8 ms·

A compelling way to enact change at large corporates is to vocally communicate when and why you are forced back into a buying position as a customer. Apple VPs

by pgt 6y ago

A compelling way to enact change at large corporates is to vocally communicate when and why you are forced back into a buying position as a customer. Apple VPs who are listening, especially Craig Federighi - here is an early warning for you. The HN crowd may seem fringe, but they are living in the future. I de-Googled my entire life over similar transgressions by Google and several of my friends are gradually going through the same process, albeit more slowly. And even though I just bought an MBP16, Apple monitoring every binary I run makes me want to sell it immediately and never buy another iPhone, Watch or Macbook. No one is going to catch Apple on performance and form factor for a long time, but I'm willing to invest in a long-term ecosystem that won't allow things like this...as long as I don't need to debug audio drivers. I am done with that phase of my life. So if I had to choose an alternate path, what would such a path look like that could eventually approach the build quality of an Apple Macbook Pro? That product doesn't have to exist yet, it just has to be on the path. (I looked at Alienware's M2 and M3, but it cost about the same as an MBP16 but with more blue LEDs.)

russelg 6y ago
The Dell XPS range is probably the closest available currently.
- ls65536 6y ago
  I had the pleasure of installing Ubuntu on a modern Dell XPS recently. I was happy to discover that everything seems to work flawlessly upon install without any additional fiddling: WiFi, trackpad, touchscreen, display scaling, and really everything else I've tried so far worked great. It's an absolute joy! There was a time I remember when various things with Linux installations were often quirky or troublesome to get working well with certain laptop hardware, but I'm convinced now that this situation has improved tremendously since then...at least from my recent experience and hearing other good things about the Dell XPS and various ThinkPad models, and of course System76 (although I haven't had a chance to try one of those myself yet).
  - dlgeek 6y ago
    You can actually buy the XPSs with Ubuntu preloaded even. (Or, used to be able to - I went back to a Thinkpad and haven't looked lately).
    - robocat 6y ago
      You can buy the XPS13 Developer Edition. The XPS15 doesn’t come preinstalled with Linux (although it apparently works well and is well supported). If you want an officially supported Dell 15”, you need to buy the more expensive Precision: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystems https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystem...
      - jessaustin 6y ago
        There may be some supply chain issues with the Linux one. When I ordered this in August, they never sent it and cancelled my order 1.5 months later. I reordered it that day, and it was delivered within several days. I do like it very much.
- rfvrgvegbegn 6y ago
  Yes , and they are also selling Ubuntu edition where you not only save quite a few $$$ (because no windows licence) but you're also sending a signal to manufacturers that there is a demand for compatibility with other OSes (unlike on Apple or MS Surfaces). So if the dev edition fits your need consider buying this one
yamrzou 6y ago
Thinkpad X1 Carbon.
tungah 6y ago
Look up System76
- jxm262 6y ago
  I switched from map to sys76 last year, never looking back at MacBook. I'd also suggest s76, x1 carbon, or Dell xps
- speedgoose 6y ago
  These are Clevo laptops. You can get the same hardware with other Clevo resellers.
yakz 6y ago
I agree--I also de-googled within the last couple years. I also did it because I need my e-mail to always work, it's just unacceptable that Google could take it away with no reasonable recourse. I was also hit by this outage today, at work, on my work laptop, while I was working. Apple literally cost me time and my employer money today, because their lack of foresight or inadequate provisioning of servers or whatever the fuck it was, fucked up my laptop. No good reason. They just fucked up, and it cost something.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  What did you move your phone to, when you degoogled your life? Apple iphones seems even worse than Android, honestly.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jmnicolas 6y ago
    I use GrapheneOS. It's rough, but as I said somewhere else, for the first time my phone isn't my enemy. I would have bought a Linux phone, but seeing that a few months ago they had trouble making calls on a Librem 5, I chose not to take the risk.
    - pgt 6y ago
      Thanks, I will look into GrapheneOS. I wish there was a phone ecosystem I could invest in that ran Clojure near the metal. Some kind of Lisp machine would be awesome and make it more palatable to endure missing libraries and apps.
      - fsflover 6y ago
        Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone.
      - 6y ago
skizm 6y ago
I just got a new XPS13 after a decade of using only macbook pros. Honestly it's pretty good and like 95-99% as good as my macbook. The only thing I really miss is the incredible touchpad. The XPS touchpad is meh, although is functional which is more than I can say about many other windows notebooks.
ls65536 6y ago
> The HN crowd may seem fringe, but they are living in the future. The other thing that really can't be discounted here is that a lot of the HN crowd are likely the default go-to people in their circle of family and friends for this sort of stuff, and in many cases they may also have major purchasing influence and technical decision making power in their respective businesses. Turning off one of them may be inconsequential on its own in the short term, but it could seriously add up to a lot more destroyed mindshare and significantly more "lost" sales over time.
