16 ms·

It seems like more and more of the work on MacOS is dedicated to propping up iOS instead of simply making a great desktop OS. As someone who does not use or wan

It seems like more and more of the work on MacOS is dedicated to propping up iOS instead of simply making a great desktop OS. As someone who does not use or want Apple's mobile devices, it's been hard to get excited about these last few releases.

k-mcgrady 10y ago
What does it not have that you want (and think a lot of other people also want)?
- epa 10y ago
  Consider what it does have that you dont want it to have (iTunes Syncing, locked filedrive, etc).
  - 7Z7 10y ago
    Can't you turn off iTunes syncing? And what is "locked filedrive"?
jasonshen 10y ago
> As someone who does not use or want Apple's mobile devices My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile devices, and that in fact the majority of their computing time is now on those devices so it makes sense that the team would focus heavily on the interface and overlap between iOS / MacOS.
- izacus 10y ago
  Huh, in most of the world the mapping between iOS and macOS users is nowhere 1-to-1. There's huge amount of users who use either one or the other. Which doesn't really change the fact that even Windows 10 has been starting to pass them by with significant new features.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    You'd be surprised. Actually there are indeed more iOS users than OS X -- but OS X users almost all have an iOS device, which is what's important here.
    - izacus 10y ago
      I would be, because most of the workplaces and other places didn't confirm your observation. With perhaps the exception of SV, which is filled with Apple hardware. Can we conjure any statistics from somewhere to confirm / deny our observations?
      - hrktb 10y ago
        I'd think devs would be kin to have a macos computer but no iOS device (android devs would be the obvious pattern, but web devs would also easily be on android) Out of that demographic, I don't see much people that care enough to buy a mac but choose an android or windows phone.
  - DasIch 10y ago
    The macOS users of the past have adopted iOS for its good macOS integration, the iOS users of the current and future will go with macOS for its good iOS integration. Apple is tying all it's devices strongly together through software and services. This way you have a huge incentive to completely buy into the Apple ecosystem. This matters far more than something like a new filesystem - a term most Apple customers have never even heard.
- chetanahuja 10y ago
  "My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile device" That's what it is... a guess. Unless you can produce some data to back it up. There's a huge community (especially outside of US) who use Macs for day-to-day work but use android mobile devices as that's the most sensible choice for a majority of the world.
  - stephenr 10y ago
    > use android mobile devices as that's the most sensible choice That is a highly subjective statement at best.
    - ahaaaaaaa 10y ago
      It's not even a preference thing though. Android phones are absolutely killing the low-end smartphone market and international users are very heavily Android locked-in. I can buy a pretty solid Android phone for 200-300 dollars, even less these days. The cheapest iPhones are 400-500 dollars. It's why Android dominates iOS globally.(https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp). Outside of SV, Android is still the most common mobile OS (including in the US).
      - chetanahuja 10y ago
        > Outside of SV, Android is still the most common mobile OS (including in the US). And as a result, the app and services ecosystem supports Android as the main platform in large ecosystems outside the US like China, India and Brazil.
  - pier25 10y ago
    Yep. Macbook + Android here.
- fooey 10y ago
  Only reason I use OSX is that's what I was issued at work. I don't own an iOS device, never have, and don't see myself ever getting one in the future. All of my personal mobile devices are Android, and all my desktops/laptops are Windows.
  - banach 10y ago
    As someone who has used Windows, Mac and Linux as both personal and work OS for > 5 years each, I'm curious to know how come (you don't see yourself getting one in the future). The two things I have against the Apple platform compared to Microsoft and Google are Apple's bias toward lock-in and their aversion to tinkering. Other than that, I think what they are offering is rather good.
    - robert_nsu 10y ago
      > aversion to tinkering That is my biggest (and really only) complaint against Apple. Sometimes you have to go under the hood and do a few things. I don't know what Apple has against this way of thinking though.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      I got a Macbook Pro as work machine in late 2014, having used a Thinkpad before. 1. Mac OS is just too unfamiliar. It starts with the keyboard layout, which I reverted to Windows-style after I went crazy trying to find the square brackets. (Which, probably for aesthetics, they didn't bother to print ont he keyboard.) 2. Mac OS's poor multi-monitor support regularly drives me crazy. To their credit, they have ironed out a lot of the bugs in Mavericks, but there is still plenty of stupid behavior (e.g. screen 1 sliding back to the desktop from a fullscreen app when a new window opens on screen 2, or a messagebox from an app on screen 3 opening on screen 1, completely out of my sight). Windows is somehow much better in this regard (at least, I was not annoyed by it that often), and even Linux has very solid multi-monitor support these days (at least for me, YMMV). 