8 ms·

I'm pretty sure at this point Apple has lost the trust of the professionals community. I personally don't think I would ever buy new equipment from Apple again.

I'm pretty sure at this point Apple has lost the trust of the professionals community. I personally don't think I would ever buy new equipment from Apple again. At most, I might buy a refurbished iPhone SE downgrading from my iPhone 7 (or spare parts for my iPhone 7) and spare parts for my 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro. It's simply not worth upgrading to new Apple equipment unless you have a lot of spare change burning a hole in your pocket, or you're a visual/graphic designer and your programs are Apple-specific. This really should concern Apple. Professionals are the ones requiring the latest equipment, purchasing the highest-margin products with the highest price inelasticity (not looking for discounts), the ones most likely to advertise through word-of-mouth, and the ones contributing the most to brand value. Apple should only look at how they lost the gaming community back in the mid-2000s to Windows, and the rise of today's e-sports and streaming industries led by said professional gamers, to see what kind of impact losing just one professional community has in terms of opportunity cost. I doubt Apple could ever be successfully commoditized because of the strength of their existing moats, but given Apple's discounts of late and inability to successfully innovate in professional hardware, they're heading more towards Wal-Mart and less towards Harrods, and that may lead to additional headaches or intangibles down the line (anti-trust worries, higher support costs and other operational expenses, decreased customer satisfaction), which all gives the impression Apple's golden age has come and gone.

