I think there is a decline in the quality of Apple's software. However I think there is a correlation between the amount of users and complaints / bugs found. Now that Apple has a large and growing user base the seeming quality is also degrading. However I could be wrong, just my opinion.
Personally I haven't had as many issues as described in the article e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me.
However the biggest issue I do have is anything network related. Getting new messages in Mail is terribly slow, iTunes constantly gives me an error then loads the album or whatever just fine afterwards.
This is my experience. I have a late 2013 iMac with a spinner running El Capitan and it's one of the absolute worst OS experiences I've ever had and I've been using computers since the 80s.
Until six months ago I did most of my day-to-day web browsing on a 2007 MBP with a 7200 RPM 160GB drive. I had to upgrade because the dying GPU was destabilizing the system, but with 4GB of RAM and competent ad-blocking, it was fine for the light use it was getting, and that did include Spotlight searches.
I'm running on a 2012 Mac Mini Core i7 with 16GB of ram with a spinning rust hard drive.
El Capitan has sped up the OS for me compared to the previous OS X release. Yosemite was so bad that I found myself avoiding using my Mac Mini instead using my rMBP with an SSD because the Mac Mini just felt so incredibly slow. With El Capitan they feel similar to me. Certain disk operations of course are slower, but overall the usability has increased under El Capitan versus Yosemite.
Based upon informal replies on Twitter when I posted about my upgrade experience, I wasn't the only one that noticed a distinct speedup compared to Yosemite on older hardware.
Mid-2012 MBP with 2.5 Ghz i5, 4GB ram here. I thought Mavericks sped it up, but Yosemite is unnoticeable. I couldn't tell you if it is faster or slower than when I bought it, to be honest. All the problems people mention in the thread, I'm somewhat surprised by. I guess I'm lucky enough to not have wifi issues, rely on iTunes, or Apple Music.
I am using a old mac mini, and I can't afford a new one... every time I update xcode, it get slower and more unstable, specially because the memory consumption jumps up, it is now in a point where it uses more memory than the mac mini has in first place (meaning it is constantly trashing with swap... crashes are common too, project corruption is also getting increasingly common).
I lucked out that my current client had a old non-updated iPod to allow me to use (you can't use new version iOS with old Xcode).
Apple does very aggressively update software to work best with the latest hardware. Sadly this does cause some negative effects for older generation users but without taking advantage of the newer stuff those users get screwed as well.
That's the first thing that went through my mind when I read the complaint about Preview crashing. Then I got to thinking about how Preview can eat up a lot of memory in certain situations (maybe large complex documents rendered to retina framebuffers), so maybe it's a memory issue. Journalists may not be as likely as people like me to insist on ridiculous amounts of RAM.
There is a huge memory leak in Preview since El Capitan and the display of PDFs sometimes fails when you zoom in. I have no idea how many users are affected by this, but it seems strange that Apple hasn't fixed it yet. Perhaps it is just a tricky bug.
It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years.
My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically replaceable, but the specs that this laptop shipped with are going to be the specs that it dies with.
When the battery goes, I'll have to either risk destroying the machine or pay way too much to Apple to do the job for me. At that point I'll probably just switch to a brand with a more reasonable user-servicing model, assuming those still exist.
While I agree with you, when your current Mac is older and relegated to media PC duty, are you going to need more than the 8 or 16GB of RAM it shipped with? As for batteries, it's almost the exact same price to buy a battery a replace it yourself as it is to have Apple do it, and you don't have to deal with proper recycling (hopefully you would.) I'm hoping we see a reverse trend but who knows.
If and only if you live near an Apple store. Otherwise you might be without your machine for a week or two during that period: that is a serious cost for many people in our profession.
That's certainly a valid concern; I have never been in that situation so yeah that could be trouble. Aren't there typically local repair centers that do authorized repairs? If not that's a huge oversight even if they only allowed battery swaps. That said, I have a 2006 MBP that is ancient and still works when wired to power even though I can replace the battery it works fine as an email/web browsing headless with a monitor.
I guess you've hurt feelings with sarcasm? But I agree. Virtualization is a bad joke with 8GB of RAM today, so I decided to assume 16GB max isn't enough lifetime for a new system and wont be consuming in the current market.
Yeah, I feel the same way. I just upgraded a 2011MBP's HDD to and SSD and replaced the battery myself, and from start to finishing up the OSX install was about an hour. My 2013 MBP is nearly unrepairable. Which is too bad because I really like the hardware. Luckily other manufactorers are closing the quality gap quickly and functionally to me linux and OSX are nearly interchangeable.
It does suck the repairability is next to none but they have the best looking hardware out there. I have yet to see any other manufacture come close to what Apple can do hardware wise. A metal laptop enclosure is basically unheard of outside of Apple sadly. I would like to see someone step up.
That case could do double duty as an axe in a pinch. It's incredibly solid. I really wished the hardware was more standard there is no way I'm going to be using OS/X.
Actually, yes. Given my computer is always on display on a desk or table in my home, I consider it to be a piece of furniture. Therefore aesthetics are as much a consideration as they are for anything else I buy for for my home.
Just like people buy cars/homes/clothes/cellphones just because of how they look.
I'd argue they should look at the overall "package" when purchasing, but if looks are important to someone that's absolutely fine, and there is nothing wrong with valuing looks.
Try installing ubuntu on a 7.1 macbook air and feel some pain. You're right though, nice enclosure. Of course I really should have known better but the places that I shopped at did not have anything at all that came close in stock.
My Dell M3800 has everything a MBP has, including the aluminum enclosure and Thunderbolt port, and more, such as 15.6 4K touchscreen and multiple USB ports. Oh, and it's also repairable.
I'm running an M3800 with Mint Linux 17.3. I can squeeze 2 hours out of the battery if I really need to; suspend/hibernate is currently completely broken, requiring that I cold boot the machine each time I open the lid; bluetooth has never worked properly, even after extracting the proprietary firmware from the Windows drivers.
And this is on a machine that shipped from Dell with Ubuntu 14.04 installed, so supposedly all the hardware is open-source friendly.
Also, just for clarification, do you mean self-repairable? The review said it, like the MBP, has non-standard screw heads making repair difficult. Thoughts?
I don't know about self-repairable...yet. Mine's still under warranty, but that's almost up and I haven't had to use it.
I do use it plugged in most of the time, but I suspect that the review is spot on with the battery life. I maybe get a little more since I don't do much in the way of video, and I have my screen dimmed and my CPU in passive cooling mode.
I would say that some of the recent Dell, Microsoft, Asus and Razer designs are pretty nice, and there are plenty of metal laptop enclosures out there if you look.
I am typing on a $500 Asus flip that is all aluminum with a glass touchscreen. It is very nice, but I regret the OS (Windows 8.1,locked in place using the hosts file to avoid MS upgrades).
The issue I see is that the other side of the fence is not so sweet either. You cannot release a buggy OS that leads to my laptop bricking itself 3 times, and then jump right into another one with a hyper-aggresive update cycle, and expect me to follow along. Never. I risk losing massive amounts of work and significantly impacting my revenue at the same time.
I still have not decided if I will accept the sunk cost of Apple or a user experience downgrade to Linux, but hopefully I can put the decision off for a number of years like I did migrating away from Windows XP.
The entire modern tech ecosystem is rotten:
My drivers don't work. My OS doesn't work. The official development software for my target OS stinks. The official emulator to run it is dastardly. The api and functionality of the OS itself is pathetically broken, and less productive than battling bugs in php ten years ago. It all looks pretty from top to bottom if you squint, but the emperor definitely wears no clothes. 2016 is massively frustrating, and I long for the time when the basic premise of a computer being a tool that needs to function effectively was the norm.
I feel you. This is why I stick with Apple, however.
They may be declining, but they still have an overall "least frustrating" experience, especially when I have to help my family members with Windows 8 or 10, or need to Futz with my nephew's Linux setup.
Had to buy a new laptop to replace a 2009 MBP recently.
Chose the mid 2012 non-retina display. Took out the disk drive and put in my own SSD and RAM. Does everything I want it to do without the slightest complaint. All told I probably paid ~$700 less for a comparably powerful machine with 10x the internal storage of a late model MBP retina, albeit heavier and with a slightly inferior display.
Next time I need to upgrade I'm with you - it's just too painful to knowingly buy into an ecosystem where upgrades and repairs feel like unabashed extortion.
Obviously there's a very large target market of folks that just want their tech to work and will happily drop a few hundred bucks each time they need to upgrade or repair. But it's hard to go back once you've opened up your computer and seen how cheap/easy it is to replace some of these extremely modular components. I imagine my mindset will change as I get older and have less time/more disposable income.
> Obviously there's a very large target market of folks that just want their tech to work and will happily drop a few hundred bucks each time they need to upgrade or repair. But it's hard to go back once you've opened up your computer and seen how cheap/easy it is to replace some of these extremely modular components. I imagine my mindset will change as I get older and have less time/more disposable income.
There is. I'm 33, and do devops/infrastructure. I just want my rig to work. Macbook Air maxed out on ram and disk. To me, its disposable every three years (comes out to be ~$60/month).
Apple is going to have to get pretty bad before I throw away the experience of walking into an Apple store, buying a new laptop, restoring from TimeMachine, and being up and running almost immediately.
As you mention, disposable income and a lack of time changes the equation.
That's not a realistic comparison... My acculated sum of every webapplication i use is (outside of my business ofc):
- 9 € / month ( Google Play Music)
- 3 € / month ( Netflix shared with 3 other people)
- 3€ / month for Google Apps ( actually, this is business... But i also use the mail for private use..)
= 15 € / month.
If i'm not mistaking, you're OS X device costs you 4 times more every month then the sum of every online webservice i use.
( this is another comparison than yours.. Some people just throw out money, others don't :) . Earning a lot of money doesn't automaticly mean you have to waste all of it )
Well, my laptop costs 11,5 €/ month on the end of life ( cfr. other post) and i pay my ISP 25 € / month. So i still have less to pay with the sum of my webservices / laptop and ISP together then his 'power horse' :)
And I don't even get that much value out of my home internet access, since I'm at work the majority of the day and anything I absolutely need >50mbps for is already on my local network (Steam streaming, for example). Still, I'd feel even more ripped off paying for 50% of the speed at 80% of the price. Or 10% of the speed at 60% of the price.
Hehe, that's why I don't have a replacement machine yet.
Also because it has so far only died about once every two years. Every time due to human error (spilled things). I can afford a two day outage every two years :)
And mind you that just two years ago, I had the same kind of reaction to that sort of comment. It's not that hard to step up a few pay grades as an engineer these days.
Specialize in something (pick 2/3) new, hot, or rare. Be willing to move. Apply to lots of jobs. Ask for quadruple whatever you think you're worth. Chances are, something will pan out.
It's irrelevant. A top of the line laptop that's reliable costs about $3k regardless of manufacturer. At least last time I checked.
And no, not on Windows because in my experience it's the most terrible system for developers. Might've improved in the last 15 years.
And no, not on linux. In my experience it requires constant tinkering with the system. According to my friends still on linux, this hasn't changed in the last 3 years.
So yeah, I guess only mac is left. Which often still requires too much tinkering, but feels like less than linux. And I honestly haven't used windows in earnest in 15 years so hard to say.
Full stack developer here on Windows, not everything maxed out.
Payed 550€ for my laptop ( 8 gb, ..) 2 years ago, everything is still working fine and it's still enough ( Visual Studio is supposed to be a "heavy" program). = 23 € / month till now and still dropping... And it's hardly game over with my laptop. When i'm at 3 years, it will cost me about 15,2 € / month.
I'll probably use it for longer. But let's say i don't have any costs and sell the laptop for 150 €, that makes it 11,2 € / month.
PS. No repairs required untill date
Edit: You can install Linux on it too or dualboot it ( i did this a long time, but didn't feel the need for it now)
That's great if you're a Windows developer. If you aren't then congratulations your performance is cripped as you have to run everything inside a Linux VM. There are just too many open source projects that stupidly hard core path seperators or rely on UNIX binaries.
Microsoft would really do well supporting a truly great UNIX layer.
You have some point there, but a lot seems to work fine. The hardest problem i had was with a x64 binary for SQLLite ( Ruby On Rails), which i couldn't fix. Cygwin would be a recommender for anyone using Windows and programming languages other then .Net.
And once you know how the C++ compilation works with VC++, the problems are minimized. ( i mostly come this accross with Python)
I recently bought a Thinkpad to try if another platform would work. I first ran Windows 10 and found it unworkable and then installed Ubuntu, did some battery tweaking. It is great; have not touched my Mac since. Especially long battery life, swappable batteries and, for my taste, a better keyboard next to more ports is just better over all for my (full stack) dev.
How did you get great battery life from Ubuntu? I've never been able to get anything close to the runtime I get on OSX. In my experience, OSX gives me the longest batter life, second is Windows and any flavor of Linux is terrible (maybe 3-4 hours on a machine that Windows gives 5-6 hours).
I get 16 hours under my Lenovo with ubuntu with tlp default settings. I have to be careful a bit with browsers (they use most in my workflow) but usually I just use lynx for programming searches. OS X on my MBP is ghastly: Apple replaced the battery and I use the same software as under Ubuntu but I struggle to get 3 hrs. On my Air it was wonderful. Windows I have not used for anything serious in 20 years.
This is why most of my *nix work is done on my server at home (since I work from home). PyCharm pretty handily supports remote Python installations, so I can just use my work-supplied Windows laptop to type the code and have it run on a VM in the other room (or across the country if they insisted I use one in the datacenter).
