12 ms·

Developers: We are no longer Apple’s target market

49 points by adambrod 14y ago

spullara 14y ago
If his site was still up, I would read it and then write the comment. But instead, I will make some sweeping assumptions about what it says based on the title. We were never their target market. It is a happy accident that what works for their consumers can also work great for developers. There were always pain points adopting the Mac as your development platform. For example, when it first came out, the JVM available for it was woefully old and out of date. Generally you had to wait 6 months to a year to get the last GA version. Now that the latest is built nightly by Oracle, this is a huge improvement. On Mountain Lion, almost every command line utility (that isn't GPL v3) has been updated like git, ruby, svn, python, etc. At the end of the day, this developer loves that it is still a unix command line with a pretty face. More than I can say for any version of Windows or Linux.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  I used to work at CERN in the early Mac OS X days, Apple came around with a presentation to convince us that using Mac OS X would be a very nice upgrade path than Scientific Linux, given the BSD roots, equal footing between Java and Objective-C for Cocoa development and nice GUI applications for scientific work. How things have changed since those days.
  - mpweiher 14y ago
    Just curious, how have things changed? Apart from aligning message with reality wrt. to the Cocoa/Java bridge fiasco?
    - pjmlp 14y ago
      Well, the Darwin layer does not bring that much for scientist used to customize Linux distributions for high volume data processing. Java, which was used a lot on my CERN days for data visualization was kicked out, after having a first class status on the platform. OpenGL was frozen for several years in version 2.1, while Windows and Linux were having OpenGL 3 and 4 drivers available. OpenCL although designed by Apple has better support in the other platforms. The development experience seems to be oriented towards development of iPhone applications. Finally the Apple tax, which doesn't bring much, when compared with hardware volume licenses plus Scientific Linux installations.
- AskHugo 14y ago
  You might want to take a look at http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/ . It's an upcoming GNU/Linux distribution that has a really "pretty face".
  - terhechte 14y ago
    I switched from various Linux distributions in 2003 to Mac OS X, not so much because of the looks, but because it had support for Linux tools in addition to native support for apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Cubase, Flash, and many more - basically the creative app building blocks. I still follow Linux news because I liked it as an OS, it just lacked some of the apps that were crucial for me. Nowadays app support has grown (Gimp is still no Photoshop though), but I can't say that I find any Linux distribution particularly visually attractive. I don't like elmentaryos much either - I think the current Ubuntu 12+ looks much better. So for me, using a Mac (despite that nowadays I write Mac & iOS apps) was and is mostly about the software that wasn't available on other operating systems.
  - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    That dock showing favourites and applications that are open (with a dot below those that are) and that top notification bar are strangely familiar... Trying to place where I've seen them before.
    - xentronium 14y ago
      Unless I missed sarcasm, it's docky[1], which in itself is a clone of os x dock. http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Docky_wiki http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Dock...
      - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
        It was sarcasm. I was channeling my inner Gruber but I should obviously leave it to him in the future. Looking at it in more detail it's actually rather nice...
  - hdra 14y ago
- kungpoo 14y ago
  Here's the cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2yvVQUJ:johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-target-market/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2y...
jyap 14y ago
TLDR summary: "I recently upgraded from a mid-2008 17″ MacBook Pro to a mid-2012 13″ MacBook Air" "I finally had statistical evidence to backup the feelings shared in the development community that Apple doesn’t prioritize OS X anymore" iOS happened. Technology progresses. You adapt. iOS also gives you another platform to target and make apps for.
- z3phyr 14y ago
  How to create software on a tablet?(not for a tablet) Consumerism is --- all the touch interface support, dropping the desktops and laptops, dropping the workstations, and paving the way for not-developer-freindly tablets, glasses, cellphones, put anything.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    You can do Android development on Android tablets with AIDE: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5haWRlLnVpIl0 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&#3.... I think Google needs to do more in the future about making Android useful or compelling for large screens, too, though.
    - z3phyr 14y ago
      Software can also be developed using SL4A.... The problem is, tablets do not provide the native - feel at home - environment to the programmers. To me, and probably to any serious developer out there, desktops (with maybe a tilling wm) provide the best dev environment. If you don't believe it... Try to give your desktop a tablet like interface with something like Gnome3 or metroUI and then see the difference ;) . The touch interface is not designed for power users. It is designed for the people who like to have beer and listen to music.
      - Aardwolf 14y ago
        I like to have beer and listen to music and write code productively, at the same time!
olgeni 14y ago
> We are no longer Apple’s target market And even that would be ok; the problem is when developers are actively despised by Apple, or treated like digital peons. But since I'm stuck with Android leaking file descriptors right now, even the peon option seems attractive...
grey-area 14y ago
