Well, two regular ports but the second one is at an odd angle. An adapter[1] is required to fill the second spot if you buy your Mini with only one drive.
I went that route. The current Mini is by far the most complicated, scary computer I've worked in, and the SSD is the absolute first thing into the chassis.
It's doable, but it's far more complicated than the current (non-retina) MacBook Pro or any desktop I've ever worked in.
The current Mac Pro is long in the tooth and to all intents and purposes is dead, despite the so-called 'update' this summer. The Mac Pro forums are a pretty sad place, folk still clutching at straws, hoping something comes out next summer.
"Lloyd Chambers (MacPerformance Guide) thinks it may be August 2013 before Apple releases a new Mac Pro because of remarks Steve made two or three years ago, brought to his attention by a reader of his site, that Apple would not release a Mac Pro until USB 3 was natively supported. The Ivy Bridge Xeon is supposed to support USB 3 natively."
(http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/152825/future-of-mac-pro)
As far as the non-upgradability of the rMBP, I don't think it's as much of a dealbreaker as some people, but Apple really could've done better. Develop a new type of low profile memory module and SSD, I'm sure some people would complain but it would be replaceable/upgradable.
>>I don't think it's as much of a dealbreaker as some people
It is the one big thing that makes me hesitate about buying an rMBP. SSD's are prone to failure according to many articles I've read and they also have a limited life span even if it doesn't have any defects. Once the thing gives up there is no way to easily swap it out and just insert a new one.
Also, sometimes I need to swap out hard drives (or SSD drives in this case). With the rMBP that is not possible. The rMBP is a nice computer but I really hope they see the error in their ways and add a replaceable standard SATA SSD.
A serious Mac-head going Ubuntu. I am also surprised, and I've been running Linux since before Ubuntu even existed, back in the before-time when Red Hat was the default distro.
But I refuse to be a partisan anymore. I remember when Apple was ... well, remember Mac OS 8? Remember the time before the iMac? Those computers made me wonder how newspapers ever got published. So I'm happy the Mac people have (mostly) usable (by their standards) hardware and software now, as long as I'm not forced to use it.
I clean-installed Ubuntu 12.10 last weekend. Out of the box it has an Amazon icon in the side 'dock', I removed it and don't remember what it does. Searching with the 'dash' search box does bring up results from Amazon. The alt-f2 run box, while looking the same as the search box except for saying "run a command" instead of "search", does not perform the Amazon searches. Personally I wouldn't really consider it obtrusive, especially since I've been living with alt-f2 and dock autohiding. I had to go out of my way to find out how to bring up the ads.
Aside from that, I'm pretty disappointed with the desktop environment. It's pretty but managing windows is a pain (can't easily alt-tab into a specific terminal window, for instance; it also hijacks Alt key to enable menu item search). I'm looking to replace it soon, but then again I'm probably not the user Ubuntu is primarily targeting these days.
To be honest, I found the ads to be quite annoying, I usually start applications by pressing the Super key and then typing the name. I don't see how showing Amazon search results for "terminal" or "chrome" are relevant.
I am happy that they accept donations on the download page now. Hopefully this will reduce the need for such experiments.
iCloud is a joke. Like eWorld. Like .Mac. Like MobileMe. You can’t do this stuff.
This, I predict, is going to turn out to be Apple's achilles heel. They make great hardware and their software is good enough but they just don't get services.
Google does services better than anybody and they're quickly closing the other gaps.
I don't know if you can justify statement like that from the proposed evidence.
The App Store and iTunes Store are pretty damned successful services, whether you like them or not.
iCloud is not a joke, it does it's job well for the 99%. I turn on my new phone, enter my apple id, and I have all my settings, apps, etc synced and ready to go.
That is true, but they all represent somehow the older version of connected software, as a pure extension of the device rather than a service on it's own. iCloud works great for a device as an invisible backup, but you can't use it to share files, co-operate, publish, share data between applications, etc. And I'd say the popular web services of today are so because they integrate across services and socialize the usage. Apple are still stuck 5-10 years behind.
Well, there is some sharing (PhotoStream), but you are right in general. And even if Google is 5 years ahead (I don't think they are), and I do use google services for sharing, the thing is I don't enjoy it. Functionality is there, but experience is lacking, alas I cannot pinpoint why. Just every time I use Google docs or Google drive I want to get out as soon as possible.
For this reason I don't see Apples lack of these services as a big problem and I don't see Googles offer as a big advantage.
It is possible, however, that with right implementation it may become a necessity.
Agreed. The Maps fiasco is a great illustration of how Apple have an institutional blind spot around the complexity of doing online, data-driven services right - and won't invest (despite $120bn in the bank) properly to deliver these. This is the single biggest thing that relegates them to "just a consumer electronics" firm - and as we know, CE firms are lucky to have 10 years on top.
The other interesting data point is the bidding for the new TLDs in summer 2012 (http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/rss/1136468/Amazon-G...). Amazon and Google bidded on 150+ new TLDs between them. Apple? With $120bn in the bank, they applied for... .apple. Even Microsoft understood the potential importance of this more than Apple (they applied for 5 or so - .live, .docs, .bing etc).
This is the single biggest thing that relegates them to "just a consumer electronics" firm - and as we know, CE firms are lucky to have 10 years on top.
Yeah this is the thing exactly. Amazon and Google are essentially content plays in mobile. Devices can come and go but as long as people are using their services they're making money.
Apple is a hardware play and that gave them a big first-mover advantage but unless they can keep coming up with iPhone/iPad level home runs that advantage deteriorates quickly. I will never buy anything in iBooks, for example, because I don't want to be limited to Apple's devices to read my books, even if I do currently have an iPhone, iPad and MBA.
They do have some platform tie-in with iTunes Music but the writing is on the wall there. Subscription models are the way forward.
I'm not sold on the long term benefit to subscription models. A well curated library has much more appeal to me than an all you can eat buffet. I have recently seen this with Netflix great service but the content I would miss the most is the kid shows that my daughter watches. The tv and movies I look forward to watching with her are not on there so in one form or snouty I curate a library that I only have to pay for once.
Same for magazines and book. I keep a few subscriptions but mainly consume the content once. When I find a good book, one I will read again I put it on my library shelf and come back to it later. Subscriptions for media lock me into a singe channel if I ever want to go back. And like Netflix, who has to negotiate with the content providers for their content, with subscriptions there is no guarantee the 5-10% of quality content I like will be there when I come back.
iCloud is not a joke, it does it's job well for the 99%. I turn on my new phone, enter my apple id, and I have all my settings, apps, etc synced and ready to go.
You must not have used iTunes Match on a daily basis. Very often some songs do not play at all, no matter how often you retry. Every week or so I cannot connect to the 'iTunes Cloud' at all, reducing my music library to what I have downloaded. Match and iTunes in the cloud are terribly broken.
I can tell you what is wrong with iCloud. It's supposed to be a sort of magical data sharing, but apparently it's only partially magical when it comes to OSX.
Go ahead, make a keynote deck, or numbers spreadsheet. Save it to "the cloud," now go look at your ipad or iphone. Where the hell is it? So much for magic.
Sharing is a royal pain in the ass with iOS. The gyrations I have to go through to move data from an ios app to the desktop is ridiculous and often impossible.
I'm hopeful they will get iCloud up to spec eventually, but for now it just sucks.
Couldn't agree more. How about photos, something supposedly mainstream?! Have fun recreating all the events/albums/locations on each device. It's just a pain to deal with. Instead, I save my iPhoto library on Dropbox so that I can sync it between devices. Sub-optimal, to say the least. Apple services have always been underwhelming.
I have a feeling iCloud is just testing the waters with Photo Stream. Full on cloud hosting of photo libraries is a large undertaking requiring masses of storage. I expect it will come eventually.
It's indeed hard to defend the lagginess, but since the praise is going to Google, it's worth noting that iCloud predates Drive by quite a while, and as far as I know, although you can use a combination of Drive, Google Cloud Messaging, and the Backup API to get a similar experience on Android, it's relatively complicated.
I've always said this too, but looking at things like Facebook, Twitter, iOS, the last thing I want is to keep sacrificing to walled gardens where I have to play by someone elses' rules.
GateKeeper, to Mac developers, is playing by Apple's rules. I don't think it's a conspiracy to say that it will tilt the favor towards those who utilize the very closed (in multiple senses of the word) App Store over regular applications.
Can devs sign apps with a self-signed root? If that's not possible, it's a closed garden already. And even if it is we can't be certain that they won't change it to App Store only in the future.
I regularly encounter applications that are not signed. It's easy to circumvent Gatekeeper (right click, then choose open). But I can imagine that this is quite confusing for the average end user. For them, it is already turning into a walled garden.
Any user who doesn't know what Gatekeeper's purpose is (and how to disable it) probably stand to benefit from keeping it on. I imagine these people are the ones most at risk for downloading malware.
People who don't want/like the walled garden can disable it trivially from the settings. For people like my mom, who clicks on any ad/link/attachment without a second thought, this will save a ton of headaches.
Any user who doesn't know what Gatekeeper's purpose is (and how to disable it) probably stand to benefit from keeping it on. I imagine these people are the ones most at risk for downloading malware.
I don't necessarily disagree (I have a mom too ;)), but: (1) there are many trustable open source programs that are unsigned because their developers cannot afford or do not want to pay $99 per year for an Apple developer account; (2) OS X could display a warning that the user can override.
What happens now is that people will Google for the error to install some legitimate software, find a blog post that describes how to disable Gatekeeper, and switch of Gatekeeper permanently.
> OS X could display a warning that the user can override.
If it had an overridable dialog straight from double-click, people will just see this as an annoyance and end up clicking the "Yeah, whatever!" button without skipping a beat.
The way it is, it's actually overridable per application with "right click->open" which gives you the overridable warning you wish for, with OSX actually remembering the overriding and you can subsequently double-click on the now whitelisted app. This whitelisting apparently survives even Sparkle updating.
It appears that it's just convoluted enough for people dangerous to themselves not to shoot themselves in the foot, yet convenient enough for the informed user to act easily. And ironically the solution is actually written in the non-overridable dialog, yet the kind of people not reading dialogs is precisely the risky kind. I'd venture it's made so on purpose.
The way it is, it's actually overridable per application with "right click->open"
As I said in my original comment ;).
This whitelisting apparently survives even Sparkle updating.
Sparkle probably never sets the com.apple.quarantine attribute and if the application does not have LSFileQuarantineEnabled set in its Info.plist, its downloaded files are not put in quarantaine. Applications that do not have that extended attribute are never checked.
What about an OSS app like Darktable (which beats the sh*t out of Lightroom, in many use cases)?
None of the devs has an Apple Developer account and not one of them, understandably, is prepared to churn out the 99 USD just to be able to sign the OS X flavor of their app:
http://goo.gl/gzFZO
Shouldn't a kick-ass app like Darktable be easily deployable by anyone, not just those who know how to circumvent the 'walled garden'?
If it's really that good (I've never tried it), then surely a couple users would be willing to donate a few bucks for it to be signed (especially seeing as lightroom costs what, $150?). $99 isn't quite pocket change, but it's not big money either.
Reading the link, it seems like (some of) the devs have philosophical objections to doing that; fine. But philosophical objections aren't the same as "it can't be done".
But the point is if the user really can't accomplish that task are they in a suitable position to judge the safety of installing the software? I know there may be cases when even such a user has a good reason to trust something but I'm sure there will be cases when people are saved by this (or at least attempts to exploit people in this way may be deterred.
Much of the unsigned software is perfectly useful valid stuff, much of it safe, much of it open source but that action to run downloaded code puts a lot of trust in the developer and the source. Even run as a non-root user it can still do things that cause real problems including steal confidential information.
That's a nonanswer; the majority of users does not know what the hell that is, and the people that do are going to think twice about disabling system-wide security to run some app.
I wasn't taking a side. I already expressed worry about it. I answered the question the best I could. Nowhere do I seek to dispel concern about Apple becoming more closed, in fact, that was kind of my lead in...
What's weird is that this has been a running argument for almost the entire existence of Apple. Here's the thing though -- Apple hasn't changed. They are simply closer to their goals then ever.
I'm not saying it's right. But computer as an appliance? That's the dream! In the 80s we would argue on Usenet that the WIMP interface was too simplistic, and that real computer users stuck to the command line only. Now, in 2012, we argue on Blogs that the iPad is too simple, and real computer users need a mouse, keyboard, and windowed interface.
I'll leave this anecdote from 1981. over 30 years ago. To show how Apple is still Apple:
"Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports. "
I think it is not so much "computer as an appliance" which is the issue but the fact that you can do less and less with your computing devices, or that they become, in the end, more convoluted to use because of the design choices made. Like, turning a desktop computer operating OS to a tablet-like OS is just plain stupid and is a loss of efficiency.
Otherwise I agree with you, Apple has not changed a bit. Some people take longer to realize it, apparently.
You can't do less with an iPad than with an Apple II, you can do a great deal more. And you can also do a great deal more with an iPad if your previous experience with computers was mostly confusing.
It depends on how you define "you". Broadly, the term "you" means "people". It doesn't mean "every person under the sun, especially programmers".
