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I guess you can't out Apple apple. Apple has the culture and cultural force to sell you a laptop with ports you don't like or a weird keyboard. Part of buying a

I guess you can't out Apple apple. Apple has the culture and cultural force to sell you a laptop with ports you don't like or a weird keyboard. Part of buying an Apple product is being on a certain cutting design edge and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac. In the PC world, the consumer space is dominated by anti-design nerdy guys who demand every port imaginable, and for good reason, and the business end is similar with their own legacy demands. Big changes in any way, be it features or lack-of are frowned upon and mocked (no wireless less space than a nomad -lame). No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different. And even then, you can just bootcamp Windows or Linux and buy the 'real' Apple you want anyway. Honestly, its a small miracle something like Apple even exits in the tech space. Its usually a race to the bottom on half-cooked features, general cheapness, and terrible UIs. Somehow Apple broke free of that and never looked back.

Klonoar 6y ago
> and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac. Complaints that you commonly see about Apple products are, I find, similar to reading complaints when you're apartment shopping: those who complain have reason to do so, and those with good experiences don't necessarily feel the need to write about them. For instance: those who experienced botched Catalina upgrades that caused Mail.app issues? I never experienced that, and I've two significantly sized accounts attached. In fact I upgraded my last machine from High Sierra to Catalina with no issues at all. The "beta" parts of macOS that people call out are just never things I've fought against - and I run a fairly custom-ish setup to boot. On that same note, I could throw a rock and find a KDE user who complains about KMail having issues... but you won't find many KMail users saying "yeah it just works and life is great". Software is complex. I wouldn't call macOS "beta" and by the same token I'm not going to label other OS/DE combos that either. (They also fixed the keyboard, so I'm over that complaint. Would I prefer the ThinkPad keyboard? Absolutely. But the new one works fine and fits the design aesthetic of the device.) tl;dr: The only "agreement" I find myself signing is that the thing looks and feels, and functions, like a premium product. I find myself endlessly frustrated that if I go car shopping for a premium item, I have different options... yet I just don't feel like I have this with computers. > No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different. This is exactly why I'm saying that my ideal product wouldn't compete with the PC market. I fully recognize that's a losing battle.
dartharva 6y ago
Good take. It's true that Apple's products cater to a fundamentally different market if we observe the nuances; they are more akin to luxury products than normal computers. The PC market demands functional computing devices that are extensible, modifiable and repairable, things Macbooks have virtually no advantage in.

Klonoar 6y ago

> and being someone's beta tester. Its not a sharp edge and its a very mature beta, but there's a sort of agreement you sign your name to when you buy a Mac. Complaints that you commonly see about Apple products are, I find, similar to reading complaints when you're apartment shopping: those who complain have reason to do so, and those with good experiences don't necessarily feel the need to write about them. For instance: those who experienced botched Catalina upgrades that caused Mail.app issues? I never experienced that, and I've two significantly sized accounts attached. In fact I upgraded my last machine from High Sierra to Catalina with no issues at all. The "beta" parts of macOS that people call out are just never things I've fought against - and I run a fairly custom-ish setup to boot. On that same note, I could throw a rock and find a KDE user who complains about KMail having issues... but you won't find many KMail users saying "yeah it just works and life is great". Software is complex. I wouldn't call macOS "beta" and by the same token I'm not going to label other OS/DE combos that either. (They also fixed the keyboard, so I'm over that complaint. Would I prefer the ThinkPad keyboard? Absolutely. But the new one works fine and fits the design aesthetic of the device.) tl;dr: The only "agreement" I find myself signing is that the thing looks and feels, and functions, like a premium product. I find myself endlessly frustrated that if I go car shopping for a premium item, I have different options... yet I just don't feel like I have this with computers. > No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different. This is exactly why I'm saying that my ideal product wouldn't compete with the PC market. I fully recognize that's a losing battle.

dartharva 6y ago

Good take. It's true that Apple's products cater to a fundamentally different market if we observe the nuances; they are more akin to luxury products than normal computers. The PC market demands functional computing devices that are extensible, modifiable and repairable, things Macbooks have virtually no advantage in.