is it so strange? I have friends and relatives who ask me to recommend a computer. I'll bet you do, too.
> The iPod most certainly didn't succeed because
> it was endorsed by pro users, nor did the iPhone.
Actually the iPod, when it was first released, was not a mass-market product. It was Mac-only, and Mac-only at a time when the only people still using Macs were enthusiasts and pros.
> In fact the reaction from the pro market to
> those products when they were introduced, was one of
> dismissal
That seemed to me to be more of Microsoft vs Apple thing. The culture has changed these days, and people aren't as dogmatic about it. Back then Mac vs Windows was like a holy war.
Back to present day, the effect of pro users isn't hard to see. Major publications have started writing articles asking if Apple has gone down-hill, and it's not the occasional think-piece, I see a new one every day (just read one on Bloomberg an hour ago). Heck, I read that Rush Limbaugh was trashing Apple last week. Not exactly a typical pro user. These views make it normal people, and don't make buying Apple products seem attractive.
Actually the iPod, when it was first released, was not a mass-market product
Who cares what kind of product the iPod "actually" was, when it was first launched? The point is that it went on to become the biggest consumer electronics hit and Apple's most successful product ever. And it had nothing to do with endorsements from pro users.
Major publications have started writing articles asking if Apple has gone down-hill
Are you new on the internet? Big publications have been writing doom and gloom stories about Apple always. That is not a new phenomenon. Meanwhile Apple has enjoyed success like no other company ever.
I wouldn't use the word "endorsements" but I absolutely believe the approval pro users was vital. What technology journalist isn't a pro user at heart? There are some, like Mossberg, who try hard to write from the pov of the average user, but if you're writing about tech, you're generally a "power user" to say the least.
The iPod wasn't just successful because it was a good product. It was also "cool" because it was high tech. We were just coming out of the beige box era, and standalone devices of any kind that connected to a computer were less common. It had particular cache. If pros hadn't considered Apple good technology, it would have spoiled that, and I doubt the iPod would have sold as well as it did.
> Are you new on the internet?
I am not.
> Big publications have been writing doom and gloom stories about Apple always.
There is a massive difference between the tone of the press this year, and previous years. By the time Steve left Apple, it was exceedingly rare for the big publications to write any negative stories about Apple. They were terrified to, because Apple would cut them off from events, etc. There were exceptions, like Gizmodo who had nothing to lose after the iPhone prototype story, but it wasn't like this year, where most stories are negative.
I remember reading on Slashdot at the time that iPod users -- betrayed by the signature white earphones -- were getting mugged, and that this was evidence that the iPod was seen as a status symbol by people far outside the tech bubble.
If pros hadn't considered Apple good technology…
Was it a good product because the pros said so, or do you think perhaps that the pros said it was a good product because it actually was?
And why do you think that only pros are capable of judging if a tech product is good? Can't non-techies judge if a product is delightful or frustrating to use? Do they only know if they like it if someone who is an engineer tells them it's ok? In my personal experience, tech people give the worst advice when it comes to gadgets, because they often have bo empathy for the fact, that normal people don't have the time or the inclination to deal with stuff that might ostensibly have great tech, but is difficult to set up and finnicky to use. Non-techies want stuff that easy to use and just works, and don't care about specs or acronyms.
There is a massive difference between the tone of the press this year, and previous years.
Your original point was that pro users' influence was apparent in the fact that the press is writing negatively about Apple. To which I replied that the press always has written negatively about Apple with the implied point that the influence excerted thusfar, does't seem to have hindered Apple's success in the slightest. But you're telling me that because the tone has changed, this time for sure the opinions of the tech press will suddenly become relevant to Apples customers, even though most of them are not interested in tech and don't follow the tech press at all?
I wrote a long response, and deleted the whole thing. These comments aren't going anywhere, so we may as well revisit things a year from now, and we can see whether Apple's doing okay without its pro users. My guess is that Apple is in for a world of pain in 2017. If that doesn't happen, well, power to them! I've been wrong before.
Oh, but it was! As far back as I have followed this stuff, every new hardware category Apple has introduced, has been met with ridicule and dismissal from the experts. Every time the same: It does nothing new. It's underpowered. It's overpriced. It's just a [whatever] in a fancy box. It doesn't even [insert specialised use case].
I can count at least one imac, one macbook air and one iphone directly attributable to me. That's to my parents and a frugal friend who normally doesn't buy expensive things.
In my parents' case I simply couldn't provide them tech support since I switched to mac. So they switched over.
And then indirectly lots of clients and people in cafes have seen me using a mac, an iphone or an ipad. I'm sure that's contributed. And I doubt that's an unusual amount for the typical pro user.
> Apple's mission has always been to make computing accessible to the masses (remember the slogan: "The computer for the rest of us"?), not to make it better for the elite few who already know how to use one.
Except the masses buy Windows 10 laptops that cost $199 or whatever. The Mac has never been "accessible to the masses" because they won't pay Apple's prosumer prices...
I suppose it depends on which masses you're referring to, but when I look around at any public place in New Jersey where there are people on laptops, I always see a very healthy representation of Mac users. Of all ages.
Apple have something like a 10% market share. I think what you see in coffee shops and on expensive commuter trains is not at all representative; if you go into a Starbucks in a trendy part of east London, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Apple had a 95% market share, but I'm pretty sure if you go to, say, eastern Europe you'll see very, very few Macs.
Apple's PC market share is much higher in the USA than it is worldwide, and it's very low in Asia, apart from Japan.
Also, Apple's market share is much higher now than it was when the masses adopted PCs. That happened under Windows 95 (which nearly drove Apple out of business) and XP.
When Windows brought computing to the masses, Apple's global market share was closer to 2%.
The world is not divided into rich tech elites who can afford the best, and uneducated, poor people whose only hope to join the tech revolution is buying the cheapest of the cheap. There is a huge segment in between.
It's true that Macs have never been the cheapest, but many, many ordinary people buy them none the less. Why? Maybe because a lot of people need a computer, but hate using it. So they choose to spend a little more to get one that is a little less user hostile. That doesn't make them feel dumb. Maybe even delights them from time to time by the many small considerations its designers have made for them.
We are using the same words to mean different things. When I say accessible, I mean approachable and usable, whereas you seem to mean affordable. When I say the masses, I mean in contrast to the elite, whereas you mean the overwhelming majority.
Pro users are a more diverse group than just app developers. My impression is that app developers are not the ones who feel poorly served by Apple's current hardware lineup[1]. Which is not to say that app developers don't have other legitimate grievances with Apple.
[1] I know, I know; the disappearing of the escape key and the function keys affects everyone! Whatever will we all do?
I think that the more "pro" market might overestimate its own representativeness. Sure you can go to a tech meetup and see a sea of glowing Apple logos, but dominance in a relatively small portion of the market is still a small chunk of market share.
I have to say Microsoft really nailed it with the Surface Studio (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-stud...). It's what Apple would have made already if they were "committed to the desktop" and wanted to stay true to their roots as the computer for creative work. They out-Appled Apple. Including the price, unfortunately.
I second that. I also agree with the OP that the amount of complaining about the MBP is a little weird considering it's still one of the nicest laptops you can get for the vast majority of users, but the fact that they found it necessary to increase the price even further really is somehwat insulting considering the few improvements they added compared to the (already very good) Macbook Pro. For all the waiting, I either expected more innovation, or better pricing. I'm not saying they should have decreased their prices, but they could at least have provided better and more options at the lower end.
Apple could have saved itself so much negative sentiment by simply not being so damn greedy, and by updating their existing desktop hardware (Mac Pro and Mac Mini) more often. They've now painted themselves in a corner where they can't serve a sizeable part of their target audience, but are asking crazy prices for them, even by Apple's standards.