If we correct for misinterpretations, I would say people in general can do more with simpler computing platforms that are more appliance-like than with their mostly confusing computer that more often acts in confusing manners, and that more often seems to be ridden with viruses and malware (whether it is or not), and also sports a number of features and buttons which if clicked the wrong way, can cause the computer to be broken (whether true or not).
When people talk about what "you" can do, they are not talking about you, specifically.
Let's compare apples to apples (pun not intended) but it is fairly obvious you cannot do AS much on a tablet as on a desktop computer. You cannot do graphic design as well, you cannot do 3d modeling, photo editing, you cannot type office documents in the most efficient way, you cannot compress movies at reasonable speeds, you cannot develop for it (although I know this is technically possible it is far from being accessible to anyone compared to Desktop experience).
It is not just about programmers. It's about people who want to do more than checking email, reading websites and running a few apps here and there for convenience. When parents want to edit HD videos of their kids taken with their camcorder they will not run to their iPad to do it, because it would be too damn sluggish for that. When you need to produce something or edit something and you do not want to do a dirty job you will sooner or later have to go back to sit in front of a laptop or desktop and use a mouse unless you like wasting your time, no matter what you computer knowledge is.
"When parents want to edit HD videos of their kids taken with their camcorder they will not run to their iPad to do it"
That's the problem right there. I don't know many "parents" (== non-technical-people) who are able to edit HD Videos, at all, period. Most non-technical people I know have memorised how to do the few things they actually need from their computer, like check emails, compose documents, and use the software-de-jour of their workplace. But anything beyond that is massively more than they know how to do without running to a more technical user for help.
The whole argument is, iPad makes it possible whereas before it wasn't possible, forget if it's fast or not.
I agree with your observations. They are sound and amplify OP's point: "I am not a Mac anymore".
Personally, I haven't even bothered trying an iPad, but speaking as a previously satisfied user of the Apple's laptops, the OP's comment very much resonated with me.
I also would like to note that (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that Apple software's propensity to assume the Big Mommy role is hardly a new phenomena. Apple was never an "open system", it is true. But there was a golden age in the '00s that produced just the right mix of open and managed systems.
Finally, there is a political subtext to all of this. Apple clearly believes in ('benign') authoritarianism -- it is in their DNA -- and given their empowered position in the computation loop, I no longer feel it is appropriate to support their bottom line, specially given the unacceptable stated position of Jobs on matters such as free speech.
I don't think you have to tell anyone here that the iPad isn't capable of doing all tasks, we're not retarded.
That the iPad isn't best for every task doesn't mean that it isn't overall the best device, or that it doesn't substantially enable people to do whatever it is they want to do (especially people who don't do any of the advanced computing tasks you bring up). The sales numbers indicate this. If people couldn't use iPads, they wouldn't buy them.
iMovie (the ideal app for parents editing a HD video of their kids) runs just fine on an _iPhone_. And remember, this is just _two_ years into the current tablet market, so this sounds a lot like how the minicomputer and mainframe guys were laughing at PCs when they were introduced.
"When parents want to edit HD videos of their kids taken with their camcorder they will not run to their iPad to do it..."
On the contrary, the video editors on iPhone and iPad are hugely popular, and if we expand to include photos, the iOS photo editing dominance is staggering. Hordes of users began editing and publishing photos who never had.
With iPad 1 I still traveled with my MBP17. With iPad 2 I started to wish I could leave it at home.
With iPad 3, the Logitech Ultraslim keyboard, and the extra screen resolution (with multitasking gestures enabled to slide right/left between running apps), I now leave the MBP at home and use iSSH to manage servers and network, Google Apps for business tasks, Diet Coda and Koder for code editing and review, iPhoto and iMovie for media editing (I shoot Nikon D3 and it even keeps NEF+JPG as managed pairs), and iCab for web apps needing file uploads and downloads. If I run into a task I need a desktop for, say, to build an iOS app or test a web app in Windows 8, I VNC in.
All told, the frustration of doing everyday tasks with the iPad 3 and Logitech Ultraslim Keyboard cover has gotten low enough I leave the laptop at home even on extended trips, so it's certainly viable as the main machine for people whose job isn't as computing oriented or content creation oriented as mine.
> you can do less and less with your computing devices, or that they become, in
> the end, more convoluted to use because of the design choices made.
Can you be specific about "less and less"? You can no take a movie, edit it, compose music for it and publish it online with your phone only.
> Like, turning a desktop computer operating OS to a tablet-like OS is just
> plain stupid and is a loss of efficiency.
Are you talking about Windows 8 or iOS, or Linux? The problem with Windows 8 was not turning desktop OS into tablet OS, it's stopping in between.
>but the fact that you can do less and less with your computing devices
Actually you can do a hell of a lot more today.
Could you do HD video, real time 3D graphics, music, use thousands of modern APIs and languages with performance of several Gazillion flops in multiple cores, connect to everywhere on the planet, etc, with an Apple II, or a Mid-nineties IIci?
Besides the 1000x more powerful graphics and soundcard, you also have 100x more powerful programs, pervasive networking, tons of peripherals, from cheap printers to linux based robots and a FULL BLOWN UNIX underneath.
The issue is that many Apple fanboys never experienced the original Apple, the one with proprietary connectors and Mac OS specific APIs for video, 2D, 3D, networking ....
When Apple tried to cater to the open source community using the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, young generations thought Apple was always more open than Microsoft, when actually they were the opposite.
Now that they are back on top with more profits than ever, they are as they always were.
How is this an issue with Apple fanboys? They're not the one's complaining about Apple.
Surely it's an issue with the people who tend to be Open Source advocates, complaining that Apple are no longer open?
Not that it's really an issue at all, it's just different strokes for different folks. With computers doing as much as they do now it's seems highly unlikely that a single company will ever fulfil all our computing needs. Certainly having seen the Wintel domination of the 90s it really doesn't seem that desirable so really what's the problem?
If you take 'Apple fanboys' to be the group who came to Apple in the early 2000s (I was amongst them) I think the parent is probably right.
I fought the fights and put up with the greif for being the only developer with a Mac out of the 50 in the office. I lived on the bleeding edge - even paying for access to early unstable OS builds. I watched the OS get better and better with each release.
It opened the doors to the world of Unix for me and I thought it was wonderful having all these amazing tools at my fingertips, thanks to Apple. I got the wrong end of the stick.
This whole article feels bang on the money to me, and I'll bet the reason it's at the top of HN is that there are plenty of us in the same boat.
I think that's a very specific definition which supports the argument but I don't really see any justification for that over, say, those who climbed on around the launch of the iPod or the iPhone. The views and expectations of those people would paint a very different picture.
There are plenty of Apple fan boys (I'm using the term in a non-prejorative way indicentally, I've got three Apple devices on my desk right now) who don't go back nearly that far.
Possibly we're just confirming that the term "fan boy" is entirely useless in any sort of real discussion?
I don't think it's useless. The fan boy phenomenon (of any type) is one of the more difficult and frustrating things in tech to deal with. Somebody who likes some company a lot, and buys their gadgets and thinks the stuff the company makes is swell, but is able to afford the fact that their company does do things wrongly sometimes is not a fan boy -- they're a fan and I don't think anybody has a problem with fans.
People who act as consistent apologists, who's identity is made up of their allegiance to this company and who react with shock and indignation that anybody could even propose that the company they've devoted a significant part of their psyche and lives to, could in any way be flawed...are fan boys. And they bring discourse to a halt by increasing the noise in a conversation to the point entire forums become useless, and actual fans get caught up in the crossfire...it's really frustrating and annoying.
And if you read all that and thought I was talking about Apple then you've missed the point. This exists as a kind of mixed-identification phenomenon exists across a broad spectrum of milieus. Car brands, politics, religion, etc. And it's to the benefit of these brands that they identify and recruit the people who are susceptible to fan boyism and use them as a deep pool of loyal customers and a passive defense to their organization's operations. Why try and spend time fighting off stories of negative aspects of your company when you have a million fan boys who'll do it for you?
And it's the constant noise they introduce, either in the form of an echo chamber of reinforcing good feeling but content free interactions or in the form of constant nonsensical diatribes and willfully ignorant defenses of their brand identity, that's why it's important for any on-line community to try and either turn fan boys into rational thinkers -- to separate the person's identity from the brand -- or drive them from the community.
HN is a place that needs signal, not noise. And fan boys bring only the loudest sort of static possible.
I don't think we disagree that many of the people who are termed fan boys add little but noise, but my problem is in accurately identifying them and in particular in then ascribing a single common world view and set of motivations to them as was being done in the thread above.
Plus being an apologist doesn't mean that you can't make a good point. Gruber could often be accurately described as an Apple apologist but I'd strongly take issue with the idea that he couldn't add to a debate on Apple. Similarly RMS when it comes to open source/freedom and others across the spectrum.
As with anything, argue with the point being made, not with the person, at least until you're absolutely sure you know them and where they're coming from far better than you're likely to through occasional interact on an internet message board.
And that's before we even get into the pejorative nature of the phrase "fan boy" and how you might as well just call someone a dick for the reaction you're likely to provoke.
Yes it's an interesting phenomenon but in terms of dealing with people who I may think are fan boys, I see no reason why there should be any reason why I should treat fan boys differently than I'd try to treat anyone else - that is take what they say at face value and engage them on that basis, or ignore them completely.
I think that's mostly fair. But we may part ways on the value of filtering through fanboy noise...Gruber for example is brilliant when he talks about Apple, but he's a terrible predictable bore hen he gets into comparisons with anything outside of Apple -- 9 out of 10 times.
When I see a Daring Fireball post, if it's about Apple I'll read it and I find many things he says interesting and insightful (even if I may disagree with them), if it's Gruber on any other topic there's no point in even trying to scrub through his posts to find the valuable points to consider.
So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, you are right, evaluate the points and not the person (don't go ad hominem), but sometimes the level of effort required to find the valuable points isn't worth it.
Same here. I jumped to Apple in the early 2000s when I realised here was a very nice machine that let me run the rather splendid iLife suite, MS Office and let me tinker to my heart's content with a BSD Unix. Best of both worlds.
I live fairly happily with hardware tinkering restrictions in my iMacs, but the inability to upgrade RAM in the new smaller iMac may be the last straw. It's really irritating.
By that definition, POSIX libc is a platform. X11 is a standard with one flagship implementation (currently X.org, formerly XFree86) and multiple other implementations fewer people care about.
It seems to be all the rage to write up anecdotal frustrations full of hyperbole about Apple these days, that's fine, but why do they have to be on Hacker News? Why should I care some guy on the internet doesn't want a computer that isn't user serviceable, or a tablet that uses a curated app store that contains 'literally thousands upon thousands of apps I don't need'? Please just go tell your buddies on the linux forums how you built your own distro instead of trolling the internet with articles about stuff you don't like, or at the very least refrain from posting them on a site like Hacker News, which is supposed to be informational (I guess).
The information content of this article is close to zero, it's nothing more than some random rant about stuff that's irrelevant for people who just use their computers to get shit done, instead of making a statement of idealism and tech-ethics out of them. Last time I checked, Macs running OS X are still great for almost any kind of creative application.
>> Maybe you should also stop stereotyping whoever hurts your Mac fan feelings.
Just cut the emotional crap, it appears to impair your ability to see the point I'm trying to make.
I've been using Linux and OS X alongside each other for over a decade, and many other *nix derivatives at work. I just pick the right tool for the right job, and more often than not, a Mac running OS X turns out to be the choice that offers the best tradeoffs, and allows me to do whatever I should or want to be doing with the lowest level of frustration. My HTPC/home server isn't running OS X, and neither does the VM I use to cross-compile packages for embedded systems. What does that say about Macs and OS X? Nothing.
That said, the problem I have with articles like this hitting Hacker News is not because I can't stand the idea some people have different ideas about what a computer is to them and how it should work. I couldn't care less. The problem is that the information content of these dime-a-dozen run-of-the-mill Apple rants is close to zero. I simply don't understand their purpose, do I have to stop using Macs because some guy on the internet prefers to use something different for whatever reason that doesn't affect me, or almost anyone else who uses their computer as a tool to get shit done?
The issue here is that recent releases of OSX have sucked more than some earlier releases of OSX, and it's annoying some people.
The hardware is now even more locked down than ever.
These are facts.
Does it mean you have to stop using a mac? No.
Does it mean that some people are moving away from macs? Yes.
Does it mean you need to rage because there's an article that mentions 'fan boys'? Not really. Chill out.
If you have any cognant and articulate arguments why this guys opinion (which I happen to currently share) is a stupid opinion to have, by all means, I'm interested...
>> If you have any cognant and articulate arguments why this guys opinion (which I happen to currently share) is a stupid opinion to have, by all means, I'm interested...
Nowhere did I say his opinion was stupid, I'm not one to judge opinions. All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN.
The cognant and articulate argument (?) here is that the internet has plenty of places to go if you want to read rants about why <insert technology or technology company here> sucks and why someone decided to leave for these elusive greener pastries that other platforms supposedly offer.
Everyone knows Macs aren't the most serviceable computers on earth, and everyone knows iOS isn't intented to be an open platform for all purposes power users or developers would use regular computers for. I don't think many other arguments are required to illustrate the point this article doesn't add much -if anything- to HN as a medium for the technology startup space.