Some interesting stats in the article: iOS = 75% of company revenue Mac OS = 14% of company revenue Unlike the early days of Apple when the company embraced and found refuge in the hacker mentality, Apple has emerged as a consumer company thanks to the wide reach and accessibility of its iOS products. The thesis is that Mac OS and being hacker friendly are becoming increasingly less relevant to Apple, and consumers are now the focus. That's broadly true, however as a long-time user I'd say the focus on consumers (not developers/hackers) has been there since at least the late 90s, and possibly the 80s (with a gap in the middle where they floundered). Re Mac OS, I fully expect them to migrate desktops to iOS completely at some point and just have a few interface tweaks for the mouse/window paradigm. The move of AppleTV to iOS foreshadows this, and the numbers above make it almost inevitable, given the cost of maintaining two ecosystems, and the fact they now have an operations guy in charge. It'll be interesting to see just how far they take developer restrictions and sandboxing on the desktop, and whether that affects their market share at all. I suspect as they are a consumer company that it won't matter to them if they lose the hackers/developers to some extent, and they will continue to attract enough developers to survive at least in the short term, while pulling them ever closer into the Apple orbit. There is a great and growing tension there though between the interests of developers (who ideally would like a cross platform solution and the flexibility to use any tools) and Apple (who want lock-in to their ecosystem). The broader problem of developing for an ecosystem like this is that it is in the control of one vendor, and you must play by their rules - the Amazon, Google, Microsoft and even Twitter platforms come with similar problems - either you adopt their chosen technology this year, and accept the restrictions they wish to impose, or you're suddenly frozen out and may fail as a result. It's a lesson for anyone building a business on someone else's ecosystem - it's hard to avoid, but does come with dangers. I'll be interested to see if the open web has a second renaissance as people recognise the deep difficulties of controlled ecosystems - its one great advantage is that it sidesteps the question of control by one platform owner, which sets it apart from all the binary or closed web platforms currently being touted as the future.
- pfisch 14y ago
  I have always used macs in passing, but in the past year I have really been using OSX a lot and from what I have used I get the impression that Apple never catered to developers or else their whole gui system would be very different. Has OSX ever really been a developer friendly environment? Every single actual gui OS feature I have used is terrible and skin deep. Having a terrible gui and slapping a linux console on it is not the same as having a real visual OS. Yes having a linux console is wonderful, but it is not an excuse for how completely lacking in features the actual visual interface is. You know, the part Apple is responsible for. What I mean by skin deep is that it works well for a consumer that isn't very computer literate really and just wants to write documents and use the internet, but if you try to do something deeper than that you basically discover that you can't or it is terrible. Finder is awful across the board. Yes you can get a replacement, but what the hell is a gui operating system for if not looking at files in the file tree. I could go into detail about why it is awful but if you have used it than you really already know. I don't think windows 7 is the greatest os or has a perfect file explorer, but it is crazy how much better it is than the one in osx. Outputting to multiple monitors and the management of the output is terrible. Currently my understanding is that you basically have to go into the linux console to have any control over it.(Like turning off your laptop monitor, or any kind of management of the individual monitors past which one is located on the right) Apple seems to not give a fuck about backwards compatibility across ios and osx. If you have an older mac(not even very old really, less than 4-5 years) and you want to update the OS to the newest one the device can handle, which is an OSX version before mountain lion; for some reason the only way to do this is to call apple on the phone and read them your credit card info so they can ship it to you which will take weeks. Even though they used to be available in the app store and the physical store. Literally the day Mountain Lion came out they basically discontinued any distribution of Lion outside of this crazy calling apple method. Also new SDKs for ios break code in undocumented ways including in features that Apple provides(like the video controller). The simulator can give wildly different output than the actual devices and each iteration of the ipad/iphone can give its own different output on the same code. This can and often is App breaking stuff. XCode is much worse than Visual Studio in too many ways to list. Even having something basic like tabs for different files is terrible, also the vi plugin for it is not good. Also imo obj-c is a pretty unpleasant language but that is trivial. I don't love windows or microsoft at all, but apple does not cater to developers in any way. Even the way they deal with developers being in their little ecosystems is very different. Microsoft XBLIG/WP/Win 8 sign up and publishing system is no cake walk but it is orders of magnitude better than how Apple treats us. Apple makes great hardware, beautiful amazing hardware. However their software is really awful and basically only caters to consumers, and really unsophisticated ones at that.(Note: Apple did not make linux, any features of OSX you are using from a console is really not something Apple is responsible for. Apple is responsible for the gui, xcode, itunes, ios, and any other little app they made that comes with osx)
alexyoung 14y ago
