Maybe its not just apple. Growing up in the 90's I imagined this cool VR / AI future right out of Gibson's Neuromancer. Instead we have these walled gardens, the Internet has become less open, less free to the masses. Everything has become about commercialization instead of innovation and exploration.
I see this type of comment a lot. It's not just iOS, Android now has a review process and Google will keep driving in the Apple direction because it is successful. And if it's like the op says where everythig is in the cloud, then walled gardens don't matter much as long as your service has a native app or mobile web (hint, they probably have both).
What's the really big issue is privacy (which I know is gone) and what facebook is doing to the world. Everyone likes to bash on Apple lately, but Apple is 'acquiring' a lot less of your personalized data than the social networks and Google are (they are also trying to take the lead in being privacy first).
Facebook is just a big ad platform and dont forget 'free' == you are the product.
Also - in the USA, we should have Fiber to all homes by now, but instead what do we have? Segmented, ancient infrastructure, run by ISPs that have carved out territories with no competition, no foreseeable upgrades and the end of "net neutrality." Greed is front and center over providing an inexpensive and innovative means of communication (internet).
Peace
Neuromancer's cool, but the world it represents isn't exactly amazing, or that much better than ours, unless I'm mistaken.
Plus, honestly... what else should we expect? We live in a capitalistic, commercialistic, materialistic society. Hypercommercialization of any and all technology is the default.
Yes a major transformation took place. I anticipated a world where my C64 would be online with friends running humorous programs on it, making me giggle while I worked, synthing music while we walked down the street. A few bad guys here and there with personal grievances, but the local cyberlord taking them out swiftly.
As it turned out, based on the 90s and Windows, there are soooooo many bad guys out there it's unbelievable. And their ability to scale is sublime. It wasn't about one devil-eyed hacker in my cafe with a piece of malware on a green crystal.... More mundane and multiplicitous, it's 100,000 script kiddies in every country around the world trying password lists in every port on every IP address. Mostly to simply re-sell the data to someone who actually has a plan.
And that's neverminding the concentrated, hybrid state/criminal enterprises operating out of labs with crazy budgets.
So I think that's why everything just had to get walled to death, or rather sterility. I still giggle at images while I'm working, but the security of the channels through which a "hold my beer" .gif travels to get to me is astonishing. It would probably take a day just to verify a 4096-bit security algorithm on my old friend, the 6502.
Not a particularly well-written article, but some interesting points.
The constant "Linux isn't good enough shots" in all these articles is annoying, though. I was on Linux full time in 2010, and found it far more pleasant than OS X.
The bits about X11/Wayland made me a bit curious. The author claims we're "only just now" moving towards Wayland -- is there a big movement towards it lately that I've been missing?
Yeah its finally shipped by default with GNOME in both Fedora and Arch (Fedora shipped it for the first time in 25). So thats where that is coming from.
I've been "full time" on Linux since 1998 (part-time since 1995 - started with Monkey Linux on a 386 laptop, then moved to Turbo Linux 2.0 on a 486 laptop); I found it interesting that the author of this article seems to think that the devs of GIMP haven't always been frustrated by the various color management issues - because most of them are proprietary problems that don't mesh with open source.
Apple's pattern seems to be small "bursts" of innovation followed by long periods of "dormancy" where they just make smaller/bigger screens. Their "walled garden" cow is just about milked out as the Open Web is enters its new rennaisance. They'll be back in 10-15 years with somethinh that looks like real innovation again.
Without Jobs I king of doubt that it will be them doing it. They might stumble onto some gem and use their vast hordes of cash to buy their way into an emerging market this time around.
> Anyone that is someone has been following Apple for the past couple of decades. Love them, or hate them, the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
I hate to write off a whole article based on a bad first sentence, but this one just about makes me do so. It starts of with a judgement of a person's worth, then shows that they seem to have completely missed the years over the past few decades where Apple stagnated and were not really relevant outside of creative circles and academia. And finishes off by saying they cannot be ignored, when in reality the business/enterprise world has gotten along just fine ignoring Apple even to this very day.
"Wearables and VR are good gimmicks, but even if they become ubiquitous, it's not a revolution, just an extension of the use cases that the iPhone revolution bootstrapped."
Smartphones seem a heck of a lot more derivative of earlier computing use cases.
Wearables and VR owe a debt to smartphones because of the cheap components from the mobile supply chain finally make them possible. The debt is not in the realm of ideas. Conceptually both VR and ubiquitous computing predate smartphones by decades.
"We all" aren't moving away from Apple, while I have many issues with the current direction and product offerings, the platform still works for me. So maybe it really is just "All - Me" but my distinct impression is that it is a noisy cohort in the blogverse that has seized upon this as the trend du jour.
I'm still using my MBA 11" from 2012 for everything. I have only 4GB RAM and it's not even a problem to work (I don't have 15 VMs running in background). :)) I have no idea when I'm going to change it and for what, but I have absolutely no desire to move back to Windows or Ubuntu.
And there is no way I move away from iOS. It works great for me. Plus, I use my iPhone 6 mostly for gaming and I've been buying games since the 3GS so I've a huge collection (including a bunch of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles that are quite expensive).
That's exactly what it is. I only hear about this nonsense on HackerNews and related sites. In The Real World, I haven't seen an increase in people abandoning MacOS for Linux or Windows, just the usual dev that claims "I've switched to Linux as my main OS and it's been great", then two weeks later you learn that dev has switched back to Mac.
As far as mobile goes, I've actually seen an increase in people moving back to iOS from Android.
You're not wrong. The idea was not for the article to be a statistically correct report of the present day status. That's easy to get and Apple's marketshare is nowhere near bad.
This is a decades-long reflection on computer history as a whole, having Apple as protagonist and important player.
The title reflects where the early-adopters - the same people that brought Apple back from the dead in the late 90's - will go from here.
