6 ms·

I think there is a company that does what you suggest. I will probably get down voted for saying it, but Apple. They put in the time to make a pretty darned goo

by biturd 14y ago

I think there is a company that does what you suggest. I will probably get down voted for saying it, but Apple. They put in the time to make a pretty darned good user experience for first impressions. There's no junk, no spyware, nothing to remove. Occasionally you might get a software bundle, like Office, or Quicken, but literally just drop it in the trash and you are done with it. Rarely would you have to find an uninstaller or dig deep to remove something, and if you do, you generally brought it on yourself and should know what you are doing. But you pay extra for this, most of which people apparently don't want to do, as I always hear "I could have bought computer xyz for 25% cheaper", as they are finishing their 15 hours of cleanup.

nitrogen 14y ago
Apple is still a polished, shiny version of the consumer-focused computer, and not, I think, the developer-focused computer that ChuckMcM is describing. The locked bootloader of the iDevices and the Mac app store are but two pieces of evidence of this.
- eropple 14y ago
  Er...what? The iDevices are completely orthogonal to whether a MBP is a "developer-focused" computer. I use mine for Android development (oh noes! locked bootloaders!), Web development, and Windows development about equally, and everything works pretty much flawlessly, with the tools I need kept close at hand. (Hell, I don't even use Quicksilver anymore, as Spotlight's gotten better and Quicksilver hasn't kept up to date.) The Mac App Store is entirely optional and none of my developer tools except XCode come through it. MonoDevelop and IntelliJ I get separately, pretty much everything else comes through homebrew. Loads and loads of applications are sold outside of the Mac App Store, too, with absolutely no problems.
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    From ChuckMcM's original post: But for that company to exist, you have to pay for the products you use, and to get to that point you have to not be able to get something 'good enough' by hacking and slashing something else into shape. Based on this and other things he said, I think Macs count as the "something else" that can be hacked into shape, since Apple is not specifically targeting all of your listed use cases. I'm also not the only one who's extrapolated the recent trend of Macs more closely resembling iDevices to imagine a possible future in which Macs become appliances, and the developer-focused computer ChuckMcM envisions can come into being.
    - jamesjporter 14y ago
      I agree — if an when Apple locks down OSX so that the only source for software is the App Store, that's when ChuckMcM's company can take off. I think there are enough people who are technically minded (no even necessarily developers) and currently use OSX because its a UNIX system that "just works" and can also run popular commerical software (MS Office and Adobe CS mostly). The day Apple does this I and others will need to buy computers from somewhere else — I think there's room for a company to fill that role.
      - eldavido 14y ago
        This is exactly why I use OS X; thanks for stating it so succinctly.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    I like my MBP for this as well, but the writing is on the wall. The Mac App Store is entirely optional now but I don't have any reason to believe it will continue to be that way. The App Store on iOS is not optional and Apple sees some benefit over Android because of that (well they define it as qualities), installing from 'outside' the Sandbox has only been getting worse. So how about a development environment for Android in the 'cloud' ? How cool would that be, your files are in iCloud so you know they are safe, your tools are always current and compatible since you're just talking to them over web API, and you can pay for a months worth of access to the compilers and debuggers for cheap instead of wasting all that time to put together an open source environment or spending big bucks for the MSDN Library equivalent service. You can watch movies on your MBP while you are building the Android manifest and running regression tests on that thing in some cloud instance that spun up just for that one task and will go back to idle when its done. Click a button and blam! it's submitted to the App Store. You may not realize it but that is the vision that is driving moving away from a computer that you hold and do things with, vs a 'viewer' into a service somewhere that is doing the lifting and "adding value" in other ways. If you read the thread on the Lisp epiphany [1] then this is the same kind of thing. But rather than data is code and code is data the epiphany here is that if you have enough network bandwidth and its available 24/7, then it becomes just another bus on the backplane and where your "computer" is and where your "screen" and "keyboard" are becomes irrelevant. At the office we have folks who put their desktop computer in some room, out of the way, and using X have their 'screens and keyboard' on their actual desk, they