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I've been pondering giving up on Macs for a while and this blind and rather stupid deferral to "AI" is going to accelerate the process. Almost nobody asked for

I've been pondering giving up on Macs for a while and this blind and rather stupid deferral to "AI" is going to accelerate the process. Almost nobody asked for this. I personally would have wanted one program to not stop starting with a cryptic message after upgrading to macOS 15.1 earlier today. But hey, crazies like me who want a decently working software are apparently not welcome in the customer base. The only reason I am still staying with Apple for my desktop needs is that I paid $8000 for my iMac Pro and that was just some short 5 years ago. But as time goes by, buying 1-2 specialized text rendering displays and going full Linux looks more and more attractive, especially with Fedora and Manjaro now offering the "immutable" distros i.e. you can frak around with your environment but then revert everything if you don't like it (or the contrary, do a DB commit of sorts i.e. have your changes persist after reboot) -- those features make backing up entire workstations even easier. Sprinkle an external ZFS server and the ability to just zfs send/recv entire disks with encryption and compression and I think just some 2-3 short years into the future I'll be laughing at Macs. Apple keeps dropping the ball. iOS 18 lost all my tab groups in Safari as well. And Photos randomly chooses not to show pictures in the big Photos feed; you have to know which day they were saved to be able to see them. /facepalm Apple is now in decline, it can't be more obvious by these fairly outrageous bugs + the fact that they are now regular followers like everyone else and are jumping on the "AI" bandwagon.

