3 ms·

That was a lot of words to reiterate that Apple is a consumer focused company. Not enterprise or B2B.

turtletontine 2y ago
Bingo. So many decisions made perfect sense once I realized Apple is basically a lifestyle brand that makes electronics, and Microsoft is a massive bureaucratic B2B conglomerate. Totally explained Microsoft’s ineptitude with consumer facing products (remember Windows Phone? Zune?), yet they have a stranglehold on the business world. This is the opposite: Apple is designed for locking individuals into its lifestyle (or ecosystem, if you prefer), and has mostly given up on enterprise facing products.
- 12_throw_away 2y ago
  Heh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...
  - robocat 2y ago
    I also wish Microsoft would treat developers as a seperate customer segment to market to. When the people using your tools hate the tools, that isn't a good sign.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      Between GitHub, VS Code, and TypeScript it is hard to make the case Microsoft doesn’t focus on developers as a segment.
      - antifa 2y ago
        I wouldn't use any of those if it required windows.
    - droopyEyelids 2y ago
      It’s not a good sign if they have the choice to use different tools. But if microsoft can make sure they don’t have a choice it’s a neutral sign!
    - josephg 2y ago
      What are you referring to? Microsoft’s developer tools are top notch. I’d pick visual studio over Xcode any day of the week - Xcode is so crazy buggy that I don’t know how anyone at Apple gets work done on it. And VSCode is probably the most popular ide on the planet.
    - kbolino 2y ago
      I'm sure they could do more, but ... They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
      Developers developers developers developers
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Stuff like this? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
  - josephg 2y ago
    They do - that’s the point of the Mac Pro. The problem is software. Lots of expensive pcie ports won’t help much when you can’t put a GPU in any of them to use cuda and such. There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software. In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
    - astrange 2y ago
      There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doing. (Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.) If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby. As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
      - gopher_space 2y ago
        If you were able to keep your housekeeping out of my way I wouldn’t have been looking at metrics in the first place. The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.
        astrange 2y ago
        "System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are. System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  The remote computers are still Macs.
- mulmen 2y ago
  Microsoft also created the Xbox and every developer I know runs a Macbook.
  - dboreham 2y ago
    No MacBook here.
  - darthwalsh 2y ago
    I use a MacBook not because it's the best software for development, but because it's the hardest to virtualize. Our project supports the three major desktop operating systems. I have Windows and Linux VMs that I can switch to when I need to test something on those OS. No serious corporation is going to risks Hackintosh.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- walrus01 2y ago
  TBH it's still possible to use a macbook air as basically a fancy unix-like workstation that has great battery life, and not buy into any of the apple ecosystem. No icloud account, no icloud backup, no iphone, no use of itunes or appletv, no apple synchronization of anything. The day that stops being viable is the day I stop buying them. The extent of my 'cloud' involvement with apple is the operating system software update mechanism and having an account to download Xcode, so that I can install compiler + macports on a new machine.
mattl 2y ago
I’d love to know what Apple uses internally for stuff like email and calendaring. I’m fairly sure they don’t use iCloud which is why some of that stuff is still less than desirable. We can probably assume that Microsoft uses some kind of Exchange set up and Google will use a version of Gmail. Whenever I meet with people from Apple, it’s over WebEx. I heard a rumor that they use some Oracle enterprise groupware, which is presumably https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Beehive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Beehive
- rcarmo 2y ago
  They use Oracle mail servers for their corporate e-mail. Ironically, the direct descendant of the Sun Internet Mail Service software I wrestled with back in the early 2000s.
  - mattl 2y ago
    Any idea what Oracle’s mail server is called? Is it the thing I linked? I don’t find it all that surprising: - Sun/NeXT were doing stuff together before Apple and NeXT merged - Lots of Java stuff at Apple immediately following the merger including a Cocoa-Java bridge and WebObjects is rewritten in Java - Oracle/Sun stuff doesn’t need to be run on Windows - Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were good friends
    - rcarmo 2y ago
      Yeah: Oracle Communications Messaging Server (8.1 and above over the past 5 years).
alwillis 2y ago
How long before these new Apple-made servers are available (or a variant) as a backend for video editing? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more-than-500-billion-usd-in-the-us-over-the-next-four-years/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more... Opening a New Manufacturing Facility in Houston As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs. Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.

Bingo. So many decisions made perfect sense once I realized Apple is basically a lifestyle brand that makes electronics, and Microsoft is a massive bureaucratic B2B conglomerate. Totally explained Microsoft’s ineptitude with consumer facing products (remember Windows Phone? Zune?), yet they have a stranglehold on the business world. This is the opposite: Apple is designed for locking individuals into its lifestyle (or ecosystem, if you prefer), and has mostly given up on enterprise facing products.