toasterlovin 8y ago
Look, this keyboard thing is a huge stain on their reputation. But I think you vastly overestimate all the other vendors in this space.
- yingw787 8y ago
  Oh, don't get me wrong. Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great, and I recently reversed my decision to "upgrade" to a Dell XPS 15 w/ Ubuntu 18.04 in order to stick to my MacBook because it honestly wasn't an upgrade. But I think Apple is coasting on its fundamentals and trying to monetize (cannibalize) a bunch of intangibles that led it to meteoric success in the first place, and that would worry me as an AAPL shareholder (I'm not one). At least in the field of package management, Linux is doing some pretty interesting things; 'snap' is pretty interesting: https://snapcraft.io/ https://snapcraft.io/, so are AppImages: https://appimage.org/ https://appimage.org/, and this is in addition to the regular updates to 'apt' or 'yum' that are officially supported by distros. Meanwhile, 'brew' still dominates the OSX landscape because Apple can't be bothered to create its own package manager. When was the last time Apple updated native UNIX-like tooling? I had heard it was around OS X Lion (basically when Steve Jobs died).
  - melling 8y ago
    "Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great" You didn't have your MacBook Pro spontaneously reboot because of the NVIDIA problem? I don't know if it was the driver or the hardware but it wasn't fun.
    - yingw787 8y ago
      Hasn't happened to me. If it did, I might have switched completely already :-) In fact that was why I returned the XPS 15, the OEM version of Ubuntu 18.04 (which did have correct sleep/hibernate behavior and worked well with the OEM battery) couldn't detect the NVIDIA Quadro P2000 card at all, which I wanted to run CUDA with. That persisted after about three factory resets, so I was like kthxbai.
      - m_mueller 8y ago
        This sort of thing is why I've resigned to just use WSL (after switching from Mac). Works well enough.
    - seba_dos1 8y ago
      ...or troubles with SATA cables seemingly designed to break in the most subtle ways.
    - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
      If that's the same issue I had, it was a defective nvidia chip. I went through 2 logicboards and I know several of my friends who had 2012 MBPs went through a few too. We used to be an Apple shop, and we had a lot come in due to that issue.
    - zeristor 8y ago
      I'm still using my MacBook Pro from 2010, and I'm working on ways to mitigate the NVidia card rebooting at its worse it was 120 times a month, but I've managed to get it down to about 10 times a month. Although IDEs seem to cause frequent reboots, but using Jupyter is far more stable.
- dman 8y ago
  How long has the keyboard issue been going on? Have we seen Apple take any accountability? In case you have tech support staff at your employer, go talk to them about how widely prevalent this issue is. When I heard the defect rates I was amazed that Apple has not issued a recall.
  - netsharc 8y ago
    It's amazing how much PR bullshit they instead do, like in the article, claiming it's just a small number blah blah blah. How about deleting threads on their support forums? Next up, airpodbatterygate.
- IloveHN84 8y ago
  But they perform similar if not better at a cheaper cost.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Dell and Lenovo offer me choice. If my keyboard fails under warranty, I can return my machine for a repair, I can get an on-site repair if my warranty covers it, or I can just ask them to overnight me a new keyboard. My warranty will remain intact after I've fitted that replacement keyboard. They'll sell me spare parts for older machines and provide a full service manual. If I'm a corporate customer, I can buy a stock of parts to keep my fleet running. Apple fundamentally do not care about professional users. They are either ignorant or indifferent to the ways that their service model fails to meet the needs of professional users.
y7 8y ago
I don't think this is about trust. As long as there isn't a competitor that builds a better product, people won't switch. I don't like Apple at this point, but I'm struggling to come up with a better alternative to an iPhone or Macbook, despite the growing number of flaws.
- thijsvandien 8y ago
  It is about trust in the sense that there was a time when buying Apple products was a safe choice. They were expensive, but you could count on them being well-designed (though you always had to be careful with first gen products) and working together seamlessly. If you could afford them, there was no reason to consider other options. That kind of brand loyalty I had is gone now. Maybe I can't switch yet, but I'm begrudgingly using their products, and am actively on the lookout for alternatives. When the right one will come along, I'm out.
  - zeristor 8y ago
    You mean like buying IBM was a safe choice in the 80s?
- yingw787 8y ago
  I don't know if people will switch per se, but people will be less inclined to purchase the latest and greatest from Apple, and less willing to invest in new things like AirPods or iWatch. If my MacBook Pro dies, which I really hope it doesn't because it's great, and I want to back up my iPhone to local storage, I might get the cheapest Mac Mini I can and use it as a storage device. Yea, I can't move something like that to Linux as long as Linux mobile backups are not great. No, I won't pay for iCloud, and I won't use my MacBook Pro dying as an excuse to buy a new MacBook Pro or an iMac like I might have before. On the side, I may be purchasing a thousand dollars in PC parts and running Linux on desktop, and using my MacBook Pro to just SSH into my desktop using OpenVPN and dynamic DNS through AWS Route 53, and using it as a mobile battery-powered shim, which can be much more easily commoditized. Maybe my MacBook Pro dies and I use a Thinkpad as a replacement to SSH into my desktop, and I learn to love Thinkpad: https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/ https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/ I should hope Apple doesn't want that. Apple should want me purchasing the Mac Pro or the iMac Pro, and maybe complement that with the MacBook, and some AirPods and an iWatch to boot. The buying decision shouldn't be like pulling teeth, and since it is, I think Apple has lost a good deal already. I will say my personal pain tolerance for this kind of stuff is low. I will personally invest a great deal of energy to future-proof my personal infrastructure. But I don't think others are too far behind as long as Apple keeps increasing or maintaining the cost of being an Apple customer over time.