I have no empirical evidence that Apple's turnaround was based on developer advocacy, but my friends and family that can afford Macs use Macs due to my recommendations in the mid 2000s. One thing I've noticed about fellow British developers is many of us don't actually have Macs at home because we simply can't afford them. You'll see us with work-purchased Apple laptops at events, but back home we have our trusty PCs, serving triple duty as games machines and entertainment devices. They might use Linux, Windows, or dual boot; but you won't find many of us dropping £1000+ for a personal Apple laptop. So now those friends and family with ageing Macs are buying tablets, because they do 90% of what they need to do at less than half the price. Meanwhile, Chromebooks have a certain appeal, and I think Google should look adapting them to suit developers (outside of switching on Developer Mode and installing another Linux distribution.)
- coob 14y ago
  As a fellow UK developer, I resent you extrapolating your personal anecdotes out to cover others you know absolutely zero about. Your generalisms don't ring true at all.
Aardwolf 14y ago
I think there is hope for this whole mobile and tablet future if, and only if, it will be possible to plug your phone/tablet into something that has a keyboard, mouse and two large monitors on your desk to work on that (and then take it elsewhere and do the same there). On top of that, optionally the device needs allow you to install and run any software you want without restrictions, and basically have unix shells and desktop UI when plugged in the stuff mentioned above. Of course, also, the CPUs and RAM need to be on-par with current desktops, but it's kind of realistic that this can happen, and the actual desktop box could be reserved for things that require some extra computing power.
- hdra 14y ago
  sounds a lot like the Surface, minus the unix shells, that is.. I guess the real question is whether it is possible to simplify computing for the general customers while at the same time preserving the ability to tinker with the computer comfortably for the developers..
- twm 14y ago
  sss
diminish 14y ago
Being persuaded in another discussion on HN, that chromebooks should not aim to be for developers, now I read the complaints that Apple does not target developers neither. I am curious, how is the situation with Win 8? What is the future machines for developers?
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  This is a facetious question if I ever saw one. Apple machines should be developer-oriented, the author is complaining that they've lost/given up on the plot for the power users who catapulted iOS to popularity by developing for it. If you are developing for Mac or iOS, use a Mac. If you've developing for the web, maybe a Mac. The thing is, you were complaining about the lack of an octocore, 8GB RAM chrome book, which is at odds with the purpose of a chromebook. You can develop web apps on a Mac. You can even SSH to a Mac or Linux box from your chrome book. The chromebook model is to provide the bare minimum a user needa to get into the Google ecosystem, so that the hardware is attainable for low-income users, and becomes a complete commodity for businesses. Nowhere in there do they account for power users; it's not part of their plan, and they don't need developers on their platform to succeed
  - diminish 14y ago
    "The chromebook model is to provide the bare minimum a user needs to get into the Google ecosystem, so that the hardware is attainable for low-income users, and becomes a complete commodity for businesses" Could you point me where you get this if it is not your idea? In contrary, I always thought ChromeOS is the model where web is the app; and all you need is a web browser to do anything you want; which includes "development". As a developer, using Firefox/Firebug, Chrome Dev tools, Online editors/Ace to do everyday job, I am myself developing on a cloud IDE to do anything I want online. The question is, why can't I only use a browser,(then why not Chromebook) to do development? And what is facetious here?
    - alanctgardner2 14y ago
      You're conflating this post, which is about Apple more or less mistreating developers, with Google's conscious decision to produce $200 ARM thin clients. They're not really the same; Apple still wants you to develop on their hardware, they more or less shackle you to it. Based on what you described your development stack is supported on Chromebooks. That's cool. Eclipse used to run on my 11" netbook as well, it doesn't mean it was a good way to develop, nor was it designed to be.
mpweiher 14y ago
Well, the Mac was the "Computer for the rest of us", so I am not sure how this is news: developers were never the target market. IIRC, the original Mac also needed a Lisa for development with the MPW (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/programming-faq/#b http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/programming-faq/#b). So things have actually improved tremendously since then, with free and improving dev tools, open-source Unix underpinnings etc. The end of the world will be postponed...
ludovicurbain 14y ago
Apple's target market always was the uninformed and unskilled untrained masses, including many so-called developers who are clueless enough to prefer OSX to linux.
digitalengineer 14y ago
It's not just developers. It's PRO users of any kind. Graphic designers and video professionals haven't been catered to as well. Heck, we're still waiting for a new Mac workhorse that's not an iMac or laptop. Video editors have been duped by the new iOS like Final Cut Pro that was not backwards compatible.
jheriko 14y ago
Wait what? Didn't MS squash Apple before their comeback precisely because they catered so much more to developers... ?
nicholassmith 14y ago
Developers are a relatively small percentage, and in some ways not an overly profitable one as whilst we want the best we're also prone to pushing machines as hard as possible, as long as possible. I've been developing on OS X for something like 8 years now, ranging from C++ dev work up to RoR and some other bits. I've never had any real issues with it as a development platform, never felt like the OS was getting in my way or anything similar. I also heavily use Linux in my day-to-day and that's definitely more developer focussed but it can also be way less productive at times. ML is a solid consumer focussed OS but it's still a very nice development platform as well, but thats my opinion.
jpalacios 14y ago
FYI adding a trailing forward slash to the url fixes the database error: http://johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-target-market/ http://johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-targe...

