7 ms·

What's more worrying for me is that entire product categories are either left abandoned (Mac Pro) or updated with inferior products (latest MacBook Pro), and it

by jwr 10y ago

What's more worrying for me is that entire product categories are either left abandoned (Mac Pro) or updated with inferior products (latest MacBook Pro), and it seems that Jony Ive's form-over-function approach encounters no opposition within the company. We lose good functionality for no good reason, other than products become "simpler" and "more pure". This in itself would not be a problem for me, if it weren't for the lack of competition. Mac OS is so far ahead in terms of "getting things done" and "just working" that it isn't even funny. And yes, I do know, I also regularly use Windows (10) and Linux (Ubuntu 16 LTS). I feel locked in: both "competing" platforms are huge time-wasters for me. I know some people feel different — past discussions have shown that most people do fewer things with their computers than me (for example, if all you need is a web browser, Ubuntu is a great choice). Now that Apple is abandoning me as a customer (I'm not the mainstream), I feel squeezed: where do I go from here? What's even worse is that the cost of entry is now so high: developing an environment that works, and then convincing developers to embrace it is nearly impossible. And the only companies that have the resources to do it (Microsoft and Google) do it badly.

beat 10y ago
I'm clinging for dear life to my beloved five year old MBP. I don't know if my next laptop will even be Apple at all.
- kenOfYugen 10y ago
  Same here. New battery, new secondary SSD, reconditioning of the MagSafe power supply and maxed out RAM are underway. Performance-wise it should be about the same as the latest Macbook, which doesn't feel like an upgrade for software development. Slow hardware helps one write good software after-all..
- sofaofthedamned 10y ago
  Gave my Macbook Pro 13 (2013) to the missus a few months ago as I was looking forward to the new one. As it is, i've just spent £1400 on a XPS 13 fully loaded and instead of a iMac i'll be buying a Surface Tablet. The missus after having each iPhone since the first is going to be buying a Pixel. Apple have lost the plot and are taking the piss out of their users. We are voting with our wallets.
  - andromeduck 10y ago
    Yeah Android really has iOS beat right now on UI/UX. It's pretty embarrassing.
  - beat 10y ago
    A friend of mine has a Surface Pro, and I have a not-insignificant amount of envy. It's the first time in almost 20 years that I've looked at a Windows laptop and felt it was in any way ahead of Apple. Great design, and it doesn't have the inevitable pointlessly-cheap compromises that plague every other "high end" Windows laptop. Of course, it's still Windows underneath. Sooner or later, I'd get tripped up by the pathetic reality of 8.3 case-insensitive filenames buried in a not-deep-enough grave.
- toodlebunions 10y ago
  I know multiple people who are buying 2014 and 2015 model years or even PCs instead of the new one.
Bud 10y ago
>We lose good functionality for no good reason, other than products become "simpler" and "more pure". You can disagree with the reasons, and certainly many do, but it's just silliness to allege that moving to USB-C was done for "no good reason". It's the exact same silliness that surfaced in the griping about removing 9-pin serial ports, and optical drives, and Ethernet ports in laptops, and FireWire in favor of something more than an order of magnitude faster, and every other innovation by Apple. It's always for a good reason.
- TillE 10y ago
  Well, not always. Removing the iPhone headphone jack was dumb and pointless. Losing the ethernet jack on Pro laptops is also pretty bad. The reason is thinness, I dunno if that's good or not. WiFi is sufficient for most people, but it sure as hell isn't better when you need high bandwidth and consistent low latency.
  - gumby 10y ago
    > Removing the iPhone headphone jack was dumb and pointless. I suspect there was a point. This is part of Apple's standard MO. It's a way to wean people onto wireless (BT). Apple's expensive BT headphones point the way to cheap third party BT headphones that aren't painful to connect (right now bluetooth infrastructure is pretty sucky). Once people are comfortable without the headphone wires they will have inductive charging like the watch and have a water resistant device like the new watch.
- rocky1138 10y ago
  Why would you want to move to USB-C other than not having to flip the cable when you inevitably put it in the wrong way. If your answer is power delivery, remember that not all cables and not all devices support power delivery on USB-C so it's nothing that couldn't have been done with "USB4" utilising the same plug we've always had.
  - CrazedGeek 10y ago
    Few reasons for me: * HDMI and DP alt modes make laptop docks a lot cheaper and more universal * Don't need an OTG cable to use a Type-C device on my Type-C phone * Potential Thunderbolt 3 port reuse
15thandwhatever 10y ago
Isn't this (form-over-function) a similar but not exactly identical phase that Microsoft went through, that resulted in the now publicized "Raymond Chen camp vs. MSDN camp" mantra? https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dareobasanjo/2004/08/25/the-msdn-camp-vs-the-raymond-chen-camp/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dareobasanjo/2004/08/25/the... Is this ever avoidable once you gain a large swath of market share, but are still under pressure to grow even more?
Jdam 10y ago
So I'm sitting here, just unlocked my Mac through putting my finger on the touchbar and reading your post, wondering who that "pro" is that I keep on hearing in conjunction with Apple during the last 6 months. I'm a dev, doing the Kool Aid for a 100bn$+ company, together with designers in my team. I always thought devs and designers would be that pro usergroup people are referring to. I've read all the complaints in the last time of "Apple is abandoning the pros" but funny thing, I only heard that on the internet and in hypothetical perspectives, nobody actually complained about the lack of Kaby Lake irl. I'm very fine with the current lineup and I'm wondering if that "pro" you're referring to is actually just an extremely narrow niche.
- roryisok 10y ago
  I guess the "pro" is anyone who wants more than 16GB RAM ?
  - Eric_WVGG 10y ago
    those "pros" complaining about the 16gb limit, I wonder how they've been getting any work done up until now?
    - jupp0r 10y ago
      Because they bought their computers 3 years ago when you asked why anybody would ever need more than 8gb.
      - Koshkin 10y ago
        For comparison, the minimum amount of RAM required by the precursor of Mac OS, NeXT, - 32MB (that's megabytes) - seemed insane. But then again, 90% of the computer science - including experiments in AI - had been done (at least, up until mid-80s) on computers that had less than 1 megabyte of RAM. (IIRC, the first version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.)
      - tluyben2 10y ago
shmerl 10y ago
> This in itself would not be a problem for me, if it weren't for the lack of competition. Mac OS is so far ahead in terms of "getting things done" I wouldn't touch MacOS for it. It's nowhere comparable in productivity for me to something like current KDE Plasma 5 on Linux. Not sure if you ever used it, but Linux is nowhere limited to Ubuntu's Unity.
- jwr 10y ago
  I didn't want to get into these kinds of discussions, but I'll venture a guess that you don't often connect/disconnect multiple monitors to your machine, and especially not one HiDPI and one HD. That experience alone is enough to ditch Linux altogether. BTW, Windows 10 is slightly better, but not by much. The major difference being that one can predictably get a signal on both monitors, I guess, which is good, but then the HiDPI story is still pretty bad.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    I do. Plasma nailed down multi-monitor setup in 5.8.x. Before that it was significantly worse. For different DPI on each monitor you'd need to use Wayland though.
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    As a keyboard user, I feel Windows more polished than macOS when you work with multiple screens. To name a simple example, pressing CMD + Shift + -> moves an application to the next monitor, with macOS you should pay for a window manager to get a similar functionality, or give up the keyboard and embrace a touchpad-centric gimmick like Expose, which I perceive as distracting with these animations. It is certainly an example of YMMV.
    - nikon 10y ago
      Spectacle is free and does this and a lot more should you need it.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    Ah, multi-monitor support. I always joke how I ditched hardware random-number generators because the window placement of macOS is a superior source of randomness. Meanwhile, multi-monitor support in Plasma 5 has worked for me for years without any trouble whatsoever.