Apple actually recognized that price is the issue.
By lowering the price of all the dongles shortly after launch, they confirmed that they may have underestimated how price sensitive their "Pro" market has become.
Mostly because the Pro market now encompasses everyone wanting to upgrade their lower-end MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. Because there's no upgrade path for these users at the moment (other than the iPad Pro which is a non starter for so many reasons).
A new, 13" MacBook would be a good step towards bridging the gap, and providing an upgrade path for everyone else.
>> Mostly because the Pro market now encompasses everyone wanting to upgrade their lower-end MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. Because there's no upgrade path for these users at the moment
That's exactly the boat I was in myself, my 2012 MacBook Air just wasn't cutting it anymore for my light Xcode use, but none of the MacBooks would have been much of an improvement in terms of computing power. Because I'm really not prepared to give up OS X yet I was basically forced to stick with the MBA, or buy a MBP at an even higher premium than before.
That said, I decided to close my eyes and plunk down the cash for a tbMBP anyway, and from a hardware perspective I love the machine, as I'm not affected by any of the (IMO for most people mostly artificial/overblown) 'problems' people are complaining about. None, except the price, which still leaves me with a bad taste. Something I haven't experienced with any of my numerous previous Apple purchases...
I completely agree. The battery life difference -- even those few hours -- are enough to drive me away. Combine that with an absurd price point jump, and I'm out. The macbook air 13" was the perfect developer laptop, and now I guess I'll buy a Lenovo Carbon X1 when this laptop dies. For my work, I don't need a big processor or high-speed RAM or high-resolution display. I need a light, usable laptop that will run all day surfing the internet in an airport. And the new MBP doesn't fit that use case.
And while the new 13" MBP is technically less volume, it's thick the whole length of it. There was something oddly nice about the MBA's shape when holding it in one hand.
It feels to me like you are putting this backwards. I've been using the MBP as my main software development platform for eight years now. My current machine is a maxed out mid 2014 15" MBPr. What does the new MBP offer me over that?
1) Very slightly faster. (2.9 vs 2.8)
2) 2 TB SSD instead of 1 TB.
3) Ability to charge and drive monitor over single cable.
But what is the price?
1) $4,199 -- nearly $1000 more expensive than the last one.
2) Complete inability to plug in any peripheral I already own without a dongle.
3) No physical ESC key.
It's only $150 more if I stick with a 1TB SSD. But if I do that, literally the only significant benefit I get from the new machine is the ability to drive monitor and charge over a single cable -- and of course, I've got to replace my existing (expensive, beautiful) monitor to do that.
Plus as an added bonus, they're discontinuing the Time Capsule, which has been my main local backup solution for years.
You nailed my two reasons for refusing to upgrade. I was planning to purchase the fully decked out MacBook Pro on release date. Then the keynote happened, and the hardware was put up for sale.
1. The removal of the physical escape key. I flat out reject having to remap the caps lock. The touch bar soft key is not an acceptable replacement. A physical escape key is unequivocally non-negotiable.
2. The price. I'm not going to pay $1,000 more for the same level of upgrades I got in 2013. With taxes, I had to dole out $3,200 CAD for a personal laptop, which was right against the fence of what I was willing to pay. I refuse to spend over $4,000 on a laptop.
These two issues, along with the removal of the headphone jack[1] on the latest iPhone puts me in the uncomfortable situation where for the first time in a decade I am researching alternative hardware outside the Apple ecosystem.
[1] My IEM headphones cost $1,500. I'm not going to carry an adapter to plug them in, and lose the ability to listen while charging.
MBP Model Read Write
Jul 2014 15" 1.1 GBps 1.0 GBps
May 2015 15" 2.0 GBps 1.5 GBps
Oct 2016 15" 2.9 GBps 2.2 GBps
These numbers come from different posts found on BareFeats[1]. Official claims, and other sources of benchmarks show approximately the same numbers for large sequential data throughput. It is moving from PCIe 2.0 to PCIe 3.0, and an increase in the number of data lanes that have allowed these rapid improvements. SATA III of older models is limited to about 0.5 GBps up and down.
You must be young. I've been using the same Emacs bindings for 35 years. I've changed my muscle memory before, and it took far longer than "a couple of days to adapt."
The previous 13" rMBP was already close enough to the Air, IMHO. And MagSafe has literally saved my laptops from destruction dozens of times over the years. The TouchBar is a stupid gimmick. These new MBPs won't have the shelf life of the old ones because the specs aren't improved enough. And the battery time is reduced and the price is increased over the old ones.
They are a worse product in every way for me over my current rMBP. Literally the only advantage is they are thinner and lighter and the display has a wider color gamut. Not worth all the trade offs. The old ones already had plenty of USB ports which today are more useful than USB-C.
I think this has little to do with the "reality distortion field" and everything to do with Apple steadily and irreversibly appliance-ifying their product line combined with a distinct lack of any kind of indication of direction for Apple and actual computers for people who do work. A lot of people were waiting for the MacBook announcement to give some hint, and a lot of them think they got one: Not a peep about anything besides a slightly more appliance-ified (and nothing else) laptop.
Regardless of strategic Cook leaks: Apple is deprecating macs-as-computers-for-professionals. It should be obvious why; so many HNers love to cheer market forces. Apple makes way more money on phones and shiny things, so that's all they're going to make from now on. Because the market cannot afford inefficiencies, and anywhere someone is making $0.99 when they could be making $1.00 is an inefficiency that must be corrected.
> Apple hasn't made a really revolutionary product since Jobs died.
It's more about regression for cosmetic reasons then not being revolutionary. There's potential with development of newer hardware and yet they use it to make slimmer devices and with less ports. Smaller motherboard ? Instead of slimming the shell, make it thicker and use the rest for batteries. 50 hour battery laptop, now that's revolutionary.
> I've been wanting a mac laptop the size and weight of a MacBook Air 13" but with a retina display for years
If they'd sold these new models as New Air, everyone would be fine; Air customers would be ecstatic and Pro customers would be interested. But they called them Pro and slapped (raised) Pro prices on them, which is basically trying to sell me shit for chocolate.
It's an utter failure of branding and marketing, which is what Apple is supposed to be the best at.
I'd say the lack of hardware function keys is an utter annoyance for 80% of existing Mac users, maybe 40% like you who can be convinced by the Touchbar provided as a replacement. Remains 40% annoyed users, minimum. Don't forget Macbooks are sold at a prime, so users are mostly people who use it professionnaly, >8 hrs a day, who expect something from it and are experts in using it (even the basic photographer ends up mastering the keyboard shortcuts of Adobe, starting with... the Esc key).
Since the Touchbar may convince noobs like my 15-year-old, provided they're spoiled with laptops no-one can afford, you may end up with a situation where old farts are only 5-10% still cursing at the lack of hardware Esc/Function keys. But that's because of the attrition of professionals, not because you've made a good product.
Face it, the market actively rejects this innovation. A lot of people who wanted to renew held off, and are replacing their Macbook with... nothing. It's a bit like if your boyfriend leaves you, and if he doesn't have anyone else to date. He just leaves you because you're bad, because your prices increased too much, and because your features are missing. I don't even thing Microsoft's innovation plays much of a role in Apple's attrition.
Now let's talk about the missing battery life incidator, the missing battery life, the missing magsafe, the missing USB ports, the missing compatibility with iPhone 7's USB key.
One more thing. The new Macbook isn't on display in stores (in France at least), 6 weeks after the keynote and one week before Christmas. Apple really has a problem with procurement.
