Rather than attempting to wow the world with “innovative” new designs like the failed Mac Pro, Apple could and should simply provide updates and speed bumps to the entire lineup on a much more frequent basis. The much smaller Apple of the mid-2000s managed this with ease. Their current failure to keep the Mac lineup fresh, even as they approach a trillion dollar market cap, is both baffling and frightening to anyone who depends on the platform for their livelihood.
Given the incredibly sad state of the Mac lineup, it’s difficult to understand how WWDC could have come and gone with no hardware releases. Apple’s transparency in 2017 regarding their miscalculation with the Mac Pro seemed encouraging, but over a year later, the company has utterly failed to produce anything tangible. Instead, customers are still forced to choose between purchasing new computers that are actually years old or holding out in the faint hope that hardware updates are still to come. Every day, the situation becomes more dire.
The Rogue Amoeba tea is not wrong. Apple’s Mac line-up is pretty much a joke at this point, and despite Tim Cook’s endless “we have great stuff in the pipeline” remarks, Apple is simply failing to deliver. The Mac is still not in a good spot.
The appeal of Macs in recent years was always the combination of a modern, graphical OS with a unix-like (mostly BSD and GNU) shell environment underneath. Windows was always better than the equivalent MacOS release at desktop applications going back to Win9x (and arguably earlier for certain things). GNU/Linux distributions always provided a better unix-like shell environment as seen by their utter dominance of the server and “unix workstation” markets (read: “swarm of terminals, a browser, and some media viewers” workflows as well as legacy *nix applications that needed better GPU horsepower than a Mac could provide). Combining the two at the OS level rather than virtual machines was aimed directly at webdevs using Macs to build on AWS. Instead, the equivalent Microsoft offering is Win10 plus WSL plus Azure, on significantly better hardware.
Apple has had years to fix their desktop OS and desktop/laptop hardware, but have not done so. At this rate, it won’t be long before Linux takes away Apple’s position as the second most popular desktop due to Apple simply giving up.
I don’t disagree with anything but the last sentence…
I love Linux, but lets be realistic. The current “growth rate” of Linux on desktop is completely flat, and has been for years… Unless you actually count Android and ChromeOS, there has been almost no growth at all.
There are more people running ChromeOS than desktop Linux (roughly double the number). OSX is 20x that. I honestly would be absolutely amazed if Linux hit even 3% market share in the desktop market in the next 5 years – I just don’t see any reason that would happen.
Yes, Apple is screwing up and are at risk to losing market share. I just don’t think Linux is where those users are going to go. Some sure, but I don’t think it would be the majority. If the ecosystem for the Linux subsystem on Windows gets fleshed out a bit more and they shore up some loss ends, I expect that is where a significant portion of the “web developer” crowd ends up landing. For the rest of the typical Mac userbase, Linux is a non-starter…
Me personally? I’m sticking with Macs for now. If I were to switch, it would probably be to Windows 10 (which I use quite a lot anyway and I could make it work for me if I had to). Linux just has too many pain points to work with for me as a daily work machine, which is pretty much why those of us developer types use Macs currently even use them.
I use a Mac basically because I want bash plus a good UI and the ability to run things like Office and Photoshop and whatnot, and even though the hardware is becoming a bit anemic by comparison, it isn’t that far behind the curve and the fit and finish is still top notch. I wish I could get faster processors, better GPUs, more memory, etc., but I don’t absolutely need it for what I do.
ps. This is all assuming a mass exodus happens. While I consider that a possibility, I also don’t really think it is likely any time soon. Things are bad in Mac land, but they are not THAT bad yet.
I’m so annoyed with the macOS lineup, and my 2013 MacBook’s GPU is dying (actually, I think it’s a $2 transistor, but same effect). I’m not going to spend the $400-$600 touchbar tax for a feature I really don’t even want, next a keyboard that can’t stand a little dust, on a 4 year old platform and a dinky GPU.
So I’m left going back to Windows (which I HATE – and WSL isn’t quite enough, it’s weird, and buggy), or switching to Linux. The Chrome OS with Linux idea is pretty appealing. I’m not certain it’ll be what I need yet, I’d love to play with it though and try to figure it out. If it’s good, I may switch to Chrome OS. I can probably even get by using older version of the Adobe programs, or just use my old MacBook if I need them (which is in frequently at this point). Or maybe I can even use the Android version in a pinch – those are the questions I have to answer.
I’m annoyed enough with Apple to be asking these questions. The last time I was this annoyed, it was Windows, and I jumped to macOS.
I was thinking about this today, after the Apple fan guy I work with was again telling me to just use a Mac.
If it were not for macOS, I think Linux would be huge as a desktop platform right now. Let’s face it, people who need a Unix back end are the ones who tend to move to a Mac. They work okay-ish for Unix type work. But they have so much.. well crap on top of it that is abstracting it from being truly useful without installing a ton of third party stuff.
Compare this to a typical Linux distribution that has thousands of programs available with a simple command. This is one of the reasons why I use Linux over a Mac, I don’t have to install homebrew to utilize a bunch of open source stuff, I just ‘apt install $program’.
I also prefer the work flow of a Gnome desktop, people think I’m nuts, but I can press one key and type for any application, I have split windows easily from Tilix, and I use zsh plugins to make everything snazzy. Plus RabbitVCS for different source repo utilities. Can’t do some of those things in macos.