49 points by adambrod 14y ago

If his site was still up, I would read it and then write the comment. But instead, I will make some sweeping assumptions about what it says based on the title. We were never their target market. It is a happy accident that what works for their consumers can also work great for developers. There were always pain points adopting the Mac as your development platform. For example, when it first came out, the JVM available for it was woefully old and out of date. Generally you had to wait 6 months to a year to get the last GA version. Now that the latest is built nightly by Oracle, this is a huge improvement. On Mountain Lion, almost every command line utility (that isn't GPL v3) has been updated like git, ruby, svn, python, etc. At the end of the day, this developer loves that it is still a unix command line with a pretty face. More than I can say for any version of Windows or Linux.

pjmlp 14y ago
I used to work at CERN in the early Mac OS X days, Apple came around with a presentation to convince us that using Mac OS X would be a very nice upgrade path than Scientific Linux, given the BSD roots, equal footing between Java and Objective-C for Cocoa development and nice GUI applications for scientific work. How things have changed since those days.
- mpweiher 14y ago
  Just curious, how have things changed? Apart from aligning message with reality wrt. to the Cocoa/Java bridge fiasco?
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Well, the Darwin layer does not bring that much for scientist used to customize Linux distributions for high volume data processing. Java, which was used a lot on my CERN days for data visualization was kicked out, after having a first class status on the platform. OpenGL was frozen for several years in version 2.1, while Windows and Linux were having OpenGL 3 and 4 drivers available. OpenCL although designed by Apple has better support in the other platforms. The development experience seems to be oriented towards development of iPhone applications. Finally the Apple tax, which doesn't bring much, when compared with hardware volume licenses plus Scientific Linux installations.
AskHugo 14y ago
You might want to take a look at http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/ . It's an upcoming GNU/Linux distribution that has a really "pretty face".
- terhechte 14y ago
  I switched from various Linux distributions in 2003 to Mac OS X, not so much because of the looks, but because it had support for Linux tools in addition to native support for apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Cubase, Flash, and many more - basically the creative app building blocks. I still follow Linux news because I liked it as an OS, it just lacked some of the apps that were crucial for me. Nowadays app support has grown (Gimp is still no Photoshop though), but I can't say that I find any Linux distribution particularly visually attractive. I don't like elmentaryos much either - I think the current Ubuntu 12+ looks much better. So for me, using a Mac (despite that nowadays I write Mac & iOS apps) was and is mostly about the software that wasn't available on other operating systems.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  That dock showing favourites and applications that are open (with a dot below those that are) and that top notification bar are strangely familiar... Trying to place where I've seen them before.
  - xentronium 14y ago
    Unless I missed sarcasm, it's docky[1], which in itself is a clone of os x dock. http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Docky_wiki http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Dock...
    - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
      It was sarcasm. I was channeling my inner Gruber but I should obviously leave it to him in the future. Looking at it in more detail it's actually rather nice...
- hdra 14y ago
kungpoo 14y ago
Here's the cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2yvVQUJ:johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-target-market/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2y...