You can literally set the Touchbar to just show the function keys.
I keep mine dynamic, have been using the laptop for a month now, and can say there has not been one occasion when the escape key wasn't there when i wanted it.
And having TouchID sensor more than makes up for it.
Of all you criticism not one has been a problem to me except battery life which is quite bad on mine.
What I take away from this is that they've devoted so little resource to Mac internally that people in the know are asking inconvenient questions, hence the need for this article. You don't hear him assuring people about the iphone.
The larger size iPad Pro is an amazing drawing tablet, I’m really glad to have one. I’d recommend one to anyone trying to take notes with a pen, make sketches, design anything (from furniture to web apps), work as an illustrator, etc. I find the pen and display to beat anything else available right now, unless you need a very large display.
There’s definitely room for software to catch up for other types of uses, but that’s more a matter of third party developers stepping up. (And the general poor market / software ecosystem on the iPad, with relatively weak sales of pro apps in general.)
Don’t expect it to be a laptop replacement. (I know some people who have had success with this, but for me the uses of iPad and laptop are almost entirely non-overlapping.)
It’s also great for watching video, and I have friends who have enjoyed playing games on one.
> that’s more a matter of third party developers stepping up.
I think the hardcore sandboxing iOS forces doesn't really work well with "Pro" workflows. Say you want to edit a Word document and insert a picture - unless both your word processor app AND image-editing app are somehow integrated with dropbox / icloud, you can't do it; if you don't want to store your multi-gb image on "the cloud", you can't work with it; etc etc. Are these use-cases for laptops only? Yeah, maybe; but that's the sort of thing the iPad Pro was supposed to do.
I was (and still am) a big supporter of laptop-replacing tablets, but Apple didn't really manage to pull it off with this device. MS seems to have nailed it better, and I'll probably get a Surface-like as soon as prices come down a bit.
That is an understatement: while sandbox restrictions can be bad for users, they can be a nightmare for developers who enter the feared 'app rejection cycles'.
Been using a Windows tablet recently, and there is a sharp line between the Win32 programs and the metro apps.
Thus you can say that a Windows tablet is a Windows desktop computer with Windows Mobile embedded.
As for the sandbox thing, i agree highly. Sadly the valley seems convinced that heavy sandboxing is the only way forward, no matter how much it infantilize the user.
Likely because the biggest proponents expect that they will always know the magic knock to get the sandbox to go away...
The problem with the iPad Pro is that from a professional's perspective, it's a much inferior Wacom Companion or Surface Pro. The pen and display might be very good, but what's the use of having a really good pen and display if you can't run Photoshop, Illustrator or Manga Studio?
Have you used a Surface Book? I bought mine as a development laptop with the touchscreen/pen as a bonus, but was pleasantly surprised at how nice they've been (I'm only an amateur/hobby drawer though)
I found Android Wear to be superior to it. Some gripes I've had: read notifications aren't synced with the phone, it is impossible to mark an email as read without opening it, no third-party watch faces, the appointment shown on the watch face won't change to the next one until the current one is over (horrible with back to back appointments, Android shows the next one 10 minutes into the current one), the iMessage app often contains conversations I deleted weeks ago, apps are slow to launch and sometimes don't launch at all. Also no always on screen with slightly worse battery life (than Android).
The Apple Watch is a much better fitness tracker than my old Android Wear watch, which had a very inaccurate heart rate sensor.
I personally think the iMac has been an amazing all-in-one package. It's simplicity gives it an appeal that has made it a near-perfect tool for casual users who want to avoid the quirkiness of Windows. The iMac also scales up to heavy-hitting design work and I rarely see a lot of complaints until you get to render heavy applications or try to do multi-track and high resolution video editing and motion graphics, which it isn’t really designed to do. But it's an amazing screen and overall it's very capable and well rounded.
The current Mac Pro has some serious flaws though. The concept was neat, but it wasn't proven in the pro market. Video Production is becoming increasingly demanding as camera resolutions climb. Since the release of the Mac Pro, a lot of people started jumping ship and going to Windows.
Today, if you're buying a Mac Pro, it’s probably not because it's an amazing machine, but because you aren't ready to leave OS X (MacOS) yet. That’s is a hard pill to swallow after years of relying on the dependability of the Mac desktop. Maybe they’ll give it a refresh, but I don’t see the tower with PCI capabilities coming back.
As for the Mac Mini, the only thing that was good for was a small server or media center, at least to me. And they abandoned that a long time ago.
My friend really likes his, though his biggest complaint keeping him off, is he wants a matching 5K display, so he can have dual displays off his iMac, which isn't an option, and apple killed their display line.
For me, the highest end mini is almost enough, as I really don't want a built in display at all... The mac pro is too overpriced (more than it was when last refreshed) and there's no new mac pro in sight... and to be honest, I really want a mid-range "Mac" (not pro, not mini), effectively i5-i7 iMac hardware without a built in display, hell build it off an itx platform board in a fancy case, then allow the pricing to rule itself out... I mean, keep the developers happy and making apps for their iOS devices... yeah, we'll build other stuff too, but really they need to figure out that a lot of actual software developers (the people that make the stuff that makes their platforms worthwhile) aren't happy with the options available.
I agree. I don't know if Apple would do it, but it would be great if they offered a Mac Pro with iMac style chips (i5 and integrated graphics at the low end) with prices starting at $1000 or $1500. Using the same case as the Xeon Mac Pros might save some money and keep things simpler.
Then they could make the Mac mini smaller and cheaper, like a scaled-up Apple TV. SSD only, no hard drive, 2 or 4 USB 3 ports, Ethernet and HDMI, starting at $399.
Doesn't even need to be called "pro"... just the new "Mac"... It's definitely an area I'd be interested in buying at, where the mini isn't quite there enough for me, and the pro is way too pricey.
The iMac is "amazing" only if you don't do CPU intensive stuff with it. Otherwise it whirrrs and throttles down. Personally I care more about the whirrring than the thermal throttling, but it's not amusing to not get the CPU/GPU speed you paid for either.
The Mac Pro is a video editing appliance ATM.
What they don't have is a developer/hobbyist oriented desktop. And this will bite them in the ass long term, because they will lose mind share. I'm very close to switching back to Linux if they don't offer me a developer oriented Mac Pro in the next 1-2 years.
Covered with the thin one that gets noisy when you compile, or with the super expensive one where half the price of the hardware doesn't help you with development? :)
I think this "assurance" pretty much confirms for me that Apple has internally begun to shift even more resources away from the Mac and the Macbook.
The very weak nature of the response which really does not provide any specifics what-so-ever is very typical when the underlying reality matches the rumor but the guy in charge just can't say it yet.
Tim Cook is Apple's Ballamer - An ops. guy, great for the bottom line but fundamentally stuck in the past.
I think you're are a bit unfair to Ballmer, recently he admitted that they were late to the game but he was pushing for hardware and was not supported by the board[1]. Not everything MS is doing is becaus Ballmer is gone but also because Ballmer prepared Microsoft for it.
> everything MS is doing is becaus Ballmer is gone but also because Ballmer prepared Microsoft for it.
There is very little evidence for this. An argument can be made for laying the ground work for Azure, but Ballmer had nothing to do with MS's recent efforts in open source and other exciting newer initiatives in the company.
The response is weak and uninformative because it's posted on an internal message board, which might as well be a public Reddit thread as far as an exec is concerned. Did you expect him to post a picture of Jony Ive posing in front of 25 iMac ID prototypes? If he says anything else he's said too much.