Or, maybe it's just me, and other people really feel enlightened and satisfied after reading this article... :-/
> All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN.
OT: Do not read the article. Furthermore, do not comment on the article, nor should yo up vote it. If you feel the article violates some aspect of HN, flag it.
However, if your reason for commenting is to just say: "I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN." then you are not contributing. You are, by admission, contributing less than the article you are commenting on.
This is not an attack. Merely an observation. You value the quality of HN. Be the quality. Don't be the problem.
On another note. You say:
"I'm not one to judge opinions."
But then you go on to judge the article, an opinion, and it's worthiness:
"All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN."
> Or, maybe it's just me, and other people really feel enlightened and satisfied after reading this article... :-/
People enjoy different things. You do not want to judge, so don't. =) The best thing you can do to promote what you want to see on HN is to promote those very things. Spending time contributing to things you don't enjoy does not help.
>> This is not an attack. Merely an observation. You value the quality of HN. Be the quality. Don't be the problem.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except this part. Maybe I'm being naive but I believe discussion about stuff you don't like about a community-driven platform like HN might actually improve it. To me, the fact that articles like this hit HN more and more often, is separate from the discussion you can have about it.
>> People enjoy different things. You do not want to judge, so don't
You are twisting my words. I don't want to judge opinions, but that doesn't mean I can't have my own, and it also doesn't mean I can't express them in relation to the stuff that gets upvoted on HN. In everything I wrote about this article don't think I've passed any judgement on the author's opinion itself. You say 'people enjoy different things' as if that justifies anything that gets posted on HN. Lots of people enjoy reading about ponies, but you don't see a lot of articles about ponies on HN, and I don't think many people think that's a bad thing.
All I'm saying is that in the time I've been visiting HN, the information value of the articles upvoted on HN is going down. If this continues, before you know it HN will be like Gizmodo with a really crappy layout. Telling me to 'just don't read the articles' or 'just don't upvote them' is a pretty negative conclusion to draw from this discussion don't you think?
> Maybe I'm being naive but I believe discussion about stuff you don't like about a community-driven platform like HN might actually improve it.
In context. But when out of context, it won't. If anything, one could argue that if your comment does provide any value toward improving HN, then the article served a greater purpose, and as a result, was of value.
Regardless, actions speak louder than words.
> All I'm saying is that in the time I've been visiting HN, the information value of the articles upvoted on HN is going down.
That's the natural state of things. I've seen people say this for years now. It's a reoccurring theme. I do not know how long you've been visiting HN, but going just by your profile, I can assure you, 444 days ago, people were discussing how HN had gone down hill.
I believe a portion of that complaint is that when you first get here, it's new, and you haven't seen the articles being presented. After a while, you start to read the same thing over and over again. It becomes dull. And things start to stand out that you might not have noticed your first day.
> You are twisting my words.
No. It's just a misunderstanding. No twisting was intended.
> You say 'people enjoy different things' as if that justifies anything that gets posted on HN.
Actually, it does. HN is based on voting, and the members of HN enjoy reading many types of articles here. If something gets voted up, it's because a segment of the members want to read these types of things on HN. That you are uninterested in this specific topic does not mean it's outside of HN's accepted role.
> Lots of people enjoy reading about ponies, but you don't see a lot of articles about ponies on HN, and I don't think many people think that's a bad thing.
Don't be silly, the context is HN, making that point moot. The argument isn't about general wants and desires, but what people want to read here on HN.
Anyways, my point is, and was, you can either be a part of the problem, or part of the solution. If you want to see different articles, submit them! Ignore the ones that you aren't interested in. Flag articles that don't belong. You can either be a positive force, or a negative one.
"Case" in point, I had the MBP17 just before change to unibody, and now the unibody. To replace the HD in the older model involved a half dozen more steps including removing the keyboard and various components. In the current model, just open the bottom and swap the drive.
I had the white Mac Mini (last model with DVD) and needed a metal spatula to get into it to upgrade RAM. With the current model, I needed... my fingertips.
And of course the Mac Pro (tower) is as open as ever.
Take apart a new Mac with Fusion Drive - as far as anyone has been able to determine, the pinouts are exactly the same as SATA, but the connector has been modified enough that it's proprietary now.
iPhone 5's new connector is actually what pushed me to abandon the Apple ecosystem:
I have a in dash GPS/HD radio/Pandora unit that until now required an iDevice for Pandora remote control. I considered upgrading from my 4S to a 5... I need a new connector. No problem, there's an adapter - $30 or $40 with a chip in it that serves in large part the purpose of ensuring I get an Apple adapter/cable.
Great, so now I get the adapter, plug it into the head unit, only to find, guess what, it still won't work - why? Because (and finding anything official on this is nigh on impossible, only outside reviewers) the adapter doesn't pass on the iPod Out control signals.
Screw that. I will wait for a firmware update for my head unit.
I sold my iPhone 4S, my iPad 3, and am now very happy with a Nokia Lumia 920, and a Samsung 700E tablet running Windows 8.
1. Recent releases of OSX have sucked more than earlier releases? Can't agree with that. I've used OSX since the beta days, and both Lion and ML are far more polished and usable. OSX was like a breath of fresh air compared to OS9, so of course it "felt" better. But there were tons of bugs that have slowly been stomped out. You may not like some of the current features of OSX ML, but the previous versions aren't unequivocally better.
2. Hardware lockdown. I have fond memories of using a kitchen knife to open up a Mac mini to replace memory. Yesterday I bumped my 2012 mini to 16GB with a simple twist. The Mac Pro is the same as it was when released. Some of the notebooks are more accessible, some less so. Replacing the hard drive on my wife's G4 powerbook involved something like 30 screws, and hoping that I didn't bend anything out of tolerance. Today that's far different; even the MacBook air has fewer parts and steps involved.
It seems to be all the rage to write up anecdotal frustrations full of hyperbole about Apple these days, that's fine, but why do they have to be on Hacker News?
You mean, as opposed to all the news praising every minor thing Apple does and banning all articles critical of Apple, which historically has always been the way things was here on HN?
I think it's about time the tide changed, and it's probably a good reality check to the people stuck in the valley still believing that Apple "defines" the market.
What does that even mean? Is HN supposed to be a medium for the preservation of some kind of philosophical balance of power between operating systems and hardware vendors? Shame on me for thinking it was a medium to report on technology and the startup scene all along :-/
It's really sad to see how every.single.time community driven websites devolve into ideological crusades between people who can't seem to just accept different people have different preferences when it comes to computers (I'm being polite here). There's a meme in here somewhere, maybe I should try to coin it.
To be honest I have seen the same happen here as on other sites. The community seems to pass through phases with its view about a company. From initial interest, near blind loyalty, to OMG WTF they are evil. This happens with individuals in tech too, though there are examples where many end up redeemed in the eyes of the community.
Apple began inching into the OMG WTF EVIL category awhile back for some and others eventually tagged along. That herd mentality that many sites develop does happen here too.
Face it, HN is a community within each community are cliques that rise and fall in their influence and that comes out in how stories and comments are views and voted on
You imply that "the community" changed opinions... but "the community" is not a person. It's not necessarily minds that change rather than the people. The readers of HN are the teenagers of yesterday, who have never stopped disliking Apple.
you shouldn't. And what you probably should also not do, is first write stuff like this and then do the opposite namely caring about it anyway (even though you seem to claim you don't) and then express that by posting your feelings about it on HN.
"The information content of this article is close to zero, nothing more than some random rant"
strrep( 'article', 'post' ); //The pot, the kettle, yadayada.
Well, if you consider that becoming the next Steve Jobs and running the next Apple is a dream/fantasy endgame for many startup people, then anything and everything related to Apple is interesting. Especially due to the prevalence of Apple hardware in so-called hacker circles.
Having a proprietary networking system when no-one else has any networking is hardly a crime. Sticking with it a little too long? Not a crime.
Likewise graphics APIs. (Which platform has non-proprietary 2D APIs?) QuickDraw 3D's problem wasn't that it was proprietary, it was that it sucked.
Likewise QuickTime video. You do realize (a) it was first, and (b) Apple licensed the architecture to the MPEG folk (MP4's container format is QuickTime) and this predates OSX.
I actually had a "discussion" about the whole connector thing with a colleague recently. Eg. In its history The Mac has used three kinds of connectors for mice and keyboards -- a serial connector for the very first Mac, ADB (same cabling as S-Video, so not actually proprietary at all) from 1985 to 1997 or so, and then USB. How's that compare with PC? Go on, I'll let you go Google.
Video is definitely the worst, I'll give you that, but even there it's mainly been a case of sticking to an early standard too long (D25 or whatever it was), the horrific octopus thing (which they tried a second time) and the problems with DVI which aren't unique to Apple.
There was a period when Apple had a weird Ethernet socket that required an adapter for 10BT or RJ45 or Token Ring, but this was because a standard hasn't emerged and competitors generally didn't support networking without an expansion card.
No question Apple has been more proprietary than, say, commodity pc clone makers, but they compare very well to everyone else (Sun, SGI, Commodore, IBM, etc.)
My point is that everyone used proprietary connectors, it's just some became perceived as non-proprietary because they got lucky. Even today you probably see PS2 (proprietary IBM) mouse and keyboard sockets on a PC backplane. Apple went to the ADB/S-video option with the Mac SE (oh and the serial keyboard cable was a phone cord now that I think about it).
Don't need to rationalize it. I have no idea what you're talking about. Speaking as someone who worked in multimedia in the 90s it was the only game in town for five years, and then the least worst option until mpeg4. There was a period when wrapping flash around a video stream got you better browser support, but that's pretty much it.
I can understand hating iTunes and Safari for windows (both of which were, at some point, foisted on people installing QuickTime) but the basic QuickTime libraries, container format, etc. were top notch and remain the best option for working with time-based media.
I remember these arguments, they always were a bit elitist. But even today I am doing a big part of my productive work on a command line. I wouldn't want to part with the GUI and mouse, sure. But given the choice between either a GUI or a command-line only Unix I will pick the Unix system any day just because it allows automating things easily. Automation and programmability is the thing that sets computers apart from dumb devices like TVs. Many of these things can be done with the help of a GUI nowadays. But most of them cannot be done efficiently without a command line.
If anything the new MacBooks have more expandability than ever... I mean, TWO thunderbolt ports? People do realize that those are just external PCIe x2 ports right? That's more external bandwidth potential than any laptop has had, like, ever.
This sounds more like bandwagon-backlash than the real thing. There's no reasons here. Just a bunch of recycled generic complaints that are pretty trendy to toss around about Apple these days. The next cool thing is hating Apple so all the Apple users will probably write more articles like this and we'll have to read it every day on the front page. Brace yourselves.
It's remarkably easy to spot these types of article early. They always begin with short sentences, and almost always include the sentence "It has been a good run."
I don't get why the parent is being downvoted and I dislike silent knee-jerk-downvoting at HN very much.
I'm absolutely orthogonal to Apple's services and devices - just never used them, and article does not seem to shed almost any lights on whether I should or shouldn't try to. Actually, it confuses me even more: author dislikes Apple's services (or does he? he's been so enthusiastic in the past!), makes some unclear points about Apple being a 'consumer electronics company now', and then suddenly wraps up with him being perfectly happy with his MacBook Pro today. Now throw in a pathetic iTitle and prepare your WordPress to be hit by the frontpages of the Internet. Am I missing something?
What the article does show clearly though is that we're in urgent need of some nagging/whining detector, if not for the whole Internet then at least for HN's frontpage.
To all of those complaining about the new Apple devices, this is what you should do. You should vote with your wallet.
I don't think that you are going to change Apple's mind, but this is the only way they'll listen.
Personally, I think they are to far gone by now. The money pouring in has simply been to much to ignore. It's not the computer for the rest of us any more...It's the computer for the rest of them...
(I am one of them, I just understand your argument and your frustration)
The thing that's been keeping me from buying an Apple device is being associated with their users. This "better than you" attitude is something I just can't stand, it's repulsive. Instead of being ashamed that they wasted $3000 on a computer they could have had for $500 (and could have donated the other $2500), they feel smug about it? WTF!
Not at all, I really dislike people that think that just because they bought something expensive, they have rights to brag about how cool they are and how lost everyone else is. The most recent example: a friend of mine posts "Oh, no! My laptop died!", to which a Mac user comments with "That's why I bought a MacBook Pro!". When I mentioned that they fail too, he began talking about the grapes being sour and how poor I am?! I would never want to be associated with people thinking this way, ever. I bet they don't even know what a savings account is.
The problem is that we don't have a choice. There's only one premium option to go for. And it's apple. It's surprising how none of the others have at least created a luxury brand, similar to Toyota/Lexus or Volkswagen/Audi.
Except they did their very best to just make their 'premium' products a blatant money-grab and little else.
Despite plunking down a pretty penny for premium brands or product lines, Dell and Sony would still nickel and dime you with LOADS of pre-installed crapware. (No experience with other manufacturers' 'premium' lines..)
Of course they gave up -- it is bloody annoying to buy an expensive piece of hardware and then spend loads of time simply fighting with it; the market just couldn't stand it any more and jumped ship when a crap-free out-of-the-box experience presented itself.