3. The userland is UNIX, but does not match my expectations well enough. It's basically in the creepy valley. For example, I was using units(1) one day and wondering why it gave a syntax error when I tried to use a power operator (like "2^64"). Then I noticed that I was in the Mac terminal, not in my Linux VM (where I usually work), and upon inspecting the manpage, I found that they hadn't updated their units(1) since 1991 (wtf). 4. The company where I work is mostly a Windows shop, so corporate IT is based on Microsoft products (AD, Exchange, Lync aka Skype for Business) all the way through. While there are Office for Mac, Outlook for Mac, and Lync for Mac, these are still no match to their Windows counterparts in terms of polish and OS-level integration. All in all, I'm already set on going back to a Windows notebook when it is time to get a new machine. (It's not like my Linux VM cares which host OS it runs on, anyway.)
nothis 10y ago
I like Apple's mobile devices but ever since the iPad turned out to be a giant iPhone instead of a true desktop/mobile hybrid, I'm scared as hell that they will lock down their desktop/laptop ecosystem the way they do with mobile. It's clear now that iOS is absorbing everything Mac. Now I'm trapped between MacOS, Windows 10 and maybe Google's Chrome environment. Linux, please take off. I wished the open source community had good interface/usability designers.
- legodt 10y ago
  Designer here. I and a lot of my colleagues love open source and what it stands for, but, the truth is, it is going to be very difficult to convert designers into hardcore open source advocates like coders/engineers can be when the tools we rely on every day are all closed source. Adobe creative suite, Rhino, proprietary render engines, and a bunch of other platforms designers use simply don't have open source alternatives competitive with market leaders, making conversion to open source very difficult for working professionals. The majority of the professional community for creating UX/UI do not have the tools to work in FOSS, so you aren't going to see many designers working for FOSS projects as result
  - cyphar 10y ago
    > The majority of the professional community for creating UX/UI do not have the tools to work in FOSS, so you aren't going to see many designers working for FOSS projects as result Then put a call out for what tools you need replaced. Maybe even back GNU to hire people to do it. As a free software developer, I have no clue what you need in order to do good design work. From my perspective, inkscape works "good enough for me". But I'm not a designer. Free software communities require some give as well as take. The fact that there isn't a free software version of $tool is because nobody has given enough of an incentive to replace it (we're too busy replacing other proprietary tools or making our own tools better).
    - zepto 10y ago
      This sounds like a good encapsulation of the reason why Desktop Linux has died - it is good enough for engineering types who get satisfaction and value out of using it, but who have no idea how to make it useful for anyone outside of the programming community.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
It's already a great desktop OS. And they did announce some things (file system) that will make it even better.
- partiallypro 10y ago
  OSX used to be ahead of the curve though compared to Windows, now...it's falling behind. I think that's where people's frustrations come from.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    I dislike Windows so much. It feels pieced together from so many kludgy parts... Anyway, I just don't see it. :)
    - danudey 10y ago
      It feels like a lot of Microsoft software has a very "eh, fuck it, whatever" kind of attitude, especially when it comes to troubleshooting. Lots of good intentions that just never get finished. Case in point, the "Do you want Windows to search for a solution?" Since the day this feature was added I've never once had Windows figure anything out; I always get "Windows was unable…". In the Win2K/XP days, you could right-click on a network adapter and choose 'repair' to do all the standard stuff (flush DNS, release/renew DHCP lease, etc.) which would solve most problems. They took that out in Vista in favour of the "idk man" wizard, and now you have to do it by hand. Windows is also full of catch-all error messages, where it says "We couldn't copy the file. Check file permissions, make sure there's free space, and if it's a network drive make sure you're still on the network", as if those weren't things that the computer couldn't check for me in milliseconds. When people say that macOS is falling behind Windows, it seems to be, at best, a superficial judgement from people who don't use both of them for productive work. Windows 10 has a lot of polish, but it also has two separate control panels for changing settings, apps which don't seem to know what kind of apps they are, and more and more new APIs and features that only store apps can use, in exchange for extremely limited access to the system. Windows is great for playing games, but for any serious work the overhead of making it work and keeping it working is just ridiculous.