I sold my MacBook Air a year ago and don't really miss it. I do my day-to-day development work on a very small Lenovo desktop PC running Ubuntu connected to two Dell 23" IPS screens. It's fast, silent and cheap & easy to upgrade w/ standard PC parts. And since all my servers run Ubuntu there's very little context-switching needed between my dev & live environments.
For light photo editing work I use a Windows PC. I'm interested in doing more serious photo editing and the best practise industry expert recommendation is to buy a custom made PC (e.g., https://imagescience.com.au/knowledge/build-a-powerful-pc-fo...).
I don't follow hardware that closely but recent developments around e.g. the amazing speed of NVMe drives and AMD's Zen architecture make the PC hardware space look pretty exciting. The new MacBook's Touch Bar seems like a gimmick in comparison.
OK, if they are so committed, where is OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan support? Why is Safari so behind that it's now called "the new IE"? Talk is cheap, let them actually do something.
I'm not challenging your argument, but have you seen Safari Technology Preview [1]? It seems to be under healthy development; for instance, recently it became the first browser to support all ES2015/16/17 features [2]. So it may be just that the standard Safari release is behind.
This is inevitable when everyone else is on a 6 weekly release schedule (not sure about Edge, but Chrome/Firefox are) and they insist on aligning browser releases with OS releases for marketing reasons.
It does look like they've got a great release coming some time, but it's clear they care more about marketing it eventually than pushing the web forward by putting the latest and greatest in user's hands.
Even if Safari catches up, everyone is still forced to use it on their iPads and iPhones as their mobile browser rendering engine and no competition is allowed in that space. So, it will still be "the new IE" but worse than the old IE since competition is locked out at the OS level.
Not being allowed to run your own engine actually has deep ramifications. For example Firefox on iOS cannot support plugins, whereas on Android it does since the beginning. It also means that Firefox cannot compete in supported web standards or performance or whatever you can think of. And once upon a time these alternative browsers weren't even allowed to run the same JS engine as Safari, which meant they were forced to be slower. This changed fairly recently, somewhere around iOS 9.
Also other browsers on iOS are more restricted than Safari. For example those Safari content blockers don't work in Firefox. So given Firefox's inability to provide plugins, this means that in Firefox you are forced to load and see annoying ads, whereas in Safari you don't have to.
On Android, Firefox is actually a good alternative to Chrome, albeit less well integrated, but then I can't imagine using a mobile browser without uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. But on iOS the alternative browsers like Firefox are nothing more than dumb shells around restricted functionality.
I'm using Firefox on all of my desktops (MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu), I'm using Firefox on my Android device. Guess which browser I'm using on my iPhone? ;-)
> I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space."
Since it uses Apple's engine underneath, you can't work around their ban on free codecs in the browser for example. Same goes for support for multiple HTML5 features (how about MSE for starters?). So it is clearly anti-competitive.
The team simply has different priorities in particular security and battery life which means some eg service workers take longer to implement (if at all).
That's why on my Mac unlike Chrome and Firefox, Safari isn't a memory hog that chews through battery life like it's nobody's business.
I find "experience" an odd word here. My browser is a tool, not a theme park or spa day. I want it to do work for me, not delight me. Perhaps I am misunderstanding "experience"?
An experience would be having a track day at Silverstone, not opening Safari.
Maybe we're both misunderstanding, but I think they meant "User Experience". Surely you agree that this is an important consideration in software development?
Pretty poor excuse. Apple has enough money to work on many things in parallel. So if they choke their browser development team, it means they are behind. Basically, it's barely important for them altogether.
Well, it doesn't matter if it's deliberate or simply lack of thought because of low priority. It is behind in the end. And if it is indeed deliberate - too bad. I don't expect Apple to change for the better until their upper management is replaced. Then may be they'll start moving and even add support for free codecs and allow using alternative browsers on iOS.
While some big developers might find it worth the investment to use metal, most of us won't. When you're already invested in OpenGL and you're a cross-platform developer, Metal is not even open for consideration. Vulkan maybe, once it's more established.
What I would really benefit from is updated OpenGL support. Right now, MacOS X is the lowest common denominator, with all the other platforms having 4.5+ as standard. I can upgrade to that with ease. But I'm never going to be able to justify rewriting the stuff with Metal, because it would mean a complete parallel implementation just for MacOS, since we would need to retain OpenGL everywhere else.
Vendor-specific graphics APIs are, for the most part, a legacy of the past which we were lucky to escape from. Apple creating Metal is an anachronism, and I don't think it will have a long life unless they make it portable.
That won't help those who don't have resources to add support for a redundant API, and would rather leave MacOS without some features than do the former.
> An open issue with anything newer than Direct3D9 is that wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 features and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts. With the MaxVersionGL key set wined3d will request a core context, but certain blitting corner cases are still broken. Mesa and the Nvidia binary driver mostly work. On MacOS you are most likely out of luck.
That phrase is confusing. They can use core profile, but Apple is simply stuck on older OpenGL, so features they rely on to implement DX11 aren't available on MacOS. So if Apple would have provided full OpenGL 4.5+ support, it wouldn't have been an issue.
I've not heard of any games or VR software released to the market that use Metal yet. I've heard it mentioned about projects still in development but so far that's all.
Both Unity and Unreal Engine (UE4) supports Metal, so any games created in Unity/UE4 for Mac & iOS might possibly use it. If the game doesn't need anything beyond GL 3 support then the creator might choose to not enable Metal and stick with GL.
I don't know what percentage of Unity/UE4 Mac & iOS games have Metal enabled, but it is potentially a very large number.
That's the thing about Metal -- as long as common libraries and game engines add support for it, most developers won't have to do much additional work to use it. Only people who are writing their own graphics engine from scratch would need to learn it.
Not everyone is going to spend resources on implementing a redundant API. Apple are just being their usual lock-in jerks by not supporting OpenGL and Vulkan.
> Why is Safari so behind that it's now called "the new IE"?
As an actual developer, who's been around since the eternal IE-version days, I really don't understand this criticism.
Honestly, Safari as a lot of new really nice browsers features that my clients are actually asking for, like blurred backgrounds[1] and native CSS carousels[2]. Realistically, things like WebRTC is only holding back a very specific subset of development.
MS is not part of Vulkan working group, and neither is Sony, so they don't do anything to support it. It can be supported on their systems only when they don't stand in the way (like on Windows or Android).
Regarding Nintendo, nice to see they are supporting Vulkan, but Nintendo Switch is not yet on sale and it remains to see how it will fare in the market against Apple and Google devices.
All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan.
> All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan.
No reason for them not to support it on any of their future devices. Older ones might not be possible, since Vulkan support has hardware requirements that not every GPU can fulfill (basically, no compute shaders = no Vulkan). Newer ones aren't a problem though, so I expect Nintendo to support it everywhere they can.
Also, think about it from GPU manufacturers perspective. Not only Nintendo have no need to reinvent the wheel anymore, they don't need to bug Nvidia about making special driver for them as well. They just use their Vulkan driver for their GPU (adapted for Nintendo OS which is FreeBSD based as far as I know). I.e. all win by stopping the pointless wheel reinvention (which costs money as well), and focusing on actually doing useful stuff. So I think Nvidia played a role here in pushing Vulkan through to Switch.
Same thing will eventually happen to Sony with whatever GPU they'll use then (AMD or Nvidia). MS will probably be the last to follow.
I thought the whole "crazy ones" theme was about Apple building things that helped people change the world. Somehow that's morphed into Apple changing the world. I think might be a problem.
What was the internal perception of Elop as CEO at the time? And of the push towards Windows Mobile? Did people see the writing on the wall or did everyone see promise?