do this because the desktop machine is modestly noisy (we have quite cases but its not silent) and really on a gigabit LAN you can't tell that your machine isn't under your desk anyway. That is coming to the world, faster than you expect, and because it will be insanely more convenient for most people supporting the few people who want to do this 'locally' will fall by the wayside. Step 1, you figure out how to present a interaction rich UX Step 2, you figure out how to move most of the data into the network. Step 3, you create tools that present the UX, process data in the network, and deliver the result. Google Docs is crushing Microsoft office, services like Box.net, DropBox, and S3 are capturing more and more of the data. Free startup idea: Github + APT, add a button to a GitHub like service that says "Build this for Ubuntu-x86-64-12.10 and give me the link to the package." Click the button, wait, then post the link to a modified APT apt-get install <URL> All of the pieces for this exist, a couple of weekends coding can put it out into the world. Now if the packages can be built in the cloud, why does your machine need to be a 'computer' again? Build it then 'add this feature with apt' is a pretty powerful thing. Probably won't happen for a couple of years at least but it will happen, too many people want it too, and too few will demand local compilation to keep it supported. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4765067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4765067 - "The Nature of Lisp"
belorn 14y ago
Apple never collect information on the users? They don't use that information for advertising? Its not a asset to the company, possible to be sold if economically useful? please remember that as a public company, they are required by law to maximize stock price.
- tadfisher 14y ago
  > please remember that as a public company, they are required by law to maximize stock price. While I agree with the rest of your rant, this is simply untrue. The best summary I can find is here: > Thanks to a legal doctrine called the business judgment rule, corporate directors who refrain from using corporate funds to line their own pockets remain legally free to pursue almost any other objective, including providing secure jobs to employees, quality products for consumers and research and tax revenues to benefit society. The idea that shareholders "own" corporations is another powerful but mistaken myth with no legal basis. Corporations are legal persons that own themselves. Stockholders own only a contract with the company, called a "share of stock," giving them limited rights under limited circumstances. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/02/opinion/la-oe-stout-stock-prices-20120902 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/02/opinion/la-oe-stout-...
  - belorn 14y ago
    An opinion article is not really an reliable source. Same law says: >directors of a corporation ... are clothed with [the] presumption, which the law accords to them, of being [motivated] in their conduct by a bona fide regard for the interests of the corporation whose affairs the stockholders have committed to their charge what that mean, is up to interpretation, but I thank you for encourage me to read up on it. Its clearly not a clean cut case as I first thought. (better link: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-companies-legally-obligated-to-maximize-profits-for-shareholders http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...)
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Corporations have a duty to act in the interest of their shareholders, but this is broadly defined. There is no requirement to maximize profit.
recoiledsnake 14y ago
>There's no junk, no spyware, nothing to remove. Occasionally you might get a software bundle, like Office, or Quicken, but literally just drop it in the trash and you are done with it Microsoft does this too, if you buy a PC from them or from a Microsoft Store. http://signature.microsoft.com/ http://signature.microsoft.com/
- douglasisshiny 14y ago
  It's sad that this exists (or has to), but I'm glad it does. I recently bought a Vizio ultrabook, which is a "Windows Signature" laptop. No crapware, trialware, bloat, etc. It came with a stripped down version of Office, Microsoft Security Essentials and Skype (which I guess could count as bloat, but I don't care). Vizio seems to get it. A sleek industrial design. Well priced. And Windows Signature. It's hard to believe that OEMs have trouble grasping this given that Apple has done it for years.
viraptor 14y ago
I see you never needed quicktime on windows? Their download page asks you for the email to "Keep me up to date with Apple news, software updates, and the latest information on products and services." Their privacy policy starts with: "You may be asked to provide your personal information anytime you are in contact with Apple or an Apple affiliated company. Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising." I don't think they're different from other companies at all.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  Little secret: if you click the download button below without entering your e-mail, it just works. Apple is very discreet in their e-mail marketing. They send maybe half a dozen emails per year, mostly after product launches or before christmas/school term/black friday/etc.