Even after reading I still think the questions is "ARE we all moving away from Apple?" or even "Are a significant number of people moving away from Apple"
I'm waiting for second generation of the current mbp. Might not make it that far as 2009 mbp is definitely showing it's age but I get prepurchase buyers remorse every time I go to buy. 2009 mbp still works well enough to put off the decision.
These days its very easy to get any flavor of Linux/Unix running in cloud at a very cheap price. Back in the day folks especially developer relied on Macs as a stable platform to work on but now that landscape has changed due to cloud. Meanwhile this transformation was happening Apple lost its focus and doing the right thing instead their bright idea was generate passive income by forcing people buying connectors.
I owned an old Mac for 7+ years it worked fine and finally I decided to get a new one. I was just amazed by amount of connectors I ended up buying.
Yeah, that first iMac took the biscuit. No ADB or SCSI, Parallel or Serial ports, no floppy drives and that stupid mouse! But in time most most manufacturers turned to USB as it really was the obvious choice for the future. Heady days!
Here is my tip to Apple. I always felt I understood Apple's Gestapo-like tactics in the past, regarding their rigid methodologies. Eliminating ports and features, removable batteries, etc. I don't understand Apples moves in the past 5 years. They have spread out and complicated everything that Jobs' made simple and attractive.
Heres my advice.
Apple is way too spread out, it should kill off the dead ends.
* Kill iTunes split it in to 5 functional media apps, and design a good simple music player. Stop trying to make me sign up for reoccurring-billing services. Makes me feel like I'm dealing with Comcast.
* Merge the App store with the Apple media store.
* Kill the watch and the car.
* Merge the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, Macbook to one product with 5 sizes each with a pro series all with a touch or keyboard interface and an appropriate OS interface depending on if a keyboard is attached. Yes, merge MacOS and iOS.
* Simplify product and Apple services pricing, two tiers, basic and unlimited.
* Bring back a pro series products and software even if it was a revenue loser.
* And simply password protections with a API service offered and incentivized like SSL certs are.
* I sort of get Apple Health, but what is Apple Home? What is Apple Music Match, or Apple Music and why isn't it included with iCloud? Merge them all.
There are plenty of IT sectors to fix and disrupt. They seem like they just think there's isn't anything work on. Cars? Watches? Movie/TV? WTF
How about
There’s just one more thing... Apple home audio video equipment and media services and amps. Compete with the big boys in home audio video. The industry is a mess with protocols, encryption, DRM, AV encoding, bit-rates, streaming services. I need my IT degree, not for computers but for my audio system. Erode cable's power grip not from the network production and delivery end from the home equipment end. Remake Apple TV as a prosumer product series called Apple Home. Hardware that works with Apple amplifiers, Apple speakers, Apple record players? etc. Introduce Apple TV an actual TV. Let's face it the only good thing about TVs these days is the actual screen, the software sucks. Everyone is tired of having 5 remote controls. My husband can’t turn on the TV! Apple is perfectly set up to do it. It’s constant and consistent market that will only grow as home entertainment improves in quality.
Apple could have done what sonos is doing. I was waiting for apple to improve on airplay and let me hook up all my stuff over apple stuff. I got the apple tv, the time capsule, the macbook pro, and I got my wife a macbook, iphone, and ipad. Why doesn't this shit conveniently work together? Why is my wife now saying we need to throw out our high end speakers and get all sonos stuff to fix our mess of an AV system? I got her every damn apple product that exists. My favorite part of apple tv was the screensavers but they can't even keep those updated in a timely manner. I'm done buying apple stuff.
Killing the watch would be insane. Apple is now the Number 2 watch maker in the world by revenue (just for watches), second only to Rolex. We don't know their actual revenue, but Fossil at no.3 raked in over $3bn. You'd really cancel a multi-billion dollar revenue stream?
The last straw for me was when osx without warning or explanation removed the vpn technology I was using. The people waiting for me to do work asked "why in the hell are you still trying to use that piece of crap" and I didn't have an answer. I never really needed the super expensive ssd or the most high end cpu. I do need more ram and am dumbfounded why apple would go 5+ years without upgrading the ram (cue the apple fans to tell me I'm stupid and don't need more ram). I put together a $700 system that better fits my needs than the $4000 macbook. The awesome magic trackpad 2 I was so worried about losing has been replaced with a mx master and I ended up liking it better. The real surprise for me is that intel 530 graphics drives a 4k display better than the macbook with its loud m370x.
I'm not a hater. I like apple's attitude on encryption. I like brushed aluminum stuff and don't mind paying for it. It just doesn't work for me when a $700 system can have better specs for my work than their $4000 system.
It wasn't the first issue I ran into being on osx and everyone else using windows. As someone who used these machines for work, I can't control what terrible protocols people use, I just need it to work.
>"It wasn't the first issue I ran into being on osx and everyone else using windows."
So Microsoft using outdated and insecure prototocols, as well as propriatery[0] ones is Apple's fault?
It's perfectly fine to say "I don't like Apple/the direction they are taking, so I'm moving to another platform." Use what works best for you. Just don't use petty excuses for it. Sorry, you are baring the brunt of the glut of "Why I'm switching" articles.
[0]Yes, I realise that Apple can also be a bad actor in this department too.
There are a lot more reasons I switched to windows than a vpn that stopped working. I tried for over 4 years to incorporate osx into an engineering work flow. The nominally cross platform eclipse stack I was using never became fully compatible with osx. It was always a usb driver or something stopping the osx version from working. Even when it did work, I would check in a project and someone else would be like "omg this doesn't work, did you do this in osx?". I had a total of 1 project ever where the client wanted to mess with the code in osx and was glad I could do it in osx. Ended up using parallels for almost all compiler toolchains. My saleae scope software is buggy in osx, ties up a cpu at 100% while its open for some reason- had to use that in parallels too. What DID I use native osx for? Browsers? Mac vim? Linux commandline? It clearly has not been worth the time and money.