I still remember seeing the promo videos for the...920 I think it was, and being utterly blown away. The promos were so good that whole communities dedicated themselves to proving that they were fake.
The statement doesn't mention the outdated, underpowered, and overpriced Mac Pro specifically, which would have been helpful to the Mac faithful. A few folks I know in the video space switched to Windows because you can build a rendering rig that's over twice as powerful for less than half the price.
I have moved from genuinely wanting to buy the new MBP pre-announcement due to technical reasons (battery life, screen) to only needing to buy it due to iOS development lock in. Reminds me very much of the process I went through with Windows based PCs (except back then it was gaming).
I think I'll just go back to a Linux laptop (all other boxes are so the laptop has always been the odd-box) and will say goodbye to the iOS world. I mostly do web anyway and can live with non-native or no Apple apps at all.
Fellow iOS dev here. I had a similar sentiment first, but this new MBP is a very fine machine. It's blazing fast and I don't need a touchscreen (I might even buy a touchbar-less version if they made one at 15"). The dongle thing will resolve itself in the next 2 years, with more peripherals going wireless or replacements with USB-C ports.
Will you really let go of Sketch and all the other great tools from 3rd party devs just because you don't like dongles & touchbar?
So many questions here. I'm sure Blackberry's CEO once said "Blackberry is not dead" – when the CEO worries about it, it means there's huge worries about it throughout the company. Were macOS leaders leaving in mass or something?
Also, there's not a single fact in Tim Cook's statement. It's not "We're investing in X or Y". It's not "Stay for 6 months and you'll be so stunned with our next release". It's not "We're planning a Macbook in 1 year to shut down criticism about last Macbook". It's "Please don't jump ship pleaaaaaase".
OTOH I'm super happy that Tim Cook noticed that there was a problem with the new Macbook and acknowledges it. It makes me hopeful, maybe he's going to take the right actions.
> the Apple Watch led to ResearchKit, which led to CareKit
That's the very wrong names to drop if Tim Cook wants to illustrate "How Apple employees get excited with anything". I haven't heard of them, and I follow IT news pretty thoroughly. They're rather an illustration that Apple employees are focussed on little things, the middle-management is too free to wander off in lower-innovation areas.
The first thing I've learnt about innovation is first you need to execute well. People expect touchscreens, USBs/jack/Fn keys, a bug-free core system, 1-To HDDs, popular games... It's not innovation, it's just execution, which serves as a basis before going 10 steps ahead of everyone.
I just don't see why the statement is directed to employees. What's wrong with Apple's credit in the eyes if the the employees, are they getting demotivated? Isn't it rather the fanbase who needs convincing? Was the communique leaked on purpose to reassure the market?
Next thing you know, Apple removes the Control key.
Looks like damage control by CEO. There wouldn't be so much backslash towards latest MacBookPro if Apple were to keep all Mac models on annual refresh.
"The desktop is very strategic for us. It’s unique compared to the notebook because you can pack a lot more performance in a desktop — the largest screens, the most memory and storage, a greater variety of I/O, and fastest performance."
To certain user communities, "almost." I know I am looking forward to seeing the new iMac. Having a good portable device is secondary to me. My 2012 MacBook Air would be fine except for the lack of memory (only 4GB). So, I will probably purchase the new MacBook Pro without the touchbar, and then sell my MacBook Air.
I think the reason why we're stuck with the current Mac Pro is because Apple learned the wrong lesson from the Power Mac G4 cube. It was beautiful but few people bought it because you could get the more powerful and expandable Power Mac G4 for less money.
This time around, Apple didn't build the the tower nearly everyone in this market would have bought instead of the trash can.
Very true. The Mac Pro is eternally reminiscent of a trash can, and it feels hazardous leaving it out in the open, because maybe someone might actually mistake it for one and drop an empty coffee cup in it.
The lack of expandability makes it feel like a doomed purchase, and costing more than $2,000 means spending on something that might prove obsolete in a year (or possibly less) feels extremely frivolous.
Extensible hardware allows us to rationalize a big purchase with the mindset that there's an intent to future-proof with an investment that allocates room for growth.
That concept does not exist with the Mac Pro form factor at all. The purchase is not even slightly user-servicable. Only a subscription to a service/maintenance agreement (read: applecare) provides nigh-full-replacement insurance. And basically, you're just paying for the privilege to gamble. You'll never get to change your old toy into a new toy.
I mean really the only component you're ever going to be able to upgrade is RAM right? Are you suggesting it should be possible to swap out CPUs in iMacs?
But you can already upgrade your hard drives through the USB interface. Nowadays that's plenty fast enough even for external SSDs. You don't really need SATA any more.
That is actually my biggest gripe with the current model Mac Pro ("trash can"). If I'm using a desktop computer, I want everything to be enclosed in a single unit as much as possible. I have and still use the previous model of Mac Pro ("cheese grater"), and I have six internal hard drives, maxed out RAM, and several PCI cards. None of that is possible with any current model Mac except maybe the RAM.
I don't own a MacPro for that reason. I ended up building a desktop PC and using it as a hackintosh (though I gave up a couple years ago and now use a 15" rMBP more often).
For disks USB is alright but it's always been kinda flaky compared to SATA or PATA. The only external port I've used for external HDs that's been as stable as internal connections was FireWire, which unfortunately never really took off.
I could definitely see why professionals or otherwise demanding users might prefer internal disks over external ones.
true. of course, a lot of the external SSDs on the market are bound by SATA interface like speeds anyway (even if they have fast external ports). so they won't be as fast as the internal flash memory in, say, a new iMac. the comparison is roughly: 500 MB/s vs 1700 MB/s
an alternative to the garden variety external SSD would be an external PCI-E card housing (e.g. sonnet or akitio) connected through a Thunderbolt cable. now that's a lot faster.
but, for that we buy an external housing in addition to the actual storage that goes into the housing. so this is more expensive than computers which let us install a PCI-E storage card directly inside the case. which Macs don't let us do easily or at all.
Except when anything slightly unexpected happens (sleep etc), your external drive is not cleanly unmounted and you risk heavy data loss, whereas internal drives are always handled properly.
A relative gifted me an old PowerMac 8600/200, which originally came with a pre-G3 PowerPC 604e CPU, but had been upgraded to a G4 by swapping out the ZIF CPU card. It definitely gave a circa 1997 machine (original OS was either MacOS 7.6 or 8.0) a new lease on life and the ability to run OSX 10.2 Jaguar, (albeit slowly and after a serious RAM and HDD upgrade).
Yes indeed - the Umax S900. I used to have one, with dual 200MHz PowerPC 604e processors, hooked up to a 256GB SCSI RAID array. That felt pretty bad-ass back in 1997/1998.
I actually upgraded my mid 2010 iMac to a 512GB solid state disk. Made soooooo much of a difference. Literally went from almost unuseable to back to my daily workhorse. I can't remember how much time from power-on to login screen was with the original drive, but ballpark a handful of minutes. Now with the new SSD it takes less than 10 seconds.
This sycophantic gladhanding drives me up the wall.
>> ...it does result in truly impressive results from time to time, like the recent AirPods, which are an incredible weaving together of Apple’s hardware and software teams to produce something that works so much better than what came before it’s laughable.
If apple focused on great hardware and software like it did through the 2000s rather than unnecessary, un-asked-for "courage" bloat, people wouldn't be asking these questions in the first place.
the whole desktop line is in serious need of a refresh. at least some new Mac Mini units. it's been over two years now. I bought the mid-range Mac Mini, and it's identical to what's in the Store today.