True you need a VM but performance doesn't have to be crippled. My out of office/at home machine is a Dell Inspiron 5558 (Core i7, 16GB RAM). I stuck an intel 256GB SSD in it, took the free upgrade to Windows 10 and do all my dev work in a few Virtualbox VMs (leaning heavily on mRemoteNG for lots of tabbed PuTTy instances!).
Total cost (including the Intel SSD) was £726 or $1049 at today's rate (exc. VAT). So didn't cost a bomb and gives me a lightening fast machine, windows for desktop duties, debian for dev, a 1920x1080 display, easily replaceable battery/ram/disk and no issue driving multiple monitors.
I also think Windows + Putty is better than Desktop Linux. I'm actually going to sell the Mac (can't get used to shortcuts, don't have money to an upgrade here in Brazil) and buy a Windows PC + Intel NUC for HTPC + Linux box.
> projects that stupidly hard core path seperators
It's also stupid to assume that your application will work seamlessly between Windows and Unix-like systems just by making sure that the path separators are OS-agnostic.
Most of the windows APIs support unix-style path separators, I actually get annoyed when I see separator injection needlessly... the bigger differences are default system paths and environment variables as such. (Also, windows-style "drive" letters" of course).
I'm 27 and just want my rig to work. That's why I build my own PC, demand mobile phones with replaceable batteries, and have a great 6 year old Lenovo laptop that, besides a slow-ish CPU, is spec'ed pretty well for 2016.
Different strokes. I've got better things to do with my time. I'd rather walk into the Apple store and replace my MBA or my iPhone when I've got a problem. That saves me time for my wife or my hobbies.
Trade money for things that save you time, to spend that time on what's important to you (if you've got the money).
> I've got better things to do with my time. I'd rather walk into the Apple store and replace my MBA or my iPhone when I've got a problem.
I don't get the comparison.
It's like apple users think the only options are buy apple (expensive, but "allegedly" rarely needs fixing, works 99% of the time, lasts a long time, etc) and a PC ("allegedly" breaks all the time, requires more maintenance, requires more time to keep up with, "cheap", etc...)
Those are not the options -- it's a false premise. There are laptop PCs which have the exact same performance & reliability as apple, but for a fraction of the price. I've gone through 4 PC laptops since 1996. My first 2 laptops, I admit, I spent a lot of time repairing but that was due to my own youthful tinkering, experimenting and the general instability of earlier OSs (DOS, Win95, Win98/ME, etc).
But my last 2 have lasted me 7+ years a piece. And I only decided to upgrade because they were beginning to show their age (slower compared to newer stuff). You can buy PC laptops with the same "just works" fidelity as apple. More options open up, and you can save yourself a fortune, if people would just eschew their brand loyalty.
> You can buy PC laptops with the same "just works" fidelity as apple. More options open up, and you can save yourself a fortune, if people would just eschew their brand loyalty.
What do you consider a fortune? $1000? $1400? That's about two days of my time consulting. I'm fine paying the premium for what I consider a better experience. It's not brand loyalty, that's for sure. I've had a terrible, terrible time trying to get work done on Windows 7, Windows 10 looks like a train wreck, and there are no Lenovo stores I can walk into same day and get a replacement like I can with an Apple store (which is in every major metro I visit).
Build a better experience, and I will gladly pay for it. Until then, Apple (grudgingly) gets my dollars.
I've had a lot of PC and Mac laptops, my first one being a Powerbook around 1994. But the --only one-- that ever died catastrophically was an Early 2011 Macbook Pro. Its problems are legion on the Apple support boards, and Apple wouldn't admit that the problems existed.
It wasn't until after I bought a new replacement laptop that Apple finally acknowledged the issues and started a repair program. I wasn't able to just walk into my Apple store to get it fixed (I live in a major metro), so I ended up going to a local authorized dealer instead.
It was basically the last straw for me. I'm happily on Windows. I don't miss the OSX Terminal because I've got CMDer, and just about everything else I was using on Mac for work is either available for Windows or has a decent equivalent. Windows is not the wasteland it was when I switched back to Mac a decade ago.
Using non-apple hardware and software does not take more time, nor does it incur more frustration. It generally does cost less money for the same level of performance. It often lasts longer than the apple-branded alternative as well due to the relative ease of repair and upgrade where the apple-branded alternative would have to be replaced.
This saves me time for my wife, my children and my hobbies. It also saves me money. Time, and money, to spend on what's important to me. It also sends a signal to companies: there is a market for upgradable, repairable hardware.
Unfortunately, upgradability is the niche use-case. Most everyone that I have ever known after a couple years of owning a computer, when faced with upgrading or replacing, they almost always choose replacement.
Because of the depreciation curve, a $500 computer is almost worthless after several years while a $1000 computer might be worth a hundred or two hundred dollars. Do you spend $200-300 on your $500 computer for say memory + SSD or put that $200-300 towards a new $1000 computer?
As far as time is considered, engineered solutions are generally read-to-go, Apple or Windows, but the Windows world still seems to be rife with bloat. Navigating the hundreds of models & manufacturers is overwhelming for the non-technical user. For many technical folks, it's much simpler to just say, 'Get a mac' or 'Get a Dell', nut the Dell option will be a small pain with navigating the choices.
Non-engineered solutions (building your own) do cost a little bit of a time investment in research, assembly and tweaking. For the technical folk here, it's merely a couple of extra hours. For the uninitiated, it's a lot of hours for knowledge that may not be readily applicable to them on a day-to-day basis.
> It also sends a signal to companies: there is a market for upgradable, repairable hardware.
I absolutely guarantee you that there simply are not enough of you to make hardware manufacturers cater to the upgradable/repairable market.
The only way upgradability/reparability will continue is if people like yourself form a non-profit or B Corp that makes open hardware that allows for it. The vast majority of people don't care.
Yep. That was the last Macbook that I would consider to be "adequately repairable". I handed one of those down to my kid after replacing the optical drive with an SSD (creating a fusion drive) and loading it up with RAM. It's still very usable as a desktop/gaming Mac. I've even replaced the battery in it once (IIRC it was glued in, but in a way that was reasonably simple to extract).
I've just bought the computer you have and have maxed it out as well. It does what I need, and it will last me for a few more years, but I don't know what I'll do when I need a new computer. I've always chosen Mac, and I have no idea where to look for a good, high-performance Windows laptop.
Unfortunately Apple values looks over functionality. Apple just keeps making changes for thinness, almost at any cost. And soldering wasn't the first example, I'd argue that removal of the ethernet jack on the MBP was a sign of things to come. Essentially everything started going downhill with the 3rd generation MBPs way back in 2012 (the original "Retina").
The 3rd gen removed: Ethernet, Firewire 800, Superdrive, Kensington lock, and nothing is user replaceable eventually... All for what? To save 0.93 pounds in weight and 0.2 cm in thickness (13" model).
I don't care if the "Macbook" and the MBA want to go this route of maximum thinness/lightness; but what irks me is that they ruined their supposed power user machine for these cuts. Give me the functionality back. It wasn't like the MBP was heavy or large even before 2012.
For me, and for nearly everyone I know, thinness is far more functional than an ethernet port. As is weight, a pound is actually a lot!
Ethernet ports are easy to add as a dongle, you can't do the same with thinness. I really only need ethernet in fixed locations, and where there I already have power, and that's the case for most people.
It's totally cool that you have different needs, but it's not cool to misascribe that to "looks."
For me, the lack of an ethernet port is a dealbreaker, because most of the on-site work I do at clients requires it. The last thing I need is to forget a dongle.
I myself gave up on Apple after my 2011 MBP bricked itself last year.
That was too bad, because I really liked the discontinued unibody form factor. If I was spending money on a new laptop, it wasn't going to be a two year old 2012 unibody or one one of the newer thinner, less user-serviceable models.
I could be wrong, but my impression is that Tim Cook is trying to position Apple as a lifestyle/fashion brand that happens to do consumer electronics and maybe a bit of software, and not as a consumer technology company that happens to be so cool it became a lifestyle/fashion brand by default.
His idea of better seems to be all about size and superficial design, not user satisfaction. Which would be good if size was all about the user experience - but it's not.
Jobs fucked up regularly (who remembers OS X 1.0?) but he still had a laser-like focus on the overall experience and he could rely on that to keep Apple on track.
Cook doesn't have that, and it's not clear that anyone else at Apple does. He's had five years of significant product launches now, and most of them have been okay-I-guess sidesteps - smaller, thinner, bigger, a different colour - or outright duds.
Also, U2.
Opportunities have been missed. Apple could have opened and owned whole new markets - user generated music and video, health devices, home automation, the power user high-end. Instead we got a watch and a a TV hardly anyone cares about, the promise of a car that will probably be late to the party, a music streaming service that streams music just like all the music streaming services do, and AI something something something maybe one day.
The money may still be flowing in, but the stock is going to get hammered if nothing changes soon.
Ha, I love the 2012 models and still have my 2012 15" rMBP. Save for the bullshit ghosting issue (three screens later I finally got my non-ghosting Samsung screen – oh, first gen woes) that was handled awfully by Apple at the time I love this device. Oh, and rubber feet falling off after four years suck, but, eh.
All the things they removed are things I never ever used. Or used rarely but didn’t really need. Exactly all the things you mention. All the rest (the performance over the Airs, the gorgeous screen over the Airs and previous Pros, the lightness, compactness, extremely solid feeling stability of the thing), it’s all just there.
Just accpet that not all people have the same needs as you. I think the 2012 models are a pitch-perfect demonstration of striking exactly the right balance (for most people). I love ’em to death. And things got only better from there, albeit incrementally.
The extra annoying part is that Apple's total lack of reputability is starting to spread to competing products - a lot of Android phones have dropped user-replaceable batteries, for instance, and a sizable amount of good Windows ultrabooks are about as repairable as MacBooks.
> extra annoying part is that Apple's total lack of reputability is starting to spread to competing products
Oh, please. Apple has nothing to do with that problem. The problem is we're a throw away society hell bent on buying the latest greatest thing. If it's anyone's fault, it's our own.
Spot on. There are sufficient players operating at comparable scale to Apple in these markets that we must conclude that trends like this are significantly driven by the demand side.
That's not to say that this trend isn't convenient for the supply side, and that this doesn't play in, it's just to say that it's self-evident that you are correct - the average consumer does, in the end, prefer hard-to-repair and therefore shorter-lived devices, with the advantages they bring, to the alternatives.
If this wasn't the case, there's a HUGE amount of money on the table, and one of the other players would certainly have grabbed it from Apple, instead of mimicking their approach.
Well, I didn't mean "this is Apple's fault" as much as "serviceability problems traditionally associated with Apple devices are now common industry wide" - and are now hard to avoid even if you look at other brands, as the person I was replying to said they would. I do understand that, ultimately, companies are just delivering what most consumers want.
This lack of repairability is actually not a recent thing at all. For example, I worked a support job in the late 90s where a high proportion of Applecare complaints were resolved with "replace the motherboard." With PCs we just replaced the offending part, which was rarely the motherboard.
The worst part of this is that Apple's success has dragged the rest of the market toward things like non-replaceable batteries.
> The worst part of this is that Apple's success has dragged the rest of the market toward things like non-replaceable batteries
I think that statement is only half right. Apple may have pioneered the move towards non-replaceable batteries, but I think it's only a symptom of increasingly integrated and small devices. If an inch thick device is thicker by 1mm because the battery is easily detachable, that's much less of an issue than on a 10mm laptop.
They may have done it in an egregious way first (gluing/soldering in components), but we probably would have gotten there before long anyway.
I've used Apple products since the early 90s. Replacing the MB is the only option since almost all components are on the MB (sound, GPU, modem, network). In contrast PCs had everything highly compartmentalised according to the PC/AT spec. Sound was ISA/PCI, video was AGP/PCI, modems were ISA, 10/100baseT PCI.
While I agree I know very few people that actually replaced their battery. Usually, when the battery died is about the time they replace that laptop anyway.
The real problem is that lithium-ion batteries suck in every dimension except energy density. They're fragile, can blow up, don't allow many charge/discharge cycles, and charge slowly.
There are other battery technologies, such as lithium iron phosphate, which have much better lifetimes, but you give up some energy density. Sealed units should use one of those technologies.
As much as I liked Mac OS X, I recently jumped ship from my early 2015 retina macbook pro to a dell xps 13 and i am super happy. Windows 10 is definitely not the same but it is much much better than how windows 8 used to be. The biggest factor that got me to switch was how locked down the hardware was and i couldnt even replace the battery if i wanted to. And i got the 128gig version thinking there would be aftermarket storage upgrade option down the line but it doesnt seem like that is happening.
Just take it into an Apple Store and pay the $129 to replace it. I've replaced a battery once on my 2012 MacBook Pro so would not consider this to be a reason to pick one platform over another.
> aftermarket storage upgrade option
I agree this sucks. But personally I am happy for Apple to focus on I/O performance at any cost even if it means no aftermarket upgrades. I just find that with so much being in the cloud and the size of USB drives increasing there hasn't been a need for a large internal storage drive.
Yeah saw that you could do it at the apple store, but it is $200 to replace. And if your computer has other damage like a bit of dent or if you replaced the display etc with aftermarket one, or if there are even tiny signs of liquid damage, they straight up refuse service.
>> I've replaced a battery once on my 2012 MacBook Pro
If you've got the unibody (2012 was the last year), it's got an end-user replaceable battery. You can buy a third party battery from Amazon, MacSales etc and swap it pretty easily.
The experience is not quite so convenient with newer models.
Non-user-serviceability buys smaller and lighter form factors. I would expect the story to be similar for hardware with similar size, weight, and battery life characteristics.
EDIT: and most importantly, more battery chemistry per weight. Safety requires that serviceable batteries are enclosed in rather substantial cases whose internals are non-user-serviceable. Apple "cheats" by making this case the entire laptop, rather than a specific battery module.