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  Yes, I can specifically say that 2 other people have chosen not to update past Mojave 10.14 because of my advice. I'm experimenting with Linux these days. There are some minor annoyances with using an outdated version of macOS. Unfortunately those apply to not just one or two apps, but every part of the OS when using Linux. Basic things like WiFi drivers or sleep support. I'm encouraged by the trackpad driver project, but it's not there yet. So I'm still hanging on to my 2014 Retina MacBook Pro using 10.13, until some Linux distro catches up. I feel like that will happen soon though.
  - ant6n 6y ago
    I should update to Mojave one of these days...
    - peterburkimsher 6y ago
      Not if you want Time Machine; stay on HFS+ if you're a dev and want easier cross-platform support.
      - samtheprogram 6y ago
        One of my family members is using Time Machine and is on Catalina, which forces APFS -- is there something I should be worried about (outside of cross-platform support)?
saxelsen 6y ago
I would say that the current Microsoft Surface laptop/book has the same build quality feel as the Macbook line, but unfortunately you're stuck with Windows 10, which is a downgrade if you're used to MacOS.
- reallydontask 6y ago
  Interestingly this also works in reverse, namely macOS is a downgrade if you are used to Windows 10.
- Tepix 6y ago
  Windows 10 is also working against you with its telemetry and ads. We shouldn't have to work against the interest of the company that sells us the software running on our PCs. This will lead to more problems down the road.
- blackrock 6y ago
  I concur. I have a Surface. It sucks. Worst computer I’ve ever bought. Keyboard sucks. Is it a tablet trying to be a laptop? Or a laptop moonlighting as a tablet? Stylus sucks. It doesn’t have the accuracy of the iPad. And it always had a weird parallax feeling, so I gave up on using it. And the software was just mediocre. I gave up and bought a Lenovo T4xx series laptop. Installed a dual boot Linux Ubuntu on it. Best. Computer. Laptop. Ever.
pomian 6y ago
From a another post on this page, someone recommended to look at Metabox. I never heard of them. I just looked over their site. Some very very cool options. Been in business a long time. https://www.metabox.com.au/ https://www.metabox.com.au/ I've tried Alienware -used to be good, bit not very impressed since Dell days, I've tried Razer- always some issues, Dell g and XPS seems the best, up to now. But this Metabox looks really fun. Wonder if others have tried?
- pgt 6y ago
  Australia's anti-encryption laws make me very wary of buying anything based there. The Singles Day ad on the landing page made me think it was a domain squatting ad page.
laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
btw, when you install any app on Android, it sends a huge hash (maybe the whole thing) to Google servers. Try to install an apk without internet connection, and then try over a slow 3G connection to see the several(!) minutes it takes. If your phone has the old style data arrows, you will see the upload one all the time while you stare at the "installing" screen.
mike-cardwell 6y ago
I'm not sure that using Google as a cautionary tale is a good idea. Given their continued growth and success...
- pgt 6y ago
  Product -> Customers -> Revenue. Not the other way around. First product goes, then customers, then revenue. It takes time. I am short Google and have been trying to figure out how to short their stock from ZA without losing opportunity on growth of other, better stocks.
nullc 6y ago
> And even though I just bought an MBP16, Look into what state law protections you have. High ticket mail order items can usually be returned for a full refund for a fairly long time. Finding out that it's phoning home about every binary you run is absolutely a good justification to return it. I would sooner throw out a computer that did that rather than use it.
AnonymousPlanet 6y ago
Microsoft saw that Macs were eating their lunch regarding developers and researchers when e.g. nearly everyone doing AI was on a MacBook or Ubuntu. You had a hard time getting Tensorflow to run on Windows because no one in the community really cared. Also everyone developing applications in the cloud was eventually targeting Linux as the production OS, which is a pain if your development OS is pretty much hostile do anything command line. MS then put a lot of money into getting a Linux like command line and support into Windows with WSL. They also got a bunch of influencers and devs do their thing with improving that kind of developer's experience. Apple, however, has been sitting on their hands in this regard. They are moving exactly the opposite direction with this crowd. I have no idea what rationale is behind that. Did they come to a different conclusion than Microsoft or are they just failing to execute on the strategy?
- threatofrain 6y ago
  It’s going to be hard to beat Msft on developer ergonomics when Msft has GitHub, Azure, VSC, and TS.
- toyg 6y ago
  MS sells cloud services. They don't really care what machine you use, as long as you live on Azure as much as possible. That's why they give you more and more tools that improve the "remote development" experience. Apple sells silicon. They don't really care about developers; as long as they can pull enough users through the iPhone->iPad->Mac funnel, they have done their job of selling as much hardware as they can. In their view, developers bitch and moan but in the end will have to go where users go - at which point, Apple can tax them for access to the walled garden.
lavp 6y ago
> The HN crowd may seem fringe, but they are living in the future. I really don’t think the HN community is at all representative of what the masses think about. Just like in any online community, it is easy to think that the thoughts of that community somewhat resemble that of most people when that simply isn’t true. HN’s base consists highly of developers who are up to date with most things in the technology industry. The rest of the world doesn’t really care enough to compromise the comfort and reliability of Google’s suite, which lets be honest, outperforms its competition by a size-able margin, and does so with a “free” price tag. People on HN have talked about de-googling for years and I have yet to see someone outside of the computer development scene do it (or even talk about it for that manner).