minikites 8y ago
>Professionals are the ones requiring the latest equipment, purchasing the highest-margin products with the highest price inelasticity (not looking for discounts), the ones most likely to advertise through word-of-mouth, and the ones contributing the most to brand value. Apple is still selling the Mac Pro that is unchanged from the 2013 model for full price. It's abundantly clear that they either don't know what professionals want or they don't care.
- kookoopuffs 8y ago
  Exactly. OP comment is thinking that professionals are the one spending the most money. I strongly disagree without knowing any statistics but I'm going to assume by looking at the sheer number of macbooks that young people have to look at youtube and iphones to have cool photo filters are their major market. Like I said, I don't have any statistics, but I'm willing to put money on it. The ones that have money can afford the high end stuff but they are always not professionals
checkyoursudo 8y ago
I just want a touchpad on a Linux-capable machine that doesn't suck as much as my Macbook's touchpad doesn't suck. Oh, and any sort of ability to integrate or do anything with my iPhone (non-jailbroken) on my Linux machines would be a big plus.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  Macbooks have a pretty standard touchpads, "force touch" aside. It's just a matter of proper software and configuration. Of course gesture support in software isn't comparable in any way, but my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro touchpad on GNU/Linux generally feels better than Macbook's ones or Magic Trackpad 2 on macOS. Also, I've got some non-jailbroken iPhone for development and I have no issues with installing ipa's on it from GNU/Linux. I didn't need more though, so haven't tested anything else, but working app installer makes me think that other simpler things should work too :P
  - scarface74 8y ago
    So besides force touch and software support there is no difference.... Isn’t that kind of big deal?
    - seba_dos1 8y ago
      Force touch? Hardly, it's a gimmick. The only "big deal" out of it is silent clicking, which is why I own Magic Trackpad 2, but not everyone will care about that. Software support - well, yes, but it's within the application makers and power users reach to fix it. There's a common myth that "Apple touchpads work on magic", while in fact neither hardware nor the driver is so special. It's just the apps.
arebours 8y ago
I'm pretty pissed at Apple. I'm typing this on a 2017 MacBook Pro, which is my first (and probably the last) Apple machine. At first I loved the keyboard but it started to misbehave within the first months of use. Now it's unusable without Unshaky (key repeating blocker written specifically for this case by some other poor Apple customer). The battery never lasted very long but now it seems it's broken too. Oh, and the specs, heavily underpowered considering it's price. I need something to do the work on so I can't just send it out to repair and wait a couple of weeks to get it back. At first I considered getting myself some cheap laptop for the interim period but once I started to look for other options I decided I'm not going back. I'm buying a ThinkPad and selling the MacBook when it's repaired, even though it's probably not worth half of its initial price now. It got under my skin so much I just want to get rid of it. Rant off.
rayiner 8y ago
> I'm pretty sure at this point Apple has lost the trust of the professionals community. I personally don't think I would ever buy new equipment from Apple again. At most, I might buy a refurbished iPhone SE downgrading from my iPhone 7 (or spare parts for my iPhone 7) and spare parts for my 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro. It's simply not worth upgrading to new Apple equipment unless you have a lot of spare change burning a hole in your pocket, or you're a visual/graphic designer and your programs are Apple-specific. I keep saying this, but every time I try non-Apple stuff I run screaming back. when I felt like my 2013 MacBook Pro was getting long in the tooth last year, I got a X1 Carbon 6th Gen. Now I'm just counting the days until my wife won't get cranky if I buy another computer. It's big things and little things. I had to reinstall Windows because random background crapware was causing battery life to vary wildly doing the same thing. (Not even third-party crapware, just like Windows randomly deciding to chew through your battery scanning for viruses or indexing stuff.) The screen developed a cluster of dead pixels within six months. The depot service replaced it for free, which was nice, but the new one has a uneven backlighting in the lower right corner. (Lenovo's Q&A for its LCDs is shit.) Oh, and the bezel is just a sticker that is starting to lift and peel. The LTE card has never worked right, despite repeated driver updates. At first it would just die during sleep, more recently it's started conking out while I'm using it. The touchpad is just okay. Windows is unpredictable crap these days. I replaced the stock install with LTSB which is a bit better. But random shit just won't work. The taskbar will randomly refuse to hide, then you'll have to play a game of "guess notification icon is preventing the taskbar from hiding" (it's usually Windows Defender). Edge fails in basic things like searching PDFs (and won't let you use a separate PDF plugin or set PDFs to auto-download instead). Chrome, meanwhile, eats up your battery. Apple has a high-profile fuckup every now and then, but at least it tends to be one thing that affects some defined set of machines you can work around, not pervasive random shit Q&A that you can't avoid. You're right though, Apple has been going downhill. I used to get a new Apple laptop every couple of years, and held off on the 2016-2018 for the reasons you mention. But at least I have hope for Apple. My iPhone XR is just about perfect, totally trouble free. I have zero hope for Lenovo, etc.
spookybones 8y ago
I mostly agree with everything you've said. However, I'm using a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro, 1st-gen retina, and it still holds up really well. One of the best future-proofing purchases I've made, which usually I don't care about. Also, the iOS app store is one of the largest gaming ecosystems in the world.
sudoaptget 8y ago
Totally agree with you.