So, it's probably wise for Apple or any other company to keep a model or two that are modular to satisfy the geekier crowd. It would be expensive, because with larger-numbers, the razor thin laptops will be cheaper due to scale.
A year ago, I wasn't sure how much longer my ancient (but still functioning!) 2008 MBP would be going on. So I went shopping. Found the same tradeoffs Marco mentions here: I didn't like the sealed nature of the newer offerings (and also, AFAICT no screen density can make up for the inexplicably missing matte displays).
I ended up buying a used 2.6Ghz i7 8GB 15" matte MBP instead of anything new from Apple, though.
About the only complaint I have is that Mavericks seems neither as stable or as well-performing as Snow Leopard, which seems to be the last time Apple released an OS that was a strict improvement over previous releases. Too bad it's no longer safe to run given the state of updates.
I still have my late 2008 MacBook Pro--the first 15" unibody design with a Core 2 Duo. I just spent about $250 for 8 GB RAM upgrade and a 500 GB SSD and did a clean install of El Cap.
It actually runs faster now than it did with the stock HD and Mountain Lion! Granted, I'm not doing a lot of heavy computing with it. For web surfing and the basics it still works great.
Anyone who wouldn't care about having the battery glued to the chassis also would not care about the 1mm difference between making it removable or not.
I also think on at least the Android front Samsung has consistently demonstrated the ability to make phones with both SD cards and removable batteries for years without compromising form factor. The S3 / S$ / S5 and Notes 2 - 4 were all extremely thin profile despite supporting removable batteries.
This is just misdirection to try to persuade people its a good thing to remove choice. It is not, it costs basically nothing in manufacturing or size to make the battery / ram / hard drive removable, and the only reason Apple / Dell / Samsung (now) / every other Android phone manufacturer does it is either to rip you off on overpriced battery replacement or drive planned obsolescence to make you buy more shit you really wouldn't need if you could just replace your damn battery two years later.
Apple is optimizing for the mainstream of the market, which mostly never repairs things (except using licensed repair outlets or the original store) and values slimness and lightness and appearance above repairability.
They're also locking down the platform more and more. I don't think this is some conspiracy to take away user freedom. I think it's because anything that makes a platform 'hackable' also makes it 'pwnable' by malware. Again they are optimizing for the mainstream of the market, which is mostly users with absolutely zero clue about malware or security. They want to field an OS that apps can't easily trojan/backdoor and conscript into a botnet or crytolocker your files, etc. Unfortunately hacker types are casualties here.
It's very, very hard to remain appealing to the hacker crowd while also targeting the mainstream. You're targeting two very different local maxima and a lot of what these two camps want is in absolute conflict -- e.g. UX vs. "power" and packability. I actually think Apple is doing a decent job all things considered. Macs are still great for development and are hackable enough, and if I want more hackability I can spring for a $30 Raspberry Pi or run anything I want inside Parallels with the bonus of not borking my main host machine if I mess it up. I am worried about the future though. If they overly "iOS-ify" the Mac they will lose me.
Comparable laptops aren't really any better. The rMBP is a lot more repairable than say the Surface Book (which won't let you even open the case without possibly cracking the display). At least Apple has a battery replacement service at an advertised price--what'll Dell charge you to replace the non-servicable battery in the XPS13 or XPS15? And no other PC laptop hits that right sweet spot of power/battery/display quality. ThinkPads have great power and good battery, but shitty screens.[1] Dells and HPs with gorgeous 4k screens can barely get 4-5 hours out of them.
I almost jumped ship recently because the Surface Book hits a great mix of screen quality/power/battery life, but judging by the forums, it's buggy as hell. So what to do? I'd love a swap-able battery in my rMBP like I have in my T450s, but at the end of the day, I never reach for my ThinkPad when I've got my Mac handy. I'll just go ahead and pay the $200 bucks Apple charges to replace the sealed battery.
[1] My non-technical wife, who has a Mac, recently needed to use my work laptop. Her first reaction on seeing the screen was "wow, your firm cheaped out, huh?" I've got a totally maxed out ThinkPad T450s with i7, 20GB of RAM, and FHD IPS display.
I'm not sure about the battery, as it's brand new, and I don't have a need to replace it yet, but the RAM and SSD are both user replaceable on the XPS15. The battery looks like it would be a fairly easy swap as well, as long as you could source the new one.
Thats the most difficult part. Original battery costs a fortune (some of them cost almost half of the new basic laptop). And if you decide to get a third party alternative - its basically a russian roulette, you never know what you gonna get, most of them are just terrible and barely last couple months
It may be a pain in the butt to do so, my 2014 Dell XPS 13 it is serviceable - the RAM is still soldered onto the mainboard unfortunately, but aside from that every other component can be replaced. I fail to understand why I can't even replace the battery safely in a modern MacBook without a headache.
All of those look like "compatible" knock-offs, not genuine OEM parts. Looks like Dell doesn't sell any official replacement batteries for that machine.
S and X Thinkpad lines have considerably improved screens nowadays. Nowhere near Retina, but they get the job done. Also, most of the parts inside are field serviceable, you don't really need more than a screwdriver to fix it.
It's a bit of an overstatement to say that the batteries are unreplaceable. They have some tape on them and they require patience to remove, but that's not anything new as far as laptop part upgrades go.
But I recently tried moving to Surface Book. Spent nearly $3k on a real nicely specc'd one. It BSOD'd daily, sleep modes are really confusing, battery drained terribly overnight, it was overall a bit of a nightmare. Granted probably half of my complaints are about Win10 rather than the SB itself, but still. I returned it.
It's SO CLOSE and if it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.
I have a Surface Book and am sticking through the problems, I've experienced everything you've mentioned. Bought it on launch, things have gotten significantly better with firmware and driver updates, but it still has a little ways to go. Seemingly the majority of the problems have to do with Skylake. At the rate things have been going, I estimate a couple more months before they have the big bugs all ironed out.
>[1] My non-technical wife, who has a Mac, recently needed to use my work laptop. Her first reaction on seeing the screen was "wow, your firm cheaped out, huh?" I've got a totally maxed out ThinkPad T450s with i7, 20GB of RAM, and FHD IPS display.
Oxymoron: tech reasons of how great your computer is; and an argument on why a non technical people don't like it.
I've concluded that spec sheets in advertising are at best excuses, and at worst lies. Most users don't care what the exact pixel count is, they just want enough pixels that everything looks great. They don't care exactly how much RAM or storage there is, so long as they don't run out of it (either "brick wall effect" or discernible slowdowns). They don't care exactly how fast the processor is, so long as it's perceived as "fast enough". If specifications are presented, it's done so precisely to convince the user "this is good enough" ... but if it was good enough, customers wouldn't be looking at those numbers to see if it's at least above some criteria indicating "well, I guess I can put up with it since you put it that way".
That's precisely why Apple doesn't give specifications for as many products as they can get away with. RAM specs are limited to regular computers. Devices with "retina" displays don't list pixel counts any more (or at least overtly so). Given how they're pushing to make storage size irrelevant on mobile devices (iCloud, dynamic app deletion/installation, Photos cloud storage, etc), I expect they'll eventually drop exact local storage specs in most ads (opting for "small/medium/large").
My point wasn't that a non-technical person would appreciate the specs. It's that the screen is so bad that it makes a non-technical person think it's a cheap-o laptop instead of one that costs almost $2,000.
ThinkPad screens have been getting better. I'm actually pretty happy with contrast/brightness of the FHD IPS on my X250 (color gamut definitely could be better, but at least it doesn't do dynamic contrast like recent Dells), but the new screens, like the X1 Yoga's new OLED screen looks fantastic (I believe that'll be a 100% Adobe RGB screen).
Whenever I switch back and forth, I'm always shocked by how many PC laptops do trackpads so terribly when the Macbooks have been out there for years now.
Not sure about the patents that apply to Apple's trackpads, which is probably the biggest reason... the closest I've seen have been on some of the chromebook models, which aren't near as good, but still better than most... then again, it's entirely possible google is paying for the ip licensing.
It's probably a transition. Apple doubled down on engineering and integration feats due the the mobile ecosystem and marketing lever (mind you MS is taking that road too if you look at Surface tech talks and ads). So things were standardless (non-disk-form-factor SSD), some things were soldered. Unless it never profitable again to have pluggable boards (let's say if simpler to just tape a new SoC and access cloud data) it will come back. Modular cell phones projects exist, tiny usb3 sockets that can be used for almost any device, etc etc I'd bet we will have gumstix like modules in laptops. Might also help durability since you don't have to avoid breaking a big motherboard full of surface mounted components.
I agree. I've had three different top of the line MBPs and they don't feel as solid as my 2007 macbook. The solid states are unreliable, the battery life never comes close to what's promised and that damn fan won't turn off. Sure, I'm a power user but isn't that why I'm paying 3500 for this?
I feel as though this is comparing two different orders of magnitude. Apple users are, in general, getting upset about software user experience. A subset of users have always been upset about repairability of apple hardware, though admittedly it's gotten worse with its laptops in the past years. The subset that wants to do what we want to do with our hardware here is much smaller and thus not who Apple is trying to sell to. In the end, the users buying macbooks want lighter, thinner machines and are willing to sacrifice basically anything to get it. Personally I've given up laptops because I'm not willing to make this tradeoff, even with "pc" hardware.
Edit: There are even some people in this thread, who I assume are "power users," that are willing to sacrifice previously sacrosanct things like ethernet ports for mobility. Personally I'm not willing to do so but I also don't have a pressing need for a laptop.
I feel as though this is comparing two different orders of magnitude. Apple users are, in general, getting upset about software user experience. A subset of users have always been upset about repairability of apple hardware, though admittedly it's gotten worse with its laptops in the past years. The subset that wants to do what we want to do with our hardware here is much smaller and thus not who Apple is trying to sell to. In the end, the users buying macbooks want lighter, thinner machines and are willing to sacrifice basically anything to get it. Personally I've given up laptops because I'm not willing to make this tradeoff, even with "pc" hardware.
Don't forget about the regular Mac Pro - I recently purchased 3 of them for my design team thinking a desktop should be better than a laptop - 2 of them have had a failure, 1 requiring a replacement graphics card the other needed a system reinstall - both took a couple days to get sorted out. I doubt our next round of funding will go towards Mac products - we can buy a Dell just as powerful with same day business support for WAY less - but to tell the truth none of the Dell Precisions we have bought in the last 3 years have had any issues.
Yep, agreed, it's a bit of a worry. But as another commenter pointed out, these $2000-ish laptops are costing us around $2 a day over about 3 years, so I use my MacBook as my primary machine and replace it around the 3 to 4 year mark, and have a couple of Core2Duo laptops (one running Windows and one running Linux) in the house also. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee, here in Australia you can't get a coffee for less than $3.50.
I put a 128GB USB3.0 SanDisk Ultra Fit[1] in my MacBook (these things are tiny), to supplement the SSD. Currently on sale for AU$74. Plenty fast enough for storing media, and I'm wearing my SSD less now too.
Not to sure what to do when the SSD wears out, probably boot of the USB stick, but that's a while away and I'll sell the laptop before then anyway.
I run OS X on a ThinkPad T420, and this unholy combo is an experience I am honestly enjoying a lot.
I like having a 9 cell battery, I like having >1TB of storage, the ThinkPad keyboard and TrackPoint, and I like being able to take the thing apart.
At the same time, I also like OS X. I get UNIX underlyings, yet can continue to use software like Photoshop. And there's just a big bunch of subjective things that IMO OS X just does better, like scrolling and font rendering.
Still, the device is growing older, and I honestly have no idea what to replace it with once the time finally comes. The strange combo I have doesn't really have a modern equivalent. Do I sacrifice modularity to stay with OS X? Do I go to Windows or Linux to keep modularity with a modern ThinkPad (which are getting too close to the way modern MacBooks are, sadly).
I thought the licence terms disallowed running OSX running on anything other than Mac. Of course, I always clicked 'Agree' without reading the licence terms.
I have been thinking of something opposite: run ubuntu on Mac.
I had the unfortunate experience of owning an early 2011 MacBook Pro. The graphics card broke down multiple times (three, iirc) requiring a 500€ logic board replacement.
This was a widespread issue, and we, the affected users, repeatedly asked Apple to recognize it and run a repair program.
By the time (two years?) they decided to roll one out I had already bought an Asus laptop, which was comparable in most ways and costs about half of what I paid for the MBPro.
I don't think I'll be buying Apple hardware for a while. Their increasing push towards planned obsolescence troubles me deeply.
This is more of a business decision than technical. The industry should avoid going into this trap. Co should give users a choice and keep the ports open.
I bought a T550 minimal configuration, for $600 upgraded the RAM to 16G & 500G SSD for $200, after using MBP for 7 years.
Though the MBP is still kicking ass with an upgraded 8G RAM & 500G SSD.
I have to agree... When I got my current rMBP(late 2014), I actually had to return my first purchase when I found out I couldn't upgrade the ram or ssd myself. Even though you can technically replace the SSD, the interface Apple is using doesn't seem to be common at all, so you're stuck with mostly costly options in a sea of cheaper SSD components.
The display isn't the best, but close... the touchpad is bar none the best in any laptop, but I might be willing to sacrifice that when I need another laptop... I haven't been doing iOS native, and my work issued laptop is an rMBP as well, but may just create a build server for cordova out of a used mac mini if/when the need arises.
I never bought into iOS devices, mainly because of early ties to Apple, and I'm somewhat entrenched in Android's ecosystem. The poor software updates, broken SMB/CIFS support and a host of other issues has me more than concerned.