- pgt 6y ago
  I am starting to see people switch around me, but it doesn't happen overnight. A surprisingly handful of non-tech people have asked me, "Hey, I see you use DuckDuckGo. Why not Google?" And then we have the conversation - it's a short conversation: Well, you cannot prosper in an environment if you operate on inaccurate or censored information. Google & YouTube censor information and track everything you search for or watch. Today your views align, tomorrow they may not. Secondly, you must insure yourself against tail risks, and having your Gmail account "cancelled" is a yuuuge tail risk. Therefore, avoid bundled Google products. Then a few months will go buy, and I'll see they are now using Firefox and DDG. When you have these conversations, it's important that it not be about your identity (open source! Linux!), but about risk-aversion.
akudha 6y ago
Apple VPs who are listening, especially Craig Federighi - here is an early warning for you. The point is, things like this should never happen in the first place. They are probably checking how far they can go, before it affects their bottom line.
- toyg 6y ago
  I don't think they are "checking"; they've carefully planned a path and are slowly and meticulously executing on it. They have no intention to stop at any point. Should the money stop flowing, they'll just come up with a new gadget. To make them backtrack on the walled garden would take an extinction-threatening event that (unfortunately) will never be on the cards as long as nobody can seriously threaten the iPhone.
  - pgt 6y ago
    I’m not so sure. A handful of high-profile opinions + a few hundred low-brow peeps like myself calling out bad behaviour can have a noticeable impact on sales in the mid-term.
ruph123 6y ago
I bought the business cousin of the XPS 17, the Precision 5750. The screen-to-body ratio is amazing. And the 4k screen is beautiful, the build is attractive, thermals are good and the speakers are nice as well. (From an Apple perspective these are the things that others often get wrong) It has some design flaws („hybrid power“) but what is really messed up is the QC: I have ProSupport and already had 4 technicians over and am currently awaiting my third full replacement. Issues are all over the place: faulty trackpad, extreme coil whine, broken display, etc. Perfect device for me if they could figure out their QC. If the next one is bot perfect, I am getting a G14 which is the best performance/watt, performance/notebook volume and one of the best performing notebooks in general.
ksec 6y ago
And there are A LOT more than what is just happening here. They have burnt a lot of good faith post Steve Jobs. But judging from current Apple management, they wont act until Sales numbers decline. As shown by the MacBook Pro Keyboard fiasco. And to make it worst, they seems to think most of these problem as PR and Marketing problem and dial up the marketing instead of actually fixing it. ( You can see that with Apple's marketing, especially with recent iPhone 12, with VPs explaining in podcast )
- pgt 6y ago
  If there are a lot more, it's worth listing them all in a blog post. A set of evidence is more compelling than only one act that could potentially be written off as well-meaning incompetence.
s3krit 6y ago
>So if I had to choose an alternate path, what would such a path look like that could eventually approach the build quality of an Apple Macbook Pro? That product doesn't have to exist yet, it just has to be on the path. Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 is what I use and I'm very happy with it. My requirements were a moderately high-performance laptop, hybrid/discrete graphics, not excessively bulky and good Linux support. I can't fault my choice. The only issue I had with hardware compatibility under Linux was due to me receiving it a couple days after launch and the drivers for the wifi card not yet being in the kernel used by Debian or Ubuntu (no longer an issue iirc). Happy to answer any specific questions you have.
peternicky 6y ago
Thank god I switched back to windows early this year. I absolutely love it and I do not foresee me returning to Apple for a considerable amount of time.
- strgcmc 6y ago
  You should know that Windows includes a similar feature (to call home and report file hashes and the user's IP for example) called SmartScreen, and with default settings it also triggers on every single application launch in the OS. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen#Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen#Windows (also I should know, I worked on a tiny part of this feature in IE9 and Windows 8)
  - peternicky 6y ago
    Thanks for the reminder. I prefer that I can disable SmartScreen easily instead of making little snitch rules on macos.
- marrone12 6y ago
  I use both Windows and Mac but I would never consider Windows some patron saint. The telemetry and dark patterns in Windows are much worse than what Apple does. Windows literally advertises its own browser in different parts of your OS and will regularly change the default back to Edge after updates. But overall I am pretty happy with Windows being my daily driver now that they have WSL.
Solocomplex 6y ago
Dell Precision and XPS are quality with official Linux support
mdoms 6y ago
> And even though I just bought an MBP16, Apple monitoring every binary I run makes me want to sell it immediately and never buy another iPhone, Watch or Macbook. You'll keep buying Apple stuff. I know it, you know it and Apple knows it. If all of their past transgressions hadn't changed your mind you'll keep doing it. Cut the shit.
m463 6y ago
they do all this on you iphone and watch, and even more.