  - viraptor 14y ago
    Sure, you can workaround those problems in many ways. The point was the same as in the article - this is the default behaviour you get. This is also the behaviour a typical user will accept and have to live with.
  - lukeschlather 14y ago
    I could never figure out how to turn off the marketing that I got from having an iTunes account. These days anything Apple sends me gets caught by my spam filter and I haven't logged into my iTunes account in years.
  - recursive 14y ago
    You can get Windows to just work also, with similar workarounds.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  And there was that one time the iTunes updater installed Safari on my computer. I'm in the habit of reading through the options on installers carefully looking for those sorts of tricks, but not updaters.
kstenerud 14y ago
Definitely NOT Apple. Despite their open source site, the most important bits of the OS are closed, and so developers can't dig into the OS to figure out if the bizarre behavior they're seeing is a bug in the OS or not. Worse, they can't submit patches for things they do find. Instead, they have to go submit a radar report, which can't be seen by anyone but themselves. It's so bad that it has become common behavior to copy/paste the report to openradar and then have other developers submit duplicate reports as a way to "upvote" a bug. That is most definitely NOT developer friendly. And then we have Xcode, the program that has inspired a twitter account dedicated to its severe brokenness. And let's not forget their terrible provisioning process that always breaks in continuous integration systems, and the asinine limit of 100 test devices. Oh, and their train wreck of a command line tool suite. And then there's their absolutely bizarre behavior of replacing every internal function name with <redacted>, and disabling stdout on iOS 6. And then we have the "eat all memory" pager system in OSX that can chew through 8 gigs like candy and bring your system to its knees should you ever try to run more than 5 programs + Xcode. If there were an iOS development environment + simulator for Ubuntu, I'd wipe this laptop and switch over.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  accidental downvote - sorry Edit: Really? Someone downvoted my explanation?!!!
  - JakeSc 14y ago
    > Really? Someone downvoted my explanation?!!! Yeah, but don't let it bother you. Your comment is appreciated, but it's off-topic and doesn't provide conversational value, so I'm going to downvote it. I'm just curating for the next user. :)
- pi18n 14y ago
  I'm really enjoying your zen-like calm. If I had to enumerate everything I disliked about their experience for developers I would be foaming at the mouth after three or four bullet points. Everything you posted is basically an understatement of the truth. Like you forgot to mention that if you do bother going to the trouble of posting a radar, it's probably going to get ignored.
pi18n 14y ago
I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers. What you are talking about is the casual experience for people that don't know how to use a computer. If you don't know how to use a computer at all, Apple is really awesome. If you are trying to make your own software or sell software (particularly for phones) Apple is awful.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers. I was an Apple user and small OS X developer, and I agree completely. Three years ago, I made a living developing shareware. Then Apple decided they wanted total control over the app ecosystem and turned the "put out a good product and wait" business model into an impossibility. VersionTracker's sale to CNET and subsequent mediocritization didn't help, of course. Now I use Ubuntu and do web development. And maybe some day WebGL and related technologies will get to the point that I can go back to the tightly optimized graphics programming I really crave.
  - pi18n 14y ago
    Yes, this restrictive control over the App Store is the most unfortunate thing they've developed. I would not be surprised if they tried to lock it down entirely by first changing the default security to "App Store only", and then removing the other options. I guess great minds think alike, because I'll be jumping ship for web development on Linux in short order.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      >I guess great minds think alike, because I'll be jumping ship for web development on Linux in short order. That's great. It's really not as painful a transition as I feared it might be. It's actually pretty astonishing how far the various linux desktop environments have come as far as usability.
  - comex 14y ago
    I've never tried to sell apps, but I don't understand your complaint. Are you saying that people were no longer interested in buying your apps because they weren't in the Mac App Store? I'd think that it would improve discoverability in general, not hurt it, not to mention make the purchase process a lot easier.