by jwr 10y ago

beat 10y ago

I'm clinging for dear life to my beloved five year old MBP. I don't know if my next laptop will even be Apple at all.

kenOfYugen 10y ago
Same here. New battery, new secondary SSD, reconditioning of the MagSafe power supply and maxed out RAM are underway. Performance-wise it should be about the same as the latest Macbook, which doesn't feel like an upgrade for software development. Slow hardware helps one write good software after-all..
sofaofthedamned 10y ago
Gave my Macbook Pro 13 (2013) to the missus a few months ago as I was looking forward to the new one. As it is, i've just spent £1400 on a XPS 13 fully loaded and instead of a iMac i'll be buying a Surface Tablet. The missus after having each iPhone since the first is going to be buying a Pixel. Apple have lost the plot and are taking the piss out of their users. We are voting with our wallets.
- andromeduck 10y ago
  Yeah Android really has iOS beat right now on UI/UX. It's pretty embarrassing.
- beat 10y ago
  A friend of mine has a Surface Pro, and I have a not-insignificant amount of envy. It's the first time in almost 20 years that I've looked at a Windows laptop and felt it was in any way ahead of Apple. Great design, and it doesn't have the inevitable pointlessly-cheap compromises that plague every other "high end" Windows laptop. Of course, it's still Windows underneath. Sooner or later, I'd get tripped up by the pathetic reality of 8.3 case-insensitive filenames buried in a not-deep-enough grave.
toodlebunions 10y ago
I know multiple people who are buying 2014 and 2015 model years or even PCs instead of the new one.

Bud 10y ago

>We lose good functionality for no good reason, other than products become "simpler" and "more pure". You can disagree with the reasons, and certainly many do, but it's just silliness to allege that moving to USB-C was done for "no good reason". It's the exact same silliness that surfaced in the griping about removing 9-pin serial ports, and optical drives, and Ethernet ports in laptops, and FireWire in favor of something more than an order of magnitude faster, and every other innovation by Apple. It's always for a good reason.