toasterlovin 8y ago

Look, this keyboard thing is a huge stain on their reputation. But I think you vastly overestimate all the other vendors in this space.

yingw787 8y ago
Oh, don't get me wrong. Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great, and I recently reversed my decision to "upgrade" to a Dell XPS 15 w/ Ubuntu 18.04 in order to stick to my MacBook because it honestly wasn't an upgrade. But I think Apple is coasting on its fundamentals and trying to monetize (cannibalize) a bunch of intangibles that led it to meteoric success in the first place, and that would worry me as an AAPL shareholder (I'm not one). At least in the field of package management, Linux is doing some pretty interesting things; 'snap' is pretty interesting: https://snapcraft.io/ https://snapcraft.io/, so are AppImages: https://appimage.org/ https://appimage.org/, and this is in addition to the regular updates to 'apt' or 'yum' that are officially supported by distros. Meanwhile, 'brew' still dominates the OSX landscape because Apple can't be bothered to create its own package manager. When was the last time Apple updated native UNIX-like tooling? I had heard it was around OS X Lion (basically when Steve Jobs died).
- melling 8y ago
  "Apple hardware from 2012-2015 was really great" You didn't have your MacBook Pro spontaneously reboot because of the NVIDIA problem? I don't know if it was the driver or the hardware but it wasn't fun.
  - yingw787 8y ago
    Hasn't happened to me. If it did, I might have switched completely already :-) In fact that was why I returned the XPS 15, the OEM version of Ubuntu 18.04 (which did have correct sleep/hibernate behavior and worked well with the OEM battery) couldn't detect the NVIDIA Quadro P2000 card at all, which I wanted to run CUDA with. That persisted after about three factory resets, so I was like kthxbai.
    - m_mueller 8y ago
      This sort of thing is why I've resigned to just use WSL (after switching from Mac). Works well enough.
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    ...or troubles with SATA cables seemingly designed to break in the most subtle ways.
  - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
    If that's the same issue I had, it was a defective nvidia chip. I went through 2 logicboards and I know several of my friends who had 2012 MBPs went through a few too. We used to be an Apple shop, and we had a lot come in due to that issue.
  - zeristor 8y ago
    I'm still using my MacBook Pro from 2010, and I'm working on ways to mitigate the NVidia card rebooting at its worse it was 120 times a month, but I've managed to get it down to about 10 times a month. Although IDEs seem to cause frequent reboots, but using Jupyter is far more stable.
dman 8y ago
How long has the keyboard issue been going on? Have we seen Apple take any accountability? In case you have tech support staff at your employer, go talk to them about how widely prevalent this issue is. When I heard the defect rates I was amazed that Apple has not issued a recall.
- netsharc 8y ago
  It's amazing how much PR bullshit they instead do, like in the article, claiming it's just a small number blah blah blah. How about deleting threads on their support forums? Next up, airpodbatterygate.
IloveHN84 8y ago
But they perform similar if not better at a cheaper cost.
jdietrich 8y ago
Dell and Lenovo offer me choice. If my keyboard fails under warranty, I can return my machine for a repair, I can get an on-site repair if my warranty covers it, or I can just ask them to overnight me a new keyboard. My warranty will remain intact after I've fitted that replacement keyboard. They'll sell me spare parts for older machines and provide a full service manual. If I'm a corporate customer, I can buy a stock of parts to keep my fleet running. Apple fundamentally do not care about professional users. They are either ignorant or indifferent to the ways that their service model fails to meet the needs of professional users.