by pgt 6y ago

russelg 6y ago

The Dell XPS range is probably the closest available currently.

ls65536 6y ago
I had the pleasure of installing Ubuntu on a modern Dell XPS recently. I was happy to discover that everything seems to work flawlessly upon install without any additional fiddling: WiFi, trackpad, touchscreen, display scaling, and really everything else I've tried so far worked great. It's an absolute joy! There was a time I remember when various things with Linux installations were often quirky or troublesome to get working well with certain laptop hardware, but I'm convinced now that this situation has improved tremendously since then...at least from my recent experience and hearing other good things about the Dell XPS and various ThinkPad models, and of course System76 (although I haven't had a chance to try one of those myself yet).
- dlgeek 6y ago
  You can actually buy the XPSs with Ubuntu preloaded even. (Or, used to be able to - I went back to a Thinkpad and haven't looked lately).
  - robocat 6y ago
    You can buy the XPS13 Developer Edition. The XPS15 doesn’t come preinstalled with Linux (although it apparently works well and is well supported). If you want an officially supported Dell 15”, you need to buy the more expensive Precision: https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystems https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/overview/cp/linuxsystem...
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      There may be some supply chain issues with the Linux one. When I ordered this in August, they never sent it and cancelled my order 1.5 months later. I reordered it that day, and it was delivered within several days. I do like it very much.
rfvrgvegbegn 6y ago
Yes , and they are also selling Ubuntu edition where you not only save quite a few $$$ (because no windows licence) but you're also sending a signal to manufacturers that there is a demand for compatibility with other OSes (unlike on Apple or MS Surfaces). So if the dev edition fits your need consider buying this one

yamrzou 6y ago

Thinkpad X1 Carbon.