TillE 10y ago
Well, not always. Removing the iPhone headphone jack was dumb and pointless. Losing the ethernet jack on Pro laptops is also pretty bad. The reason is thinness, I dunno if that's good or not. WiFi is sufficient for most people, but it sure as hell isn't better when you need high bandwidth and consistent low latency.
- gumby 10y ago
  > Removing the iPhone headphone jack was dumb and pointless. I suspect there was a point. This is part of Apple's standard MO. It's a way to wean people onto wireless (BT). Apple's expensive BT headphones point the way to cheap third party BT headphones that aren't painful to connect (right now bluetooth infrastructure is pretty sucky). Once people are comfortable without the headphone wires they will have inductive charging like the watch and have a water resistant device like the new watch.
rocky1138 10y ago
Why would you want to move to USB-C other than not having to flip the cable when you inevitably put it in the wrong way. If your answer is power delivery, remember that not all cables and not all devices support power delivery on USB-C so it's nothing that couldn't have been done with "USB4" utilising the same plug we've always had.
- CrazedGeek 10y ago
  Few reasons for me: * HDMI and DP alt modes make laptop docks a lot cheaper and more universal * Don't need an OTG cable to use a Type-C device on my Type-C phone * Potential Thunderbolt 3 port reuse

15thandwhatever 10y ago

Isn't this (form-over-function) a similar but not exactly identical phase that Microsoft went through, that resulted in the now publicized "Raymond Chen camp vs. MSDN camp" mantra? https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dareobasanjo/2004/08/25/the-msdn-camp-vs-the-raymond-chen-camp/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dareobasanjo/2004/08/25/the... Is this ever avoidable once you gain a large swath of market share, but are still under pressure to grow even more?

Jdam 10y ago

So I'm sitting here, just unlocked my Mac through putting my finger on the touchbar and reading your post, wondering who that "pro" is that I keep on hearing in conjunction with Apple during the last 6 months. I'm a dev, doing the Kool Aid for a 100bn$+ company, together with designers in my team. I always thought devs and designers would be that pro usergroup people are referring to. I've read all the complaints in the last time of "Apple is abandoning the pros" but funny thing, I only heard that on the internet and in hypothetical perspectives, nobody actually complained about the lack of Kaby Lake irl. I'm very fine with the current lineup and I'm wondering if that "pro" you're referring to is actually just an extremely narrow niche.

roryisok 10y ago
I guess the "pro" is anyone who wants more than 16GB RAM ?
- Eric_WVGG 10y ago
  those "pros" complaining about the 16gb limit, I wonder how they've been getting any work done up until now?
  - jupp0r 10y ago
    Because they bought their computers 3 years ago when you asked why anybody would ever need more than 8gb.
    - Koshkin 10y ago
      For comparison, the minimum amount of RAM required by the precursor of Mac OS, NeXT, - 32MB (that's megabytes) - seemed insane. But then again, 90% of the computer science - including experiments in AI - had been done (at least, up until mid-80s) on computers that had less than 1 megabyte of RAM. (IIRC, the first version of UNIX was designed to run on a computer with 24 kilobytes of RAM.)
    - tluyben2 10y ago

shmerl 10y ago

> This in itself would not be a problem for me, if it weren't for the lack of competition. Mac OS is so far ahead in terms of "getting things done" I wouldn't touch MacOS for it. It's nowhere comparable in productivity for me to something like current KDE Plasma 5 on Linux. Not sure if you ever used it, but Linux is nowhere limited to Ubuntu's Unity.

jwr 10y ago
I didn't want to get into these kinds of discussions, but I'll venture a guess that you don't often connect/disconnect multiple monitors to your machine, and especially not one HiDPI and one HD. That experience alone is enough to ditch Linux altogether. BTW, Windows 10 is slightly better, but not by much. The major difference being that one can predictably get a signal on both monitors, I guess, which is good, but then the HiDPI story is still pretty bad.
- shmerl 10y ago
  I do. Plasma nailed down multi-monitor setup in 5.8.x. Before that it was significantly worse. For different DPI on each monitor you'd need to use Wayland though.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  As a keyboard user, I feel Windows more polished than macOS when you work with multiple screens. To name a simple example, pressing CMD + Shift + -> moves an application to the next monitor, with macOS you should pay for a window manager to get a similar functionality, or give up the keyboard and embrace a touchpad-centric gimmick like Expose, which I perceive as distracting with these animations. It is certainly an example of YMMV.
  - nikon 10y ago
    Spectacle is free and does this and a lot more should you need it.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Ah, multi-monitor support. I always joke how I ditched hardware random-number generators because the window placement of macOS is a superior source of randomness. Meanwhile, multi-monitor support in Plasma 5 has worked for me for years without any trouble whatsoever.