k-mcgrady 10y ago

What does it not have that you want (and think a lot of other people also want)?

epa 10y ago
Consider what it does have that you dont want it to have (iTunes Syncing, locked filedrive, etc).
- 7Z7 10y ago
  Can't you turn off iTunes syncing? And what is "locked filedrive"?

jasonshen 10y ago

> As someone who does not use or want Apple's mobile devices My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile devices, and that in fact the majority of their computing time is now on those devices so it makes sense that the team would focus heavily on the interface and overlap between iOS / MacOS.

izacus 10y ago
Huh, in most of the world the mapping between iOS and macOS users is nowhere 1-to-1. There's huge amount of users who use either one or the other. Which doesn't really change the fact that even Windows 10 has been starting to pass them by with significant new features.
- coldtea 10y ago
  You'd be surprised. Actually there are indeed more iOS users than OS X -- but OS X users almost all have an iOS device, which is what's important here.
  - izacus 10y ago
    I would be, because most of the workplaces and other places didn't confirm your observation. With perhaps the exception of SV, which is filled with Apple hardware. Can we conjure any statistics from somewhere to confirm / deny our observations?
    - hrktb 10y ago
      I'd think devs would be kin to have a macos computer but no iOS device (android devs would be the obvious pattern, but web devs would also easily be on android) Out of that demographic, I don't see much people that care enough to buy a mac but choose an android or windows phone.
- DasIch 10y ago
  The macOS users of the past have adopted iOS for its good macOS integration, the iOS users of the current and future will go with macOS for its good iOS integration. Apple is tying all it's devices strongly together through software and services. This way you have a huge incentive to completely buy into the Apple ecosystem. This matters far more than something like a new filesystem - a term most Apple customers have never even heard.
chetanahuja 10y ago
"My guess is that most of Mac users do want/use Apple mobile device" That's what it is... a guess. Unless you can produce some data to back it up. There's a huge community (especially outside of US) who use Macs for day-to-day work but use android mobile devices as that's the most sensible choice for a majority of the world.
- stephenr 10y ago
  > use android mobile devices as that's the most sensible choice That is a highly subjective statement at best.
  - ahaaaaaaa 10y ago
    It's not even a preference thing though. Android phones are absolutely killing the low-end smartphone market and international users are very heavily Android locked-in. I can buy a pretty solid Android phone for 200-300 dollars, even less these days. The cheapest iPhones are 400-500 dollars. It's why Android dominates iOS globally.(https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp). Outside of SV, Android is still the most common mobile OS (including in the US).
    - chetanahuja 10y ago
      > Outside of SV, Android is still the most common mobile OS (including in the US). And as a result, the app and services ecosystem supports Android as the main platform in large ecosystems outside the US like China, India and Brazil.
- pier25 10y ago
  Yep. Macbook + Android here.
fooey 10y ago
Only reason I use OSX is that's what I was issued at work. I don't own an iOS device, never have, and don't see myself ever getting one in the future. All of my personal mobile devices are Android, and all my desktops/laptops are Windows.
- banach 10y ago
  As someone who has used Windows, Mac and Linux as both personal and work OS for > 5 years each, I'm curious to know how come (you don't see yourself getting one in the future). The two things I have against the Apple platform compared to Microsoft and Google are Apple's bias toward lock-in and their aversion to tinkering. Other than that, I think what they are offering is rather good.
  - robert_nsu 10y ago
    > aversion to tinkering That is my biggest (and really only) complaint against Apple. Sometimes you have to go under the hood and do a few things. I don't know what Apple has against this way of thinking though.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    I got a Macbook Pro as work machine in late 2014, having used a Thinkpad before. 1. Mac OS is just too unfamiliar. It starts with the keyboard layout, which I reverted to Windows-style after I went crazy trying to find the square brackets. (Which, probably for aesthetics, they didn't bother to print ont he keyboard.) 2. Mac OS's poor multi-monitor support regularly drives me crazy. To their credit, they have ironed out a lot of the bugs in Mavericks, but there is still plenty of stupid behavior (e.g. screen 1 sliding back to the desktop from a fullscreen app when a new window opens on screen 2, or a messagebox from an app on screen 3 opening on screen 1, completely out of my sight). Windows is somehow much better in this regard (at least, I was not annoyed by it that often), and even Linux has very solid multi-monitor support these days (at least for me, YMMV). 3. The userland is UNIX, but does not match my expectations well enough. It's basically in the creepy valley. For example, I was using units(1) one day and wondering why it gave a syntax error when I tried to use a power operator (like "2^64"). Then I noticed that I was in the Mac terminal, not in my Linux VM (where I usually work), and upon inspecting the manpage, I found that they hadn't updated their units(1) since 1991 (wtf). 4. The company where I work is mostly a Windows shop, so corporate IT is based on Microsoft products (AD, Exchange, Lync aka Skype for Business) all the way through. While there are Office for Mac, Outlook for Mac, and Lync for Mac, these are still no match to their Windows counterparts in terms of polish and OS-level integration. All in all, I'm already set on going back to a Windows notebook when it is time to get a new machine. (It's not like my Linux VM cares which host OS it runs on, anyway.)