tungah 6y ago

Look up System76

jxm262 6y ago
I switched from map to sys76 last year, never looking back at MacBook. I'd also suggest s76, x1 carbon, or Dell xps
speedgoose 6y ago
These are Clevo laptops. You can get the same hardware with other Clevo resellers.

yakz 6y ago

I agree--I also de-googled within the last couple years. I also did it because I need my e-mail to always work, it's just unacceptable that Google could take it away with no reasonable recourse. I was also hit by this outage today, at work, on my work laptop, while I was working. Apple literally cost me time and my employer money today, because their lack of foresight or inadequate provisioning of servers or whatever the fuck it was, fucked up my laptop. No good reason. They just fucked up, and it cost something.

tomjen3 6y ago
What did you move your phone to, when you degoogled your life? Apple iphones seems even worse than Android, honestly.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  I use GrapheneOS. It's rough, but as I said somewhere else, for the first time my phone isn't my enemy. I would have bought a Linux phone, but seeing that a few months ago they had trouble making calls on a Librem 5, I chose not to take the risk.
  - pgt 6y ago
    Thanks, I will look into GrapheneOS. I wish there was a phone ecosystem I could invest in that ran Clojure near the metal. Some kind of Lisp machine would be awesome and make it more palatable to endure missing libraries and apps.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone.
    - 6y ago

skizm 6y ago

I just got a new XPS13 after a decade of using only macbook pros. Honestly it's pretty good and like 95-99% as good as my macbook. The only thing I really miss is the incredible touchpad. The XPS touchpad is meh, although is functional which is more than I can say about many other windows notebooks.

ls65536 6y ago

> The HN crowd may seem fringe, but they are living in the future. The other thing that really can't be discounted here is that a lot of the HN crowd are likely the default go-to people in their circle of family and friends for this sort of stuff, and in many cases they may also have major purchasing influence and technical decision making power in their respective businesses. Turning off one of them may be inconsequential on its own in the short term, but it could seriously add up to a lot more destroyed mindshare and significantly more "lost" sales over time.

peterburkimsher 6y ago
Yes, I can specifically say that 2 other people have chosen not to update past Mojave 10.14 because of my advice. I'm experimenting with Linux these days. There are some minor annoyances with using an outdated version of macOS. Unfortunately those apply to not just one or two apps, but every part of the OS when using Linux. Basic things like WiFi drivers or sleep support. I'm encouraged by the trackpad driver project, but it's not there yet. So I'm still hanging on to my 2014 Retina MacBook Pro using 10.13, until some Linux distro catches up. I feel like that will happen soon though.
- ant6n 6y ago
  I should update to Mojave one of these days...
  - peterburkimsher 6y ago
    Not if you want Time Machine; stay on HFS+ if you're a dev and want easier cross-platform support.
    - samtheprogram 6y ago
      One of my family members is using Time Machine and is on Catalina, which forces APFS -- is there something I should be worried about (outside of cross-platform support)?

saxelsen 6y ago

I would say that the current Microsoft Surface laptop/book has the same build quality feel as the Macbook line, but unfortunately you're stuck with Windows 10, which is a downgrade if you're used to MacOS.

reallydontask 6y ago
Interestingly this also works in reverse, namely macOS is a downgrade if you are used to Windows 10.
Tepix 6y ago
Windows 10 is also working against you with its telemetry and ads. We shouldn't have to work against the interest of the company that sells us the software running on our PCs. This will lead to more problems down the road.
blackrock 6y ago
I concur. I have a Surface. It sucks. Worst computer I’ve ever bought. Keyboard sucks. Is it a tablet trying to be a laptop? Or a laptop moonlighting as a tablet? Stylus sucks. It doesn’t have the accuracy of the iPad. And it always had a weird parallax feeling, so I gave up on using it. And the software was just mediocre. I gave up and bought a Lenovo T4xx series laptop. Installed a dual boot Linux Ubuntu on it. Best. Computer. Laptop. Ever.