I upgrade every 2 years. It costs me about $1-2K for the "next" model's difference (after selling the old one on Craiglist/Ebay), however averaging the usage out over those 2 years I'm still getting really good bang for buck without hardware fault issues.
I have one of the last MBP from that era that still has replaceable memory, hard drive and optical drive. My machine is maxed out on memory, SSD and swapped the optical for a backup HDD.
I love the thing and had the fried graphics card issue fixed some time ago instead of opting to replace the MBP with a newer model.
This old thing is struggling to keep up with El Capitan these days though and I'm now mulling a Thinkpad with OpenBSD as a replacement. I kind of wish I could get this same body with updated hardware and OSX 10.6 but that's not in the cards.
Oh, fully agreed. Have you gotten one of those ads when you don't have good network connectivity? Fails to load, fails to respond even if you go into airplane mode -- you have to wait until it can talk to Apple servers again before being able to use the app. Just happened to me yesterday.
I just bought my first iPhone (switching from an Android, the droid maxx - great battery life) largely because I missed being able to easily sync music with my phone. What do I get? Broken music player. Two of the four tabs at the bottom of the Music app are Apple Music-related (radio, "connect"). The UI for switching between displays of my library - artist, album, song - has degraded terribly. And I had to painstakingly delete all of the "cloud" versions of things I'd bought long ago from iTunes. Figured out how to only show music local to my device and now there's an annoying bar across the top of the app at all times.
I mean, fuck, how do you screw up the best mobile music player interface that hard? Just to encourage adoption of a shitty streaming service, with no way to opt out?
Do people not care about syncing music to their phone and listening to it offline anymore?
"Have you gotten one of those ads when you don't have good network connectivity? Fails to load, fails to respond even if you go into airplane mode"
Had this happen twice today on my long commute. After 15 minutes, gave up trying to make my very expensive phone play music. This on top of the usual iTunes complaints is pushing me to abandon Apple until things improve.
I don't have an issue with Apple Music -- just with the hard sell.
I have a huge collection synced to iTunes Match, and I get to spend quality time in a facility with heavily proxied wifi and no cellular coverage. I don't really need a streaming service.
Apple used to be pay more and deal with less bullshit. Add the bullshit, and the value prop changes.
I've been using OS X since just Leopard, but I've noticed a decline as well. I'm not excited for new releases anymore. For example, I haven't moved to El Capitan. By contrast, I couldn't wait for Snow Leopard--I was really excited to use it.
Snow Leopard was the peak, in my experience; like you, I felt like each new version of OS X through 10.6.8 came as an improvement. Since then, I greet each new release with a sigh - "okay, let's find out what previously straightforward process they've decided to complicate with a bunch of fancy animations this time".
I think people mythologize Snow Leopard. Personally I had multiple very annoying issues[1] in SL that were never resolved until I upgraded to Lion. While I wont say that OS X release after SL have been bug free or had fewer bugs than SL it has always been a trade off - some things got better and others got worse.
The only constant is iTunes, it seems to get progressively worse with every release :(
It's not that Snow Leopard had fewer bugs than its successors, but that it was the last update which clearly had fewer bugs than its predecessors. Since then, each new version has changed things around without seeming to make life better overall.
What's more, as the iOS tail has come to wag the Mac OS dog, Apple's concept of an "improvement" has increasingly diverged from mine. Most of the things they've added since Snow Leopard have ranged from useless to annoying as far as I'm concerned. I don't want an app store, I don't understand workspaces, the new fullscreen mode makes my second monitor worthless. Every new version seems to have new hotkeys and swipe gestures that do strange and incomprehensible things when I trigger them by accident, which I would disable if I had any idea what they were called or where to look for their settings.
I don't think this is just an age thing, either, or a romanticism about the past; my family got our first Macintosh in 1985, and I have used every single version of Mac OS since System 0.9. There have definitely been better and worse eras. I have nostalgic feelings about System 5, and to a lesser extent about Mac OS 8. I don't so much feel nostalgic about 10.6.8 as I have simply felt annoyed by each update since.
iTunes has been awful for years. The only reason it hasn't got worse is because devices are more powerful. I do think they are producing more and more buggy-on-release software with a video game mindset of "patch it post launch". Sadly it is the way software appears to be today. I have no problem with fixing problems post-launch (obviously!) but shipping a product just to meat a deadline (looking at Microsoft with Windows 10 here as well!!) is a pain in the ass for users.
There is a big difference between shipping an MVP (a HN favourite!) and a buggy piece of shit product.
Will it harm Apple (or Microsoft, or ...) in the long run? Probably not. Sadly users seem to be used to this kind of thing now from all the main players so what alternative do they have?
On a positive I have found Android L to be a solid release which is probably the only solid major point release I have used from any major software company in many years.
When did iTunes remove drag and drop adding songs to your phone? That's probably the specific date that I'd pin the decline to. When they said "let's take something simple and make it more complicated."
Two apps I use the most on my iPhone are Podcasts and Music. On my PC (windows) I use iTunes often.
Both the iPhone apps and the modern version of iTunes are an utter, over-designed mess. It felt like the core programming functionality was there, until some UX designer got a hold of the front end of those apps and decided to fubar it beyond recognition.
There is _Literally_ no way to just look at all music on your iPhone. You have to have it in playlists or add the songs you want to a playlist, or just shuffle all songs.
*Edit: No way to look at all iPhone songs while not using iTunes with your iPhone plugged into your PC.
This just isn't true. You can easily browse your songs on an iPhone in the Music app by album, artist, song, genre, etc. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, or maybe you're not familiar with the UI?
I have iOS 9.2 and updated Music to the latest version. There is no "view all songs". But perhaps you found some way? Like I just want to see all songs, not playlists, not genres, everything. I'd love to find out :)
This kills me. In an older version of iTunes (not that long ago), I could open it up and see every song in my library in one big long list. Typing a few characters would find the song I wanted. When that song finished playing, it would just play the next one in the list.
Now, it's just as you say - hard to find specific albums or artists or songs, and once I do, I can't quite tell what it'll do when a song finishes playing. Since I found it through the search box, and not in a list... will it play the next song in the album? In a playlist? Will it just stop?
What I don't know is whether my feelings about the new interface is logical, or if it could be summed up as "you damn kids." Is it a paradigm that I'm just not used to yet, or is the UX objectively bad?
I just think that for some programs or interfaces, like YouTube, it is fine for a while. Works great.
But then they hire a new UX person, or the incumbent UX person gets bored - so they keep refactoring the interface to put out an image of "getting work done" or "adding features and enhancements".
Basically making work for themselves and refactoring an already fine interface that user's are familiar with and just introducing new headaches to users along the way.
I use both Windows 10 and OS X on a rMBP all day at work. I definitely think Windows 10 is way more stable and polished.
I constantly have problems with OS X WiFi connecting/dropping out, this has only been a recent thing since 10.11 (before OS X wifi support was incredible).
I also have problems with Spotlight screwing up. I use spotlight for launching apps, and it often just loses all the apps which I use all day every day. Instead of finding 'Skype' for example, it'll return a list of all the times I've mentioned Skype in emails instead. Again, this broke in 10.11.
I never really use the new features in OS X, which is fine, but 10.11 especially has so many regressions in it for me it is pretty annoying. It also absolutely blasted my unix config in a really hard to fix way, which hasn't ever happened on a previous OS X update.
Definitely should download Alfred (on Mac App Store) as a replacement for Spotlight. I use it basically for launching and quick math, etc. but it can do almost anything.
It doesn't have any of the slowdowns that Spotlight does, and it still has a small interface by default that can move anywhere on the screen.
Spotlight has been straight broken for me since 2008, especially when using large external drives (stuck "scanning" for >5 hours every time the drive is power cycles, using a whole core). I just gave up and now forceably disable spotlight.
You raise a good point, but like many of these things it's not totally broken, just temporarily. Just when you're about to try and look for a fix/alternative, it starts working again.
So you get that impression of everything being a bit creaky but never really getting motivated to spend some time fixing it.
Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership.
If you switch Apple and Microsoft in the above paragraph, it sounds a lot like the past...
Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership.
> while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership
I'm not holding my breath. A lot of decisions around Windows 10 have been, in my opinion, user hostile. If Apple drops the ball, the most likely outcome is that we return to the bad old days where there's Windows - it's ugly and it sucks but everyone know how to use it - and nothing a whole lot better.
...[Mossberg] fingered iTunes for the desktop "I dread opening the thing"
This is so spot on. It feels like they rearrange iTunes every month, especially the mobile version.
Recently I noticed that I'd be searching for a song (that I have on my phone) and it would default to their streaming service.... Why would I want to use my data to stream a song that I already have on my phone?
Well, if he was alive, a lot of weird design choices would not have been made. Like the pencil sticking out of the iPad, that weird battery pack, the magic mouse with the charging port on the bottom, etc.
Can we grow up and get over the stupid fucking "pencil sticking out of the iPad" meme? The thing charges enough for several days' usage in ONE MINUTE. Get over it, people.
Same thing for Magic Mouse. You think you can design it better? You have a better place for that port? The damn thing needs a few MINUTES of charge time per month. It's a non-issue. The port is exactly where it should be.
You might be willing to give them a mulligan on their recent design choices, but I'm not. Apple has historically had smart, sensible designs -- even Apple haters can't deny that.
The amount of time required to charge doesn't change the fact that no reasonable person would consider the pencil or the mouse charging method a good design.
>> Same thing for Magic Mouse. You think you can design it better? You have a better place for that port?
Well, there are already mice with charging ports where a cord would normally go. It's a solved problem.
Nope. If you look at the actual design, there is not space for a port there. It's only a solved problem if you're content to bulk up the mouse in that particular area, for something that, again, takes a few minutes a month.
I think his solution to that problem was to move away from iTunes as the central hub towards iCloud as the central hub. That vision has mostly been achieved, at least from my perspective. I only use iTunes on OS X to listen to music or podcasts, very rarely for any syncing or direct interaction with my phone.
Really? I installed iTunes on Windows in 2005 to load songs onto my first-gen iPod shuffle, and it sucked back then too, despite the fact Steve was very much alive.
The purpose of the new iTunes is to steer you away from listening to music and towards purchasing music or social features, or whatever other part of their ecosystem they're trying to push.
I've just gone through some pain to downgrade from iTunes 12 to iTunes 10 and can't believe I've been putting up with such crap for so long. iTunes 10 is so much better and so much easier it's ridiculous.
You think iTunes is bad on Mac? Try it on PC. iTunes has always, always been horrible. I think anyone suggesting it was ever "good" is rewriting history.
>Mossberg pointed to "a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps." He fingered iTunes for the desktop ("I dread opening the thing"), and the Mail, Photos, and iCloud programs.
As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I purposely used any of the above.
What's driving me away is a combination of flaky behavior on the desktop (bizarre wifi glitches; bizarre NFS/SMB/AFP mount behaviors; increasing system instability), and a lack of differentiation across both the desktop and mobile platform. There was a time when I needed a Mac or i-Device to do things I cared about/needed, but those days are long over. Almost all of my compute activity happens on a server in my homelab or 'the cloud', and Linux and Android meets or exceeds my needs for completing other tasks. I just swapped my iPhone 6+ for a Nexus 6P, and my current MacBook (12" model) will probably be my last when I retire it in 3-4 years.
Thanks for the link. They really boiled itunes down to the core product. Skipping through songs multiple times finally works quickly. I don't know how itunes lags with multiple song skips on an SSD.
When I started using Android I subscribed to Google Play Music. It allowed me to upload my music collection, including songs that we're on Google Play. It's not matching, like Apple. It's literally just taking my music and allowing me to store it in the cloud and download it onto mobile devices. It's really handy so far and makes much more sense compared to iTunes. Plus there's no "sync" concept once you're there. You just download music out of your collection or you don't.
I don't know how the iTunes matching works, but Play Music does swap out your version of a song with theirs if they see they're the same thing. I think this has only been within the last year or so that they started doing this though. I don't have any personal files anymore, so I can't comment on how accurate it is.
Play Music does match and does get it wrong, as I've found out with a few continuous albums where tracks have got swapped out for unmixed versions. You can manually tell it not to but only on a per-track basis (e.g. see https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1zruza/getting_kin...)
I feel like there's definitely a gap in the market for a cloud music service that is simple and effective, I would love to just upload all my music and know it was going to play back anywhere (desktop and mobile) with the original tracks and proper gapless playback, and I would be able to download my music back out of there, with a nice clean UI.
Apple Music fails because it swaps out tracks and is generally flaky (little control over the upload process, tracks don't play, etc.), Google Play fails because it swaps out tracks and has, IMO, a pretty horrible UI on both desktop and mobile.
I've played a little with Subsonic but found the clients lacking. Any other suggestions? Maybe I should just build my own!
I want and need a deluxe Linux OS for which I would pay $200/year, which would do things well. This includes:
- Porting bugfixes forward (I dropped Ubuntu because they didn't port a bugfix from 12.x to 13.04 - After 2 days trying to recover my network auth, I asked a Mac to my boss).
- Designed for me, not for monkeys with big fingers who bring up Amazon results for every search (That's not why I dropped Ubuntu, but desktop developers aren't within the targets of Canonical),
- Who would hire and pay UX designers. I want the Mac OS X experience. I don't want to recompile my kernel. I want few features in the OS, but well-designed. I want people working days over days to fine-tune the mouse controls in the OS (the first warning that made me upset about Ubuntu). I want to hear the rumble of developers integrating Webkit with nice developer tools into an open-source chromium.