by biturd 14y ago

nitrogen 14y ago

Apple is still a polished, shiny version of the consumer-focused computer, and not, I think, the developer-focused computer that ChuckMcM is describing. The locked bootloader of the iDevices and the Mac app store are but two pieces of evidence of this.

eropple 14y ago
Er...what? The iDevices are completely orthogonal to whether a MBP is a "developer-focused" computer. I use mine for Android development (oh noes! locked bootloaders!), Web development, and Windows development about equally, and everything works pretty much flawlessly, with the tools I need kept close at hand. (Hell, I don't even use Quicksilver anymore, as Spotlight's gotten better and Quicksilver hasn't kept up to date.) The Mac App Store is entirely optional and none of my developer tools except XCode come through it. MonoDevelop and IntelliJ I get separately, pretty much everything else comes through homebrew. Loads and loads of applications are sold outside of the Mac App Store, too, with absolutely no problems.
- nitrogen 14y ago
  From ChuckMcM's original post: But for that company to exist, you have to pay for the products you use, and to get to that point you have to not be able to get something 'good enough' by hacking and slashing something else into shape. Based on this and other things he said, I think Macs count as the "something else" that can be hacked into shape, since Apple is not specifically targeting all of your listed use cases. I'm also not the only one who's extrapolated the recent trend of Macs more closely resembling iDevices to imagine a possible future in which Macs become appliances, and the developer-focused computer ChuckMcM envisions can come into being.
  - jamesjporter 14y ago
    I agree — if an when Apple locks down OSX so that the only source for software is the App Store, that's when ChuckMcM's company can take off. I think there are enough people who are technically minded (no even necessarily developers) and currently use OSX because its a UNIX system that "just works" and can also run popular commerical software (MS Office and Adobe CS mostly). The day Apple does this I and others will need to buy computers from somewhere else — I think there's room for a company to fill that role.
    - eldavido 14y ago
      This is exactly why I use OS X; thanks for stating it so succinctly.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I like my MBP for this as well, but the writing is on the wall. The Mac App Store is entirely optional now but I don't have any reason to believe it will continue to be that way. The App Store on iOS is not optional and Apple sees some benefit over Android because of that (well they define it as qualities), installing from 'outside' the Sandbox has only been getting worse. So how about a development environment for Android in the 'cloud' ? How cool would that be, your files are in iCloud so you know they are safe, your tools are always current and compatible since you're just talking to them over web API, and you can pay for a months worth of access to the compilers and debuggers for cheap instead of wasting all that time to put together an open source environment or spending big bucks for the MSDN Library equivalent service. You can watch movies on your MBP while you are building the Android manifest and running regression tests on that thing in some cloud instance that spun up just for that one task and will go back to idle when its done. Click a button and blam! it's submitted to the App Store. You may not realize it but that is the vision that is driving moving away from a computer that you hold and do things with, vs a 'viewer' into a service somewhere that is doing the lifting and "adding value" in other ways. If you read the thread on the Lisp epiphany [1] then this is the same kind of thing. But rather than data is code and code is data the epiphany here is that if you have enough network bandwidth and its available 24/7, then it becomes just another bus on the backplane and where your "computer" is and where your "screen" and "keyboard" are becomes irrelevant. At the office we have folks who put their desktop computer in some room, out of the way, and using X have their 'screens and keyboard' on their actual desk, they do this because the desktop machine is modestly noisy (we have quite cases but its not silent) and really on a gigabit LAN you can't tell that your machine isn't under your desk anyway. That is coming to the world, faster than you expect, and because it will be insanely more convenient for most people supporting the few people who want to do this 'locally' will fall by the wayside. Step 1, you figure out how to present a interaction rich UX Step 2, you figure out how to move most of the data into the network. Step 3, you create tools that present the UX, process data in the network, and deliver the result. Google Docs is crushing Microsoft office, services like Box.net, DropBox, and S3 are capturing more and more of the data. Free startup idea: Github + APT, add a button to a GitHub like service that says "Build this for Ubuntu-x86-64-12.10 and give me the link to the package." Click the button, wait, then post the link to a modified APT apt-get install <URL> All of the pieces for this exist, a couple of weekends coding can put it out into the world. Now if the packages can be built in the cloud, why does your machine need to be a 'computer' again? Build it then 'add this feature with apt' is a pretty powerful thing. Probably won't happen for a couple of years at least but it will happen, too many people want it too, and too few will demand local compilation to keep it supported. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4765067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4765067 - "The Nature of Lisp"