That whole line needs more RAM, newer CPUs, and SSD across the board. :|
But don't actually LIKE the mac mini. It's not something I particularly want.
I do kind of want the huge cinema displays. But they're expensive.
I do kind of want the cylindrical mac pro. But it's expensive.
Apple's laptops are the sweet spot. I want them. The price is right. And they have performed. Tablets and touchscreens suck compared to a solid laptop.
Mac minis are borderline indistinguishable from any other mac during use. But they've always been coasters. Lazy susans. Arm rests. Furniture.
The only time you think about it being a mac mini is when you cycle power, or when you imagine opening it up, and adding more power because multi-tasking.
Providing the mac pro at closer to mini prices would be cool. The polished metal cyclinder is kind of cool. But it's hard to find fetish items that endure six months these days. The death march of cell phone upgrades has seen to that.
Once they started soldering and epoxying internals, well... I start to feel guilty about polluting the environment with electronics waste, and I start googling recycling programs.
"Apple's laptops are the sweet spot. I want them. The price is right."
Is it, though? After evaluating the 2016 13" (and having owned a 2012, 2014 and early 2015), I now have the Kaby Lake XPS 13".
$1799 for a _similarly_ (because yes, I know it doesn't have Touch ID, or the display - but build quality is similar, the display is better - 3200x1800, more connectivity options) specced model that costs $2499 from Apple.
$700 is a decent chunk of change, and yes, over the course of a couple of years life, for a developer, it's not earth shattering. But it is nearly 40% more expensive, for questionable value.
Oh, definitely true. Apple is always a higher price in general, just as a brand name. It's their intended marketing strategy.
Even within Apple's own product line though, compare what you get with the cylindrical desktop Mac Pro for the price, and stand it next to one of their own laptops.
Then stand the Mac Mini next to them. It's a lower price, but it's uncharismatic.
A game changer for the mac mini might be improved methods of environmental integration. Most of the time I think about better ways to hide it, out of sight, out of mind.
The only thing I want within immediate reach is a power button, and a wall switch (any variety of toggle) would be ideal. Hard wired. An actual button. I press button, it goes on. I press button, it goes off. Not an animated skeuomorphic 16 million color display depicting one. No wi-fi tether. No analytics. No GPS. No chipset. No thunderbolt. No USB. No IP address. No internet of things. Just a god damned switch. On/off. The end.
Mac Pros were hugely disappointing for professionals:
- The big boxes were highly upgradeable, which is what a professional needs.
- The trashcans are a nice concept but traded the main perk of Mac Pros for design.
I don't think anyone really wants the mac mini. What I want is a stackable, modular mac desktop. On top goes the core unit, with the CPU, Ram and integrated graphics. Below that, you can attach a graphics module if you want graphics, Storage modules, expansions etc. It's very possible with today's connectors and it feels like a very Apple thing to do. They don't seem to have an interest in really pushing desktops though.
I absolutely want a Mac mini. I want a Mac to develop software, run Adobe Illustrator, and do all the day-to-day stuff like email. I have monitors already so don't need an iMac, and the Mac Pro is more power than I need. The Mac mini is spot on.
I would buy a new mac mini immediately, should they manufacture one that was worth buying. I still have the original PowerPC G4 mini, and upgraded the RAM and HDD in that. For a modern equivalent, I'd like to be able to replace the RAM and SSD at a minimum. But apart from that, I'm actually OK with the limitations; I have a beefy PC for the big stuff, but I do need a mac around for mac-specific stuff, and one with good enough graphics and CPU would suit me fine. It's a shame that they no longer make a suitable system.
I very much want another Mac Mini. For what I need at home, it's the perfect little machine. I don't need much for graphics or onboard storage, and the Mac Pro is wicked overkill. I love the iMac line, but I like being able to use my own monitor as well and just upgrade. The Mac Mini physically fits in my life better too.
> “Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” Cook wrote. “If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.”
Having them in the roadmap only does so much, though; people need to buy computers now, and having some unspecified (but "great") computers that will come out at some unspecified later date isn't the same as having up-to-date computers now, and it doesn't show that when those computers in the roadmap do materialize, that they won't be left fallow for years as these were.
I just spent ~$4,000 over the weekend on components to build myself a shiny new desktop. It'll be running Linux, just like my primary laptop does, and so I imagine I'll probably sell my one-year-old MacBook Pro before long as well.
I'm sure 6 months ago apple would have said they are working on "great" laptops. But we ended up with half ish the battery life promised, 16GB ram max, and needing dongles to connect to monitors, mouse, cameras, or external disks.
32GB ram laptops don't utilize LPDDR3, as in Low Power DDR3, which is used to reduce power consumption.
If you're happy carrying a "portable" jet turbine, be my guest.
>> 32GB ram laptops don't utilize LPDDR3, as in Low Power DDR3, which is used to reduce power consumption. If you're happy carrying a "portable" jet turbine, be my guest.
I think you're missing the point. People want the option for 32GB even if it increases power consumption. Given how most people don't need more than 16GB, you can probably assume that those pining for 32GB are at least willing to make that compromise.
I'm sticking to my 2015 MBPr until the next refresh. That refresh should be based on Intel Kaby Lake and the 200 chipset. This at least technically will allow Apple to offert 32 GByte memory versions.
Because it would require the change of design as Phil supposedly stated. However attaching lightning proboscis and "revolutionising" keyboard by removing key(s) obviously is a piece of cake and a way to go.
Seriously. They do not care about RAM as Pro users clearly do and we feel betrayed. I wonder if and when will anti-touch display stubbornness vanish as it kind of did when they introduced stylus (sorry, Pencil).
No. Apple decided between adding more, but more power hungry memories and battery life. 16 GByte memory was deemed ok for most of all users and battery life became more important.
Design within the limitations and handling market requirements in short.
No, it can't be. Intel provides their best products as given by their constraints, goals and customer demands (and Apple is a big customer). Apple releases the best products based on their goals, constraints and customer demands (as much as Apple now listens to them).
I really have my doubts, because most of the gear I have won't be changing by then. The "solution" will remain for me to have two sets of cables for most of my gear: USB-B/C to USB-A and USB-C cables (because I'm not replacing my desktop anytime soon).
Which roots? The System 8 and 9 days, when my Mac would freeze on me every day? Throughout its history, Apple has had its ups and downs when it comes to quality on the desktop. There have been high points (System 7, OS 10.4 or so?) and low points, just as Microsoft have had their Windows 2000 and (shudder) Windows Me. There are no "roots", there are only local minima and maxima.
Wtf, Win 2000 was boss. It took the desktop in the XXI century with the NT kernel. Sure, it had some security issues, but it was the best desktop ever at the time, and a real revolution.
I don't think "only ruin remains" is a fair statement to say about Apple, when the causes you're lamenting are the saving grace that got them to be a $300B+ company from effectively the brink of death.
Honestly I've been feeling the same way lately, not so much about iTunes but about the post-iPhone, post-Steve Jobs Apple. I've been a Mac user for over 10 years. In 2006 it felt that Apple was fully devoted to the Mac and its Mac customers. It made computers that fit the needs of a wide variety of people, from casual users to power users. Its hardware was upgradeable, even if it sometimes meant needing to unscrew a lot of screws (but this was not true in highly accessible models such as the Power Macs and the MacBook). OS X was absolutely fantastic. It was heads and shoulders better than Windows XP and Windows Vista, and desktop Linux was a major hassle back then, especially for laptop users. Quite frankly, the Macintosh of the mid-2000s was the closest thing to personal computing perfection I've ever experienced.