> Implementing PEAP-MS-CHAP v2 Authentication for Microsoft VPNs may require less change to configuration and have a lesser impact to systems than implementing a more secure VPN tunnel, such as using L2TP, IKEv2, or SSTP VPN tunnels in conjunction with MS-CHAP v2 or EAP-MS-CHAP v2 for authentication.
> I do need more ram and am dumbfounded why apple would go 5+ years without upgrading the ram (cue the apple fans to tell me I'm stupid and don't need more ram).
Intel's mobility processors only support up to 16 GB RAM. At least Apple upped the base spec to the full 16 GB. Processors supporting more than 16 GB are due out in 2017.
But those Xeon CPUs are not ULV. Are you reading what I wrote or you do not know what Ultra Low Voltage CPU mean?! Apple uses exclusively ULV CPUs and Intel will offer first ULV models that extend 16GB limit at the end of 2017. So it's on Intel not Apple. And if Apple do not bump the RAM limit in 2018. then we can throw that on them.
The 2016 15" Macbook Pro's HQ series CPUs are ULV?
I'm pretty sure laptops using 6##0HQ family are 32GB capable.
Apple may have a valid reason for not giving 32GB (battery life), but that's a separate issue from whether you can have 32GB with that processor family.
Yes, but you have to admit that not using the DDR4 was an iffy, arbitrary judgement call on the part of Apple.
Only the 15"s can have 32GB, and I would think a lot of pro users would make the battery life trade off if given the opportunity.
The reduced battery life of a 32GB 15" Macbook Pro would not impact a significant number of Mac users -- most normal people wouldn't be willing to pay for the RAM upgrade (Apple RAM is never cheap) and it seems like the majority of people prefer the 13" models anyways, and they are capped at 16GB.
I think that the problem lies in Touch Bar. T1 Chip and Touch strip require far more battery power than I thought. So battery is already on the edge of being disappointing if not already that. Plus lack of Non Touch Bar 15" model is also disappointing. But hey, I think that in a next iteration or two those will be great machines. With 32GB options, more battery power, reduced price and better software integration for Touch Bar. So I am patient. I bought maxed out 13" in 2015 and I can't be happier with that machine.
Because those Thinkpads don't use a single stick of the low-profile RAM that Ultrabooks and MacBooks use. All Intel Ultrabooks have the same issue going on, there's no single low-powered low-profile 32GB RAM on the market. The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition is the same way.
It's not an Apple excuse, don't pretend like it is.
Ultrabooks were created to compete with MacBooks. Apple has only ever sold "ultrabooks", they're just getting slimmer over the years. Like much of the rest of the market. If it was Apple's excuse, you'd need to explain the Surface and XPS 13 and a whole host of other non-Apple machines.
Apple doesn't sell desktop replacements like Lenovo does.
I love ultrabooks- I was using a eeepc when the 2012 macbook pro came out and took credit for removing the cdrom. The problem with current macbooks is that they moved beyond ultrabooks and became ultralights. Thinner at all costs. Forget about any ram upgrade, forget about any extra cpu core, forget about longer battery life, it is thinner at all costs. I am an apple fan. I had $6000 budgeted towards a new xeon macbook and tb3 external gpu. The release we got just has me scratching my head. Why did they brand this piddly weak macbook as a macbook pro? Where is the external gpu? Where is any other tb3 equipment? Where is a performance macbook? I want apple to succeed, I want apple to have my money, so it makes me sad when they fail like this.
Because those don't use mobility processors and Apple won't make laptops with 2 to 3 hours of battery life or huge batteries.
Apple have criteria for what processors they are prepared to use and the ones in the Lenovo don't meet them. If they do meet yours, it's cool, buy the Lenovo.
The mbp uses the same hq series i7 as those thinkpads, but apple chose soldered lpddr3 RAM, which that i7 supports up to 16 gb, over socketed ddr4, which it supports up to 64 gb. Lpddr3 uses the same amount of power when active, but less in standby and idle. So apple optimized for idle battery life and thinness. I have one of those thinkpads, it's chunky.
Because there is at least a good Chrome browser in every platform.
Aside from iOS, you mean?
Actually, the non-Chrome browsers on every platform are good enough and Chrome doesn't stand out. That's why the author missed this extremely obvious extra jab at apple.
There is a "good Chrome browser" on iOS. It syncs your passwords and bookmarks and works as intended. The fact that it's not sharing rendering technology with the other Chrome browsers doesn't matter at all to end users, and matters very little to developers.
I've always bristled at the idea -- prevalent in Mac Evangelism going all the way back to the 1980s -- that I'm "corporate" and not "creative" because I create things like electronics, optics, embedded systems, and industrial controls, rather than newsletters and advertising.
It doesn't help that many of the people I personally knew who were mac evangelists (programmers) in the late 80s and early 90s tended to be sniveling elitists.
Huh. From the title and the themes, I was expecting an amazing article. But this isn't it. It struck me as confused, poorly written, and not well supported.
Personally I think Apple is in trouble. Sustaining their dominance was never going to be easy, and I don't think they're rising to the challenges. So I expect too soon read something like this, but engaging, succinct, and persuasive.
I was not expecting it to reach Hackernews frontpage :-) Sorry if it was a confusing read, I just wrote my personal thoughts. It was not the intention to make an objective checklist. Feedback is appreciated.
the authors understanding of X11 seems flawed. Or at least i don't agree with X11 being the thing holding linux back. There have been many proposed replacement, and finally it appears wayland may make some headway, but from a user experience, the windowing system has very little influence. Perhaps the author means desktop environments, gnome/kde/xfce... those certainly effect the user experience, and the fragmented culture of the user experience can be frustrating. However from my vantage that is by design, the classic make it whatever you want it to be. All-in-all a disappointing article.