- I, developer, using IntelliJ IDEA, using apt-get/brew, I want to be the paying customer of that OS. I don't want my data be sold. I might want some cloud sync, but I don't want share buttons, especially when I watch porn (I'm absolutely serious). And I want the cloud parts of my OS to be under APL-Affero.
- Obviously those bugfixes must be sent back upstream to the OSS community. Ideally there would be half the money left to pay back, but let's start pessimistic.
- As a bonus, in that OS, all apps would be webkit/js-based. But I'm dreaming.
It is totally possible to charge for open-source, even the GPL says it. You can't prevent people from re-sharing the OS online, but you can offer upgrades to subscribed users only.
I wanted the Apple experience, but that's not coming back. Look what Nest did: They're selling a working thermostat for 3x the price. Tesla is selling electric cars for deluxe customers. I want to pay $200 per year, recurring, for a stable env with little novelty and many bugfixes, and I want to "deluxe". I want to purchase the feeling of being superior with my OS.
And I say that as a peson who earns €32.000 gross per year (France).
All of the things are already there but not packaged in the way _you_ want it. You need to invest the time to chose and pick if you want to use Linux in this specific way. If you don't want to do that job, then I guess Linux is not for you, stick to OS X untill by pure chanse someone creates a distribution which does exactly what you want.
(Btw. I never compiled a Linux kernel for my desktop/laptop)
Because? Because it's slow? Or because it's weakly typed? See it that way: Everyone and their todler can program in js, including experts of PHP, Java, Nodejs. With thousands devs, we'd see an explosion of apps, and many good quality ones in the marketplace. If there's a way we can embed V8 at an X Server level, open all OS APIs to js, sandbox while still optimizing the RAM resources, assist with the type-checking, the benefits would be huge.
Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware.
Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a while and people will keep using and loving Apple hardware and putting up with their miserable software.
For the record, I use Notes/Mail/Photos on my iPhone, and Preview has never crashed for me.
"Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware."
If you swapped all occurrences of "hardware" and "software" in the above statement with each other, you'd have what people said about Apple in the 1990s.
I completely disagree. One of the main reasons I switched to OS X was the iLife software. I've heard a lot of people say the same. The reason I use an iPhone over Android? Again, the software.
Apple definitely had some misses over the years, but this is deeply unfair to a company that has basically designed the entire landscape of consumer software that we see today. The Apple was copied by IBM, Mac OS was copied by Windows, and iOS was copied by Android (which was pre-existing but was completely redesigned in the image of iOS).
If you want to see a hardware company that doesn't get software, look no further than Sony. Apple's main problem is that they don't get cloud services. This is where Apple can't compete with Google in the same way that Sony couldn't compete with Apple.
It would be nice if there was better Linux support from Apple. I haven't tried it, but from reading guides it seems like installing Linux on a Macbook comes with a whole set of gotchas and workarounds.
For a long time I ran Debian in VMware Fusion in fullscreen mode on my iMac. There's a penalty but it's faster than you might think. My interest at the time was an effort to recover some sense of control over data privacy. Gradually I moved bits and pieces into the guest and these days I simply run Debian bare metal on a Lenovo. When my colleague wants to collaborate on a Keynote or Pages document she shares it on iCloud and I do pretty well editing in Firefox.
I remember Steve Jobs saying that Apple is a software company, and then quoting Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.". Apple certainly has the talent in-house to be a software company (llvm, webkit, cups, swift, metal, etc., even if they didn't start the first three) but somehow it doesn't seem to reach the higher level apps (iTunes, Podcast, etc.).
I suspect poor product management: I strongly doubt llvm or swift are driven like iTunes.
> Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware.
Wrong.
This may be less true recently, but for a good decade Apple had the superior OS and were the only ones who got device and media integration right - that's all software.
I dunno. I may not be on Apple any more, but I thought some iterations of their software were really damned good, like Snow Leopard, older versions of Mail, Keynote, iPhoto, iMovie (the one that no longer supported plug-ins - was that 08?), Safari, and so on.
For me, iLife (iPhoto and iMovie in particular) has always been a very compelling reason for non-techies to switch from Windows to Mac. It's probably the only thing that I miss from Mac since switching to Windows.
I stopped using OSX shortly after Lion came out, surprisingly because of hardware problems and comically poor support from Apple (I'm not going to go into that again here). Since then I've been using Linux for work and Windows, as always, for gaming and blurays (because there's no other viable choice).
Something weird has happened though. When I left OSX, it was already a bit buggy. A lot of stuff didn't work properly and wasn't well thought out. Windows, aside from the unfortunate Metro experiment, has just gotten better.
Over the life of Windows 7, the only time I had BSOD's was when the SSD with the OS got too close to full. If I kept some free space on my OS partition, BSOD's simply did not happen. Windows 8 was even more stable. It just works. Yes, I added Classic Shell so I could just completely avoid Metro, and the result is an OS that just works and doesn't get in the way. I have privacy concerns about W10 which have prevented me from upgrading, and that really is the one major fly in MS's ointment. Free upgrades are nice, but I'd prefer to pay for an OS where my data isn't treated as a product.
Will I continue to use Windows? Well, there's no other choice for gaming and blurays, so yes. Privacy concerns aside, this is more palatable than ever. Linux continues to be a workhorse for me, and I don't miss OSX one bit.
Edit: I should mention that I tend to customize certain aspects of my OS rather extensively. I like things to be a certain way. Linux is fantastic for this. Windows is good too. OSX is really hit or miss. Some things aren't too bad, but other things are an absolute chore. It's amazing that an OS can restrict hardware and customization choices to the extent OSX does and still be buggy.
The OS has been pretty good after El Capitain. It was some serious garbage in some of the prior versions, though that also made me question why bother.
The worst is that there's no way of knowing. I can't remember which version it was, but man it sucked that I happed to close and open my lid until my wifi would work.
Makes me think that upgrading from Windows 8.1 to 10 can't be that bad.
They had some wifi wakeup issues for a couple releases/bug fixes and it took a long time for then to come out with a fix. They control both the hardware and the software and have no one else to blame.
Walt Mossberg outlined the issues really well. A lot of programs are becoming bloated, and as the company expands the number of people working on its products fragmentation across the platform is inevitable.
Essentially Apple is the first company in history with such as large distributed platform of devices utilized by an unprecedented number of people, and unlike every other company, it wants to keep a tight grip on every aspect of that. By the time is addresses an issue, it loses sight of another. This is how I imagine Apple is functioning right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5C8rnpAbIs
What scares me is their inability to fix things. Apple Music has been slow and unreliable as hell and with awful usability from the start. And it has not really improved at all.
I haven't used Apple software in a long time, but Google is not immune to this either apparently. If you use the YouTube app, and especially if you use Chromecast, you'll experience countless bugs as it fails to reconcile state changes between the devices or properly buffer videos. I'm considering setting up a raspi or something and installing an ad blocker on it to replace my Chromecast. I don't think this is what Google wants but its product is difficult to use any other way.
Hangouts / Google Calendar are also really clunky and seem poorly tested. Things often go out of sync or you're randomly asked to re-login several times a month, and only during video chats.
Google maps was always very buggy for me on Android, but fine on iOS.
Hangouts is bad. Very slow and bloated everywhere. On mobile it only syncs notifications at random. Audio and video quality is total crap, and even with this new web beta thing where it's supposed to be better, it's still much worse than skype.
The most incredible thing, and I am ashamed of typing this but whatever, is that I've actually felt an improvement in my life after turning off hangouts in gmail. WTF.
The problem is that Steve Jobs isn't around any more to give the company the proper focus and hold everyone to a high quality standard.
The recent slippage in quality and focus mirrors what happened in the late 80s and early 90s after Steve was forced out. There was considerable leftover momentum in the short term which allowed the company to coast for while and keep up some semblance of health, but eventually the lack of focus caught up with them. They became "beleaguered" in the mid-90s and only recovered when Steve came back (and axed products that weren't working, focused resources on new problems, simplified the product line, etc). It took many years, but he eventually turned them into a powerhouse.
Now that he's been gone for a while, we are seeing a similar phenomenon. In the short term after he left, the company had considerable momentum (due mostly to the iPhone) which carried them along for a number of years, but without someone at the top who had his ability to maintain focus, the company is starting to slip again.
My take on this is not that Apple has gotten worse, but that they have actually gotten better at cloud services. Whereas no one actually used MobileMe or iDisk, their new generation of cloud services is actually being used. It's true that they're losing ground because Google has defined a bar for cloud services that they can't reach, but they are trying and not entirely failing at it.
The secondary aspect is the surface area of what they are dealing with. This is a far cry from the old Mac OS days where they were really a PC company. Now they have to make OS X, iOS (for both phones/tablets), and tvOS all work together seamlessly. If quality was exactly the same, they would have far more bugs just based on the cartesian complexity of possible interactions.
I hope they can sort it out because I'm feeling the pain just like everyone else, but I don't see any better alternatives at the moment.
> My take on this is not that Apple has gotten worse, but that they have actually gotten better at cloud services.
Which isn't saying much, since they're still terrible. Their cloud-synced Notes.app is almost unusable; every time I add a note on the phone there's maybe a one-in-three chance it'll sync to the desktop immediately, a one-in-three chance it'll sync the next day, and a one-in-three chance it'll appear three days later or more. If Apple has in fact gotten better at cloud services, it's only because they were so abysmal before that there was nowhere to go but up.
For me it always 'syncs' but in a very original way; I get 3-4 copies after a sync on all devices. Not even sure how you make a bug like that. Not complaining though it is better than no sync.
No, the problem is that they are making very questionable design decisions in their new software: this is unaffected by being spread too thin. It indicates a total loss of the sensibilities that made Apple software great to begin with, not just "bugs."
How much of this is due to the loss of Steve Jobs? A great amount, I think. He had all day to look at the outputs of different teams and tell them why it was stupid or ugly.
I don't much care about the software - I haven't used iTunes in years, don't use Mail, etc. etc. - it's the operating system I care about.
Wi-fi has been buggy on OS X for literally years now. And each new major release seems to bring some new pain point where it refuses to turn on, refuses to connect, doesn't transmit data... and on and on. There's no way Apple can't know about this - it must drive their own employees crazy. Yet, nothing gets done.
If I were in the market for a new laptop right now I'd be taking a serious look at a Surface Book - it's the first thing I've seen that looks like it could rival a Macbook in the hardware department. Sadly, I'd have to do a lot more research into getting a decent POSIX environment set up on it before I could take the plunge.
Recent Macs have a wifi chip that requires WME/WMM extensions (Wireless Multimedia) in most cases. For most APs it will have issues if these are switched off. Rumor is it's a chipset thing not a software thing.
Got any more information on that? I usually leave WMM off on account of it being extra complexity that doesn't seem to make anything work better, and I haven't noticed any particular issues with my six month old rMBP. Which chipsets are supposedly afflicted?
(side note: I wish they'd never stopped using Atheros WiFi.)
It was a while back and The Goog is not delivering, but I do distinctly remember this being an issue and that enabling this extension fixed it. But maybe only certain MBPs are affected.
That is my experience as well, with multiple APs. Once I switched to a better one (TP-Link Archer C7) the problems disappeared. Same with an airport express base station. No issues at all, wifi connection is near instant when the notebook wakes up.
Can anyone in this thread recommend a rock solid off-the-shelf wifi router?
The last year I have gone through three routers:
* Asus RT-N66U ("the Dark Knight"), worked fine on 2.5GHz, but the 5GHz signal gradually became worse until one day it just disppeared. Apparently a lot of users have had this issue.
* Asus RT-AC66U, the smaller version of the same router. Just stopped working occasionally, requiring a reboot.
* Netgear AC1750 R6400-100NAS (little brother to the "Nighthawk"). Current router, was stable enough for a while, but now needs rebooting a couple of times every week. SSL/TLS connections stop working randomly. Devices such as iPhone and AppleTV fail to get packets through on the first try after being dormant for a while.
At work we have the Netgear AC1900/R7000 "Nighthawk", which has been extremely stable. But it's also quite expensive, and large (as is the AC1750).
I've lost all faith in Asus, and the only other brand I can see that has a good reputation is Ubiquity. They make "pro" access points for hotels and such. Then again, hotel wifi is the worst.
I'd consider a Ubiquiti AP or a MikroTik. Both make solid devices for routing and wifi. Especially MikroTik offers some nice all-in-one devices. Never had a problem with them.
Mikrotik looks cool, never heard of them. But they only have one 5GHz (802.11ac) router, and it seems it came out recently? Not sure how I feel about jumping on something that new. I know nothing about the chipsets they use.
For wifi they use only Atheros chipsets because they write their own drivers and changing chipsets would require a complete rewrite for some of their custom stuff.
They had devices with 5 GHz before, just not in their SOHO devices. I've got two of their SXT lites (5 GHz) with directional antennas and my wireless uptime between them is around 70d.
Btw, the interface of their routers is a bit … verbose. I like it, but you should definitely have a look at it before you buy one of their routers: http://demo.mt.lv/webfig/
Even their cheapest devices come with a full copy of their OS, so you could just buy a hAP lite (~$25) and see if you like it. I did the same and never looked back.
Wi-Fi is crappy because Apple cuts lots of corners as a way to save battery life. Roaming can be a huge drain on the battery, so disabling or reducing the frequency of certain wireless functions is a quick and dirty way to improve battery life. It's so easy to pass off wireless problems to access points, so I imagine Apple had been doing it for years before anyone noticed.
That actually sounds like a legitimate strategy. I would want the device which is plugged into the wall to handle more of the heavy lifting if it means I get an extra hour of battery life.
I recently tried moving to Surface Book. Spent nearly $3k on a real nicely specc'd one. It BSOD'd daily, sleep modes are really confusing, battery drained terribly overnight, it was overall a bit of a nightmare. Granted probably half of my complaints are about Win10 rather than the SB itself, but still. I returned it.