nothis 10y ago

I like Apple's mobile devices but ever since the iPad turned out to be a giant iPhone instead of a true desktop/mobile hybrid, I'm scared as hell that they will lock down their desktop/laptop ecosystem the way they do with mobile. It's clear now that iOS is absorbing everything Mac. Now I'm trapped between MacOS, Windows 10 and maybe Google's Chrome environment. Linux, please take off. I wished the open source community had good interface/usability designers.

legodt 10y ago
Designer here. I and a lot of my colleagues love open source and what it stands for, but, the truth is, it is going to be very difficult to convert designers into hardcore open source advocates like coders/engineers can be when the tools we rely on every day are all closed source. Adobe creative suite, Rhino, proprietary render engines, and a bunch of other platforms designers use simply don't have open source alternatives competitive with market leaders, making conversion to open source very difficult for working professionals. The majority of the professional community for creating UX/UI do not have the tools to work in FOSS, so you aren't going to see many designers working for FOSS projects as result
- cyphar 10y ago
  > The majority of the professional community for creating UX/UI do not have the tools to work in FOSS, so you aren't going to see many designers working for FOSS projects as result Then put a call out for what tools you need replaced. Maybe even back GNU to hire people to do it. As a free software developer, I have no clue what you need in order to do good design work. From my perspective, inkscape works "good enough for me". But I'm not a designer. Free software communities require some give as well as take. The fact that there isn't a free software version of $tool is because nobody has given enough of an incentive to replace it (we're too busy replacing other proprietary tools or making our own tools better).
  - zepto 10y ago
    This sounds like a good encapsulation of the reason why Desktop Linux has died - it is good enough for engineering types who get satisfaction and value out of using it, but who have no idea how to make it useful for anyone outside of the programming community.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

It's already a great desktop OS. And they did announce some things (file system) that will make it even better.

partiallypro 10y ago
OSX used to be ahead of the curve though compared to Windows, now...it's falling behind. I think that's where people's frustrations come from.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I dislike Windows so much. It feels pieced together from so many kludgy parts... Anyway, I just don't see it. :)
  - danudey 10y ago
    It feels like a lot of Microsoft software has a very "eh, fuck it, whatever" kind of attitude, especially when it comes to troubleshooting. Lots of good intentions that just never get finished. Case in point, the "Do you want Windows to search for a solution?" Since the day this feature was added I've never once had Windows figure anything out; I always get "Windows was unable…". In the Win2K/XP days, you could right-click on a network adapter and choose 'repair' to do all the standard stuff (flush DNS, release/renew DHCP lease, etc.) which would solve most problems. They took that out in Vista in favour of the "idk man" wizard, and now you have to do it by hand. Windows is also full of catch-all error messages, where it says "We couldn't copy the file. Check file permissions, make sure there's free space, and if it's a network drive make sure you're still on the network", as if those weren't things that the computer couldn't check for me in milliseconds. When people say that macOS is falling behind Windows, it seems to be, at best, a superficial judgement from people who don't use both of them for productive work. Windows 10 has a lot of polish, but it also has two separate control panels for changing settings, apps which don't seem to know what kind of apps they are, and more and more new APIs and features that only store apps can use, in exchange for extremely limited access to the system. Windows is great for playing games, but for any serious work the overhead of making it work and keeping it working is just ridiculous.