jyap 14y ago

TLDR summary: "I recently upgraded from a mid-2008 17″ MacBook Pro to a mid-2012 13″ MacBook Air" "I finally had statistical evidence to backup the feelings shared in the development community that Apple doesn’t prioritize OS X anymore" iOS happened. Technology progresses. You adapt. iOS also gives you another platform to target and make apps for.

z3phyr 14y ago
How to create software on a tablet?(not for a tablet) Consumerism is --- all the touch interface support, dropping the desktops and laptops, dropping the workstations, and paving the way for not-developer-freindly tablets, glasses, cellphones, put anything.
- mtgx 14y ago
  You can do Android development on Android tablets with AIDE: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5haWRlLnVpIl0 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&#3.... I think Google needs to do more in the future about making Android useful or compelling for large screens, too, though.
  - z3phyr 14y ago
    Software can also be developed using SL4A.... The problem is, tablets do not provide the native - feel at home - environment to the programmers. To me, and probably to any serious developer out there, desktops (with maybe a tilling wm) provide the best dev environment. If you don't believe it... Try to give your desktop a tablet like interface with something like Gnome3 or metroUI and then see the difference ;) . The touch interface is not designed for power users. It is designed for the people who like to have beer and listen to music.
    - Aardwolf 14y ago
      I like to have beer and listen to music and write code productively, at the same time!

olgeni 14y ago

> We are no longer Apple’s target market And even that would be ok; the problem is when developers are actively despised by Apple, or treated like digital peons. But since I'm stuck with Android leaking file descriptors right now, even the peon option seems attractive...

grey-area 14y ago

Some interesting stats in the article: iOS = 75% of company revenue Mac OS = 14% of company revenue Unlike the early days of Apple when the company embraced and found refuge in the hacker mentality, Apple has emerged as a consumer company thanks to the wide reach and accessibility of its iOS products. The thesis is that Mac OS and being hacker friendly are becoming increasingly less relevant to Apple, and consumers are now the focus. That's broadly true, however as a long-time user I'd say the focus on consumers (not developers/hackers) has been there since at least the late 90s, and possibly the 80s (with a gap in the middle where they floundered). Re Mac OS, I fully expect them to migrate desktops to iOS completely at some point and just have a few interface tweaks for the mouse/window paradigm. The move of AppleTV to iOS foreshadows this, and the numbers above make it almost inevitable, given the cost of maintaining two ecosystems, and the fact they now have an operations guy in charge. It'll be interesting to see just how far they take developer restrictions and sandboxing on the desktop, and whether that affects their market share at all. I suspect as they are a consumer company that it won't matter to them if they lose the hackers/developers to some extent, and they will continue to attract enough developers to survive at least in the short term, while pulling them ever closer into the Apple orbit. There is a great and growing tension there though between the interests of developers (who ideally would like a cross platform solution and the flexibility to use any tools) and Apple (who want lock-in to their ecosystem). The broader problem of developing for an ecosystem like this is that it is in the control of one vendor, and you must play by their rules - the Amazon, Google, Microsoft and even Twitter platforms come with similar problems - either you adopt their chosen technology this year, and accept the restrictions they wish to impose, or you're suddenly frozen out and may fail as a result. It's a lesson for anyone building a business on someone else's ecosystem - it's hard to avoid, but does come with dangers. I'll be interested to see if the open web has a second renaissance as people recognise the deep difficulties of controlled ecosystems - its one great advantage is that it sidesteps the question of control by one platform owner, which sets it apart from all the binary or closed web platforms currently being touted as the future.