diggan 2y ago
> Apple is now in decline I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. At that point it was clear that professional users weren't the focus anymore, and I promptly left the ecosystem. I still have a iPhone (12 mini) that I only keep because it still works, but every time CarPlay tries to murder me in traffic, I get one step closer to just yeeting that phone into the sea.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  That was the low point for MacBooks. The newer models are much better.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    Hardware-wise they undoubtedly are. That's not contested and it's easy to check and prove. Software though? Not at all impressed. They still check every program you ever start and it's very noticeable by the performance. Or they don't care about Intel Macs anymore, that's also a real possibility.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  Oh I agree, I cringed hard back then as well but at least the Mac software and speed was decent so I figured the beginning of their slow downfall will not affect me for a while, and I was right. Nowadays though... I am stuck with a former workstation-grade hardware where Neovim needs FIVE SECONDS TO START because macOS is auditing each and every of its syscalls. I switch to my (now allegedly ancient) full-AMD laptop with 5500U CPU and the only thing that needs more than 0.5 secs to start is Firefox. I was not able to find one thing that did not react instantly. I am seriously considering just plugging my 35" gaming display to the Linux laptop and make that my main work setup. And you are right -- pro users made Apple rich but are now undesired because they apparently demand too much ("Who needs stable software, bleeeerrrrgh! Am I right guys?"). Yeah, screw Apple. I am back on the hamster-wheel employment grind now, sadly, but once I stabilize a bit more I'll just move to 2 HiDPI display and assemble a future-proof Linux workstation to go wit them. Pretty sure that with periodical thermal paste maintenance it can easily last me 10 years and I'd only change it if there's something seriously tempting out there (about which I am very doubtful; the tech giants were only worried about becoming oligopolists and they care not about their users' needs). Apple had its opportunities. They wasted them. Sure, many people will consider them the top for a while still and will keep buying, but their pricing policy has made it blindingly obvious that less people are buying and they are now doing their damnedest to compensate for this by either including less in the package, making the carton package itself cheaper, or just making all products except the base models outrageously overpriced. That's how they keep the profit margins. The curse of being a public-traded company and all that. Those policies will work for them. For some time more. I wonder what happens after.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Something's seriously wrong with your system. I just launched nvim on mine and couldn't measurably detect the interval between hitting enter to exec the command and seeing the welcome screen. Even opening and immediately quitting my substantially customized Emacs took 1.7s. Your setup should not be taking many seconds to do those routine things. Last time I experienced something like that, I had a dying harddrive that was logging a continual series of read timeouts.
    - 2y ago
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  >> Apple is now in decline >I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. It doesn't look like it: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=aapl&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=aapl&ie...
  - diggan 2y ago
    Obviously, by the context, it should be clear we're not talking about the stock price, probably the least interesting data point.
    - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
      What are you talking about then, market share? unit numbers? gross profit? net profit? If I was judging by the context I'd say it's just a good old cynical whinge which is OK but very subjective.
      - diggan 2y ago
        Quality, robustness, stability and longevity, especially important for developers and other professionals requiring quality hardware and software.
      - pdimitar 2y ago
        User goodwill. I'm a programmer and I can easily accept they don't care about us. Fine. But I've been hearing very casual users loudly complaining as well. At one point sales drop below what executives find acceptable. It has already started for iPhones and has been like that for several years.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    There is a long tail of consequences for short-sighted policies and people monitoring stock prices always seem to be taken by surprise by them when they occur. You should include additional factors in your analysis.
- hbn 2y ago
  Apple silicon Macs have been many people's favorite computers they've ever purchased (myself included) and blew out the value proposition for buying practically any other computer, unless you specifically need Windows for some reason. iPhones have gotten so good they can barely come up with anything new to add year-over-year. Young people in the west are almost exclusively buying iPhones because people like them. They basically own the tablet space, if you're looking for a tablet there's almost no reason to go with anything other than an iPad. Same for smart watches, they make the best selling watching in the world. For the amount of devices they move, they're shockingly reliable and have a smoother customer support / coverage system than any other company I've had to deal with. That's why people keep coming back. It's pretty bizarre to say they're in decline. The only area I can see active decline is how badly they let Spotify eat their lunch with music streaming when they used to basically own digital music distribution.
  - fourfour3 2y ago
    Exactly. The 2016-2018 models were the low point, but Apple has listened and has improved since then. The 2019 16” was a step in the right direction. More ports, better cooling, better keyboard. The M1 Pro/Max line up brought back HDMI, MagSafe, SD card slots, and are seriously fast, quiet, & cool. The M2 and M3 releases have been iterative performance improvements and haven’t made any stupid decisions. Apple’s also invested development effort into useful tooling for developers like their virtualisation framework - this has made Docker on Mac vastly more pleasant for instance.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    If you find my statement bizarre then you're either super lucky or haven't paid much attention. Even their Photos app started making mistakes since iOS 18.
  - seec 2y ago
    People buy their hardware for entirely different reasons than what you make up. They have financial success but that doesn't mean much. I have had 2 Apple Watch and I mostly find it to be a deeply flawed poorly thought product, especially for the price.

diggan 2y ago

> Apple is now in decline I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. At that point it was clear that professional users weren't the focus anymore, and I promptly left the ecosystem. I still have a iPhone (12 mini) that I only keep because it still works, but every time CarPlay tries to murder me in traffic, I get one step closer to just yeeting that phone into the sea.