But once the iPhone came out and became a major success, it started to appear that Apple was neglecting the Mac. Hardware refreshes, which used to occur roughly twice a year for most models back in the mid-2000s, started to reduce in frequency. Thinness and lightness started to become the design goals at the expense of upgradeability and performance, first with the soldered-on memory of the original MacBook Air in 2008 and with the non-user serviceable battery in the 2008 uni-body MacBook Pro. Then once Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, these trends started to intensify. The soldered-on nature of the MacBook Air spread to the MacBook Pro. The easily serviceable white MacBook was discontinued. The Mac Mini, which at one point had user-upgradeable RAM and had an option for a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, was nerfed, with no quad-core option and with soldered RAM. Even the iMac got the soldered RAM treatment, except for the high-end 27" model. The only truly upgradeable and expandable Mac, the Mac Pro, was transformed from a mini-tower to a modern day version of the G4 Cube, but with no expansion slots (the G4 Cube had one slot, if I recall correctly). And while Apple's hardware offerings increasingly became non-upgradeable and compromised, Apple's refresh frequencies started dragging out dramatically; the worst being the Mac Pro, which hasn't been refreshed in three years, an eternity in the computing world. And I haven't even gotten into the port situation, especially with the new MacBook Pro.
The sad thing is that for me and other fans of Mac OS X, there are no longer any "no compromise" personal computer solutions these days like what Apple used to provide back when the company was fully devoted to the Mac. I assessed the situation in 2013 and ended up holding my nose and buying a MacBook Air despite my dislike for non-upgradeable hardware since I didn't want to have to deal with Windows 8 and the controversy surrounding GNOME 3/KDE 4 at the time. Now it's 2016 and the situation regarding the Mac has worsened. Today's Macs are not much of an upgrade from my 2013 MacBook Air, although I hope my out-of-warranty MacBook Air will last me a few more years. The PC world has a wonderful selection of hardware at every price and performance point imaginable, which appeals to me. Unfortunately, buying a PC means having to deal with Windows or desktop Linux. While they've come a long way since the days of Windows XP and 2005-era distributions, they are still, in my opinion, far behind Mac OS X when it comes to consistency, polish, and productivity. Two weeks or so after Apple announced its 2016 MacBook Pro, I bought a refurbished ThinkPad T430 to familiarize myself with Windows 10. Windows 10 isn't that bad, but I ran into an annoying problem regarding drivers. When I tried to insert a USB 3.0 thumb drive into the USB 3.0 port, Windows complained that it couldn't recognize it. My MacBook Air had no problems recognizing it. I tried updating the drivers on my ThinkPad; still no good. Finally I installed FreeBSD on my ThinkPad. It recognized the thumb drive perfectly fine. If drivers for a common laptop are more of a hassle on Windows 10 than on FreeBSD, something must be wrong.
It saddens me that after decades of Apple providing an alternative commercial platform for those who won't do Windows, Apple has given up, not because Microsoft has crushed it, but because Apple now has a reliable revenue stream coming from its consumer electronics devices and from casual Mac users and no longer needs to cater to more-demanding users. Unfortunately what this means for us power users is that we have been handed over to the world of Windows and desktop Linux, and there is no modern-day polished third party OS like BeOS, OS/2, or OPENSTEP out there for us in 2016. It's really sad, and I don't think there's a viable solution. We power users are a niche market, and nobody is going to invest the millions of dollars and the major engineering effort needed to build an OS (or even a Linux desktop environment + an app ecosystem) that is as polished as OS X just to placate a bunch of disaffected Mac power users.
Sadly it looks like I'm either going to need to hold on to Mac hardware like how many people in Cuba hold on to their 1950's American cars, or I'm going to need to suck it up and learn to love Windows and/or the Linux desktop. I apologize if I sound too melodramatic, but I feel like I've been abandoned with nowhere pleasant to go to.
I've never been an Apple user but I feel you. For me the most baffling part is that a company with supposed hundreds of billions in cash reserves is just sitting on their bottom ignoring a good chunk of their users. I've heard some news that they fired a lot of QA engineers as well but I have no clue if that's true or not.
It does make a lot of sense to keep a strong hold of your market even if you are struggling. Even if you don't have good ideas about innovation, periodical hardware refreshes and opening up a little would project an image of you planning to return, even if it's 2-3 years down the line.
The lack of action from Apple's side however is the most non-sensical reaction in this situation. I honestly can't explain it -- unless we assume that bean-counting businessmen forbid any action where no big profit margins are visible.
As for the current PC/laptop landscape, you might be a little too melodramatic. Windows 10 is an extremely capable consumer-grade OS and while it absolutely doesn't have the polish of macOS, it's the OS that works with the most hardware in history (I was really surprised to read you had a problem with your USB dongle; I have 5 different brands of dongles, USB Type-A and Type-C alike and they worked out of the box) and shows a lot of potential for the near future.
I do agree that the [former] attention to detail Apple showed was unmatched. It's a huge loss to simply let a good chunk of your users go.
More then 90% of that cash is overseas, and Apple is not going to bring it back to the US. (Maybe at some point they'll move engineering where the cash is so they can put more of it to use.)
I had a kind of similar feeling: the Mac hardware tag price is going higher and higher while its performance doesn't come close that of PC, but on the other hand I utterly don't want a PC running Windows 10.
I actually like Windows a lot: I was running Windows 7 as my main operating system on my Macbook Pro for years (until HDD problem, and sadly Windows cannot be installed on a disk connected to the optical sata connector). But I hated the UI nerfing coming with Windows 8. I used it nonetheless because I needed it for Windows Phone development.
But Windows 10 is another whole story. Beside the very unpolished UI, the major blocking point for me is the forced update system. Not that minor updates is a problem, I would apply them anyway, but Microsoft also releases entire new operating system via this system and brand them as updates (eg. Anniversary Update). This can break compatibility, this can mess up the whole system (it happened for each release so far) and it is totally unacceptable for me, as a computer science educated people, to let a third party replace my whole system on my hardware without my consent.
Because I don't except the Mac situation nor the Windows 10 one evolving in a way I like in the foreseeable 2 or 3 years, so I end up buying a Macbook Pro retina 2015 with 256GB and French keyboard layout. Note that I only did that because I'm in a short trip in Japan and the yen/euro conversion rate helped my paying 1214€ for a machine sold 1 689€ at home (= 475€ off) and I wouldn't have buy a new Mac at its full French retail price. I love the retina screen, but I feel forced a bit forced in my buying.
1) OSX is not viable any longer? Really? As evidenced by what? I mean, looking at WWDC talks, there's a ton of improvement year over year. Of course there's always more things that could be done, but remember, the core OS team is very small (especially compared to Microsoft, for example). Not to say that there isn't stagnation in some UI aspects (Finder, I'm looking at you...) but saying that the entire OS is no longer viable is a bit dramatic.
2) I don't see much competition that can even match Apple's build quality. The ones I do see, I am excited about, because that means they are striving to improve, and can challenge Apple and force them to improve more. Much better that, than having Apple rest on their laurels because nobody is even trying to get close.
I agree but on the viable operating system part, I think it's important not to discount the impressive research that has gone into the power saving and security aspects of the Darwin kernel, as well as innovations in saving of application state and state sharing between devices
Mac OS X or whatever they're calling it at the moment is buggier than it used to be. 10.11 is where I really started noticing it. The OS no longer deals with memory pressure well, causing the computer to freeze up when Safari's memory usage spikes. The new USB stack in 10.11 often has me restarting the computer to get my devices working again. In addition to big things like that being broken, I'm finding more and more little things not working like they used to. I recently came across a bug that would sometimes not allow me to select a file in an open dialog with my cursor, but I could select it with the keyboard and arrow keys.