It's SO CLOSE and it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.
Unfortunately the first generation of the Surface Book has been plagued with bugs. I avoided it assuming it would need a generation (or two) to get things right. But look where Microsoft took the Surface Pro in two generations. Surface Book is going to be amazing in a year or two. Heck, it might be there now, I hear a lot of the bugs have been fixed...but imo, it's not worth it right now. I say this as a very loyal Surface line customer.
Since I updated to 10.11.3 (a few days ago) my Air crashes about once a day. It used to be once in a while and in the past months about once in a week.
iTunes give we some weird null error if I switch accounts. Since a few weeks I think (do not use it often, only for updates).
My iphone 6 often refuses to show the 'copy'-popup the first time I select something. So I regularly have to selected something again, just to get the popup. This used to work the first time.
They have a bunch of gripes, but at the same time there's still a lot that makes them happy and they're not about to start using Windows or Linux instead. This is exactly how I feel: yeah, there's stuff they need to do better and some of their stuff has either gotten totally crufty (iTunes) or was a bit too early (Apple Music, Apple Watch), but overall I still prefer Apple's products to their competitors at this point in time.
Well just today I called my wife, neither my mic nor the speaker in my phone were working. I couldn't hear the phone ringing and when she picked up we couldn't communicate. She instead called me and everything started to work. I have no clue where the fault lies and it's concerning because what if I was calling 911?
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadPersonally I haven't had as many issues as described in the article e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me.
However the biggest issue I do have is anything network related. Getting new messages in Mail is terribly slow, iTunes constantly gives me an error then loads the album or whatever just fine afterwards.
El Capitan has sped up the OS for me compared to the previous OS X release. Yosemite was so bad that I found myself avoiding using my Mac Mini instead using my rMBP with an SSD because the Mac Mini just felt so incredibly slow. With El Capitan they feel similar to me. Certain disk operations of course are slower, but overall the usability has increased under El Capitan versus Yosemite.
Based upon informal replies on Twitter when I posted about my upgrade experience, I wasn't the only one that noticed a distinct speedup compared to Yosemite on older hardware.
I am using a old mac mini, and I can't afford a new one... every time I update xcode, it get slower and more unstable, specially because the memory consumption jumps up, it is now in a point where it uses more memory than the mac mini has in first place (meaning it is constantly trashing with swap... crashes are common too, project corruption is also getting increasingly common).
I lucked out that my current client had a old non-updated iPod to allow me to use (you can't use new version iOS with old Xcode).
That's the first thing that went through my mind when I read the complaint about Preview crashing. Then I got to thinking about how Preview can eat up a lot of memory in certain situations (maybe large complex documents rendered to retina framebuffers), so maybe it's a memory issue. Journalists may not be as likely as people like me to insist on ridiculous amounts of RAM.
My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically replaceable, but the specs that this laptop shipped with are going to be the specs that it dies with.
When the battery goes, I'll have to either risk destroying the machine or pay way too much to Apple to do the job for me. At that point I'll probably just switch to a brand with a more reasonable user-servicing model, assuming those still exist.
Just like people buy cars/homes/clothes/cellphones just because of how they look.
I'd argue they should look at the overall "package" when purchasing, but if looks are important to someone that's absolutely fine, and there is nothing wrong with valuing looks.
I was still using a MacBook Pro 17 from 2011 up until a few months ago. It is still rock solid with no creaks or wear/tear.
And let me ask you do you buy a car based on how it looks ? How about clothes ?
That's the benefit of plastic for portable, droppable, devices.
And this is on a machine that shipped from Dell with Ubuntu 14.04 installed, so supposedly all the hardware is open-source friendly.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458699,00.asp
Also, just for clarification, do you mean self-repairable? The review said it, like the MBP, has non-standard screw heads making repair difficult. Thoughts?
I do use it plugged in most of the time, but I suspect that the review is spot on with the battery life. I maybe get a little more since I don't do much in the way of video, and I have my screen dimmed and my CPU in passive cooling mode.
The issue I see is that the other side of the fence is not so sweet either. You cannot release a buggy OS that leads to my laptop bricking itself 3 times, and then jump right into another one with a hyper-aggresive update cycle, and expect me to follow along. Never. I risk losing massive amounts of work and significantly impacting my revenue at the same time.
I still have not decided if I will accept the sunk cost of Apple or a user experience downgrade to Linux, but hopefully I can put the decision off for a number of years like I did migrating away from Windows XP.
The entire modern tech ecosystem is rotten:
My drivers don't work. My OS doesn't work. The official development software for my target OS stinks. The official emulator to run it is dastardly. The api and functionality of the OS itself is pathetically broken, and less productive than battling bugs in php ten years ago. It all looks pretty from top to bottom if you squint, but the emperor definitely wears no clothes. 2016 is massively frustrating, and I long for the time when the basic premise of a computer being a tool that needs to function effectively was the norm.
They may be declining, but they still have an overall "least frustrating" experience, especially when I have to help my family members with Windows 8 or 10, or need to Futz with my nephew's Linux setup.
Chose the mid 2012 non-retina display. Took out the disk drive and put in my own SSD and RAM. Does everything I want it to do without the slightest complaint. All told I probably paid ~$700 less for a comparably powerful machine with 10x the internal storage of a late model MBP retina, albeit heavier and with a slightly inferior display.
Next time I need to upgrade I'm with you - it's just too painful to knowingly buy into an ecosystem where upgrades and repairs feel like unabashed extortion.
Obviously there's a very large target market of folks that just want their tech to work and will happily drop a few hundred bucks each time they need to upgrade or repair. But it's hard to go back once you've opened up your computer and seen how cheap/easy it is to replace some of these extremely modular components. I imagine my mindset will change as I get older and have less time/more disposable income.
There is. I'm 33, and do devops/infrastructure. I just want my rig to work. Macbook Air maxed out on ram and disk. To me, its disposable every three years (comes out to be ~$60/month).
Apple is going to have to get pretty bad before I throw away the experience of walking into an Apple store, buying a new laptop, restoring from TimeMachine, and being up and running almost immediately.
As you mention, disposable income and a lack of time changes the equation.
Even phased like that that is a lot of money.
EDIT: I know people who spend more than that on Starbucks each month.
- 9 € / month ( Google Play Music)
- 3 € / month ( Netflix shared with 3 other people)
- 3€ / month for Google Apps ( actually, this is business... But i also use the mail for private use..)
= 15 € / month.
If i'm not mistaking, you're OS X device costs you 4 times more every month then the sum of every online webservice i use.
( this is another comparison than yours.. Some people just throw out money, others don't :) . Earning a lot of money doesn't automaticly mean you have to waste all of it )
Well.. you need something to run those things on
Is that any better? ;)
It turns out I spend far more on internet access than I do on hardware, and I wouldn't have thought that to be the case.
I think that's more than worth it. Why the hell haven't I bought a backup machine yet just in case this one breaks?
Because you're leveraging credit in the event of a failure! No need to let equipment languish when you can simply pop into the store!
Also because it has so far only died about once every two years. Every time due to human error (spilled things). I can afford a two day outage every two years :)
Then again, it's cheaper than a month of rent for a 1-bedroom in this damn city (San Francisco).
And mind you that just two years ago, I had the same kind of reaction to that sort of comment. It's not that hard to step up a few pay grades as an engineer these days.
And no, not on Windows because in my experience it's the most terrible system for developers. Might've improved in the last 15 years.
And no, not on linux. In my experience it requires constant tinkering with the system. According to my friends still on linux, this hasn't changed in the last 3 years.
So yeah, I guess only mac is left. Which often still requires too much tinkering, but feels like less than linux. And I honestly haven't used windows in earnest in 15 years so hard to say.
Payed 550€ for my laptop ( 8 gb, ..) 2 years ago, everything is still working fine and it's still enough ( Visual Studio is supposed to be a "heavy" program). = 23 € / month till now and still dropping... And it's hardly game over with my laptop. When i'm at 3 years, it will cost me about 15,2 € / month.
I'll probably use it for longer. But let's say i don't have any costs and sell the laptop for 150 €, that makes it 11,2 € / month.
PS. No repairs required untill date
Edit: You can install Linux on it too or dualboot it ( i did this a long time, but didn't feel the need for it now)
Edit:. The Pi is just for experimenting, no GUI required ;)
There are tools like docker-machine facilitate running Docker under Linux VMs non-Linux platforms though.
Microsoft would really do well supporting a truly great UNIX layer.
I wouldn't say stupidly. Open source projects just don't prioritize Windows development.
And once you know how the C++ compilation works with VC++, the problems are minimized. ( i mostly come this accross with Python)
It isn't a hassle free road though
Total cost (including the Intel SSD) was £726 or $1049 at today's rate (exc. VAT). So didn't cost a bomb and gives me a lightening fast machine, windows for desktop duties, debian for dev, a 1920x1080 display, easily replaceable battery/ram/disk and no issue driving multiple monitors.
It's also stupid to assume that your application will work seamlessly between Windows and Unix-like systems just by making sure that the path separators are OS-agnostic.
Trade money for things that save you time, to spend that time on what's important to you (if you've got the money).
I don't get the comparison.
It's like apple users think the only options are buy apple (expensive, but "allegedly" rarely needs fixing, works 99% of the time, lasts a long time, etc) and a PC ("allegedly" breaks all the time, requires more maintenance, requires more time to keep up with, "cheap", etc...)
Those are not the options -- it's a false premise. There are laptop PCs which have the exact same performance & reliability as apple, but for a fraction of the price. I've gone through 4 PC laptops since 1996. My first 2 laptops, I admit, I spent a lot of time repairing but that was due to my own youthful tinkering, experimenting and the general instability of earlier OSs (DOS, Win95, Win98/ME, etc).
But my last 2 have lasted me 7+ years a piece. And I only decided to upgrade because they were beginning to show their age (slower compared to newer stuff). You can buy PC laptops with the same "just works" fidelity as apple. More options open up, and you can save yourself a fortune, if people would just eschew their brand loyalty.
What do you consider a fortune? $1000? $1400? That's about two days of my time consulting. I'm fine paying the premium for what I consider a better experience. It's not brand loyalty, that's for sure. I've had a terrible, terrible time trying to get work done on Windows 7, Windows 10 looks like a train wreck, and there are no Lenovo stores I can walk into same day and get a replacement like I can with an Apple store (which is in every major metro I visit).
Build a better experience, and I will gladly pay for it. Until then, Apple (grudgingly) gets my dollars.
It wasn't until after I bought a new replacement laptop that Apple finally acknowledged the issues and started a repair program. I wasn't able to just walk into my Apple store to get it fixed (I live in a major metro), so I ended up going to a local authorized dealer instead.
It was basically the last straw for me. I'm happily on Windows. I don't miss the OSX Terminal because I've got CMDer, and just about everything else I was using on Mac for work is either available for Windows or has a decent equivalent. Windows is not the wasteland it was when I switched back to Mac a decade ago.
On my home country people get paid 1000 euros a month!
This saves me time for my wife, my children and my hobbies. It also saves me money. Time, and money, to spend on what's important to me. It also sends a signal to companies: there is a market for upgradable, repairable hardware.
Because of the depreciation curve, a $500 computer is almost worthless after several years while a $1000 computer might be worth a hundred or two hundred dollars. Do you spend $200-300 on your $500 computer for say memory + SSD or put that $200-300 towards a new $1000 computer?
As far as time is considered, engineered solutions are generally read-to-go, Apple or Windows, but the Windows world still seems to be rife with bloat. Navigating the hundreds of models & manufacturers is overwhelming for the non-technical user. For many technical folks, it's much simpler to just say, 'Get a mac' or 'Get a Dell', nut the Dell option will be a small pain with navigating the choices.
Non-engineered solutions (building your own) do cost a little bit of a time investment in research, assembly and tweaking. For the technical folk here, it's merely a couple of extra hours. For the uninitiated, it's a lot of hours for knowledge that may not be readily applicable to them on a day-to-day basis.
I absolutely guarantee you that there simply are not enough of you to make hardware manufacturers cater to the upgradable/repairable market.
The only way upgradability/reparability will continue is if people like yourself form a non-profit or B Corp that makes open hardware that allows for it. The vast majority of people don't care.
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10840227
The 3rd gen removed: Ethernet, Firewire 800, Superdrive, Kensington lock, and nothing is user replaceable eventually... All for what? To save 0.93 pounds in weight and 0.2 cm in thickness (13" model).
I don't care if the "Macbook" and the MBA want to go this route of maximum thinness/lightness; but what irks me is that they ruined their supposed power user machine for these cuts. Give me the functionality back. It wasn't like the MBP was heavy or large even before 2012.
Ethernet ports are easy to add as a dongle, you can't do the same with thinness. I really only need ethernet in fixed locations, and where there I already have power, and that's the case for most people.
It's totally cool that you have different needs, but it's not cool to misascribe that to "looks."
I myself gave up on Apple after my 2011 MBP bricked itself last year.
That was too bad, because I really liked the discontinued unibody form factor. If I was spending money on a new laptop, it wasn't going to be a two year old 2012 unibody or one one of the newer thinner, less user-serviceable models.
His idea of better seems to be all about size and superficial design, not user satisfaction. Which would be good if size was all about the user experience - but it's not.
Jobs fucked up regularly (who remembers OS X 1.0?) but he still had a laser-like focus on the overall experience and he could rely on that to keep Apple on track.
Cook doesn't have that, and it's not clear that anyone else at Apple does. He's had five years of significant product launches now, and most of them have been okay-I-guess sidesteps - smaller, thinner, bigger, a different colour - or outright duds.