I really meant X11. The desktop manager fragmentation is an issue but not so much. It doesn't help for the end user if the system is difficult to maintain, if out of the box it's easy to break, it stutters, crashes, doesn't draw correctly, and overall is difficult to make fluid. Latency is high, one app can hang the windowing drawing, etc. So yes, it's a lot to blame on X11.
Except that that's not why Apple avoided X11. Apple decided to build their own thing because they wanted to avoid also-ran cross-compatibility with other UNIX clones, and additionally they wanted fancy antialiased font rendering which X11 didn't support at the time.
Apple built Quartz while Xorg developed Xft. A couple years in and Quartz didn't have any compelling features over Xorg, just an alien API.
It's true that X11 is terrible but nearly all of its competitors have shown themselves to be worse. Wayland wasn't practical until recently (like 2014?) when GPU memory and latency has dropped to the point where actually running a full compositor is no longer expensive. And most people using Wayland will just host an Xorg inside for X11 backwards compatibility anyway...
You're right about that. I didn't want to extend too much on that part and I can see how it can be misinterpreted. I didn't mean that Apple's direct reason to build Quartz was because of X. But it is true that X didn't have any reasons to be used back then in the mid-90's as well, specially coming from NEXT with it's Display Postscript compositing manager.
I have seen many things, but not that. My first suspicion is that it is not X11 that hangs, but the blasted compositor that whatever DE you were using insist on applying because "UX"...
Oh give me a break, "we all" are not moving away from Apple. People are pissed off, and rightly so. But no one is running out and ditching all their hardware. We're all sitting around to see what 2017 brings for changes, and if there isn't any significant, we're still going to be buying the new whatever there is. We're after the OS, that's not going to change.
It's not that we are all "pissed", it's not the tone of the article. I wrote it because that's what I see happening. And I will be the first to be proven wrong. But right now, it's not that Apple products are "bad", it's more like everybody else caught up while they're in standstill. That's the gist of the article.
Last year I switched to Linux after 12 years of Mac, and to Android after using iOS since the first iPhone. Quite a few of my peers have done the same already, and a lot of them are looking at their options and refusing to upgrade their Apple hardware.
I'm proud of you, but I've played with Linux on the desktop for the last nineteen years, in various flavors. It's just never going to compete with the MacOS experience. It will never have the nice applications, the polished interface, the tight integration with my iphone/ipad. Great server OS, poor desktop.
The "MacOS experience" has been in steady decline since Snow Leopard, while Linux on the desktop has come a long way and continues to get better. I'm using elementaryOS, which despite it missing a few things (in fairness it's currently v0.4), I find is a workable macOS replacement.
Apple should bring back Scott Forstall as CEO, leaving Cook to do what he does best, i.e. supply chain management.
> I'm proud of you, but I've played with Linux on the desktop for the last nineteen years, in various flavors. It's just never going to compete with the MacOS experience. It will never have the nice applications, the polished interface, the tight integration with my iphone/ipad. Great server OS, poor desktop.
sjtgraham (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13383982) and several of his or her peers find that it does have what they need, while obviously you don't. I doubt that there's an objective, correct answer to "does Linux compete with macOS?", but, if there is, I also doubt that we're going to find it by this sort of anecdote-slinging.
The choice of applications, xcode, ios device integration, and polished interface, is not anecdotal. Those are facts. I don't get those moving to Linux.
You'll need to expand on "choice of applications" because most things are UNIX or UNIX-like compatible and nearly everything I use on Linux is Linux/Mac compatible. If anything, Windows is lacking and using things like Cygwin isn't good enough for many things.
xCode is walled garden specific. If you're developing for Apple products it might make sense to use Apple products that will be designed to make developing for Apple products easier. I don't see how this is a "plus" to any developer who isn't developing for Apple products. There are plenty of devs who don't work on code related to Apple products at all!
Similarly, iOS integration is moot. What if they use Android? Don't need awesome iOS integration if you don't wall yourself off into Apple's garden.
I like polishing my own interface because I absolutely detest the design of Mac. That's a flavor and is not "factually" better. Many of the design decisions from Apple make me scratch my head in confusion.
Unibox, Capture One, XCode, Contacts/Calendar syncing to iphone/ipad, iMessage syncing. Theses are required applications.
That's awesome you enjoy that, but I'm not one to waste my time polishing, and modifying the OS I'm using. That's just insane to me.
One little side mention, the font rendering on Mac is so much more enjoyable to look at, that it impacts me immensely. Especially when dealing with web sites. Looking at them on Windows or Linux is horrific.
Linux on the desktop for the last nineteen years, in various flavors. It's just never going to compete with the MacOS experience.
I used Mac as a software dev for three years and went from enthusiastic to "never again".
Macs aren't for everyone and while I move back and forth between Linux and Windows I still defend Mac users, even wish there where more of them to really stokke the fire under Microsofts desktop division : )
What I can totally live without though is the "Mac is objectively best" attitude. It is NOT. At least not for everyone.
So: can we please stop? I'll defend you paying for your tools and you guys stop acting like our operating systems of choice aren't as good as yours?
You're replying on a post about how "we" are all moving away from Apple, so you have to remember that context. A lot of these replies are challenging that premise, especially when the author of that article provides no evidence of their headline.
I've seen no evidence or numbers of this mass exodus from mac->linux that people claim except a few loud/popular blog posts by individuals who have done it. That distorts what is actually happening.
I actually agree with a lot of what is said in the article, but I dispute how many people are actually moving to Linux. I looked into moving to Linux this past month because I needed a new machine, but went with a 2016 MBP instead. I really wanted to go Linux, I love Linux, but I just don't think it's there yet if you want a portable. There needs to be better collaboration between a hardware manufacturer and the distribution, which is really what MacOS continues to excel at. And for all the hate the new MBP received on this website, I like just about everything about it.