Apple really needs a Snow Sierra release to just concentrate on squashing bugs.
I'm not so sure it's no longer viable as it is stagnant.
Looking at some of the major "features" - more emoticons and reactions in Messages... Siri.
Some were certainly nice - Apple Pay... but I don't really see PIP being used, or Continuity (which usually actually pisses me off, because I'll switch from my Mac to my phone with an image or similar on the Clipboard, and have to wait several seconds while Continuity syncs - shame, such potential).
OSX/MacOS is still viable but it doesn't receive the attention it once did. It feels second-rate compared to the mobile OS. I get the feeling one day Apple is going to release the new MacBook and it will just be an iPad with a keyboard.
And looking back on ye olden MacOS 9, prior to OSX, there were things that just felt nice about the interface that no longer hold sway.
Clicking on an icon gave an immediate response. The mouse cursor felt more precise. Compare to these nightmarish touchpad/button slabs (and worse still, touchscreens), mouse movement and pointer precision were lightyears beyond the way things seem to work lately.
I have to retry things a solid 1/3 of the time, because some kind of gesture or taptic garbage tripped me up, and pushed me into an unintended outcome. I have to focus, and concentrate on finessing my hand motions and pressure or I am punished by mistakes that need an undo. When I'm in a rush, life is hell. This makes me hate life.
No zealously decorative animations meant (on an unstressed system with low CPU/RAM load) the menus flashed before you like lightning. Text was crisp, unshaded pixels, with no font smoothing. There were no transparency overlays, and so everything was high contrast. Nothing was EVER lagged by network traffic except browser images and FTP/SMB shares. (and doom deathmatches)
Most of this was also true of Windows 2000 at the time.
Had operating systems stood frozen (particularly GUIs), while terabytes of disk space, gigabytes of RAM and dozens of CPU cores had inflated our hardware resources, I've often held the belief that we'd like our computers more, and fewer people would be as obnoxiously incompetant with computers as we see. I'm probably wrong, but the idea feels right.
It's poorly maintained. Large parts haven't been updated in a decade.
Take a basic command, `readlink -f`. Works everywhere except MacOS X. This comes from FreeBSD, which added `-f` years ago, but MacOS X hasn't resynched its code with FreeBSD for an age, so it's running the version from 2007 or similar. I can show you plenty of examples of this sort.
It would take very little effort to do this on a regular basis, and it could probably be automated.
This creeping incompatibility due to being outdated and unmaintained is becoming increasingly problematic. Not something a regular user cares about, but for development and technical users, it's lacking.
This comes at no surprise. I predicted that at some point desktop computers used by designers and software engineers would start approaching workstation class pricing (around 4K USD or more) as laptops took over. This will reflect the depressed demand as more people are able to get what they need done via a laptop.
Apple might be one of the few manufacturers able to sell desktops at a loss, and justify it since the Makers are the ones using them to generate demand for other, higher margin products like phones, tablets, and laptops.
The PC market also exhibits this trend, but at a slower pace because PC gamers keep prices a little more depressed. However now that high end GPUs are approaching $1000 each, it's probably happening there too.
High-end GPUs are overkill for most tasks for software developers. My current PC has a $600 GPU in it (because I wanted to buy top-of-the-line, and that meant the 980 Ti; I carried it over to the new build), which is now about a $300 GPU. The rest of the desktop was $800, including 32GB of RAM and a 6700K. It's not nearly as expensive as you suggest and it's not going to be.
A high-end PC is going to top out at $1400 or so for the foreseeable future. You can go higher if you want to pay for it--but you aren't going to need to. If anything, those prices will come down, not go up.
I wonder if a problem is maintaining a commitment to the Mac when the computer market is no longer committed to desktop / laptop computers in general. It seems that the world has kinda topped out on what they (we?) need, which is some kind of modestly functioning computer with a keyboard for "work," and a phone for everything else.
The "death of the desktop computers" is greatly exaggerated.
It's simply that a well-built future-proof PC can easily last you 5 years. I have the 2nd generation i7 and after 5 years of usage, I only added 16GB RAM and a better GPU (since I play demanding games). Might add 2x 512GB SSDs but I guess I'll just switch the motherboard and CPU in order to be able to use the NVMe models.
Anyway. The market might have platooed on the profit margins several years ago but that doesn't mean that the PC and gaming laptop branches aren't VERY much alive and kicking, and even gathering steam lately.
Good ol' i5-2500k Sandy Bridge keeps going on strong. I expect it to last yet another 5 years. "Thanks" to intel monopoly the desktop has been in a good place (if a tad expensive) for a long time now.
You still going to be able to build a "workstation" PC for less than apple.
And I am assuming you mean a Single i7 on consumer mother boards.
I am not sure if even the most expensive MAC pro could get near something built on say the X99-E-10G WS workstation class MB (4x SLI and 128GB Main Memory)
What do you need a Pro for that you can't do on a 15" MacBook or iMac? Serious video editing and 3D graphics. That's about it. For 95% of us the portables get the job done.
3D graphics - the graphics of the Mac Pro have not been refreshed in 3 years. Lots of memory. More CPU than the iMac. Better storage. Multiple screens. Better cooling. I have a MB Pro and an iMac, and while they are great devices, a proper desktop mac is something I miss.
I was just struck at how Trumpian this sounds: "If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that."
Though I also notice the Obamian "let me be very clear". Tim Cook for President?!
It's one thing to be committed to the Mac. But do they see the Mac as a Mac, or do they see it as an iPad Super?
If they're going to commit to the iPad Super at the expense of the Mac that professionals have come to rely on, they are going to have a seriously disgruntled user base.
I think my next Mac will be a desktop because the current lineup of Macbooks do absolutely nothing for me and my current Macbook will be going to the great Apple Store in the sky sooner rather than later. And perhaps an Android tablet for being on the move.
My main issue with macOS is that it is terribly slow with HDD. For example, if you launch Office or any other heavy application on a HDD macOS, the app start time is the range of tens of seconds (unacceptable), but if you do so on a SSD macOS the app start time is the range of seconds (acceptable).
IMHO, there are two solutions to this issue:
a) Change the macOS filesystem so that it is at par with ntfs in terms of I/O performance.
b) Keep the current macOS filesystem with its performance issues, but make HDD effectively obsolete by releasing a lineup of SSD-only Macs at an attractive price point so that users are compelled to change their old HDD systems.
Seems ironic. When I worked there, all Apple employees had a Mac on their desk and probably used it on a daily basis. Yet the CEO thinks he needs to assure the employees that Apple is still committed to improving them.
"Cook cites the far better performance of desktop computers, including screen sizes, memory, storage and more variety in I/O"
A bold statement considering that the only I/O on the current iMac is 4x USB, 2x thunderbolt, Ethernet, SD card, and a 1/8 jack- a collection of ports bested by all but the most anemic computers
Edit: fixed port thanks to HillaryBriss. I was actually too generous in my original listing of ports
Committed to the Mac sounds great, but it's not just hardware updates that are lagging. macOS software applications aren't updated/maintained as much as they should be.
I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-charting and wire-framing.
The new Linux subsystem thing is a god-send. It was completely seamless for me to transition from the Mac to Windows pretty much solely because there wasn't really a transition. All our provisioning and development scripts just worked.
It's been fun to do a bit of gaming on it too :)
The touchpad is really the only thing that I think compares poorly. Apple really nails that whole experience. After a few weeks I'm getting better with it, but it's still painful compared to the precision and certainty I had on my Macbook Pro.
I'm sure I'll be back on a Macbook someday (cause hey, change is fun) but no regrets right now.