Also, U2.
Opportunities have been missed. Apple could have opened and owned whole new markets - user generated music and video, health devices, home automation, the power user high-end. Instead we got a watch and a a TV hardly anyone cares about, the promise of a car that will probably be late to the party, a music streaming service that streams music just like all the music streaming services do, and AI something something something maybe one day.
The money may still be flowing in, but the stock is going to get hammered if nothing changes soon.
All the things they removed are things I never ever used. Or used rarely but didn’t really need. Exactly all the things you mention. All the rest (the performance over the Airs, the gorgeous screen over the Airs and previous Pros, the lightness, compactness, extremely solid feeling stability of the thing), it’s all just there.
Just accpet that not all people have the same needs as you. I think the 2012 models are a pitch-perfect demonstration of striking exactly the right balance (for most people). I love ’em to death. And things got only better from there, albeit incrementally.
Oh, please. Apple has nothing to do with that problem. The problem is we're a throw away society hell bent on buying the latest greatest thing. If it's anyone's fault, it's our own.
That's not to say that this trend isn't convenient for the supply side, and that this doesn't play in, it's just to say that it's self-evident that you are correct - the average consumer does, in the end, prefer hard-to-repair and therefore shorter-lived devices, with the advantages they bring, to the alternatives.
If this wasn't the case, there's a HUGE amount of money on the table, and one of the other players would certainly have grabbed it from Apple, instead of mimicking their approach.
The worst part of this is that Apple's success has dragged the rest of the market toward things like non-replaceable batteries.
I think that statement is only half right. Apple may have pioneered the move towards non-replaceable batteries, but I think it's only a symptom of increasingly integrated and small devices. If an inch thick device is thicker by 1mm because the battery is easily detachable, that's much less of an issue than on a 10mm laptop.
They may have done it in an egregious way first (gluing/soldering in components), but we probably would have gotten there before long anyway.
While I agree I know very few people that actually replaced their battery. Usually, when the battery died is about the time they replace that laptop anyway.
There are other battery technologies, such as lithium iron phosphate, which have much better lifetimes, but you give up some energy density. Sealed units should use one of those technologies.
Just take it into an Apple Store and pay the $129 to replace it. I've replaced a battery once on my 2012 MacBook Pro so would not consider this to be a reason to pick one platform over another.
> aftermarket storage upgrade option
I agree this sucks. But personally I am happy for Apple to focus on I/O performance at any cost even if it means no aftermarket upgrades. I just find that with so much being in the cloud and the size of USB drives increasing there hasn't been a need for a large internal storage drive.
If you've got the unibody (2012 was the last year), it's got an end-user replaceable battery. You can buy a third party battery from Amazon, MacSales etc and swap it pretty easily.
The experience is not quite so convenient with newer models.
EDIT: and most importantly, more battery chemistry per weight. Safety requires that serviceable batteries are enclosed in rather substantial cases whose internals are non-user-serviceable. Apple "cheats" by making this case the entire laptop, rather than a specific battery module.
Which is a shame because OS X is a nice operating system. I would like to use it.
https://marco.org/2016/01/04/md101ll-a
A year ago, I wasn't sure how much longer my ancient (but still functioning!) 2008 MBP would be going on. So I went shopping. Found the same tradeoffs Marco mentions here: I didn't like the sealed nature of the newer offerings (and also, AFAICT no screen density can make up for the inexplicably missing matte displays).
I ended up buying a used 2.6Ghz i7 8GB 15" matte MBP instead of anything new from Apple, though.
About the only complaint I have is that Mavericks seems neither as stable or as well-performing as Snow Leopard, which seems to be the last time Apple released an OS that was a strict improvement over previous releases. Too bad it's no longer safe to run given the state of updates.
It actually runs faster now than it did with the stock HD and Mountain Lion! Granted, I'm not doing a lot of heavy computing with it. For web surfing and the basics it still works great.
The drives in the new MacBook Pro are blisteringly quick compared to just a stock standard SSD.
I also think on at least the Android front Samsung has consistently demonstrated the ability to make phones with both SD cards and removable batteries for years without compromising form factor. The S3 / S$ / S5 and Notes 2 - 4 were all extremely thin profile despite supporting removable batteries.
This is just misdirection to try to persuade people its a good thing to remove choice. It is not, it costs basically nothing in manufacturing or size to make the battery / ram / hard drive removable, and the only reason Apple / Dell / Samsung (now) / every other Android phone manufacturer does it is either to rip you off on overpriced battery replacement or drive planned obsolescence to make you buy more shit you really wouldn't need if you could just replace your damn battery two years later.
They're also locking down the platform more and more. I don't think this is some conspiracy to take away user freedom. I think it's because anything that makes a platform 'hackable' also makes it 'pwnable' by malware. Again they are optimizing for the mainstream of the market, which is mostly users with absolutely zero clue about malware or security. They want to field an OS that apps can't easily trojan/backdoor and conscript into a botnet or crytolocker your files, etc. Unfortunately hacker types are casualties here.
It's very, very hard to remain appealing to the hacker crowd while also targeting the mainstream. You're targeting two very different local maxima and a lot of what these two camps want is in absolute conflict -- e.g. UX vs. "power" and packability. I actually think Apple is doing a decent job all things considered. Macs are still great for development and are hackable enough, and if I want more hackability I can spring for a $30 Raspberry Pi or run anything I want inside Parallels with the bonus of not borking my main host machine if I mess it up. I am worried about the future though. If they overly "iOS-ify" the Mac they will lose me.
I almost jumped ship recently because the Surface Book hits a great mix of screen quality/power/battery life, but judging by the forums, it's buggy as hell. So what to do? I'd love a swap-able battery in my rMBP like I have in my T450s, but at the end of the day, I never reach for my ThinkPad when I've got my Mac handy. I'll just go ahead and pay the $200 bucks Apple charges to replace the sealed battery.
[1] My non-technical wife, who has a Mac, recently needed to use my work laptop. Her first reaction on seeing the screen was "wow, your firm cheaped out, huh?" I've got a totally maxed out ThinkPad T450s with i7, 20GB of RAM, and FHD IPS display.
Thats the most difficult part. Original battery costs a fortune (some of them cost almost half of the new basic laptop). And if you decide to get a third party alternative - its basically a russian roulette, you never know what you gonna get, most of them are just terrible and barely last couple months
> And no other PC laptop hits that right sweet spot of power/battery/display quality.
... so I'm going to venture a guess that "the laptop is serviceable" isn't the only criteria being weighed here.
I swapped the DVD player out on an elitebook for a second 500 GB SSD.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Dell+XPS+13+Teardown/36157
Man, I love the idea of this thing.
But I recently tried moving to Surface Book. Spent nearly $3k on a real nicely specc'd one. It BSOD'd daily, sleep modes are really confusing, battery drained terribly overnight, it was overall a bit of a nightmare. Granted probably half of my complaints are about Win10 rather than the SB itself, but still. I returned it.
It's SO CLOSE and if it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.
Oxymoron: tech reasons of how great your computer is; and an argument on why a non technical people don't like it.
That's precisely why Apple doesn't give specifications for as many products as they can get away with. RAM specs are limited to regular computers. Devices with "retina" displays don't list pixel counts any more (or at least overtly so). Given how they're pushing to make storage size irrelevant on mobile devices (iCloud, dynamic app deletion/installation, Photos cloud storage, etc), I expect they'll eventually drop exact local storage specs in most ads (opting for "small/medium/large").
Whenever I switch back and forth, I'm always shocked by how many PC laptops do trackpads so terribly when the Macbooks have been out there for years now.
Edit: There are even some people in this thread, who I assume are "power users," that are willing to sacrifice previously sacrosanct things like ethernet ports for mobility. Personally I'm not willing to do so but I also don't have a pressing need for a laptop.
Good luck!
I put a 128GB USB3.0 SanDisk Ultra Fit[1] in my MacBook (these things are tiny), to supplement the SSD. Currently on sale for AU$74. Plenty fast enough for storing media, and I'm wearing my SSD less now too.
Not to sure what to do when the SSD wears out, probably boot of the USB stick, but that's a while away and I'll sell the laptop before then anyway.
1. https://www.sandisk.com.au/home/usb-flash/ultra-fit-usb
I like having a 9 cell battery, I like having >1TB of storage, the ThinkPad keyboard and TrackPoint, and I like being able to take the thing apart.
At the same time, I also like OS X. I get UNIX underlyings, yet can continue to use software like Photoshop. And there's just a big bunch of subjective things that IMO OS X just does better, like scrolling and font rendering.
Still, the device is growing older, and I honestly have no idea what to replace it with once the time finally comes. The strange combo I have doesn't really have a modern equivalent. Do I sacrifice modularity to stay with OS X? Do I go to Windows or Linux to keep modularity with a modern ThinkPad (which are getting too close to the way modern MacBooks are, sadly).
I have been thinking of something opposite: run ubuntu on Mac.
... it may be too late: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=macbook+air+ba...
By the time (two years?) they decided to roll one out I had already bought an Asus laptop, which was comparable in most ways and costs about half of what I paid for the MBPro.
I don't think I'll be buying Apple hardware for a while. Their increasing push towards planned obsolescence troubles me deeply.
I bought a T550 minimal configuration, for $600 upgraded the RAM to 16G & 500G SSD for $200, after using MBP for 7 years.
Though the MBP is still kicking ass with an upgraded 8G RAM & 500G SSD.
The display isn't the best, but close... the touchpad is bar none the best in any laptop, but I might be willing to sacrifice that when I need another laptop... I haven't been doing iOS native, and my work issued laptop is an rMBP as well, but may just create a build server for cordova out of a used mac mini if/when the need arises.
I never bought into iOS devices, mainly because of early ties to Apple, and I'm somewhat entrenched in Android's ecosystem. The poor software updates, broken SMB/CIFS support and a host of other issues has me more than concerned.
I love the thing and had the fried graphics card issue fixed some time ago instead of opting to replace the MBP with a newer model.
This old thing is struggling to keep up with El Capitan these days though and I'm now mulling a Thinkpad with OpenBSD as a replacement. I kind of wish I could get this same body with updated hardware and OSX 10.6 but that's not in the cards.
Leave me alone. I get periodic full screen ads when I try to listen to music. Is that too much to ask?
I just bought my first iPhone (switching from an Android, the droid maxx - great battery life) largely because I missed being able to easily sync music with my phone. What do I get? Broken music player. Two of the four tabs at the bottom of the Music app are Apple Music-related (radio, "connect"). The UI for switching between displays of my library - artist, album, song - has degraded terribly. And I had to painstakingly delete all of the "cloud" versions of things I'd bought long ago from iTunes. Figured out how to only show music local to my device and now there's an annoying bar across the top of the app at all times.
I mean, fuck, how do you screw up the best mobile music player interface that hard? Just to encourage adoption of a shitty streaming service, with no way to opt out?
Do people not care about syncing music to their phone and listening to it offline anymore?
Had this happen twice today on my long commute. After 15 minutes, gave up trying to make my very expensive phone play music. This on top of the usual iTunes complaints is pushing me to abandon Apple until things improve.
They need to rethink this app/service.
I have a huge collection synced to iTunes Match, and I get to spend quality time in a facility with heavily proxied wifi and no cellular coverage. I don't really need a streaming service.
Apple used to be pay more and deal with less bullshit. Add the bullshit, and the value prop changes.
The only constant is iTunes, it seems to get progressively worse with every release :(
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2256080?start=0&tstart=...
What's more, as the iOS tail has come to wag the Mac OS dog, Apple's concept of an "improvement" has increasingly diverged from mine. Most of the things they've added since Snow Leopard have ranged from useless to annoying as far as I'm concerned. I don't want an app store, I don't understand workspaces, the new fullscreen mode makes my second monitor worthless. Every new version seems to have new hotkeys and swipe gestures that do strange and incomprehensible things when I trigger them by accident, which I would disable if I had any idea what they were called or where to look for their settings.
I don't think this is just an age thing, either, or a romanticism about the past; my family got our first Macintosh in 1985, and I have used every single version of Mac OS since System 0.9. There have definitely been better and worse eras. I have nostalgic feelings about System 5, and to a lesser extent about Mac OS 8. I don't so much feel nostalgic about 10.6.8 as I have simply felt annoyed by each update since.
There is a big difference between shipping an MVP (a HN favourite!) and a buggy piece of shit product.
Will it harm Apple (or Microsoft, or ...) in the long run? Probably not. Sadly users seem to be used to this kind of thing now from all the main players so what alternative do they have?
On a positive I have found Android L to be a solid release which is probably the only solid major point release I have used from any major software company in many years.
Both the iPhone apps and the modern version of iTunes are an utter, over-designed mess. It felt like the core programming functionality was there, until some UX designer got a hold of the front end of those apps and decided to fubar it beyond recognition.
There is _Literally_ no way to just look at all music on your iPhone. You have to have it in playlists or add the songs you want to a playlist, or just shuffle all songs.
*Edit: No way to look at all iPhone songs while not using iTunes with your iPhone plugged into your PC.
The reason you couldn't figure it out is because Apple has completely abandoned usability in favor of a comically flat UI aesthetic.
A UI disaster that most Music users will never discover.
Now, it's just as you say - hard to find specific albums or artists or songs, and once I do, I can't quite tell what it'll do when a song finishes playing. Since I found it through the search box, and not in a list... will it play the next song in the album? In a playlist? Will it just stop?
What I don't know is whether my feelings about the new interface is logical, or if it could be summed up as "you damn kids." Is it a paradigm that I'm just not used to yet, or is the UX objectively bad?