Personally, because I have more time and skills than money, I use cheapo Dells and Lenovos which I wipe and set up from scratch. But for my parents and other relatives who really couldn't care less, I'd recommend an Apple laptop in a flash and not have to waste hours upon hours as tech support. (Now that they're more easily available, I'm cautiously considering moving this recommendation to a Dellbuntu...)
They failed, and to be fair, most have failed. The fact of the matter is that is hard to dominate your market, everybody will downplay your success. And nobody will ever give credit to your product, or to your strategy, or to your business. It's always luck, customers with more money than brains, deception.
The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. They were all flukes in history that are going to be corrected when the market corrects itself. Excuse me?
The truth is, Apple, and Audi and BMW, must be doing something right. It's just not something for you.
Apple is making the exact same mistake the RIM made. They've gone from targeting hardcore fans, to targeting teenagers.
The problem is that teenagers are quick to jump ship to the coolest new thing. Apple has been making "coolest new thing" for a while, but they're getting really popular now, which seems to be inversely proportional to "cool".
For RIM, they moved away from targeting hardcore, email-addicted business people, and it made them vulnerable enough to get killed.
RIM never moved their target. In fact I still think they try and promote the Blackberry as the device for 'email-addicted business people'.
And I think it's because of the fact they thought their 'hard-core fans' would stick with them put them where they are today , not the other way around.
> Apple is making the exact same mistake the RIM made. They've gone from targeting hardcore fans, to targeting teenagers.
Not sure what you're talking about. Apple, like any major technology company, has always targeted both hardcore fans and teenagers. Nothing's changed there.
On a related note, another constant in Apple's history has been its naysayers. Apple's critics are infamous for proclaiming in every year of the company's existence that it is doomed. People were saying exactly what you're saying 10 years ago when the iPod came out.
What happened to RIM is that all they were left with was their hardcore, email-addicted, security minded end users and corporations. But that proved to be a small subset of their overall user base. The majority (me) jumped ship when the iPhone came along. Why? Mobile email was critical to us because we were always on the move. The apps that you could get on the iPhone - whether a 2 hour movie for a plane ride or a flight app that let me understand where my plane was before the gal at the counter did, or maps that let me find a Starbucks near the meeting - more than made up for the slightly less (then) optimal email vs a BB. RIM had to move. They just moved poorly because they couldn't adjust.
The RIM situation was even worse than you describe. It was actually very similar to Nextel's earlier fast rise and collapse.
They saw erosion in their enterprise sales, but missed the fact that the superior web browsing experience and eventually applications on the iPhone was driving folks away. They honestly thought that their keyboard was still a key differentiator that folks cared about.
So they stuffed the channel in the low end of the market, and pushed the cheap text messaging of BBM as the core offering. Suddenly sketchy cell phone kiosks are pushing BlackBerries, and they became the new T-Mobile Sidekick. Just like with Nextel, that low end push tainted the brand, as thugs and drug dealers learned quickly that BBM (like DirectConnect) was initially not interceptable.
Maybe my experience is warped, but if I had to stereotype I'd say it's younger people walking around with Android phones and older well-off businesspeople walking around with iPhones. I'm not sure "targeting teenagers" really holds.
The people I know who still use Blackberries? Both of them are hardcore fans. Back in the 90s, every Mac user I knew was a hardcore fan… all five or so of them.
Apple is what it is today because it started selling to everyone else. RIM is what it is today because it hasn't yet figured out how to do that.
As for why people keep saying that Apple is targeting teenagers, the reason is that the iPhone has a crazy bathtub curve to its user base and most people only see half of it. The wealthiest, most successful business people I know all own iPhones. On the other hand, all the people I know with who are unemployed with uncontrolled substance abuse issues also own iPhones. Everyone in the middle owns Android. In a particularly funny anecdote, I knew someone who went through rehab, got clean, and almost immediately tried to replace his iPhone with an Android.
If you don't know any crackheads, then the iPhone seems like the phone of the wealthy entrepreneur. If you don't know any people who are successful in business, then the iPhone looks like the choice of the crackheads. Your experience is warped, but no more so than those who say its the phone of teenagers.
I think the company you're explaining is Microsoft :) Both MS and RIM have released a me-too tablet with a curiously bad email client, and both have lost a lot of smartphone market share since the iPhone & Android have been introduced.
And even if Apple is treating power users badly - I certainly think they are - there is still nobody who treats them better. The BlackBerry was killed by more practical smartphones. Who will kill the Mac?
"Apple is making the exact same mistake the RIM made. They've gone from targeting hardcore fans, to targeting teenagers."
What is a RIM "hardcore fan" these days, and how many of them still buy RIM products? How profitable is the demographic who wants a smartphone but needs a full keyboard?
I wonder what was the vision he thought he shared with Apple ?
If you reverse all his points then it seems like in his mind Apple provided ultra customisable hardware and software with great options for the enterprise. I don't remember that Apple.
5 years ago, Apple was seemingly "light years" ahead of everyone. Kowtowing wasn't really even a thought because so much more was being provided than elsewhere that there was no real compromise to choose Apple.
That's not true and is increasingly more than just untrue...
I can sympathize and I feel less content with Apple than I used to. I love their hardware - anyway I always find myself buying a new device rather than upgrading. Apple does great stuff but as other's I'm really worried that they won't fix their awkardness with the web.
But another note - how come no one can throw in a bit of analysis to back up these kind of argument? Otherwise it just seems like typical disillusionment (as products and companies inevitably evolve). As such it doesn't mean anything, it just means one person with a blog decided to use Ubuntu. There is a guy with a blog for every product that has ever changed. Throw in some analysis, and it may make a bigger difference.
Will he have the same annoying and egocentric article next time another nobody decide that he no longer like a product or start being bored by drinking coffee?
It's simply stunning to me to see how long it's taken the computer geeks to work this out. Apple stopped making toys for you over a decade ago and you are only just realising it now?
I guess this is another consequence of the filter bubble. As all we read on the internet is the opinion of other geeks, we forget that geeks are hopelessly outnumbered by normals and they are the ones Apple is targeting and reaping the rewards.
This was always Steve Jobs vision and it's not like it was a secret.
However, the most ludicrous part of this post is the suggestion that Apple would be best served as a company making servers again and trying its best to grab back that lucrative desktop linux market.
This, in a nutshell, is why Apple was revolutionary. The geeks just simply didn't see normal people and made hardware and software that suited their own needs and behold, it sucked mightily. Apple made the step of putting the normal person first and, shockingly, normal people decided to pay good money for their products.
All of this should be obvious to anyone who reads HN and witnessed Apples meteoric rise. It's a bit disconcerting to discover that apparently it isn't.
The article isn't saying Apple should go back to making servers, he is just saying they are no longer serving him in particular anymore, which is fair.
I will however contend that MY main issue with Apple now a-days is that its actually becoming worse on the "normal person front" (at least when it comes to OS X). Messages for example is a complete disaster. I regularly have to help family members with their Macs (many of which originally moved to the Mac on my insistence ages ago), and I can tell you that they are still quite confused (increasingly so) about how to use these machines. Here is an article that touches on this: http://blog.davidchartier.com/post/36634783567/im-getting-si...
However, I am still pretty happy with iOS/iDevices. I have not been as happy with an Apple product as with the iPad mini in a LONG time. I do agree with others though that if they don't get their act together with "services" (Maps, Sync, basically anything that isn't judged on a purely client side "niceness" scale), it may be an issue for them. However my opinion is that they just shouldn't be bothering with this at all, but that's a whole other story.
There is also a contingent of UNIX users who use Mac OS X pragmatically. I have never had the illusion that Apple wasn't a consumer device company at heart. But Macs have been great UNIX workstations for the last decade or so. Once they make more serious attempts to turn their laptop line into 'iOS computers', I'll switch back to Linux or BSD. But for now, it is good hardware with a good UNIX operating system.
I just bought a MacBook Air last week, after a 2 year break without a Mac laptop. I had been using Lion and Mountain Lion on a Mac Mini, but the last week or so have been a revelation for me. Crazy battery life (about 9 hours of normal programming), full screen apps with swiping to switch between them, fast fast fast at everyday operations thanks to the SSD, the whole thing is at the same time a major turn towards iDevice-ification, and a giant leap forward in usability for laptops.
I wonder how many people worrying about iOS-ification are:
a) running Lion, where the transition was still in mid-course, or
b) using a desktop, where the design decisions aren't so obviously right (my Mac Mini for example has a huge monitor, hence I'm less inclined to use full-screen apps)
In case a), there were definite weakness in Lion. Full-screen apps hadn't yet made their near-global appearance, and Spaces was ... weird. These problems have been shaken out in Mountain Lion. For b) it seems to me that OSX has been optimised for the laptop environment, where screen real-estate is limited. If you aren't using full-screen as your standard app config, you're missing out on some of what makes Mountain Lion a great experience).
When I compare all of this to the laptop I use at work, a Dell running Fedora, there is no comparison. My Mac is a far, far better development machine (well, aside from the fact that brew is weak sauce compared to a full-blown yum, but then this is not news). It's not a question of there being pros and cons on each side, my Mac is simply better for pretty much any metric I care to imagine.
Which is not to say that some people may not have genuine grievances with the current Mac platform. I just wanted to add my own personal experience - going from being mildly disappointed by Lion to completely wowed by Mountain Lion.
- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people.
- The whole-screen app stuff is a good idea, but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors, which many geeks use (the problem is: when you go full screen on one monitor, the other no longer shows anything by gray linen)
- Many features were removed for what seems to be no good reason, e.g. RSS feeds.
- Some iPad-like behaviors make little sense on a desktop, e.g. automatically closing Safari if idle for a while. It takes several seconds to open a web link just because it has to relaunch the application.
- Annoying for my company, Taodyne (3D presentations): stereoscopy used to be perfectly stable on 10.6, unstable since 10.7, to the point of causing kernel panics or system freezes regularly.
- Memory management has been a weak point since Rhapsody. In Rhapsody, you could crash the system simply by zooming in Preview. Today, you can still halt your top-of-the-line system to a crawl simply by running a process that eats all available memory. I'd much rather have an easy quota system where I can say "unless otherwise specified, no app can take more than 1/4th of available RAM". Or a paging system that makes smarter decisions and keeps the "interactive" stuff resident enough that I can still kill the offending process.
- Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears. Or the keyboard that sometimes forgets half the keys you type. Or Safari that stops refreshing part of the screen. Or moving a window across monitors that now causes the window and background icons to blink. And so on. Lion does not feel as polished as Snow Leopard.
Overall, I still like Apple products, but I definitely see them losing their edge on the software quality front. I think that Maps on iOS is just the most glaring example, but it's not the only one.
- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people.
I'd like to see this backed up by numbers. Sure, Lion and Mountain Lion are quite slow on spinning platters, but OS X feels almost an order of magnitude faster since I had an SSD. Much faster than Snow Leopard with a hard disk. The numbers are also on my side, an SSD completely blows away hard disks both in access times and read/write speed.
but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors
Indeed. Big time. It works ok on the road, but when I have an external screen connected I never use full screen support. It would be easy to make things better: allow users to put another full-screen application (or desktop) on the secondary screen.
Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears.
I really disliked Lion for all its bugs. But things have been steadily improving since Mountain Lion, to the point where even iMessage works most of the time in 10.8.2 ;).
I think c3d is right in that Lion and Mountain Lion are slower than Snow Leopard if you don't have an SSD. It seems to me that recently Apple have been designing OSX with SSD-equipped computers as the target. They assume that you will have fast read times, and use algorithms to optimise that. For example, they 'deactivate' applications that aren't being used, because they know they can restart them from SSD very quickly, which in turn frees up physical RAM, which speeds the computer up elsewhere. The problem is that if you don't have an SSD, this decision is catastrophic for performance. As always, Apple are skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it is...
Apple has made no attempts to turn Macs into "iOS." it's copied some features, like full screen, but the system is as developer friendly as ever (and more unix compatible than ever).
Words have meaning. Being in a minority doesn't mean abnormal. You may not intend it to be a value judgement, but it clearly is when you're referring to a group of people. Perhaps in a clinical setting normal/abnormal doesn't have any perjorative qualities, but in normal day to day use it does.
Your question is also a non sequiter. Computer usage patterns aren't always correlated to either proficiency in programming or computer experience. For example, I know many commercial programmers who have the most simplistic understanding of their OS, be it Linux, OSX or Windows. They don't understand the difference between CISC/RISC, nor do they exhibit a greater facility with various application than non-programmers. As I've said before, computer knowledge is a continuum, and trying to pigeonhole users into neat categories is foolish. There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't. Neither are better than the other, and calling some normal with the subtext that they're inferior to computer geeks is elitist.
We forget that geeks are hopelessly outnumbered by normals and they are the ones Apple is targeting and reaping the rewards.
This was always Steve Jobs vision and it's not like it was a secret.
Nah, Steve Jobs' vision wasn't to make computers for "normals." That was Jef Raskin's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin) vision. Steve Jobs' vision was to make computers for Steve Jobs.
Using the svtle theme while not being part of svtle comes off as really slimy. You are ripping off someone else's work and there are no two ways about it.
Why does this have to be such a negative article? I would prefer to see a praising of how great the latest Ubuntu is in detail. Intro with "I've been a power mac user for x years..." and then go on to sing the praises.