pomian 6y ago

From a another post on this page, someone recommended to look at Metabox. I never heard of them. I just looked over their site. Some very very cool options. Been in business a long time. https://www.metabox.com.au/ https://www.metabox.com.au/ I've tried Alienware -used to be good, bit not very impressed since Dell days, I've tried Razer- always some issues, Dell g and XPS seems the best, up to now. But this Metabox looks really fun. Wonder if others have tried?

pgt 6y ago
Australia's anti-encryption laws make me very wary of buying anything based there. The Singles Day ad on the landing page made me think it was a domain squatting ad page.

laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago

btw, when you install any app on Android, it sends a huge hash (maybe the whole thing) to Google servers. Try to install an apk without internet connection, and then try over a slow 3G connection to see the several(!) minutes it takes. If your phone has the old style data arrows, you will see the upload one all the time while you stare at the "installing" screen.

mike-cardwell 6y ago

I'm not sure that using Google as a cautionary tale is a good idea. Given their continued growth and success...

pgt 6y ago
Product -> Customers -> Revenue. Not the other way around. First product goes, then customers, then revenue. It takes time. I am short Google and have been trying to figure out how to short their stock from ZA without losing opportunity on growth of other, better stocks.

nullc 6y ago

> And even though I just bought an MBP16, Look into what state law protections you have. High ticket mail order items can usually be returned for a full refund for a fairly long time. Finding out that it's phoning home about every binary you run is absolutely a good justification to return it. I would sooner throw out a computer that did that rather than use it.

AnonymousPlanet 6y ago

Microsoft saw that Macs were eating their lunch regarding developers and researchers when e.g. nearly everyone doing AI was on a MacBook or Ubuntu. You had a hard time getting Tensorflow to run on Windows because no one in the community really cared. Also everyone developing applications in the cloud was eventually targeting Linux as the production OS, which is a pain if your development OS is pretty much hostile do anything command line. MS then put a lot of money into getting a Linux like command line and support into Windows with WSL. They also got a bunch of influencers and devs do their thing with improving that kind of developer's experience. Apple, however, has been sitting on their hands in this regard. They are moving exactly the opposite direction with this crowd. I have no idea what rationale is behind that. Did they come to a different conclusion than Microsoft or are they just failing to execute on the strategy?

threatofrain 6y ago
It’s going to be hard to beat Msft on developer ergonomics when Msft has GitHub, Azure, VSC, and TS.
toyg 6y ago
MS sells cloud services. They don't really care what machine you use, as long as you live on Azure as much as possible. That's why they give you more and more tools that improve the "remote development" experience. Apple sells silicon. They don't really care about developers; as long as they can pull enough users through the iPhone->iPad->Mac funnel, they have done their job of selling as much hardware as they can. In their view, developers bitch and moan but in the end will have to go where users go - at which point, Apple can tax them for access to the walled garden.

lavp 6y ago

> The HN crowd may seem fringe, but they are living in the future. I really don’t think the HN community is at all representative of what the masses think about. Just like in any online community, it is easy to think that the thoughts of that community somewhat resemble that of most people when that simply isn’t true. HN’s base consists highly of developers who are up to date with most things in the technology industry. The rest of the world doesn’t really care enough to compromise the comfort and reliability of Google’s suite, which lets be honest, outperforms its competition by a size-able margin, and does so with a “free” price tag. People on HN have talked about de-googling for years and I have yet to see someone outside of the computer development scene do it (or even talk about it for that manner).

pgt 6y ago
I am starting to see people switch around me, but it doesn't happen overnight. A surprisingly handful of non-tech people have asked me, "Hey, I see you use DuckDuckGo. Why not Google?" And then we have the conversation - it's a short conversation: Well, you cannot prosper in an environment if you operate on inaccurate or censored information. Google & YouTube censor information and track everything you search for or watch. Today your views align, tomorrow they may not. Secondly, you must insure yourself against tail risks, and having your Gmail account "cancelled" is a yuuuge tail risk. Therefore, avoid bundled Google products. Then a few months will go buy, and I'll see they are now using Firefox and DDG. When you have these conversations, it's important that it not be about your identity (open source! Linux!), but about risk-aversion.