belorn 14y ago

Apple never collect information on the users? They don't use that information for advertising? Its not a asset to the company, possible to be sold if economically useful? please remember that as a public company, they are required by law to maximize stock price.

tadfisher 14y ago
> please remember that as a public company, they are required by law to maximize stock price. While I agree with the rest of your rant, this is simply untrue. The best summary I can find is here: > Thanks to a legal doctrine called the business judgment rule, corporate directors who refrain from using corporate funds to line their own pockets remain legally free to pursue almost any other objective, including providing secure jobs to employees, quality products for consumers and research and tax revenues to benefit society. The idea that shareholders "own" corporations is another powerful but mistaken myth with no legal basis. Corporations are legal persons that own themselves. Stockholders own only a contract with the company, called a "share of stock," giving them limited rights under limited circumstances. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/02/opinion/la-oe-stout-stock-prices-20120902 http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/02/opinion/la-oe-stout-...
- belorn 14y ago
  An opinion article is not really an reliable source. Same law says: >directors of a corporation ... are clothed with [the] presumption, which the law accords to them, of being [motivated] in their conduct by a bona fide regard for the interests of the corporation whose affairs the stockholders have committed to their charge what that mean, is up to interpretation, but I thank you for encourage me to read up on it. Its clearly not a clean cut case as I first thought. (better link: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-companies-legally-obligated-to-maximize-profits-for-shareholders http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...)
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Corporations have a duty to act in the interest of their shareholders, but this is broadly defined. There is no requirement to maximize profit.

recoiledsnake 14y ago

>There's no junk, no spyware, nothing to remove. Occasionally you might get a software bundle, like Office, or Quicken, but literally just drop it in the trash and you are done with it Microsoft does this too, if you buy a PC from them or from a Microsoft Store. http://signature.microsoft.com/ http://signature.microsoft.com/

douglasisshiny 14y ago
It's sad that this exists (or has to), but I'm glad it does. I recently bought a Vizio ultrabook, which is a "Windows Signature" laptop. No crapware, trialware, bloat, etc. It came with a stripped down version of Office, Microsoft Security Essentials and Skype (which I guess could count as bloat, but I don't care). Vizio seems to get it. A sleek industrial design. Well priced. And Windows Signature. It's hard to believe that OEMs have trouble grasping this given that Apple has done it for years.

viraptor 14y ago

I see you never needed quicktime on windows? Their download page asks you for the email to "Keep me up to date with Apple news, software updates, and the latest information on products and services." Their privacy policy starts with: "You may be asked to provide your personal information anytime you are in contact with Apple or an Apple affiliated company. Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising." I don't think they're different from other companies at all.