y7 8y ago

I don't think this is about trust. As long as there isn't a competitor that builds a better product, people won't switch. I don't like Apple at this point, but I'm struggling to come up with a better alternative to an iPhone or Macbook, despite the growing number of flaws.

thijsvandien 8y ago
It is about trust in the sense that there was a time when buying Apple products was a safe choice. They were expensive, but you could count on them being well-designed (though you always had to be careful with first gen products) and working together seamlessly. If you could afford them, there was no reason to consider other options. That kind of brand loyalty I had is gone now. Maybe I can't switch yet, but I'm begrudgingly using their products, and am actively on the lookout for alternatives. When the right one will come along, I'm out.
- zeristor 8y ago
  You mean like buying IBM was a safe choice in the 80s?
yingw787 8y ago
I don't know if people will switch per se, but people will be less inclined to purchase the latest and greatest from Apple, and less willing to invest in new things like AirPods or iWatch. If my MacBook Pro dies, which I really hope it doesn't because it's great, and I want to back up my iPhone to local storage, I might get the cheapest Mac Mini I can and use it as a storage device. Yea, I can't move something like that to Linux as long as Linux mobile backups are not great. No, I won't pay for iCloud, and I won't use my MacBook Pro dying as an excuse to buy a new MacBook Pro or an iMac like I might have before. On the side, I may be purchasing a thousand dollars in PC parts and running Linux on desktop, and using my MacBook Pro to just SSH into my desktop using OpenVPN and dynamic DNS through AWS Route 53, and using it as a mobile battery-powered shim, which can be much more easily commoditized. Maybe my MacBook Pro dies and I use a Thinkpad as a replacement to SSH into my desktop, and I learn to love Thinkpad: https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/ https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/ I should hope Apple doesn't want that. Apple should want me purchasing the Mac Pro or the iMac Pro, and maybe complement that with the MacBook, and some AirPods and an iWatch to boot. The buying decision shouldn't be like pulling teeth, and since it is, I think Apple has lost a good deal already. I will say my personal pain tolerance for this kind of stuff is low. I will personally invest a great deal of energy to future-proof my personal infrastructure. But I don't think others are too far behind as long as Apple keeps increasing or maintaining the cost of being an Apple customer over time.

minikites 8y ago

>Professionals are the ones requiring the latest equipment, purchasing the highest-margin products with the highest price inelasticity (not looking for discounts), the ones most likely to advertise through word-of-mouth, and the ones contributing the most to brand value. Apple is still selling the Mac Pro that is unchanged from the 2013 model for full price. It's abundantly clear that they either don't know what professionals want or they don't care.

kookoopuffs 8y ago
Exactly. OP comment is thinking that professionals are the one spending the most money. I strongly disagree without knowing any statistics but I'm going to assume by looking at the sheer number of macbooks that young people have to look at youtube and iphones to have cool photo filters are their major market. Like I said, I don't have any statistics, but I'm willing to put money on it. The ones that have money can afford the high end stuff but they are always not professionals

checkyoursudo 8y ago

I just want a touchpad on a Linux-capable machine that doesn't suck as much as my Macbook's touchpad doesn't suck. Oh, and any sort of ability to integrate or do anything with my iPhone (non-jailbroken) on my Linux machines would be a big plus.