I have a lot of gripes with MacOS and where Apple has been taking it, but I still think it's a better experience than Linux on a laptop. Yes, that is a personal opinion, but this is coming from someone that has been waiting and waiting to switch to Linux if the right machine came along. Still waiting. I do not want to be fidgeting with drivers whatsoever. I need it to just work, so I can get to work.
> I've seen no evidence or numbers of this mass exodus from mac->linux that people claim
It's all around you but people are failing to see it right now. Apple is pushing the common denominator off of laptops and desktops and onto Tablets and Phones. There is a 33% drop since just start of 2016.
"According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Apple’s desktop and notebook operating system—formerly OS X, now macOS—powered just 6.1 percent of all personal computers last month, down from 7 percent a year ago and a peak of 9.6 percent as recently as April 2016"
The only one's claiming something is objectively better, are the ones saying they moved onto Linux. You know, like the entire point of this article titled "Why are we all moving away from Apple?"
I knew the title itself was going to be both good and bad for my intentions, but as I responded in another thread down below, the point of the article is not to be a statistical report.
It's a reflection on history, decades-long, using Apple as the protagonist.
I am a very long time Apple fan, having used everything they released. And I am not 'frustrated' by recent releases. I am a technologist, I like technology, and I will use whatever is the best for now and the future. Which is why I chose Apple years ago. And which is why I am no longer enthusiastic by its future roadmap.
People are buying things like Dell XPS laptops instead of macbooks - you get far faster hardware, and a better development environment.
I moved at the end of last year. I sometimes have to hop back on my macbook and it pains me when I do so - minutes of watching a rainbow spinner. Compiling things takes forever. The magsafe adapter is awful (Been through so many magsafe adapters, they all fail in exactly the same way).
The macbook was the ultimate developers laptop for a good few years there. Now it's just - I don't know - something for hipsters who think removing things makes it better? It's underpowered, overpriced, and the OS seems slower and more clunky than ever.
Sorry, tell me about the better development environment. Especially if one needs xCode? What are you getting that exists on there, that doesn't exist on MacOS?
That's one of the points. Back then, using Xcode and develop for iOS were bonuses, yet another reason to buy a Mac. These days, it feels more like I am obligated to buy a Mac if I want to develop for iOS. Not the same pleasure it once was.
The xps 13, the surface book and most other "developer-friendly" laptops don't fit more than 16 gb. I use a t460p which supports 64 gb, but I just have 16 gb in there because even for hadoop development I don't need more.
The memory cap issue is a non-issue. 99% of the people who complained wouldn't pay extra to get 32 gb.
Its not difficult not install, but there are often a few tweaks that are needed to get everything working. Sometimes that can be quite tricky even for experienced people (I can't get both bluetooth and wireless working reliably one one machine I have, despite having tried 3 or 4 disrtos on it).
The only performance area that I can think of where Macbook Pros have trailed PC laptops in recent years is with discrete GPUs. CPU-wise, they've been pretty much the same.
Once you get into solid state disk I/O, PC laptops have some catching up to do.
Years ago, we abandoned Macs in our datacenter when Apple neutered OS X Server and gave us no alternative. Windows is now king there.
Now we are seriously considering abandoning Mac for, of all things, our Prepress department. Why? Because for the last three years, macOS has been become almost unusable with network shares with a large number of files (anything more than a few thousand). Think minutes, at times, to open an f-ing folder. It is a known bug. It has been around since 10.9. Apple has not even acknowledged the problem. What takes milliseconds on Windows can take anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes on a Mac. The problem exists regardless of share type. SMB and AFP are equally bad.
We are as core a user as it gets. Prepress. Graphic arts. And Apple is unable to make a Mac work efficiently on something so obscure as a file share. They have made it quite clear that they do not care about power users like us, and they are never going to care again.
We have work to do. Browsing a network file system is a basic service. It should not be difficult. It should not, as it currently is for us (and an untold number of others), cut our productivity by half because our users spend so much time just trying to open a file.
A sizable corporate environment is far different than this discussion pertains to. My company for 3000+ is all windows based, for obvious reasons. I still use Mac as my primary dev machine, and Windows, and Linux, and Freebsd, and everything else.
> "My company for 3000+ is all windows based, for obvious reasons"
What so you can lock up your co-workers with Citrix and Cisco tools made to track and neuter freedoms?
So you can pay consultants silly amounts of money to hire other consultants to set up AD policies to satisfy your executives who "Talked to "BigCorp's" CTO and they use Citrix for VPN because it's "secure" so we should too".
Or so you can shoehorn solutions like Lync(Skype4B) down peoples throats because theoretically it "Checks all the right boxes to keep management happy and get us that ISO certificate."
I'm not saying this is your fault, or trying to be facetious, I'm actually trying to empathise with you but talking/writing/thinking about the clusterbork that is Enterprise windows deployments is sickening.
We actually began with Linux. We moved to Mac because:
Samba has serious problems with large filesystems due to the disconnect between case sensitive and case insensitive filesystems. It incurs massive overhead when you have thousands of files in a folder.
Netatalk has serious problems with large filesystems due to the inefficiency of its CNID database. Perhaps they finally solved this, but we have moved on and aren't going back.
Exactly. I imagine people are moving towards Apple more than they ever have. Though the author neglects to provide any actual data proving either way and rather assumes all share their narrow view based on headlines. Apple doesn't update Mac hardware and software for developers in the way have in the past, but developers are small subset of customers so make of course sense they should be focusing on their main massive customer base. Developers assume MBP to mean meant for only Pro users, but imagine (Without data), that even most Pro customers are not developers/creatives, and rather normal consumers who want the best or bigger screens. As a developer and designer, I would love if Apple were to focus more on our needs, but more importantly, I want them to do what's best for their business so that will be able to continue to produce solid products as no other option comes close to what the Apple Ecosphere can offer currently in my opinion, Linux and Google included. But we all have our own needs some for those that don't like Apple's direction, like the author, glad they are finding other options they find more suitable.