Aside from PCMCIA/ExpressCard upgrades, which are useless nowadays thanks to USB2/3, the only upgrades available to laptops are memory + disk. RAM is cheap enough where companies can toss in 8gb (soon, 16gb) without a second thought, which is more than enough for probably 99% of the customer base for as long as the laptop is in service.
That leaves the disk drive as the one non-upgradable part. I imagine part of the reason for this is the (relative) bulkiness of the 2.5" SSD form factor. Are there any other standardized sizes that could work in a rMBP form factor? 1.8" maybe? The 11" MBA may have problems fitting it, but a swappable 1.8" SSD on the larger models would be quite nice.
It's the first time he's been happy with an OS rather than OS X, so it would make sense that he wouldn't swap out the hardware before making sure he can live without OS X (seeing as OS X is hard to run without Apple hardware).
"Apple, I am done with you! I shall throw out this $2000 laptop, and purchase a Thinkpad, because I cannot see any way to get any more use out of the hardware I have now!"
I use a Macbook Pro for work and while the hardware may be pleasant to look at, it's a pain to use. The keyboard is set entirely too close to the screen, meaning I can't use it comfortably for very long without an external screen and/or keyboard, the nice 90 degree angles along the edges mean that if I can using it I quickly get marks in my wrists from it (and occasionally have hands start to go to sleep, a really bad sign), the touchpad is placed to where it's difficult to keep straight wrists/proper keyboard usage without touching the touchpad. But is sure does look pretty.
I had a Lenovo T60 for quite a while and, while it looked like a cheap piece of plastic, it was wonderfully durable, keyboard was placed in a good spot, the positioning of the buttons/touchpad were all just right. Just because it looks nice does not make something well-designed, and I have yet to use an Apple device that I would consider anywhere close to ergonomic friendly (the iPod nano being the closest as you only really used 2 "buttons" on the circle, pause/play and next).
I disagree. I own a Lenovo Thinkpad x220. It's perfect (for me).
Its keyboard is reason alone that it beats the MacBook Pro.
On top of that, I bought it back in 2011 for around 960 USD (converted). The configuration included an i5-2520M, 8GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, an 80GB m-SATA SSD and an upgrade to a 3-year on-site warranty.
Same here. I'm typing this on a macbook pro that I'm currently sucking data off onto my x220 running Arch. Similar setup. That msata bay rocks with an SSD in it, eh?
FWIW, specs say 8gb max but I've got 16gb ticking away in it nicely. You're probably aware of that but worth posting here for others if they are interested. One of the best laptop keyboards I've used.
I switched about 3 years back. I was using PB12 then and PowerPC was already on its way out. I figured that if I have to get new software anyway, I may switch the platforms as well.
The Thinkpad T400 I got is still a good machine, 3 years later. So good, that my brother bought himself Thinkpad X230 and is satisfied as well.
I hear it. I'm a stickler for comfort and design, so I'll be going for the thinnest, slabbiest, least-dent-prone thinkpad I can find when the time comes. I really do insist on the slab - i.e. as few indentations as possible - approach, so I hope its considered necessary, somewhere in the future, by Thinkpad designers ..
I really love my work thinkpad, except I'm not a big fan of trackpoints, and the touchpad is truly hateful. For work that's fine because I'm always docked, but I probably wouldn't consider them for personal use for that reason alone.
Have you tried changing the stock rubber cap to the vastly more ergonomic concave model? It gives you much finer control, effortlessly. It's a popular aftermarket part available for a couple dollars on auction sites.
I suspect trackpad vs trackpoint is one of those whichever you get used to first things. I use a USB thinkpad keyboard for my desk and have multiple times went hours before noticing my mouse was not plugged in. It somehow psychologically maps 1:1 with a mouse.
I've been trying to kick the Apple habit since I got my first tiBook, which was the _revelation_ for me at the time, that Apple of all people were producing the Unix laptop, and also making the physicality of the thing badass.
So, in my effort to stay true to my Unix'ish roots, I've gotten a Motorola Lapdock real cheap, its at least as comfy as a macbook Air, and I'm plugging in things like .. raspberryPi, MK802/808 Android or Ubuntu sticks, my desktop 'slab PC', and so on. I think I'm close to kicking the habit - they /really/ lost me at the drop of the MacbookPro17" .. my existing one will run into the ground, and I will soon put Linux on it.
In the meantime, I would suggest that those looking for an alternative to the sexy nature of the hardware aspect, albeit with a little extra effort, switching to Ubuntu-on-a-Stick is really a pleasant treat.
> they /really/ lost me at the drop of the MacbookPro17"
I feel your pain! It was the only laptop with enough screen real estate and power to work as a desktop on the road.
But lately with the increasingly draconian carry-on restrictions I've downsized my luggage, and turns out my MPB17 just barely doesn't fit in a 16x13x7 bag (that fits in the new commuter jet regs). The MBPr15 fits, has more screen res, and is lighter. So I had been planning an upgrade. If the new MBPr13 had dual graphics I'd be willing to even go with that as it would fit in my puddle jumper bag's outside pocket.
But... This past year the outsized MBP17 had me trying out my iPad 3 instead, and now I'm not sure I need a laptop for travel at all.
Yeah I'm closely watching the tablet space, if I can get a 17" tablet with ultra-high res, plug in a PC-on-a-stick, and use a keyboard with it, I'll have my development machine again. I just can't really sit there for long on a 15" screen, its not wide-view enough for my liking .. and the MBP17" was, ultimately, my main machine. Oh well.
I'm using the Lapdock Atrix, but yeah, same thing as the 500 basically. I really think Lapdock+PC-On-Stick is my new direction, away from the Apple Hegemony. It is simply amazing being able to carry my Ubuntu workstation with me in my pocket, plug into big screen/&etc., or use the lapdock on train rides (typical laptop use case for me personally) to do extra work. Its truly neat. I hope it happens mainstream..
As long as things keep going multi-core, ARM is going to be just fine for me. x86 compatability not such a need.. We've got Linode for that. ;)
Most PC-on-Sticks' use HDMI video output. I have a small dodgy cable rig to go from HDMI out to Lapdock HDMI in, but thats just because: Motorola. It could be quite feasible that Lapdock clones will arrive soon, with standard connectors..
I actually didn't mind OSX too much, but the using my work provided MBP was an experience in frustration. The usability was horrible compared to my thinkpad, and I ended up leaving it docked as a desktop mostly.
Every corner of the MBP is rounded except the edge that your wrists actually come into contact with, which are sharp and leave painful marks. The trackpad lacked actual "mouse buttons" which made a simple task like highlighting and right clicking on text a finger dexterity test. The keyboard feels cheap and slow. Most of all, I miss my trackpoint. :)
For actual usability, it seems to me ThinkPad is a close to laptop perfection as you can get. I replaced my 2007 TP (Windows XP) with a new one this year (Ubuntu). If apple sold OSX for non-apple hardware I'd probably be running that instead of linux.
If your wrists are in contact with the front edge, your desk is probably too high and you might be much more comfortable at a lower height (even beyond the sharp-edge issue, your shoulders may thank you).
Or to quote Steve Jobs, "you're holding it wrong." ;-)
"Even if you hate the software and all things iOS, it's hard to find a better designed laptop."
I think this was the case for most of the 2000's, and a big reason my last few laptops have been Macs -- but I'm not so sure it's that way any more. For a long time, the big PC OEM's seemed to view hardware specs as the main difference people would buy a $1500 laptop over a $500 one, so they just stuck better hardware inside the $500 shell. Nowadays I think they've caught on that people pay attention to design and overall build quality.
It might still be hard to find a better designed laptop, but I think the PC OEM's are finally starting to make some that can at least compete.
I think the author is maybe reading too many Apple fanboy blogs. Apple still makes OS X and all the developer tools. Developing for iOS is far easier than Android.
Sure the Mac is becoming more of an appliance but with stagnant hardware speeds is it that big of a deal? Also, Apple has been hostile to DIY repairs and add-ons since forever. I remember being 12 years old arguing on the 1-800-APPL-SOS help line that 3rd party RAM was not causing my problem and no I wouldn't uninstall it to get help.
Apple relies on its developers to power the App Store. They (hopefully) won't forget that. I'm not worried.
You don't hear anyone ever talking about how awesome Apple Logic is for making music or how easy Final Cut Pro is for video. They still make them and they're great quality. Just because the masses of Apple reporters aren't focused on your baby doesn't mean Apple doesn't care about it. Apple is just selling their profit vision to investors.
Computer as appliance means not a general-purpose computer. If you cannot use it to execute your own code and access the hardware, then it is not general-purpose. That means the new wave of locked down computers are instead multi-purpose computers - those purposes being defined by what it cannot do.
Apple makes damn good multi-purpose machines for the most common purposes of most people - which they have consistently explained is their company's goal forever. Just look at their general-purpose tools (XServe, Mac Pro, Developer Tools) being neglected, and single-purpose machines being cannibalized (iPod) or taken lightly (Apple TV).
All of Apple's lineup is of respectable quality, but it is obvious where the focus is converging. Now there is an opening for others to explore new general-purpose and single-purpose machines.
I don’t agree with the point on convergence. It seems clear to me that Apple is not turning OS X into iOS. It’s still very much a WIMP interface best suited for keyboard and mouse. Windows 8 is a good example of PC/tablet convergence, and however much you like or dislike that approach, it’s the opposite of what Apple is doing.
On some other points I do agree, like the gluing down and lack of expandability/repairability.
I don't get this. Why are you using svbtle theme if you don't belong to the svbtle community ? I know there is some wordpress theme out there that clones svbtle but it's not an excuse.
Has much changed in two years? Every once in a while I hear Linux is finally user friendly, and I go try it and my multiple monitors don't work and my graphics card drivers require manual installation and I get constantly riddled with permissions prompts which I'm sure is necessary but still annoys me as an end user.
Not much has changed. I stopped upgrading my work desktop because the drivers for my wired Ethernet needs to be recompiled every Ubuntu upgrade. Very annoying when I am in the middle of a sprint and I have to stop to figure out why basic things are no longer working.
It has. But there is still the ol' quirks. I had problems with sounds on ubuntu on my ThinkPad. I had to install XFCE for it to play nice with 2 monitors (since the gpu in the old laptop is kind of sucky). But Macosx has even worse compability, so if you buy computer parts that are knows to play nice with linux you'll have a swell time :).
Also, when you start playing with tiling window managers you'll be glad you don't have a mac.
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 401 ms ] thread[1]http://www.ifixit.com/Apple-Parts/Mac-Mini-Dual-Hard-Drive-K...
It's doable, but it's far more complicated than the current (non-retina) MacBook Pro or any desktop I've ever worked in.
"Lloyd Chambers (MacPerformance Guide) thinks it may be August 2013 before Apple releases a new Mac Pro because of remarks Steve made two or three years ago, brought to his attention by a reader of his site, that Apple would not release a Mac Pro until USB 3 was natively supported. The Ivy Bridge Xeon is supposed to support USB 3 natively." (http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/152825/future-of-mac-pro)
Only one vendor, OWC (MacSales), ships a compatible SSD, but of course you can't use it in non-Apple laptops which have a standard SATA connector.
Picture in article here: http://www.mactrast.com/2012/11/apple-ssds-and-the-fusion-dr...
It is the one big thing that makes me hesitate about buying an rMBP. SSD's are prone to failure according to many articles I've read and they also have a limited life span even if it doesn't have any defects. Once the thing gives up there is no way to easily swap it out and just insert a new one.
Also, sometimes I need to swap out hard drives (or SSD drives in this case). With the rMBP that is not possible. The rMBP is a nice computer but I really hope they see the error in their ways and add a replaceable standard SATA SSD.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Retina_2012
But I refuse to be a partisan anymore. I remember when Apple was ... well, remember Mac OS 8? Remember the time before the iMac? Those computers made me wonder how newspapers ever got published. So I'm happy the Mac people have (mostly) usable (by their standards) hardware and software now, as long as I'm not forced to use it.
Edit: I am referring to this http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/09/22/1319216/ubuntu-will-n...
I haven't seen them first hand, but I was hoping someone might give their opinion here.
Aside from that, I'm pretty disappointed with the desktop environment. It's pretty but managing windows is a pain (can't easily alt-tab into a specific terminal window, for instance; it also hijacks Alt key to enable menu item search). I'm looking to replace it soon, but then again I'm probably not the user Ubuntu is primarily targeting these days.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...
To be honest, I found the ads to be quite annoying, I usually start applications by pressing the Super key and then typing the name. I don't see how showing Amazon search results for "terminal" or "chrome" are relevant.
I am happy that they accept donations on the download page now. Hopefully this will reduce the need for such experiments.
This, I predict, is going to turn out to be Apple's achilles heel. They make great hardware and their software is good enough but they just don't get services.
Google does services better than anybody and they're quickly closing the other gaps.
The App Store and iTunes Store are pretty damned successful services, whether you like them or not.
iCloud is not a joke, it does it's job well for the 99%. I turn on my new phone, enter my apple id, and I have all my settings, apps, etc synced and ready to go.