pfisch 14y ago
I have always used macs in passing, but in the past year I have really been using OSX a lot and from what I have used I get the impression that Apple never catered to developers or else their whole gui system would be very different. Has OSX ever really been a developer friendly environment? Every single actual gui OS feature I have used is terrible and skin deep. Having a terrible gui and slapping a linux console on it is not the same as having a real visual OS. Yes having a linux console is wonderful, but it is not an excuse for how completely lacking in features the actual visual interface is. You know, the part Apple is responsible for. What I mean by skin deep is that it works well for a consumer that isn't very computer literate really and just wants to write documents and use the internet, but if you try to do something deeper than that you basically discover that you can't or it is terrible. Finder is awful across the board. Yes you can get a replacement, but what the hell is a gui operating system for if not looking at files in the file tree. I could go into detail about why it is awful but if you have used it than you really already know. I don't think windows 7 is the greatest os or has a perfect file explorer, but it is crazy how much better it is than the one in osx. Outputting to multiple monitors and the management of the output is terrible. Currently my understanding is that you basically have to go into the linux console to have any control over it.(Like turning off your laptop monitor, or any kind of management of the individual monitors past which one is located on the right) Apple seems to not give a fuck about backwards compatibility across ios and osx. If you have an older mac(not even very old really, less than 4-5 years) and you want to update the OS to the newest one the device can handle, which is an OSX version before mountain lion; for some reason the only way to do this is to call apple on the phone and read them your credit card info so they can ship it to you which will take weeks. Even though they used to be available in the app store and the physical store. Literally the day Mountain Lion came out they basically discontinued any distribution of Lion outside of this crazy calling apple method. Also new SDKs for ios break code in undocumented ways including in features that Apple provides(like the video controller). The simulator can give wildly different output than the actual devices and each iteration of the ipad/iphone can give its own different output on the same code. This can and often is App breaking stuff. XCode is much worse than Visual Studio in too many ways to list. Even having something basic like tabs for different files is terrible, also the vi plugin for it is not good. Also imo obj-c is a pretty unpleasant language but that is trivial. I don't love windows or microsoft at all, but apple does not cater to developers in any way. Even the way they deal with developers being in their little ecosystems is very different. Microsoft XBLIG/WP/Win 8 sign up and publishing system is no cake walk but it is orders of magnitude better than how Apple treats us. Apple makes great hardware, beautiful amazing hardware. However their software is really awful and basically only caters to consumers, and really unsophisticated ones at that.(Note: Apple did not make linux, any features of OSX you are using from a console is really not something Apple is responsible for. Apple is responsible for the gui, xcode, itunes, ios, and any other little app they made that comes with osx)

alexyoung 14y ago

I have no empirical evidence that Apple's turnaround was based on developer advocacy, but my friends and family that can afford Macs use Macs due to my recommendations in the mid 2000s. One thing I've noticed about fellow British developers is many of us don't actually have Macs at home because we simply can't afford them. You'll see us with work-purchased Apple laptops at events, but back home we have our trusty PCs, serving triple duty as games machines and entertainment devices. They might use Linux, Windows, or dual boot; but you won't find many of us dropping £1000+ for a personal Apple laptop. So now those friends and family with ageing Macs are buying tablets, because they do 90% of what they need to do at less than half the price. Meanwhile, Chromebooks have a certain appeal, and I think Google should look adapting them to suit developers (outside of switching on Developer Mode and installing another Linux distribution.)

coob 14y ago
As a fellow UK developer, I resent you extrapolating your personal anecdotes out to cover others you know absolutely zero about. Your generalisms don't ring true at all.