Assuming there's movement away from Apple, how much of that movement, if any, can be attributed to more polished macOS-like linux options that are available? Not that Mint, Elementary OS, Ubuntu, etc. are exactly new...
I'm ready to leave Apple (at least on the laptop side). Almost all my work these days is on some Windows terminal over RDP. But where am I going to go? After years of seeing PC manufacturers churn out crap, I simply don't trust them.
Dell has a nifty XPS 15 update that actually increases the size of the battery by 15%.[1] But my last Dell had annoying coil whine, shoddy construction, and plastic palm rest portions that (unlike aluminum) showed wear spots over time. Do I want to roll that dice again?
[1] The new XPS likely will be a downgrade from my 2013 rMBP. There's no option for a power-efficient high-DPI display. Your choices are 10+ hours with the 1080p, or 5-6 hours with the 4k. But at least it's a path forward.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadWhat's the really big issue is privacy (which I know is gone) and what facebook is doing to the world. Everyone likes to bash on Apple lately, but Apple is 'acquiring' a lot less of your personalized data than the social networks and Google are (they are also trying to take the lead in being privacy first).
Facebook is just a big ad platform and dont forget 'free' == you are the product.
[0] https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/
Plus, honestly... what else should we expect? We live in a capitalistic, commercialistic, materialistic society. Hypercommercialization of any and all technology is the default.
As it turned out, based on the 90s and Windows, there are soooooo many bad guys out there it's unbelievable. And their ability to scale is sublime. It wasn't about one devil-eyed hacker in my cafe with a piece of malware on a green crystal.... More mundane and multiplicitous, it's 100,000 script kiddies in every country around the world trying password lists in every port on every IP address. Mostly to simply re-sell the data to someone who actually has a plan.
And that's neverminding the concentrated, hybrid state/criminal enterprises operating out of labs with crazy budgets.
So I think that's why everything just had to get walled to death, or rather sterility. I still giggle at images while I'm working, but the security of the channels through which a "hold my beer" .gif travels to get to me is astonishing. It would probably take a day just to verify a 4096-bit security algorithm on my old friend, the 6502.
The constant "Linux isn't good enough shots" in all these articles is annoying, though. I was on Linux full time in 2010, and found it far more pleasant than OS X.
I hate to write off a whole article based on a bad first sentence, but this one just about makes me do so. It starts of with a judgement of a person's worth, then shows that they seem to have completely missed the years over the past few decades where Apple stagnated and were not really relevant outside of creative circles and academia. And finishes off by saying they cannot be ignored, when in reality the business/enterprise world has gotten along just fine ignoring Apple even to this very day.
Smartphones seem a heck of a lot more derivative of earlier computing use cases.
Wearables and VR owe a debt to smartphones because of the cheap components from the mobile supply chain finally make them possible. The debt is not in the realm of ideas. Conceptually both VR and ubiquitous computing predate smartphones by decades.
I'm still using my MBA 11" from 2012 for everything. I have only 4GB RAM and it's not even a problem to work (I don't have 15 VMs running in background). :)) I have no idea when I'm going to change it and for what, but I have absolutely no desire to move back to Windows or Ubuntu.
And there is no way I move away from iOS. It works great for me. Plus, I use my iPhone 6 mostly for gaming and I've been buying games since the 3GS so I've a huge collection (including a bunch of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles that are quite expensive).
As far as mobile goes, I've actually seen an increase in people moving back to iOS from Android.
This is a decades-long reflection on computer history as a whole, having Apple as protagonist and important player.
The title reflects where the early-adopters - the same people that brought Apple back from the dead in the late 90's - will go from here.
I owned an old Mac for 7+ years it worked fine and finally I decided to get a new one. I was just amazed by amount of connectors I ended up buying.
Here is my tip to Apple. I always felt I understood Apple's Gestapo-like tactics in the past, regarding their rigid methodologies. Eliminating ports and features, removable batteries, etc. I don't understand Apples moves in the past 5 years. They have spread out and complicated everything that Jobs' made simple and attractive.
Heres my advice.
Apple is way too spread out, it should kill off the dead ends.
* Kill iTunes split it in to 5 functional media apps, and design a good simple music player. Stop trying to make me sign up for reoccurring-billing services. Makes me feel like I'm dealing with Comcast.
* Merge the App store with the Apple media store.
* Kill the watch and the car.
* Merge the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, Macbook to one product with 5 sizes each with a pro series all with a touch or keyboard interface and an appropriate OS interface depending on if a keyboard is attached. Yes, merge MacOS and iOS.
* Simplify product and Apple services pricing, two tiers, basic and unlimited.
* Bring back a pro series products and software even if it was a revenue loser.
* And simply password protections with a API service offered and incentivized like SSL certs are.
* I sort of get Apple Health, but what is Apple Home? What is Apple Music Match, or Apple Music and why isn't it included with iCloud? Merge them all.
There are plenty of IT sectors to fix and disrupt. They seem like they just think there's isn't anything work on. Cars? Watches? Movie/TV? WTF
How about
There’s just one more thing... Apple home audio video equipment and media services and amps. Compete with the big boys in home audio video. The industry is a mess with protocols, encryption, DRM, AV encoding, bit-rates, streaming services. I need my IT degree, not for computers but for my audio system. Erode cable's power grip not from the network production and delivery end from the home equipment end. Remake Apple TV as a prosumer product series called Apple Home. Hardware that works with Apple amplifiers, Apple speakers, Apple record players? etc. Introduce Apple TV an actual TV. Let's face it the only good thing about TVs these days is the actual screen, the software sucks. Everyone is tired of having 5 remote controls. My husband can’t turn on the TV! Apple is perfectly set up to do it. It’s constant and consistent market that will only grow as home entertainment improves in quality.