The other interesting data point is the bidding for the new TLDs in summer 2012 (http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/rss/1136468/Amazon-G...). Amazon and Google bidded on 150+ new TLDs between them. Apple? With $120bn in the bank, they applied for... .apple. Even Microsoft understood the potential importance of this more than Apple (they applied for 5 or so - .live, .docs, .bing etc).
Yeah this is the thing exactly. Amazon and Google are essentially content plays in mobile. Devices can come and go but as long as people are using their services they're making money.
Apple is a hardware play and that gave them a big first-mover advantage but unless they can keep coming up with iPhone/iPad level home runs that advantage deteriorates quickly. I will never buy anything in iBooks, for example, because I don't want to be limited to Apple's devices to read my books, even if I do currently have an iPhone, iPad and MBA.
They do have some platform tie-in with iTunes Music but the writing is on the wall there. Subscription models are the way forward.
Same for magazines and book. I keep a few subscriptions but mainly consume the content once. When I find a good book, one I will read again I put it on my library shelf and come back to it later. Subscriptions for media lock me into a singe channel if I ever want to go back. And like Netflix, who has to negotiate with the content providers for their content, with subscriptions there is no guarantee the 5-10% of quality content I like will be there when I come back.
You must not have used iTunes Match on a daily basis. Very often some songs do not play at all, no matter how often you retry. Every week or so I cannot connect to the 'iTunes Cloud' at all, reducing my music library to what I have downloaded. Match and iTunes in the cloud are terribly broken.
Maybe people try to use it for more than this?
Go ahead, make a keynote deck, or numbers spreadsheet. Save it to "the cloud," now go look at your ipad or iphone. Where the hell is it? So much for magic.
Sharing is a royal pain in the ass with iOS. The gyrations I have to go through to move data from an ios app to the desktop is ridiculous and often impossible.
I'm hopeful they will get iCloud up to spec eventually, but for now it just sucks.
GateKeeper, to Mac developers, is playing by Apple's rules. I don't think it's a conspiracy to say that it will tilt the favor towards those who utilize the very closed (in multiple senses of the word) App Store over regular applications.
People who don't want/like the walled garden can disable it trivially from the settings. For people like my mom, who clicks on any ad/link/attachment without a second thought, this will save a ton of headaches.
I don't necessarily disagree (I have a mom too ;)), but: (1) there are many trustable open source programs that are unsigned because their developers cannot afford or do not want to pay $99 per year for an Apple developer account; (2) OS X could display a warning that the user can override.
What happens now is that people will Google for the error to install some legitimate software, find a blog post that describes how to disable Gatekeeper, and switch of Gatekeeper permanently.
If it had an overridable dialog straight from double-click, people will just see this as an annoyance and end up clicking the "Yeah, whatever!" button without skipping a beat.
The way it is, it's actually overridable per application with "right click->open" which gives you the overridable warning you wish for, with OSX actually remembering the overriding and you can subsequently double-click on the now whitelisted app. This whitelisting apparently survives even Sparkle updating.
It appears that it's just convoluted enough for people dangerous to themselves not to shoot themselves in the foot, yet convenient enough for the informed user to act easily. And ironically the solution is actually written in the non-overridable dialog, yet the kind of people not reading dialogs is precisely the risky kind. I'd venture it's made so on purpose.
As I said in my original comment ;).
This whitelisting apparently survives even Sparkle updating.
Sparkle probably never sets the com.apple.quarantine attribute and if the application does not have LSFileQuarantineEnabled set in its Info.plist, its downloaded files are not put in quarantaine. Applications that do not have that extended attribute are never checked.
None of the devs has an Apple Developer account and not one of them, understandably, is prepared to churn out the 99 USD just to be able to sign the OS X flavor of their app: http://goo.gl/gzFZO
Shouldn't a kick-ass app like Darktable be easily deployable by anyone, not just those who know how to circumvent the 'walled garden'?
Reading the link, it seems like (some of) the devs have philosophical objections to doing that; fine. But philosophical objections aren't the same as "it can't be done".
Much of the unsigned software is perfectly useful valid stuff, much of it safe, much of it open source but that action to run downloaded code puts a lot of trust in the developer and the source. Even run as a non-root user it can still do things that cause real problems including steal confidential information.
I'm not saying it's right. But computer as an appliance? That's the dream! In the 80s we would argue on Usenet that the WIMP interface was too simplistic, and that real computer users stuck to the command line only. Now, in 2012, we argue on Blogs that the iPad is too simple, and real computer users need a mouse, keyboard, and windowed interface.
I'll leave this anecdote from 1981. over 30 years ago. To show how Apple is still Apple:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
"Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports. "
Otherwise I agree with you, Apple has not changed a bit. Some people take longer to realize it, apparently.
It depends on how you define "you". Broadly, the term "you" means "people". It doesn't mean "every person under the sun, especially programmers".
If we correct for misinterpretations, I would say people in general can do more with simpler computing platforms that are more appliance-like than with their mostly confusing computer that more often acts in confusing manners, and that more often seems to be ridden with viruses and malware (whether it is or not), and also sports a number of features and buttons which if clicked the wrong way, can cause the computer to be broken (whether true or not).
When people talk about what "you" can do, they are not talking about you, specifically.
It is not just about programmers. It's about people who want to do more than checking email, reading websites and running a few apps here and there for convenience. When parents want to edit HD videos of their kids taken with their camcorder they will not run to their iPad to do it, because it would be too damn sluggish for that. When you need to produce something or edit something and you do not want to do a dirty job you will sooner or later have to go back to sit in front of a laptop or desktop and use a mouse unless you like wasting your time, no matter what you computer knowledge is.
That's the problem right there. I don't know many "parents" (== non-technical-people) who are able to edit HD Videos, at all, period. Most non-technical people I know have memorised how to do the few things they actually need from their computer, like check emails, compose documents, and use the software-de-jour of their workplace. But anything beyond that is massively more than they know how to do without running to a more technical user for help.
The whole argument is, iPad makes it possible whereas before it wasn't possible, forget if it's fast or not.
Personally, I haven't even bothered trying an iPad, but speaking as a previously satisfied user of the Apple's laptops, the OP's comment very much resonated with me.
I also would like to note that (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that Apple software's propensity to assume the Big Mommy role is hardly a new phenomena. Apple was never an "open system", it is true. But there was a golden age in the '00s that produced just the right mix of open and managed systems.
Finally, there is a political subtext to all of this. Apple clearly believes in ('benign') authoritarianism -- it is in their DNA -- and given their empowered position in the computation loop, I no longer feel it is appropriate to support their bottom line, specially given the unacceptable stated position of Jobs on matters such as free speech.
That the iPad isn't best for every task doesn't mean that it isn't overall the best device, or that it doesn't substantially enable people to do whatever it is they want to do (especially people who don't do any of the advanced computing tasks you bring up). The sales numbers indicate this. If people couldn't use iPads, they wouldn't buy them.
On the contrary, the video editors on iPhone and iPad are hugely popular, and if we expand to include photos, the iOS photo editing dominance is staggering. Hordes of users began editing and publishing photos who never had.
With iPad 1 I still traveled with my MBP17. With iPad 2 I started to wish I could leave it at home.
With iPad 3, the Logitech Ultraslim keyboard, and the extra screen resolution (with multitasking gestures enabled to slide right/left between running apps), I now leave the MBP at home and use iSSH to manage servers and network, Google Apps for business tasks, Diet Coda and Koder for code editing and review, iPhoto and iMovie for media editing (I shoot Nikon D3 and it even keeps NEF+JPG as managed pairs), and iCab for web apps needing file uploads and downloads. If I run into a task I need a desktop for, say, to build an iOS app or test a web app in Windows 8, I VNC in.
All told, the frustration of doing everyday tasks with the iPad 3 and Logitech Ultraslim Keyboard cover has gotten low enough I leave the laptop at home even on extended trips, so it's certainly viable as the main machine for people whose job isn't as computing oriented or content creation oriented as mine.
Actually you can do a hell of a lot more today.
Could you do HD video, real time 3D graphics, music, use thousands of modern APIs and languages with performance of several Gazillion flops in multiple cores, connect to everywhere on the planet, etc, with an Apple II, or a Mid-nineties IIci?
Besides the 1000x more powerful graphics and soundcard, you also have 100x more powerful programs, pervasive networking, tons of peripherals, from cheap printers to linux based robots and a FULL BLOWN UNIX underneath.
When Apple tried to cater to the open source community using the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, young generations thought Apple was always more open than Microsoft, when actually they were the opposite.
Now that they are back on top with more profits than ever, they are as they always were.
Surely it's an issue with the people who tend to be Open Source advocates, complaining that Apple are no longer open?
Not that it's really an issue at all, it's just different strokes for different folks. With computers doing as much as they do now it's seems highly unlikely that a single company will ever fulfil all our computing needs. Certainly having seen the Wintel domination of the 90s it really doesn't seem that desirable so really what's the problem?
The thing is that Apple was never open.
I fought the fights and put up with the greif for being the only developer with a Mac out of the 50 in the office. I lived on the bleeding edge - even paying for access to early unstable OS builds. I watched the OS get better and better with each release.
It opened the doors to the world of Unix for me and I thought it was wonderful having all these amazing tools at my fingertips, thanks to Apple. I got the wrong end of the stick.
This whole article feels bang on the money to me, and I'll bet the reason it's at the top of HN is that there are plenty of us in the same boat.
There are plenty of Apple fan boys (I'm using the term in a non-prejorative way indicentally, I've got three Apple devices on my desk right now) who don't go back nearly that far.
Possibly we're just confirming that the term "fan boy" is entirely useless in any sort of real discussion?
People who act as consistent apologists, who's identity is made up of their allegiance to this company and who react with shock and indignation that anybody could even propose that the company they've devoted a significant part of their psyche and lives to, could in any way be flawed...are fan boys. And they bring discourse to a halt by increasing the noise in a conversation to the point entire forums become useless, and actual fans get caught up in the crossfire...it's really frustrating and annoying.
And if you read all that and thought I was talking about Apple then you've missed the point. This exists as a kind of mixed-identification phenomenon exists across a broad spectrum of milieus. Car brands, politics, religion, etc. And it's to the benefit of these brands that they identify and recruit the people who are susceptible to fan boyism and use them as a deep pool of loyal customers and a passive defense to their organization's operations. Why try and spend time fighting off stories of negative aspects of your company when you have a million fan boys who'll do it for you?
And it's the constant noise they introduce, either in the form of an echo chamber of reinforcing good feeling but content free interactions or in the form of constant nonsensical diatribes and willfully ignorant defenses of their brand identity, that's why it's important for any on-line community to try and either turn fan boys into rational thinkers -- to separate the person's identity from the brand -- or drive them from the community.
HN is a place that needs signal, not noise. And fan boys bring only the loudest sort of static possible.
Plus being an apologist doesn't mean that you can't make a good point. Gruber could often be accurately described as an Apple apologist but I'd strongly take issue with the idea that he couldn't add to a debate on Apple. Similarly RMS when it comes to open source/freedom and others across the spectrum.
As with anything, argue with the point being made, not with the person, at least until you're absolutely sure you know them and where they're coming from far better than you're likely to through occasional interact on an internet message board.
And that's before we even get into the pejorative nature of the phrase "fan boy" and how you might as well just call someone a dick for the reaction you're likely to provoke.
Yes it's an interesting phenomenon but in terms of dealing with people who I may think are fan boys, I see no reason why there should be any reason why I should treat fan boys differently than I'd try to treat anyone else - that is take what they say at face value and engage them on that basis, or ignore them completely.
When I see a Daring Fireball post, if it's about Apple I'll read it and I find many things he says interesting and insightful (even if I may disagree with them), if it's Gruber on any other topic there's no point in even trying to scrub through his posts to find the valuable points to consider.
So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, you are right, evaluate the points and not the person (don't go ad hominem), but sometimes the level of effort required to find the valuable points isn't worth it.
I live fairly happily with hardware tinkering restrictions in my iMacs, but the inability to upgrade RAM in the new smaller iMac may be the last straw. It's really irritating.
Which other platforms had/have non platform specific APIs for 2D and video?
By that definition, POSIX libc is a platform. X11 is a standard with one flagship implementation (currently X.org, formerly XFree86) and multiple other implementations fewer people care about.
This is where I stopped reading...
It seems to be all the rage to write up anecdotal frustrations full of hyperbole about Apple these days, that's fine, but why do they have to be on Hacker News? Why should I care some guy on the internet doesn't want a computer that isn't user serviceable, or a tablet that uses a curated app store that contains 'literally thousands upon thousands of apps I don't need'? Please just go tell your buddies on the linux forums how you built your own distro instead of trolling the internet with articles about stuff you don't like, or at the very least refrain from posting them on a site like Hacker News, which is supposed to be informational (I guess).
The information content of this article is close to zero, it's nothing more than some random rant about stuff that's irrelevant for people who just use their computers to get shit done, instead of making a statement of idealism and tech-ethics out of them. Last time I checked, Macs running OS X are still great for almost any kind of creative application.
Yes, I even have Mac OS X systems available to me.
Maybe you should also stop stereotyping whoever hurts your Mac fan feelings.
Just cut the emotional crap, it appears to impair your ability to see the point I'm trying to make.