Aardwolf 14y ago

I think there is hope for this whole mobile and tablet future if, and only if, it will be possible to plug your phone/tablet into something that has a keyboard, mouse and two large monitors on your desk to work on that (and then take it elsewhere and do the same there). On top of that, optionally the device needs allow you to install and run any software you want without restrictions, and basically have unix shells and desktop UI when plugged in the stuff mentioned above. Of course, also, the CPUs and RAM need to be on-par with current desktops, but it's kind of realistic that this can happen, and the actual desktop box could be reserved for things that require some extra computing power.

hdra 14y ago
sounds a lot like the Surface, minus the unix shells, that is.. I guess the real question is whether it is possible to simplify computing for the general customers while at the same time preserving the ability to tinker with the computer comfortably for the developers..
twm 14y ago
sss

diminish 14y ago

Being persuaded in another discussion on HN, that chromebooks should not aim to be for developers, now I read the complaints that Apple does not target developers neither. I am curious, how is the situation with Win 8? What is the future machines for developers?

alanctgardner2 14y ago
This is a facetious question if I ever saw one. Apple machines should be developer-oriented, the author is complaining that they've lost/given up on the plot for the power users who catapulted iOS to popularity by developing for it. If you are developing for Mac or iOS, use a Mac. If you've developing for the web, maybe a Mac. The thing is, you were complaining about the lack of an octocore, 8GB RAM chrome book, which is at odds with the purpose of a chromebook. You can develop web apps on a Mac. You can even SSH to a Mac or Linux box from your chrome book. The chromebook model is to provide the bare minimum a user needa to get into the Google ecosystem, so that the hardware is attainable for low-income users, and becomes a complete commodity for businesses. Nowhere in there do they account for power users; it's not part of their plan, and they don't need developers on their platform to succeed
- diminish 14y ago
  "The chromebook model is to provide the bare minimum a user needs to get into the Google ecosystem, so that the hardware is attainable for low-income users, and becomes a complete commodity for businesses" Could you point me where you get this if it is not your idea? In contrary, I always thought ChromeOS is the model where web is the app; and all you need is a web browser to do anything you want; which includes "development". As a developer, using Firefox/Firebug, Chrome Dev tools, Online editors/Ace to do everyday job, I am myself developing on a cloud IDE to do anything I want online. The question is, why can't I only use a browser,(then why not Chromebook) to do development? And what is facetious here?
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    You're conflating this post, which is about Apple more or less mistreating developers, with Google's conscious decision to produce $200 ARM thin clients. They're not really the same; Apple still wants you to develop on their hardware, they more or less shackle you to it. Based on what you described your development stack is supported on Chromebooks. That's cool. Eclipse used to run on my 11" netbook as well, it doesn't mean it was a good way to develop, nor was it designed to be.

mpweiher 14y ago

Well, the Mac was the "Computer for the rest of us", so I am not sure how this is news: developers were never the target market. IIRC, the original Mac also needed a Lisa for development with the MPW (http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/programming-faq/#b http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/programming-faq/#b). So things have actually improved tremendously since then, with free and improving dev tools, open-source Unix underpinnings etc. The end of the world will be postponed...

ludovicurbain 14y ago

Apple's target market always was the uninformed and unskilled untrained masses, including many so-called developers who are clueless enough to prefer OSX to linux.

digitalengineer 14y ago

It's not just developers. It's PRO users of any kind. Graphic designers and video professionals haven't been catered to as well. Heck, we're still waiting for a new Mac workhorse that's not an iMac or laptop. Video editors have been duped by the new iOS like Final Cut Pro that was not backwards compatible.

jheriko 14y ago

Wait what? Didn't MS squash Apple before their comeback precisely because they catered so much more to developers... ?

nicholassmith 14y ago

Developers are a relatively small percentage, and in some ways not an overly profitable one as whilst we want the best we're also prone to pushing machines as hard as possible, as long as possible. I've been developing on OS X for something like 8 years now, ranging from C++ dev work up to RoR and some other bits. I've never had any real issues with it as a development platform, never felt like the OS was getting in my way or anything similar. I also heavily use Linux in my day-to-day and that's definitely more developer focussed but it can also be way less productive at times. ML is a solid consumer focussed OS but it's still a very nice development platform as well, but thats my opinion.

jpalacios 14y ago

FYI adding a trailing forward slash to the url fixes the database error: http://johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-target-market/ http://johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-targe...