seba_dos1 8y ago
Macbooks have a pretty standard touchpads, "force touch" aside. It's just a matter of proper software and configuration. Of course gesture support in software isn't comparable in any way, but my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro touchpad on GNU/Linux generally feels better than Macbook's ones or Magic Trackpad 2 on macOS. Also, I've got some non-jailbroken iPhone for development and I have no issues with installing ipa's on it from GNU/Linux. I didn't need more though, so haven't tested anything else, but working app installer makes me think that other simpler things should work too :P
- scarface74 8y ago
  So besides force touch and software support there is no difference.... Isn’t that kind of big deal?
  - seba_dos1 8y ago
    Force touch? Hardly, it's a gimmick. The only "big deal" out of it is silent clicking, which is why I own Magic Trackpad 2, but not everyone will care about that. Software support - well, yes, but it's within the application makers and power users reach to fix it. There's a common myth that "Apple touchpads work on magic", while in fact neither hardware nor the driver is so special. It's just the apps.

arebours 8y ago

I'm pretty pissed at Apple. I'm typing this on a 2017 MacBook Pro, which is my first (and probably the last) Apple machine. At first I loved the keyboard but it started to misbehave within the first months of use. Now it's unusable without Unshaky (key repeating blocker written specifically for this case by some other poor Apple customer). The battery never lasted very long but now it seems it's broken too. Oh, and the specs, heavily underpowered considering it's price. I need something to do the work on so I can't just send it out to repair and wait a couple of weeks to get it back. At first I considered getting myself some cheap laptop for the interim period but once I started to look for other options I decided I'm not going back. I'm buying a ThinkPad and selling the MacBook when it's repaired, even though it's probably not worth half of its initial price now. It got under my skin so much I just want to get rid of it. Rant off.

rayiner 8y ago

> I'm pretty sure at this point Apple has lost the trust of the professionals community. I personally don't think I would ever buy new equipment from Apple again. At most, I might buy a refurbished iPhone SE downgrading from my iPhone 7 (or spare parts for my iPhone 7) and spare parts for my 2012 non-Retina MacBook Pro. It's simply not worth upgrading to new Apple equipment unless you have a lot of spare change burning a hole in your pocket, or you're a visual/graphic designer and your programs are Apple-specific. I keep saying this, but every time I try non-Apple stuff I run screaming back. when I felt like my 2013 MacBook Pro was getting long in the tooth last year, I got a X1 Carbon 6th Gen. Now I'm just counting the days until my wife won't get cranky if I buy another computer. It's big things and little things. I had to reinstall Windows because random background crapware was causing battery life to vary wildly doing the same thing. (Not even third-party crapware, just like Windows randomly deciding to chew through your battery scanning for viruses or indexing stuff.) The screen developed a cluster of dead pixels within six months. The depot service replaced it for free, which was nice, but the new one has a uneven backlighting in the lower right corner. (Lenovo's Q&A for its LCDs is shit.) Oh, and the bezel is just a sticker that is starting to lift and peel. The LTE card has never worked right, despite repeated driver updates. At first it would just die during sleep, more recently it's started conking out while I'm using it. The touchpad is just okay. Windows is unpredictable crap these days. I replaced the stock install with LTSB which is a bit better. But random shit just won't work. The taskbar will randomly refuse to hide, then you'll have to play a game of "guess notification icon is preventing the taskbar from hiding" (it's usually Windows Defender). Edge fails in basic things like searching PDFs (and won't let you use a separate PDF plugin or set PDFs to auto-download instead). Chrome, meanwhile, eats up your battery. Apple has a high-profile fuckup every now and then, but at least it tends to be one thing that affects some defined set of machines you can work around, not pervasive random shit Q&A that you can't avoid. You're right though, Apple has been going downhill. I used to get a new Apple laptop every couple of years, and held off on the 2016-2018 for the reasons you mention. But at least I have hope for Apple. My iPhone XR is just about perfect, totally trouble free. I have zero hope for Lenovo, etc.

spookybones 8y ago

I mostly agree with everything you've said. However, I'm using a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro, 1st-gen retina, and it still holds up really well. One of the best future-proofing purchases I've made, which usually I don't care about. Also, the iOS app store is one of the largest gaming ecosystems in the world.

sudoaptget 8y ago

Totally agree with you.