I've been using Linux and OS X alongside each other for over a decade, and many other *nix derivatives at work. I just pick the right tool for the right job, and more often than not, a Mac running OS X turns out to be the choice that offers the best tradeoffs, and allows me to do whatever I should or want to be doing with the lowest level of frustration. My HTPC/home server isn't running OS X, and neither does the VM I use to cross-compile packages for embedded systems. What does that say about Macs and OS X? Nothing.
That said, the problem I have with articles like this hitting Hacker News is not because I can't stand the idea some people have different ideas about what a computer is to them and how it should work. I couldn't care less. The problem is that the information content of these dime-a-dozen run-of-the-mill Apple rants is close to zero. I simply don't understand their purpose, do I have to stop using Macs because some guy on the internet prefers to use something different for whatever reason that doesn't affect me, or almost anyone else who uses their computer as a tool to get shit done?
The hardware is now even more locked down than ever.
These are facts.
Does it mean you have to stop using a mac? No.
Does it mean that some people are moving away from macs? Yes.
Does it mean you need to rage because there's an article that mentions 'fan boys'? Not really. Chill out.
If you have any cognant and articulate arguments why this guys opinion (which I happen to currently share) is a stupid opinion to have, by all means, I'm interested...
Nowhere did I say his opinion was stupid, I'm not one to judge opinions. All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN.
The cognant and articulate argument (?) here is that the internet has plenty of places to go if you want to read rants about why <insert technology or technology company here> sucks and why someone decided to leave for these elusive greener pastries that other platforms supposedly offer.
Everyone knows Macs aren't the most serviceable computers on earth, and everyone knows iOS isn't intented to be an open platform for all purposes power users or developers would use regular computers for. I don't think many other arguments are required to illustrate the point this article doesn't add much -if anything- to HN as a medium for the technology startup space.
Or, maybe it's just me, and other people really feel enlightened and satisfied after reading this article... :-/
OT: Do not read the article. Furthermore, do not comment on the article, nor should yo up vote it. If you feel the article violates some aspect of HN, flag it.
However, if your reason for commenting is to just say: "I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN." then you are not contributing. You are, by admission, contributing less than the article you are commenting on.
This is not an attack. Merely an observation. You value the quality of HN. Be the quality. Don't be the problem.
On another note. You say:
"I'm not one to judge opinions."
But then you go on to judge the article, an opinion, and it's worthiness:
"All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN."
> Or, maybe it's just me, and other people really feel enlightened and satisfied after reading this article... :-/
People enjoy different things. You do not want to judge, so don't. =) The best thing you can do to promote what you want to see on HN is to promote those very things. Spending time contributing to things you don't enjoy does not help.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except this part. Maybe I'm being naive but I believe discussion about stuff you don't like about a community-driven platform like HN might actually improve it. To me, the fact that articles like this hit HN more and more often, is separate from the discussion you can have about it.
>> People enjoy different things. You do not want to judge, so don't
You are twisting my words. I don't want to judge opinions, but that doesn't mean I can't have my own, and it also doesn't mean I can't express them in relation to the stuff that gets upvoted on HN. In everything I wrote about this article don't think I've passed any judgement on the author's opinion itself. You say 'people enjoy different things' as if that justifies anything that gets posted on HN. Lots of people enjoy reading about ponies, but you don't see a lot of articles about ponies on HN, and I don't think many people think that's a bad thing.
All I'm saying is that in the time I've been visiting HN, the information value of the articles upvoted on HN is going down. If this continues, before you know it HN will be like Gizmodo with a really crappy layout. Telling me to 'just don't read the articles' or 'just don't upvote them' is a pretty negative conclusion to draw from this discussion don't you think?
In context. But when out of context, it won't. If anything, one could argue that if your comment does provide any value toward improving HN, then the article served a greater purpose, and as a result, was of value.
Regardless, actions speak louder than words.
> All I'm saying is that in the time I've been visiting HN, the information value of the articles upvoted on HN is going down.
That's the natural state of things. I've seen people say this for years now. It's a reoccurring theme. I do not know how long you've been visiting HN, but going just by your profile, I can assure you, 444 days ago, people were discussing how HN had gone down hill.
I believe a portion of that complaint is that when you first get here, it's new, and you haven't seen the articles being presented. After a while, you start to read the same thing over and over again. It becomes dull. And things start to stand out that you might not have noticed your first day.
> You are twisting my words.
No. It's just a misunderstanding. No twisting was intended.
> You say 'people enjoy different things' as if that justifies anything that gets posted on HN.
Actually, it does. HN is based on voting, and the members of HN enjoy reading many types of articles here. If something gets voted up, it's because a segment of the members want to read these types of things on HN. That you are uninterested in this specific topic does not mean it's outside of HN's accepted role.
> Lots of people enjoy reading about ponies, but you don't see a lot of articles about ponies on HN, and I don't think many people think that's a bad thing.
Don't be silly, the context is HN, making that point moot. The argument isn't about general wants and desires, but what people want to read here on HN.
Anyways, my point is, and was, you can either be a part of the problem, or part of the solution. If you want to see different articles, submit them! Ignore the ones that you aren't interested in. Flag articles that don't belong. You can either be a positive force, or a negative one.
"Case" in point, I had the MBP17 just before change to unibody, and now the unibody. To replace the HD in the older model involved a half dozen more steps including removing the keyboard and various components. In the current model, just open the bottom and swap the drive.
I had the white Mac Mini (last model with DVD) and needed a metal spatula to get into it to upgrade RAM. With the current model, I needed... my fingertips.
And of course the Mac Pro (tower) is as open as ever.
Take apart a new Mac with Fusion Drive - as far as anyone has been able to determine, the pinouts are exactly the same as SATA, but the connector has been modified enough that it's proprietary now.
iPhone 5's new connector is actually what pushed me to abandon the Apple ecosystem:
I have a in dash GPS/HD radio/Pandora unit that until now required an iDevice for Pandora remote control. I considered upgrading from my 4S to a 5... I need a new connector. No problem, there's an adapter - $30 or $40 with a chip in it that serves in large part the purpose of ensuring I get an Apple adapter/cable.
Great, so now I get the adapter, plug it into the head unit, only to find, guess what, it still won't work - why? Because (and finding anything official on this is nigh on impossible, only outside reviewers) the adapter doesn't pass on the iPod Out control signals.
Screw that. I will wait for a firmware update for my head unit.
I sold my iPhone 4S, my iPad 3, and am now very happy with a Nokia Lumia 920, and a Samsung 700E tablet running Windows 8.
1. Recent releases of OSX have sucked more than earlier releases? Can't agree with that. I've used OSX since the beta days, and both Lion and ML are far more polished and usable. OSX was like a breath of fresh air compared to OS9, so of course it "felt" better. But there were tons of bugs that have slowly been stomped out. You may not like some of the current features of OSX ML, but the previous versions aren't unequivocally better.
2. Hardware lockdown. I have fond memories of using a kitchen knife to open up a Mac mini to replace memory. Yesterday I bumped my 2012 mini to 16GB with a simple twist. The Mac Pro is the same as it was when released. Some of the notebooks are more accessible, some less so. Replacing the hard drive on my wife's G4 powerbook involved something like 30 screws, and hoping that I didn't bend anything out of tolerance. Today that's far different; even the MacBook air has fewer parts and steps involved.
You mean, as opposed to all the news praising every minor thing Apple does and banning all articles critical of Apple, which historically has always been the way things was here on HN?
I think it's about time the tide changed, and it's probably a good reality check to the people stuck in the valley still believing that Apple "defines" the market.
It's really sad to see how every.single.time community driven websites devolve into ideological crusades between people who can't seem to just accept different people have different preferences when it comes to computers (I'm being polite here). There's a meme in here somewhere, maybe I should try to coin it.
Apple began inching into the OMG WTF EVIL category awhile back for some and others eventually tagged along. That herd mentality that many sites develop does happen here too.
Face it, HN is a community within each community are cliques that rise and fall in their influence and that comes out in how stories and comments are views and voted on
you shouldn't. And what you probably should also not do, is first write stuff like this and then do the opposite namely caring about it anyway (even though you seem to claim you don't) and then express that by posting your feelings about it on HN.
"The information content of this article is close to zero, nothing more than some random rant"
strrep( 'article', 'post' ); //The pot, the kettle, yadayada.
Likewise graphics APIs. (Which platform has non-proprietary 2D APIs?) QuickDraw 3D's problem wasn't that it was proprietary, it was that it sucked.
Likewise QuickTime video. You do realize (a) it was first, and (b) Apple licensed the architecture to the MPEG folk (MP4's container format is QuickTime) and this predates OSX.
I actually had a "discussion" about the whole connector thing with a colleague recently. Eg. In its history The Mac has used three kinds of connectors for mice and keyboards -- a serial connector for the very first Mac, ADB (same cabling as S-Video, so not actually proprietary at all) from 1985 to 1997 or so, and then USB. How's that compare with PC? Go on, I'll let you go Google.
Video is definitely the worst, I'll give you that, but even there it's mainly been a case of sticking to an early standard too long (D25 or whatever it was), the horrific octopus thing (which they tried a second time) and the problems with DVI which aren't unique to Apple.
There was a period when Apple had a weird Ethernet socket that required an adapter for 10BT or RJ45 or Token Ring, but this was because a standard hasn't emerged and competitors generally didn't support networking without an expansion card.
No question Apple has been more proprietary than, say, commodity pc clone makers, but they compare very well to everyone else (Sun, SGI, Commodore, IBM, etc.)
I can understand hating iTunes and Safari for windows (both of which were, at some point, foisted on people installing QuickTime) but the basic QuickTime libraries, container format, etc. were top notch and remain the best option for working with time-based media.
He states a bunch of things he doesnt like, but gives no reasons why they're bad.
At the end he still says he's running a Mac Book and it's the happiest he's ever been (albeit with Ubuntu but still). Makes no sense.
I'm absolutely orthogonal to Apple's services and devices - just never used them, and article does not seem to shed almost any lights on whether I should or shouldn't try to. Actually, it confuses me even more: author dislikes Apple's services (or does he? he's been so enthusiastic in the past!), makes some unclear points about Apple being a 'consumer electronics company now', and then suddenly wraps up with him being perfectly happy with his MacBook Pro today. Now throw in a pathetic iTitle and prepare your WordPress to be hit by the frontpages of the Internet. Am I missing something?
What the article does show clearly though is that we're in urgent need of some nagging/whining detector, if not for the whole Internet then at least for HN's frontpage.
I don't think that you are going to change Apple's mind, but this is the only way they'll listen.
Personally, I think they are to far gone by now. The money pouring in has simply been to much to ignore. It's not the computer for the rest of us any more...It's the computer for the rest of them...
(I am one of them, I just understand your argument and your frustration)
But then how will people know I have Taste?
It's not like they didn't try, it's more like they just gave up.
Despite plunking down a pretty penny for premium brands or product lines, Dell and Sony would still nickel and dime you with LOADS of pre-installed crapware. (No experience with other manufacturers' 'premium' lines..)
Of course they gave up -- it is bloody annoying to buy an expensive piece of hardware and then spend loads of time simply fighting with it; the market just couldn't stand it any more and jumped ship when a crap-free out-of-the-box experience presented itself.
Personally, because I have more time and skills than money, I use cheapo Dells and Lenovos which I wipe and set up from scratch. But for my parents and other relatives who really couldn't care less, I'd recommend an Apple laptop in a flash and not have to waste hours upon hours as tech support. (Now that they're more easily available, I'm cautiously considering moving this recommendation to a Dellbuntu...)
/rant.
They failed, and to be fair, most have failed. The fact of the matter is that is hard to dominate your market, everybody will downplay your success. And nobody will ever give credit to your product, or to your strategy, or to your business. It's always luck, customers with more money than brains, deception.
The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. They were all flukes in history that are going to be corrected when the market corrects itself. Excuse me?
The truth is, Apple, and Audi and BMW, must be doing something right. It's just not something for you.
I like the fact that we can identify those types of people via a single brand. Let's not change that.
The problem is that teenagers are quick to jump ship to the coolest new thing. Apple has been making "coolest new thing" for a while, but they're getting really popular now, which seems to be inversely proportional to "cool".
For RIM, they moved away from targeting hardcore, email-addicted business people, and it made them vulnerable enough to get killed.
Apple is doing the same thing.
And I think it's because of the fact they thought their 'hard-core fans' would stick with them put them where they are today , not the other way around.
Not sure what you're talking about. Apple, like any major technology company, has always targeted both hardcore fans and teenagers. Nothing's changed there.
On a related note, another constant in Apple's history has been its naysayers. Apple's critics are infamous for proclaiming in every year of the company's existence that it is doomed. People were saying exactly what you're saying 10 years ago when the iPod came out.
And now they have $80 billion dollars in the bank.
They saw erosion in their enterprise sales, but missed the fact that the superior web browsing experience and eventually applications on the iPhone was driving folks away. They honestly thought that their keyboard was still a key differentiator that folks cared about.
So they stuffed the channel in the low end of the market, and pushed the cheap text messaging of BBM as the core offering. Suddenly sketchy cell phone kiosks are pushing BlackBerries, and they became the new T-Mobile Sidekick. Just like with Nextel, that low end push tainted the brand, as thugs and drug dealers learned quickly that BBM (like DirectConnect) was initially not interceptable.