12_throw_away 2y ago
Heh, it sure would be nice if they made a computer that was explicitly for getting work done (hell, they could call it a "workstation"). I miss the days when big tech still saw a market for this ...
- robocat 2y ago
  I also wish Microsoft would treat developers as a seperate customer segment to market to. When the people using your tools hate the tools, that isn't a good sign.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    Between GitHub, VS Code, and TypeScript it is hard to make the case Microsoft doesn’t focus on developers as a segment.
    - antifa 2y ago
      I wouldn't use any of those if it required windows.
  - droopyEyelids 2y ago
    It’s not a good sign if they have the choice to use different tools. But if microsoft can make sure they don’t have a choice it’s a neutral sign!
  - josephg 2y ago
    What are you referring to? Microsoft’s developer tools are top notch. I’d pick visual studio over Xcode any day of the week - Xcode is so crazy buggy that I don’t know how anyone at Apple gets work done on it. And VSCode is probably the most popular ide on the planet.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    I'm sure they could do more, but ... They own GitHub, they make Visual Studio Code, they made C#/.NET open-source and cross-platform, they added Linux support to Windows (twice), and they created WinGet, just off the top of my head.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
    Developers developers developers developers
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Stuff like this? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
- josephg 2y ago
  They do - that’s the point of the Mac Pro. The problem is software. Lots of expensive pcie ports won’t help much when you can’t put a GPU in any of them to use cuda and such. There’s also so much inefficient, bloated crap that ships with modern macOS that I would never pick it for a proper workstation these days. I have CPU meters in the system tray, and there’s always some stupid process gobbling up all my spare cycles. The other day it was some automatic iPhone backup process. (Why was that using so much cpu, Apple?). Sometimes it’s indexing my hard drive, or looking for faces in photos, or who knows what stupid thing. It’s always something, and its almost always first party software. In comparison, the cores on my Linux workstation are whisper quiet, and usually idle at 0%. The computer waits for me to give it work.
  - astrange 2y ago
    There is no reason to care about this. There's two or three different mechanisms that stop background processes from having any effect on actual work you're doing. (Namely background QoS, it only runs on the efficiency cores, and more expensive activities stop when the user is active.) If you're having an actual specific problem report it with Feedback Assistant. If you aren't, I recommend removing all that useless monitoring stuff and getting an outdoor hobby. As an actual performance engineer I've basically never in my life gotten a useful report from someone looking at those every day. Although other vibes based bugs like "I feel like my battery life is bad lately" often do find something.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      If you were able to keep your housekeeping out of my way I wouldn’t have been looking at metrics in the first place. The “bug” here is system activity I’m not deliberately invoking.
      - astrange 2y ago
        "System activity" isn't a valuable user metric because not all CPU %s are equal and CPU % isn't a consumable resource. Fans, battery life, case temperature, some others are. System activity can certainly cause problems like paging out all the file cache pages you wanted to use when you get back to the machine. It doesn't have to though.
scarface_74 2y ago
The remote computers are still Macs.
mulmen 2y ago
Microsoft also created the Xbox and every developer I know runs a Macbook.
- dboreham 2y ago
  No MacBook here.
- darthwalsh 2y ago
  I use a MacBook not because it's the best software for development, but because it's the hardest to virtualize. Our project supports the three major desktop operating systems. I have Windows and Linux VMs that I can switch to when I need to test something on those OS. No serious corporation is going to risks Hackintosh.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
walrus01 2y ago
TBH it's still possible to use a macbook air as basically a fancy unix-like workstation that has great battery life, and not buy into any of the apple ecosystem. No icloud account, no icloud backup, no iphone, no use of itunes or appletv, no apple synchronization of anything. The day that stops being viable is the day I stop buying them. The extent of my 'cloud' involvement with apple is the operating system software update mechanism and having an account to download Xcode, so that I can install compiler + macports on a new machine.

mattl 2y ago

I’d love to know what Apple uses internally for stuff like email and calendaring. I’m fairly sure they don’t use iCloud which is why some of that stuff is still less than desirable. We can probably assume that Microsoft uses some kind of Exchange set up and Google will use a version of Gmail. Whenever I meet with people from Apple, it’s over WebEx. I heard a rumor that they use some Oracle enterprise groupware, which is presumably https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Beehive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Beehive

rcarmo 2y ago
They use Oracle mail servers for their corporate e-mail. Ironically, the direct descendant of the Sun Internet Mail Service software I wrestled with back in the early 2000s.
- mattl 2y ago
  Any idea what Oracle’s mail server is called? Is it the thing I linked? I don’t find it all that surprising: - Sun/NeXT were doing stuff together before Apple and NeXT merged - Lots of Java stuff at Apple immediately following the merger including a Cocoa-Java bridge and WebObjects is rewritten in Java - Oracle/Sun stuff doesn’t need to be run on Windows - Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were good friends
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Yeah: Oracle Communications Messaging Server (8.1 and above over the past 5 years).

alwillis 2y ago

How long before these new Apple-made servers are available (or a variant) as a backend for video editing? https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more-than-500-billion-usd-in-the-us-over-the-next-four-years/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more... Opening a New Manufacturing Facility in Houston As part of its new U.S. investments, Apple will work with manufacturing partners to begin production of servers in Houston later this year. A 250,000-square-foot server manufacturing facility, slated to open in 2026, will create thousands of jobs. Previously manufactured outside the U.S., the servers that will soon be assembled in Houston play a key role in powering Apple Intelligence, and are the foundation of Private Cloud Compute, which combines powerful AI processing with the most advanced security architecture ever deployed at scale for AI cloud computing. The servers bring together years of R&D by Apple engineers, and deliver the industry-leading security and performance of Apple silicon to the data center.