Killing the watch would be insane. Apple is now the Number 2 watch maker in the world by revenue (just for watches), second only to Rolex. We don't know their actual revenue, but Fossil at no.3 raked in over $3bn. You'd really cancel a multi-billion dollar revenue stream?
I'm not a hater. I like apple's attitude on encryption. I like brushed aluminum stuff and don't mind paying for it. It just doesn't work for me when a $700 system can have better specs for my work than their $4000 system.
>"why in the hell are you still trying to use that piece of crap"
I'd've retorted with "Why the hell are you still using PPTP for your VPN?"
So Microsoft using outdated and insecure prototocols, as well as propriatery[0] ones is Apple's fault?
It's perfectly fine to say "I don't like Apple/the direction they are taking, so I'm moving to another platform." Use what works best for you. Just don't use petty excuses for it. Sorry, you are baring the brunt of the glut of "Why I'm switching" articles.
[0]Yes, I realise that Apple can also be a bad actor in this department too.
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/2743314
Intel's mobility processors only support up to 16 GB RAM. At least Apple upped the base spec to the full 16 GB. Processors supporting more than 16 GB are due out in 2017.
Edit: I was wrong about CPU, mixed it with LPDDR, here -> https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/
Wait, what?
The 2016 15" Macbook Pro's HQ series CPUs are ULV?
I'm pretty sure laptops using 6##0HQ family are 32GB capable.
Apple may have a valid reason for not giving 32GB (battery life), but that's a separate issue from whether you can have 32GB with that processor family.
--edit: added reference to CPUs used in 2016 macs: http://www.everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-201...
Source: https://macdaddy.io/macbook-pro-limited-16gb-ram/
Only the 15"s can have 32GB, and I would think a lot of pro users would make the battery life trade off if given the opportunity.
The reduced battery life of a 32GB 15" Macbook Pro would not impact a significant number of Mac users -- most normal people wouldn't be willing to pay for the RAM upgrade (Apple RAM is never cheap) and it seems like the majority of people prefer the 13" models anyways, and they are capped at 16GB.
It's not an Apple excuse, don't pretend like it is.
Apple doesn't sell desktop replacements like Lenovo does.
Apple have criteria for what processors they are prepared to use and the ones in the Lenovo don't meet them. If they do meet yours, it's cool, buy the Lenovo.
Aside from iOS, you mean?
Actually, the non-Chrome browsers on every platform are good enough and Chrome doesn't stand out. That's why the author missed this extremely obvious extra jab at apple.
Apple does not allow browsers in the app store if they don't use their own rendering engine.
This was a joke, right? It's doing more to hold back usage of new web standards than pretty much anything out there.
Chrome's implementation on iOS doesn't help development, but it doesn't appreciably hinder development either.
Mars, we are going to Mars!
Personally I think Apple is in trouble. Sustaining their dominance was never going to be easy, and I don't think they're rising to the challenges. So I expect too soon read something like this, but engaging, succinct, and persuasive.
- Sketch (this is macOS' killer app, there is no other app on any OS where you can create mockups that fast and accurate)
- Support of multiple 27" screens with 5K (5K makes a difference and the new 15" MBP can drive 2 (!) of them at the same time)
- Xcode (and if it's sometimes just for using the iOS simulator)
- Word (for contracts) and Excel (rarely)
- And of course the trackpad: sometimes I have to deliver and when in panic mode, the touchpad must work 100%
But when I look myself at the list above, it's not much left to migrate fully to another OS.
Edit: Thanks for the downvote but why?
Apple built Quartz while Xorg developed Xft. A couple years in and Quartz didn't have any compelling features over Xorg, just an alien API.
It's true that X11 is terrible but nearly all of its competitors have shown themselves to be worse. Wayland wasn't practical until recently (like 2014?) when GPU memory and latency has dropped to the point where actually running a full compositor is no longer expensive. And most people using Wayland will just host an Xorg inside for X11 backwards compatibility anyway...
I have seen many things, but not that. My first suspicion is that it is not X11 that hangs, but the blasted compositor that whatever DE you were using insist on applying because "UX"...
because it's trendy, and you can write a medium post about it.
Apple should bring back Scott Forstall as CEO, leaving Cook to do what he does best, i.e. supply chain management.
Did you ask anything? I read over the thread and only saw statements.
other than anecdotally saying A is better than B, just because.
This could have been a reply to your posts actually.
sjtgraham (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13383982) and several of his or her peers find that it does have what they need, while obviously you don't. I doubt that there's an objective, correct answer to "does Linux compete with macOS?", but, if there is, I also doubt that we're going to find it by this sort of anecdote-slinging.
xCode is walled garden specific. If you're developing for Apple products it might make sense to use Apple products that will be designed to make developing for Apple products easier. I don't see how this is a "plus" to any developer who isn't developing for Apple products. There are plenty of devs who don't work on code related to Apple products at all!
Similarly, iOS integration is moot. What if they use Android? Don't need awesome iOS integration if you don't wall yourself off into Apple's garden.
I like polishing my own interface because I absolutely detest the design of Mac. That's a flavor and is not "factually" better. Many of the design decisions from Apple make me scratch my head in confusion.
That's awesome you enjoy that, but I'm not one to waste my time polishing, and modifying the OS I'm using. That's just insane to me.
One little side mention, the font rendering on Mac is so much more enjoyable to look at, that it impacts me immensely. Especially when dealing with web sites. Looking at them on Windows or Linux is horrific.
I used Mac as a software dev for three years and went from enthusiastic to "never again".
Macs aren't for everyone and while I move back and forth between Linux and Windows I still defend Mac users, even wish there where more of them to really stokke the fire under Microsofts desktop division : )
What I can totally live without though is the "Mac is objectively best" attitude. It is NOT. At least not for everyone.