But then they hire a new UX person, or the incumbent UX person gets bored - so they keep refactoring the interface to put out an image of "getting work done" or "adding features and enhancements".
Basically making work for themselves and refactoring an already fine interface that user's are familiar with and just introducing new headaches to users along the way.
I constantly have problems with OS X WiFi connecting/dropping out, this has only been a recent thing since 10.11 (before OS X wifi support was incredible).
I also have problems with Spotlight screwing up. I use spotlight for launching apps, and it often just loses all the apps which I use all day every day. Instead of finding 'Skype' for example, it'll return a list of all the times I've mentioned Skype in emails instead. Again, this broke in 10.11.
I never really use the new features in OS X, which is fine, but 10.11 especially has so many regressions in it for me it is pretty annoying. It also absolutely blasted my unix config in a really hard to fix way, which hasn't ever happened on a previous OS X update.
It doesn't have any of the slowdowns that Spotlight does, and it still has a small interface by default that can move anywhere on the screen.
So you get that impression of everything being a bit creaky but never really getting motivated to spend some time fixing it.
Apple will begin sitting on it's laurels while core services and products degrade, while Microsoft enters a quiet, user-first renaissance under new leadership.
If you switch Apple and Microsoft in the above paragraph, it sounds a lot like the past...
(buzzer sound)
I'm not holding my breath. A lot of decisions around Windows 10 have been, in my opinion, user hostile. If Apple drops the ball, the most likely outcome is that we return to the bad old days where there's Windows - it's ugly and it sucks but everyone know how to use it - and nothing a whole lot better.
This is so spot on. It feels like they rearrange iTunes every month, especially the mobile version.
Recently I noticed that I'd be searching for a song (that I have on my phone) and it would default to their streaming service.... Why would I want to use my data to stream a song that I already have on my phone?
Well, if he was alive, a lot of weird design choices would not have been made. Like the pencil sticking out of the iPad, that weird battery pack, the magic mouse with the charging port on the bottom, etc.
Same thing for Magic Mouse. You think you can design it better? You have a better place for that port? The damn thing needs a few MINUTES of charge time per month. It's a non-issue. The port is exactly where it should be.
The amount of time required to charge doesn't change the fact that no reasonable person would consider the pencil or the mouse charging method a good design.
>> Same thing for Magic Mouse. You think you can design it better? You have a better place for that port?
Well, there are already mice with charging ports where a cord would normally go. It's a solved problem.
the puck?
http://www.applegazette.com/mac/apple-puck-mouse-named-one-o...
- device management - content management - audio - video - photos
I've got a large music library, iTunes is horrible with it, trying to copy to device in iTunes is even worse.
Already photos (and camera taken videos) are treated differently (Photos app) than music/commercial videos.
iTunes is a frankenapp that really doesn't do anything well, aside from maybe be an avenue to buy things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP
It gets worse: this is now also the default behavior on the ipod touch.
As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I purposely used any of the above.
What's driving me away is a combination of flaky behavior on the desktop (bizarre wifi glitches; bizarre NFS/SMB/AFP mount behaviors; increasing system instability), and a lack of differentiation across both the desktop and mobile platform. There was a time when I needed a Mac or i-Device to do things I cared about/needed, but those days are long over. Almost all of my compute activity happens on a server in my homelab or 'the cloud', and Linux and Android meets or exceeds my needs for completing other tasks. I just swapped my iPhone 6+ for a Nexus 6P, and my current MacBook (12" model) will probably be my last when I retire it in 3-4 years.
It's not the best player ever, but it's free, it's better than iTunes, and it does all I want.
I feel like there's definitely a gap in the market for a cloud music service that is simple and effective, I would love to just upload all my music and know it was going to play back anywhere (desktop and mobile) with the original tracks and proper gapless playback, and I would be able to download my music back out of there, with a nice clean UI.
Apple Music fails because it swaps out tracks and is generally flaky (little control over the upload process, tracks don't play, etc.), Google Play fails because it swaps out tracks and has, IMO, a pretty horrible UI on both desktop and mobile.
I've played a little with Subsonic but found the clients lacking. Any other suggestions? Maybe I should just build my own!
http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/fidelia/
http://audirvana.com/
I want and need a deluxe Linux OS for which I would pay $200/year, which would do things well. This includes:
- Porting bugfixes forward (I dropped Ubuntu because they didn't port a bugfix from 12.x to 13.04 - After 2 days trying to recover my network auth, I asked a Mac to my boss).
- Designed for me, not for monkeys with big fingers who bring up Amazon results for every search (That's not why I dropped Ubuntu, but desktop developers aren't within the targets of Canonical),
- Who would hire and pay UX designers. I want the Mac OS X experience. I don't want to recompile my kernel. I want few features in the OS, but well-designed. I want people working days over days to fine-tune the mouse controls in the OS (the first warning that made me upset about Ubuntu). I want to hear the rumble of developers integrating Webkit with nice developer tools into an open-source chromium.
- I, developer, using IntelliJ IDEA, using apt-get/brew, I want to be the paying customer of that OS. I don't want my data be sold. I might want some cloud sync, but I don't want share buttons, especially when I watch porn (I'm absolutely serious). And I want the cloud parts of my OS to be under APL-Affero.
- Obviously those bugfixes must be sent back upstream to the OSS community. Ideally there would be half the money left to pay back, but let's start pessimistic.
- As a bonus, in that OS, all apps would be webkit/js-based. But I'm dreaming.
It is totally possible to charge for open-source, even the GPL says it. You can't prevent people from re-sharing the OS online, but you can offer upgrades to subscribed users only.
I wanted the Apple experience, but that's not coming back. Look what Nest did: They're selling a working thermostat for 3x the price. Tesla is selling electric cars for deluxe customers. I want to pay $200 per year, recurring, for a stable env with little novelty and many bugfixes, and I want to "deluxe". I want to purchase the feeling of being superior with my OS.
And I say that as a peson who earns €32.000 gross per year (France).
(Btw. I never compiled a Linux kernel for my desktop/laptop)
Oh good heavens no, that's the absolute last thing I want from a OS.
Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware.
Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a while and people will keep using and loving Apple hardware and putting up with their miserable software.
For the record, I use Notes/Mail/Photos on my iPhone, and Preview has never crashed for me.
If you swapped all occurrences of "hardware" and "software" in the above statement with each other, you'd have what people said about Apple in the 1990s.
If you want to see a hardware company that doesn't get software, look no further than Sony. Apple's main problem is that they don't get cloud services. This is where Apple can't compete with Google in the same way that Sony couldn't compete with Apple.
I suspect poor product management: I strongly doubt llvm or swift are driven like iTunes.
Wrong.
This may be less true recently, but for a good decade Apple had the superior OS and were the only ones who got device and media integration right - that's all software.
I dunno. I may not be on Apple any more, but I thought some iterations of their software were really damned good, like Snow Leopard, older versions of Mail, Keynote, iPhoto, iMovie (the one that no longer supported plug-ins - was that 08?), Safari, and so on.
For me, iLife (iPhoto and iMovie in particular) has always been a very compelling reason for non-techies to switch from Windows to Mac. It's probably the only thing that I miss from Mac since switching to Windows.
Something weird has happened though. When I left OSX, it was already a bit buggy. A lot of stuff didn't work properly and wasn't well thought out. Windows, aside from the unfortunate Metro experiment, has just gotten better.
Over the life of Windows 7, the only time I had BSOD's was when the SSD with the OS got too close to full. If I kept some free space on my OS partition, BSOD's simply did not happen. Windows 8 was even more stable. It just works. Yes, I added Classic Shell so I could just completely avoid Metro, and the result is an OS that just works and doesn't get in the way. I have privacy concerns about W10 which have prevented me from upgrading, and that really is the one major fly in MS's ointment. Free upgrades are nice, but I'd prefer to pay for an OS where my data isn't treated as a product.
Will I continue to use Windows? Well, there's no other choice for gaming and blurays, so yes. Privacy concerns aside, this is more palatable than ever. Linux continues to be a workhorse for me, and I don't miss OSX one bit.
Edit: I should mention that I tend to customize certain aspects of my OS rather extensively. I like things to be a certain way. Linux is fantastic for this. Windows is good too. OSX is really hit or miss. Some things aren't too bad, but other things are an absolute chore. It's amazing that an OS can restrict hardware and customization choices to the extent OSX does and still be buggy.
The software is another matter.
And I've still gone back to routine crashes if I have a VM open. It hasn't been this bad for me in years.
Makes me think that upgrading from Windows 8.1 to 10 can't be that bad.
Essentially Apple is the first company in history with such as large distributed platform of devices utilized by an unprecedented number of people, and unlike every other company, it wants to keep a tight grip on every aspect of that. By the time is addresses an issue, it loses sight of another. This is how I imagine Apple is functioning right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5C8rnpAbIs
They likely see the problem but can't execute.
Hangouts / Google Calendar are also really clunky and seem poorly tested. Things often go out of sync or you're randomly asked to re-login several times a month, and only during video chats.
Hangouts is bad. Very slow and bloated everywhere. On mobile it only syncs notifications at random. Audio and video quality is total crap, and even with this new web beta thing where it's supposed to be better, it's still much worse than skype.
The most incredible thing, and I am ashamed of typing this but whatever, is that I've actually felt an improvement in my life after turning off hangouts in gmail. WTF.
The recent slippage in quality and focus mirrors what happened in the late 80s and early 90s after Steve was forced out. There was considerable leftover momentum in the short term which allowed the company to coast for while and keep up some semblance of health, but eventually the lack of focus caught up with them. They became "beleaguered" in the mid-90s and only recovered when Steve came back (and axed products that weren't working, focused resources on new problems, simplified the product line, etc). It took many years, but he eventually turned them into a powerhouse.
Now that he's been gone for a while, we are seeing a similar phenomenon. In the short term after he left, the company had considerable momentum (due mostly to the iPhone) which carried them along for a number of years, but without someone at the top who had his ability to maintain focus, the company is starting to slip again.
This time, there may be no coming back.
The secondary aspect is the surface area of what they are dealing with. This is a far cry from the old Mac OS days where they were really a PC company. Now they have to make OS X, iOS (for both phones/tablets), and tvOS all work together seamlessly. If quality was exactly the same, they would have far more bugs just based on the cartesian complexity of possible interactions.
I hope they can sort it out because I'm feeling the pain just like everyone else, but I don't see any better alternatives at the moment.
Which isn't saying much, since they're still terrible. Their cloud-synced Notes.app is almost unusable; every time I add a note on the phone there's maybe a one-in-three chance it'll sync to the desktop immediately, a one-in-three chance it'll sync the next day, and a one-in-three chance it'll appear three days later or more. If Apple has in fact gotten better at cloud services, it's only because they were so abysmal before that there was nowhere to go but up.
Sync works fine (and near immediately if you refresh on a device) but doesn't actively push, I find.
How much of this is due to the loss of Steve Jobs? A great amount, I think. He had all day to look at the outputs of different teams and tell them why it was stupid or ugly.
Wi-fi has been buggy on OS X for literally years now. And each new major release seems to bring some new pain point where it refuses to turn on, refuses to connect, doesn't transmit data... and on and on. There's no way Apple can't know about this - it must drive their own employees crazy. Yet, nothing gets done.
If I were in the market for a new laptop right now I'd be taking a serious look at a Surface Book - it's the first thing I've seen that looks like it could rival a Macbook in the hardware department. Sadly, I'd have to do a lot more research into getting a decent POSIX environment set up on it before I could take the plunge.
(side note: I wish they'd never stopped using Atheros WiFi.)
The last year I have gone through three routers:
* Asus RT-N66U ("the Dark Knight"), worked fine on 2.5GHz, but the 5GHz signal gradually became worse until one day it just disppeared. Apparently a lot of users have had this issue.
* Asus RT-AC66U, the smaller version of the same router. Just stopped working occasionally, requiring a reboot.
* Netgear AC1750 R6400-100NAS (little brother to the "Nighthawk"). Current router, was stable enough for a while, but now needs rebooting a couple of times every week. SSL/TLS connections stop working randomly. Devices such as iPhone and AppleTV fail to get packets through on the first try after being dormant for a while.
At work we have the Netgear AC1900/R7000 "Nighthawk", which has been extremely stable. But it's also quite expensive, and large (as is the AC1750).
I've lost all faith in Asus, and the only other brand I can see that has a good reputation is Ubiquity. They make "pro" access points for hotels and such. Then again, hotel wifi is the worst.
They had devices with 5 GHz before, just not in their SOHO devices. I've got two of their SXT lites (5 GHz) with directional antennas and my wireless uptime between them is around 70d.
Btw, the interface of their routers is a bit … verbose. I like it, but you should definitely have a look at it before you buy one of their routers: http://demo.mt.lv/webfig/
Even their cheapest devices come with a full copy of their OS, so you could just buy a hAP lite (~$25) and see if you like it. I did the same and never looked back.
It's SO CLOSE and it was $1,000 cheaper I may have just dealt with it. Just not quite there.
iTunes give we some weird null error if I switch accounts. Since a few weeks I think (do not use it often, only for updates).
My iphone 6 often refuses to show the 'copy'-popup the first time I select something. So I regularly have to selected something again, just to get the popup. This used to work the first time.
Just some examples that come to mind.
http://atp.fm/episodes/155
They have a bunch of gripes, but at the same time there's still a lot that makes them happy and they're not about to start using Windows or Linux instead. This is exactly how I feel: yeah, there's stuff they need to do better and some of their stuff has either gotten totally crufty (iTunes) or was a bit too early (Apple Music, Apple Watch), but overall I still prefer Apple's products to their competitors at this point in time.
Music, messaging, news. All these things are entire billion dollar industries, we can't expect them to hit a home run on everything.