Maybe my experience is warped, but if I had to stereotype I'd say it's younger people walking around with Android phones and older well-off businesspeople walking around with iPhones. I'm not sure "targeting teenagers" really holds.
The people I know who still use Blackberries? Both of them are hardcore fans. Back in the 90s, every Mac user I knew was a hardcore fan… all five or so of them.
Apple is what it is today because it started selling to everyone else. RIM is what it is today because it hasn't yet figured out how to do that.
If you don't know any crackheads, then the iPhone seems like the phone of the wealthy entrepreneur. If you don't know any people who are successful in business, then the iPhone looks like the choice of the crackheads. Your experience is warped, but no more so than those who say its the phone of teenagers.
And even if Apple is treating power users badly - I certainly think they are - there is still nobody who treats them better. The BlackBerry was killed by more practical smartphones. Who will kill the Mac?
What is a RIM "hardcore fan" these days, and how many of them still buy RIM products? How profitable is the demographic who wants a smartphone but needs a full keyboard?
By the way, I don't think the author is really criticizing Apple much. He just recognizes that Apple's vision is no longer in line with his own.
If you reverse all his points then it seems like in his mind Apple provided ultra customisable hardware and software with great options for the enterprise. I don't remember that Apple.
5 years ago, Apple was seemingly "light years" ahead of everyone. Kowtowing wasn't really even a thought because so much more was being provided than elsewhere that there was no real compromise to choose Apple.
That's not true and is increasingly more than just untrue...
But another note - how come no one can throw in a bit of analysis to back up these kind of argument? Otherwise it just seems like typical disillusionment (as products and companies inevitably evolve). As such it doesn't mean anything, it just means one person with a blog decided to use Ubuntu. There is a guy with a blog for every product that has ever changed. Throw in some analysis, and it may make a bigger difference.
I guess this is another consequence of the filter bubble. As all we read on the internet is the opinion of other geeks, we forget that geeks are hopelessly outnumbered by normals and they are the ones Apple is targeting and reaping the rewards.
This was always Steve Jobs vision and it's not like it was a secret.
However, the most ludicrous part of this post is the suggestion that Apple would be best served as a company making servers again and trying its best to grab back that lucrative desktop linux market.
This, in a nutshell, is why Apple was revolutionary. The geeks just simply didn't see normal people and made hardware and software that suited their own needs and behold, it sucked mightily. Apple made the step of putting the normal person first and, shockingly, normal people decided to pay good money for their products.
All of this should be obvious to anyone who reads HN and witnessed Apples meteoric rise. It's a bit disconcerting to discover that apparently it isn't.
I will however contend that MY main issue with Apple now a-days is that its actually becoming worse on the "normal person front" (at least when it comes to OS X). Messages for example is a complete disaster. I regularly have to help family members with their Macs (many of which originally moved to the Mac on my insistence ages ago), and I can tell you that they are still quite confused (increasingly so) about how to use these machines. Here is an article that touches on this: http://blog.davidchartier.com/post/36634783567/im-getting-si...
However, I am still pretty happy with iOS/iDevices. I have not been as happy with an Apple product as with the iPad mini in a LONG time. I do agree with others though that if they don't get their act together with "services" (Maps, Sync, basically anything that isn't judged on a purely client side "niceness" scale), it may be an issue for them. However my opinion is that they just shouldn't be bothering with this at all, but that's a whole other story.
Those days are long gone it seems.
I wonder how many people worrying about iOS-ification are:
a) running Lion, where the transition was still in mid-course, or
b) using a desktop, where the design decisions aren't so obviously right (my Mac Mini for example has a huge monitor, hence I'm less inclined to use full-screen apps)
In case a), there were definite weakness in Lion. Full-screen apps hadn't yet made their near-global appearance, and Spaces was ... weird. These problems have been shaken out in Mountain Lion. For b) it seems to me that OSX has been optimised for the laptop environment, where screen real-estate is limited. If you aren't using full-screen as your standard app config, you're missing out on some of what makes Mountain Lion a great experience).
When I compare all of this to the laptop I use at work, a Dell running Fedora, there is no comparison. My Mac is a far, far better development machine (well, aside from the fact that brew is weak sauce compared to a full-blown yum, but then this is not news). It's not a question of there being pros and cons on each side, my Mac is simply better for pretty much any metric I care to imagine.
Which is not to say that some people may not have genuine grievances with the current Mac platform. I just wanted to add my own personal experience - going from being mildly disappointed by Lion to completely wowed by Mountain Lion.
- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people.
- The whole-screen app stuff is a good idea, but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors, which many geeks use (the problem is: when you go full screen on one monitor, the other no longer shows anything by gray linen)
- Many features were removed for what seems to be no good reason, e.g. RSS feeds.
- Some iPad-like behaviors make little sense on a desktop, e.g. automatically closing Safari if idle for a while. It takes several seconds to open a web link just because it has to relaunch the application.
- Annoying for my company, Taodyne (3D presentations): stereoscopy used to be perfectly stable on 10.6, unstable since 10.7, to the point of causing kernel panics or system freezes regularly.
- Memory management has been a weak point since Rhapsody. In Rhapsody, you could crash the system simply by zooming in Preview. Today, you can still halt your top-of-the-line system to a crawl simply by running a process that eats all available memory. I'd much rather have an easy quota system where I can say "unless otherwise specified, no app can take more than 1/4th of available RAM". Or a paging system that makes smarter decisions and keeps the "interactive" stuff resident enough that I can still kill the offending process.
- Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears. Or the keyboard that sometimes forgets half the keys you type. Or Safari that stops refreshing part of the screen. Or moving a window across monitors that now causes the window and background icons to blink. And so on. Lion does not feel as polished as Snow Leopard.
Overall, I still like Apple products, but I definitely see them losing their edge on the software quality front. I think that Maps on iOS is just the most glaring example, but it's not the only one.
I'd like to see this backed up by numbers. Sure, Lion and Mountain Lion are quite slow on spinning platters, but OS X feels almost an order of magnitude faster since I had an SSD. Much faster than Snow Leopard with a hard disk. The numbers are also on my side, an SSD completely blows away hard disks both in access times and read/write speed.
but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors
Indeed. Big time. It works ok on the road, but when I have an external screen connected I never use full screen support. It would be easy to make things better: allow users to put another full-screen application (or desktop) on the secondary screen.
Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears.
I really disliked Lion for all its bugs. But things have been steadily improving since Mountain Lion, to the point where even iMessage works most of the time in 10.8.2 ;).
Computer/tech savvy is obviously a continuum. Lumping people into binary categories doesn't help the conversation much.
Do you accept that those with enough proficiency to be creating commercial software have different modes of computer usage to the majority that don't?
Your question is also a non sequiter. Computer usage patterns aren't always correlated to either proficiency in programming or computer experience. For example, I know many commercial programmers who have the most simplistic understanding of their OS, be it Linux, OSX or Windows. They don't understand the difference between CISC/RISC, nor do they exhibit a greater facility with various application than non-programmers. As I've said before, computer knowledge is a continuum, and trying to pigeonhole users into neat categories is foolish. There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't. Neither are better than the other, and calling some normal with the subtext that they're inferior to computer geeks is elitist.
This was always Steve Jobs vision and it's not like it was a secret.
Nah, Steve Jobs' vision wasn't to make computers for "normals." That was Jef Raskin's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin) vision. Steve Jobs' vision was to make computers for Steve Jobs.
Even if you hate the software and all things iOS, it's hard to find a better designed laptop.
That leaves the disk drive as the one non-upgradable part. I imagine part of the reason for this is the (relative) bulkiness of the 2.5" SSD form factor. Are there any other standardized sizes that could work in a rMBP form factor? 1.8" maybe? The 11" MBA may have problems fitting it, but a swappable 1.8" SSD on the larger models would be quite nice.
I had a Lenovo T60 for quite a while and, while it looked like a cheap piece of plastic, it was wonderfully durable, keyboard was placed in a good spot, the positioning of the buttons/touchpad were all just right. Just because it looks nice does not make something well-designed, and I have yet to use an Apple device that I would consider anywhere close to ergonomic friendly (the iPod nano being the closest as you only really used 2 "buttons" on the circle, pause/play and next).
Its keyboard is reason alone that it beats the MacBook Pro.
On top of that, I bought it back in 2011 for around 960 USD (converted). The configuration included an i5-2520M, 8GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, an 80GB m-SATA SSD and an upgrade to a 3-year on-site warranty.
FWIW, specs say 8gb max but I've got 16gb ticking away in it nicely. You're probably aware of that but worth posting here for others if they are interested. One of the best laptop keyboards I've used.
The Thinkpad T400 I got is still a good machine, 3 years later. So good, that my brother bought himself Thinkpad X230 and is satisfied as well.
I'm very attached to really good, big touchpads though - losing gesture support is hard!
So, in my effort to stay true to my Unix'ish roots, I've gotten a Motorola Lapdock real cheap, its at least as comfy as a macbook Air, and I'm plugging in things like .. raspberryPi, MK802/808 Android or Ubuntu sticks, my desktop 'slab PC', and so on. I think I'm close to kicking the habit - they /really/ lost me at the drop of the MacbookPro17" .. my existing one will run into the ground, and I will soon put Linux on it.
In the meantime, I would suggest that those looking for an alternative to the sexy nature of the hardware aspect, albeit with a little extra effort, switching to Ubuntu-on-a-Stick is really a pleasant treat.
I feel your pain! It was the only laptop with enough screen real estate and power to work as a desktop on the road.
But lately with the increasingly draconian carry-on restrictions I've downsized my luggage, and turns out my MPB17 just barely doesn't fit in a 16x13x7 bag (that fits in the new commuter jet regs). The MBPr15 fits, has more screen res, and is lighter. So I had been planning an upgrade. If the new MBPr13 had dual graphics I'd be willing to even go with that as it would fit in my puddle jumper bag's outside pocket.
But... This past year the outsized MBP17 had me trying out my iPad 3 instead, and now I'm not sure I need a laptop for travel at all.
>I really think Lapdock+PC-On-Stick is my new direction
Ideally an ARM-based PC-On-Stick or one with a beefier Intel or AMD processor?
(I am aware that the second option cannot be powered over the USB connection.)
Also, how does the video get from the PC-On-Stick to the Lapdock's display? does it go over a USB connection and then through DisplayLink hardware?
Most PC-on-Sticks' use HDMI video output. I have a small dodgy cable rig to go from HDMI out to Lapdock HDMI in, but thats just because: Motorola. It could be quite feasible that Lapdock clones will arrive soon, with standard connectors..
As much as I love the idea behind Ubuntu, it really cannot compare to OS X (or, for development, a more nerd-centric Linux distro like Arch)
Every corner of the MBP is rounded except the edge that your wrists actually come into contact with, which are sharp and leave painful marks. The trackpad lacked actual "mouse buttons" which made a simple task like highlighting and right clicking on text a finger dexterity test. The keyboard feels cheap and slow. Most of all, I miss my trackpoint. :)
For actual usability, it seems to me ThinkPad is a close to laptop perfection as you can get. I replaced my 2007 TP (Windows XP) with a new one this year (Ubuntu). If apple sold OSX for non-apple hardware I'd probably be running that instead of linux.
Or to quote Steve Jobs, "you're holding it wrong." ;-)
I think this was the case for most of the 2000's, and a big reason my last few laptops have been Macs -- but I'm not so sure it's that way any more. For a long time, the big PC OEM's seemed to view hardware specs as the main difference people would buy a $1500 laptop over a $500 one, so they just stuck better hardware inside the $500 shell. Nowadays I think they've caught on that people pay attention to design and overall build quality.
It might still be hard to find a better designed laptop, but I think the PC OEM's are finally starting to make some that can at least compete.
Sure the Mac is becoming more of an appliance but with stagnant hardware speeds is it that big of a deal? Also, Apple has been hostile to DIY repairs and add-ons since forever. I remember being 12 years old arguing on the 1-800-APPL-SOS help line that 3rd party RAM was not causing my problem and no I wouldn't uninstall it to get help.
Apple relies on its developers to power the App Store. They (hopefully) won't forget that. I'm not worried.
You don't hear anyone ever talking about how awesome Apple Logic is for making music or how easy Final Cut Pro is for video. They still make them and they're great quality. Just because the masses of Apple reporters aren't focused on your baby doesn't mean Apple doesn't care about it. Apple is just selling their profit vision to investors.
Well, I'm sure they won't forget the 25 [1]. They may forget about everyone else though.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/04/analyst-just-25-developers-...
Apple makes damn good multi-purpose machines for the most common purposes of most people - which they have consistently explained is their company's goal forever. Just look at their general-purpose tools (XServe, Mac Pro, Developer Tools) being neglected, and single-purpose machines being cannibalized (iPod) or taken lightly (Apple TV).
All of Apple's lineup is of respectable quality, but it is obvious where the focus is converging. Now there is an opening for others to explore new general-purpose and single-purpose machines.
On some other points I do agree, like the gluing down and lack of expandability/repairability.
Using svbtle theme does not make you smarter.
Knowing he is not in svbtle does not make you smarter.
Try it you might be surprised.
Also, when you start playing with tiling window managers you'll be glad you don't have a mac.