So: can we please stop? I'll defend you paying for your tools and you guys stop acting like our operating systems of choice aren't as good as yours?
Please?
I've seen no evidence or numbers of this mass exodus from mac->linux that people claim except a few loud/popular blog posts by individuals who have done it. That distorts what is actually happening.
I actually agree with a lot of what is said in the article, but I dispute how many people are actually moving to Linux. I looked into moving to Linux this past month because I needed a new machine, but went with a 2016 MBP instead. I really wanted to go Linux, I love Linux, but I just don't think it's there yet if you want a portable. There needs to be better collaboration between a hardware manufacturer and the distribution, which is really what MacOS continues to excel at. And for all the hate the new MBP received on this website, I like just about everything about it.
I have a lot of gripes with MacOS and where Apple has been taking it, but I still think it's a better experience than Linux on a laptop. Yes, that is a personal opinion, but this is coming from someone that has been waiting and waiting to switch to Linux if the right machine came along. Still waiting. I do not want to be fidgeting with drivers whatsoever. I need it to just work, so I can get to work.
It's all around you but people are failing to see it right now. Apple is pushing the common denominator off of laptops and desktops and onto Tablets and Phones. There is a 33% drop since just start of 2016.
"According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Apple’s desktop and notebook operating system—formerly OS X, now macOS—powered just 6.1 percent of all personal computers last month, down from 7 percent a year ago and a peak of 9.6 percent as recently as April 2016"
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3155128/macs/macs-share-fal...
Just look at these numbers Linux has continued to climb while Apple's MacOS OSX numbers get smaller and smaller. https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
I would say the ONLY thing that keeps 50% of the people is building iOS requiers MacOS OS X equipment. It certainly isn't the Apple Experience.
> The only one's claiming something is objectively better, are the ones saying they moved onto Linux.
So, in other words linux will never compete even if Mac OSX isn't objectively better?
It's a reflection on history, decades-long, using Apple as the protagonist.
I am a very long time Apple fan, having used everything they released. And I am not 'frustrated' by recent releases. I am a technologist, I like technology, and I will use whatever is the best for now and the future. Which is why I chose Apple years ago. And which is why I am no longer enthusiastic by its future roadmap.
People are buying things like Dell XPS laptops instead of macbooks - you get far faster hardware, and a better development environment.
I moved at the end of last year. I sometimes have to hop back on my macbook and it pains me when I do so - minutes of watching a rainbow spinner. Compiling things takes forever. The magsafe adapter is awful (Been through so many magsafe adapters, they all fail in exactly the same way).
The macbook was the ultimate developers laptop for a good few years there. Now it's just - I don't know - something for hipsters who think removing things makes it better? It's underpowered, overpriced, and the OS seems slower and more clunky than ever.
In Linux and Windows, it's always possible to compile for any platform, at the worst using a VM
Essentially Apple is exploiting its developer community by decreeing that you must use a Mac to develop for iOS giving it guaranteed sales.
There's plenty of actual things to blame apple for without inventing new ones. The issue with the new mbp is not performance.
Surely at least in part it is, when one of the major issues is the memory cap?
The memory cap issue is a non-issue. 99% of the people who complained wouldn't pay extra to get 32 gb.
To be fair, it's dead simple to install Linux if you don't like Windows.
Once you get into solid state disk I/O, PC laptops have some catching up to do.
For the same money as a mbp, you're getting more memory, faster CPU, better battery life, etc etc
Years ago, we abandoned Macs in our datacenter when Apple neutered OS X Server and gave us no alternative. Windows is now king there.
Now we are seriously considering abandoning Mac for, of all things, our Prepress department. Why? Because for the last three years, macOS has been become almost unusable with network shares with a large number of files (anything more than a few thousand). Think minutes, at times, to open an f-ing folder. It is a known bug. It has been around since 10.9. Apple has not even acknowledged the problem. What takes milliseconds on Windows can take anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes on a Mac. The problem exists regardless of share type. SMB and AFP are equally bad.
We are as core a user as it gets. Prepress. Graphic arts. And Apple is unable to make a Mac work efficiently on something so obscure as a file share. They have made it quite clear that they do not care about power users like us, and they are never going to care again.
We have work to do. Browsing a network file system is a basic service. It should not be difficult. It should not, as it currently is for us (and an untold number of others), cut our productivity by half because our users spend so much time just trying to open a file.
What so you can lock up your co-workers with Citrix and Cisco tools made to track and neuter freedoms? So you can pay consultants silly amounts of money to hire other consultants to set up AD policies to satisfy your executives who "Talked to "BigCorp's" CTO and they use Citrix for VPN because it's "secure" so we should too". Or so you can shoehorn solutions like Lync(Skype4B) down peoples throats because theoretically it "Checks all the right boxes to keep management happy and get us that ISO certificate."
I'm not saying this is your fault, or trying to be facetious, I'm actually trying to empathise with you but talking/writing/thinking about the clusterbork that is Enterprise windows deployments is sickening.
Samba has serious problems with large filesystems due to the disconnect between case sensitive and case insensitive filesystems. It incurs massive overhead when you have thousands of files in a folder.
Netatalk has serious problems with large filesystems due to the inefficiency of its CNID database. Perhaps they finally solved this, but we have moved on and aren't going back.
Dell has a nifty XPS 15 update that actually increases the size of the battery by 15%.[1] But my last Dell had annoying coil whine, shoddy construction, and plastic palm rest portions that (unlike aluminum) showed wear spots over time. Do I want to roll that dice again?
[1] The new XPS likely will be a downgrade from my 2013 rMBP. There's no option for a power-efficient high-DPI display. Your choices are 10+ hours with the 1080p, or 5-6 hours with the 4k. But at least it's a path forward.
There is concern that apple is moving away from us, the pro user.
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/03/rein-or-reign/