kstrauser 2y ago
That was the low point for MacBooks. The newer models are much better.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  Hardware-wise they undoubtedly are. That's not contested and it's easy to check and prove. Software though? Not at all impressed. They still check every program you ever start and it's very noticeable by the performance. Or they don't care about Intel Macs anymore, that's also a real possibility.
pdimitar 2y ago
Oh I agree, I cringed hard back then as well but at least the Mac software and speed was decent so I figured the beginning of their slow downfall will not affect me for a while, and I was right. Nowadays though... I am stuck with a former workstation-grade hardware where Neovim needs FIVE SECONDS TO START because macOS is auditing each and every of its syscalls. I switch to my (now allegedly ancient) full-AMD laptop with 5500U CPU and the only thing that needs more than 0.5 secs to start is Firefox. I was not able to find one thing that did not react instantly. I am seriously considering just plugging my 35" gaming display to the Linux laptop and make that my main work setup. And you are right -- pro users made Apple rich but are now undesired because they apparently demand too much ("Who needs stable software, bleeeerrrrgh! Am I right guys?"). Yeah, screw Apple. I am back on the hamster-wheel employment grind now, sadly, but once I stabilize a bit more I'll just move to 2 HiDPI display and assemble a future-proof Linux workstation to go wit them. Pretty sure that with periodical thermal paste maintenance it can easily last me 10 years and I'd only change it if there's something seriously tempting out there (about which I am very doubtful; the tech giants were only worried about becoming oligopolists and they care not about their users' needs). Apple had its opportunities. They wasted them. Sure, many people will consider them the top for a while still and will keep buying, but their pricing policy has made it blindingly obvious that less people are buying and they are now doing their damnedest to compensate for this by either including less in the package, making the carton package itself cheaper, or just making all products except the base models outrageously overpriced. That's how they keep the profit margins. The curse of being a public-traded company and all that. Those policies will work for them. For some time more. I wonder what happens after.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Something's seriously wrong with your system. I just launched nvim on mine and couldn't measurably detect the interval between hitting enter to exec the command and seeing the welcome screen. Even opening and immediately quitting my substantially customized Emacs took 1.7s. Your setup should not be taking many seconds to do those routine things. Last time I experienced something like that, I had a dying harddrive that was logging a continual series of read timeouts.
  - 2y ago
tonyedgecombe 2y ago
>> Apple is now in decline >I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. It doesn't look like it: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=aapl&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=aapl&ie...
- diggan 2y ago
  Obviously, by the context, it should be clear we're not talking about the stock price, probably the least interesting data point.
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    What are you talking about then, market share? unit numbers? gross profit? net profit? If I was judging by the context I'd say it's just a good old cynical whinge which is OK but very subjective.
    - diggan 2y ago
      Quality, robustness, stability and longevity, especially important for developers and other professionals requiring quality hardware and software.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      User goodwill. I'm a programmer and I can easily accept they don't care about us. Fine. But I've been hearing very casual users loudly complaining as well. At one point sales drop below what executives find acceptable. It has already started for iPhones and has been like that for several years.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  There is a long tail of consequences for short-sighted policies and people monitoring stock prices always seem to be taken by surprise by them when they occur. You should include additional factors in your analysis.
hbn 2y ago
Apple silicon Macs have been many people's favorite computers they've ever purchased (myself included) and blew out the value proposition for buying practically any other computer, unless you specifically need Windows for some reason. iPhones have gotten so good they can barely come up with anything new to add year-over-year. Young people in the west are almost exclusively buying iPhones because people like them. They basically own the tablet space, if you're looking for a tablet there's almost no reason to go with anything other than an iPad. Same for smart watches, they make the best selling watching in the world. For the amount of devices they move, they're shockingly reliable and have a smoother customer support / coverage system than any other company I've had to deal with. That's why people keep coming back. It's pretty bizarre to say they're in decline. The only area I can see active decline is how badly they let Spotify eat their lunch with music streaming when they used to basically own digital music distribution.
- fourfour3 2y ago
  Exactly. The 2016-2018 models were the low point, but Apple has listened and has improved since then. The 2019 16” was a step in the right direction. More ports, better cooling, better keyboard. The M1 Pro/Max line up brought back HDMI, MagSafe, SD card slots, and are seriously fast, quiet, & cool. The M2 and M3 releases have been iterative performance improvements and haven’t made any stupid decisions. Apple’s also invested development effort into useful tooling for developers like their virtualisation framework - this has made Docker on Mac vastly more pleasant for instance.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  If you find my statement bizarre then you're either super lucky or haven't paid much attention. Even their Photos app started making mistakes since iOS 18.
- seec 2y ago
  People buy their hardware for entirely different reasons than what you make up. They have financial success but that doesn't mean much. I have had 2 Apple Watch and I mostly find it to be a deeply flawed poorly thought product, especially for the price.