akudha 6y ago

Apple VPs who are listening, especially Craig Federighi - here is an early warning for you. The point is, things like this should never happen in the first place. They are probably checking how far they can go, before it affects their bottom line.

toyg 6y ago
I don't think they are "checking"; they've carefully planned a path and are slowly and meticulously executing on it. They have no intention to stop at any point. Should the money stop flowing, they'll just come up with a new gadget. To make them backtrack on the walled garden would take an extinction-threatening event that (unfortunately) will never be on the cards as long as nobody can seriously threaten the iPhone.
- pgt 6y ago
  I’m not so sure. A handful of high-profile opinions + a few hundred low-brow peeps like myself calling out bad behaviour can have a noticeable impact on sales in the mid-term.

ruph123 6y ago

I bought the business cousin of the XPS 17, the Precision 5750. The screen-to-body ratio is amazing. And the 4k screen is beautiful, the build is attractive, thermals are good and the speakers are nice as well. (From an Apple perspective these are the things that others often get wrong) It has some design flaws („hybrid power“) but what is really messed up is the QC: I have ProSupport and already had 4 technicians over and am currently awaiting my third full replacement. Issues are all over the place: faulty trackpad, extreme coil whine, broken display, etc. Perfect device for me if they could figure out their QC. If the next one is bot perfect, I am getting a G14 which is the best performance/watt, performance/notebook volume and one of the best performing notebooks in general.

ksec 6y ago

And there are A LOT more than what is just happening here. They have burnt a lot of good faith post Steve Jobs. But judging from current Apple management, they wont act until Sales numbers decline. As shown by the MacBook Pro Keyboard fiasco. And to make it worst, they seems to think most of these problem as PR and Marketing problem and dial up the marketing instead of actually fixing it. ( You can see that with Apple's marketing, especially with recent iPhone 12, with VPs explaining in podcast )

pgt 6y ago
If there are a lot more, it's worth listing them all in a blog post. A set of evidence is more compelling than only one act that could potentially be written off as well-meaning incompetence.

s3krit 6y ago

>So if I had to choose an alternate path, what would such a path look like that could eventually approach the build quality of an Apple Macbook Pro? That product doesn't have to exist yet, it just has to be on the path. Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2 is what I use and I'm very happy with it. My requirements were a moderately high-performance laptop, hybrid/discrete graphics, not excessively bulky and good Linux support. I can't fault my choice. The only issue I had with hardware compatibility under Linux was due to me receiving it a couple days after launch and the drivers for the wifi card not yet being in the kernel used by Debian or Ubuntu (no longer an issue iirc). Happy to answer any specific questions you have.

peternicky 6y ago

Thank god I switched back to windows early this year. I absolutely love it and I do not foresee me returning to Apple for a considerable amount of time.

strgcmc 6y ago
You should know that Windows includes a similar feature (to call home and report file hashes and the user's IP for example) called SmartScreen, and with default settings it also triggers on every single application launch in the OS. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen#Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SmartScreen#Windows (also I should know, I worked on a tiny part of this feature in IE9 and Windows 8)
- peternicky 6y ago
  Thanks for the reminder. I prefer that I can disable SmartScreen easily instead of making little snitch rules on macos.
marrone12 6y ago
I use both Windows and Mac but I would never consider Windows some patron saint. The telemetry and dark patterns in Windows are much worse than what Apple does. Windows literally advertises its own browser in different parts of your OS and will regularly change the default back to Edge after updates. But overall I am pretty happy with Windows being my daily driver now that they have WSL.

Solocomplex 6y ago

Dell Precision and XPS are quality with official Linux support

mdoms 6y ago

> And even though I just bought an MBP16, Apple monitoring every binary I run makes me want to sell it immediately and never buy another iPhone, Watch or Macbook. You'll keep buying Apple stuff. I know it, you know it and Apple knows it. If all of their past transgressions hadn't changed your mind you'll keep doing it. Cut the shit.

m463 6y ago

they do all this on you iphone and watch, and even more.