ricardobeat 14y ago
Little secret: if you click the download button below without entering your e-mail, it just works. Apple is very discreet in their e-mail marketing. They send maybe half a dozen emails per year, mostly after product launches or before christmas/school term/black friday/etc.
- viraptor 14y ago
  Sure, you can workaround those problems in many ways. The point was the same as in the article - this is the default behaviour you get. This is also the behaviour a typical user will accept and have to live with.
- lukeschlather 14y ago
  I could never figure out how to turn off the marketing that I got from having an iTunes account. These days anything Apple sends me gets caught by my spam filter and I haven't logged into my iTunes account in years.
- recursive 14y ago
  You can get Windows to just work also, with similar workarounds.
Symmetry 14y ago
And there was that one time the iTunes updater installed Safari on my computer. I'm in the habit of reading through the options on installers carefully looking for those sorts of tricks, but not updaters.

kstenerud 14y ago

Definitely NOT Apple. Despite their open source site, the most important bits of the OS are closed, and so developers can't dig into the OS to figure out if the bizarre behavior they're seeing is a bug in the OS or not. Worse, they can't submit patches for things they do find. Instead, they have to go submit a radar report, which can't be seen by anyone but themselves. It's so bad that it has become common behavior to copy/paste the report to openradar and then have other developers submit duplicate reports as a way to "upvote" a bug. That is most definitely NOT developer friendly. And then we have Xcode, the program that has inspired a twitter account dedicated to its severe brokenness. And let's not forget their terrible provisioning process that always breaks in continuous integration systems, and the asinine limit of 100 test devices. Oh, and their train wreck of a command line tool suite. And then there's their absolutely bizarre behavior of replacing every internal function name with <redacted>, and disabling stdout on iOS 6. And then we have the "eat all memory" pager system in OSX that can chew through 8 gigs like candy and bring your system to its knees should you ever try to run more than 5 programs + Xcode. If there were an iOS development environment + simulator for Ubuntu, I'd wipe this laptop and switch over.

pooriaazimi 14y ago
accidental downvote - sorry Edit: Really? Someone downvoted my explanation?!!!
- JakeSc 14y ago
  > Really? Someone downvoted my explanation?!!! Yeah, but don't let it bother you. Your comment is appreciated, but it's off-topic and doesn't provide conversational value, so I'm going to downvote it. I'm just curating for the next user. :)
pi18n 14y ago
I'm really enjoying your zen-like calm. If I had to enumerate everything I disliked about their experience for developers I would be foaming at the mouth after three or four bullet points. Everything you posted is basically an understatement of the truth. Like you forgot to mention that if you do bother going to the trouble of posting a radar, it's probably going to get ignored.

pi18n 14y ago

I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers. What you are talking about is the casual experience for people that don't know how to use a computer. If you don't know how to use a computer at all, Apple is really awesome. If you are trying to make your own software or sell software (particularly for phones) Apple is awful.

mistercow 14y ago
>I am an Apple user, and the Apple experience has jumped off a cliff for developers. I was an Apple user and small OS X developer, and I agree completely. Three years ago, I made a living developing shareware. Then Apple decided they wanted total control over the app ecosystem and turned the "put out a good product and wait" business model into an impossibility. VersionTracker's sale to CNET and subsequent mediocritization didn't help, of course. Now I use Ubuntu and do web development. And maybe some day WebGL and related technologies will get to the point that I can go back to the tightly optimized graphics programming I really crave.
- pi18n 14y ago
  Yes, this restrictive control over the App Store is the most unfortunate thing they've developed. I would not be surprised if they tried to lock it down entirely by first changing the default security to "App Store only", and then removing the other options. I guess great minds think alike, because I'll be jumping ship for web development on Linux in short order.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >I guess great minds think alike, because I'll be jumping ship for web development on Linux in short order. That's great. It's really not as painful a transition as I feared it might be. It's actually pretty astonishing how far the various linux desktop environments have come as far as usability.
- comex 14y ago
  I've never tried to sell apps, but I don't understand your complaint. Are you saying that people were no longer interested in buying your apps because they weren't in the Mac App Store? I'd think that it would improve discoverability in general, not hurt it, not to mention make the purchase process a lot easier.