Linux is making more sense for developers as apple locks down the platform.
That said, you can simply type command + spacebar to do a spotlight search and type any app name and hit enter and it runs. The same can be done in windows. I think it’s win + s to get to cortana
Tim Cook is killing all the advantages steve built up. He’s killed Mac gaming. Things were actually not terrible around 2010 or so. Many games were getting ported. Of course that’s right before they gave up on OpenGL. He’s killing web/app developer use by not refreshing anything and treating the pro line like an expensive toy for facebook. He’s killed OpenCL just as machine learning is starting to get big. They could have built out a stack and owned that.
In a few years, macs will be running on iphone processors. That’s where we are headed.
Actually, Ubuntu has had that ability too, since they introduced the Unity desktop environment. Initially I didn’t like it, but the convenience quickly grew on me.
On my other system I run FreeBSD with the JWM window manager. There I configure only the menu items I use on daily basis – so I don’t have to hunt around for my most used applications.
All game engines that matter to professional studios already support Metal.
What matters in ML is middleware like Tensor Flow or Caffe, which already support Metal.
Khronos has lost too many developers sticking with their bare bones C APIs, leaving developers to go fishing for additional libraries or language bindings.
Yeah it’s not like it’s some sort of huge problem to install Homebrew. Thousands manage it.
At a previous job, I wrote some utilities in C++ (and Boost) to speed up our client network testing. Some devs got Macbooks for their work laptops instead of the standard issue Lenovos. Could they get homebrew compiling my utilities? Not on your life, not gcc, not clang.
On that occasion, both Linux and Windows were far more friendlier and intuitive to get proper compilers working.
Why would Homebrew compile your utilities? The vast majority of people use it as intended: as a package manager. If your code didn’t compile on macOS then fix the code?
It was standard C++14, compiled with both the latest GCC and Clang at the time with the strictest warnings as errors, on both Windows and Linux. Mac did not ship an up to date Clang at the time.
Fuck you, “fix the code”. Nice try, but you just showed your fanboi.
Lots of systems still don’t have C++14 compliance.
http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support
And that page doesn’t list the embedded world, where finding C++11 support is even worse.
You don’t need to tell me
We were only using Linux and Windows, and Mac support was new, and at the time both GCC and Clang were basically C++14 complete (it was around 2015/16). I used GCC and Clang for both Linux and Windows to compile the code, and Clang on the whole tends to be more strict and compliant than GCC.
At the very least, Clang should have been working for Mac, since most Clang developers seem to be on Macs themselves. The “official” Clang for Mac seemed only to be available for XCode, was old, and the version number was completely out of step with the Clang project itself. And the main point was that even after installing Homebrew, the testers never managed to get Clang or GCC downloaded and installed from Homebrew.
In general -Werr makes little sense unless you want your code to “break” on a newer GCC / Clang. I’ve also seen a clean build on GCC but not on Clang.
Edited 2018-06-20 16:55 UTC
Desktop, I’m not so sure – but as a development platform, you’re probably right. Aside from people working in media production, most of the (professional) Mac users I know are folks who are developing applications that will be hosted on Linux-based servers – and like OS X because it is (or at least was) the easiest way to get a suitable dev platform & a user-friendly desktop platform in one OS.
Though it seems that general UNIX knowledge is becoming less-applicable to OS X as time goes by. I’m not much of a developer, but I’ve found that to be true with general sysadmin stuff – E.g. I recently helped a friend setup an old Macbook Air to act as a fileserver, so he could access his files while traveling.
The part that I expected to be the most difficult (getting an SSH server running in the first place) turned out to be ridiculously simple, just a matter of clicking a “Remote Access” checkbox – but getting the SSH server to listen on a port other than 22 (given the frequency of brute-force attempts against the default SSH port)? That turned out to be the hard part, and took the better part of an hour to figure out – I don’t remember the details now, but I also don’t think that I fully understand what I ended up doing at the time… I think it involved duplicating some kind of XML config file (.plist?) for the SSH server, modifying it to use a non-default port, and then using some kind of OS X-specific command line tool to automatically run run a second copy of sshd using the config from the duplicate/modified config file.
(Compared to every other UNIX-like OS I’ve used, where it’s just a matter of editing one line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config & restarting sshd. Which generally doesn’t take more than 5 minutes, and that’s only if you have to google both the location of sshd_config & the command to restart sshd.)
Join the club, I’m in the exact same position, albeit with a slightly older MBP (which I’ve had to disable the discrete GPU).
Linux has already hit 3% market share:
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/09/01/1639250/linux-desktop-mark…
https://itsfoss.com/linux-market-share/
Statistical blip? Holding steady at around 2%.
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?op…
Apple used to be known for quality hardware, and a pride in design testing and refining, and building systems out of quality components.
Whether you were tech nerd, or a lay person, you know that an apple device was a good investment – through actually understanding what they’d built, or through a well deserved reputation.
After the 2015 MacBook Pro models, Apple took a turn towards becoming a fashion brand – just like their other iDevices.
Apple’s focus is now on emojis – I don’t say this as a joke, just look at the actual output of apple engineers, a good proportion of their announcements is emojis – colours and thin-ness.
As long as a device looks good on a sales bench – that’s all that matters.
Look at actual fact design decisions that back this up:
1. reduced battery life – very few companies intentionally reduce battery life, and even reduce battery capacity too – apple did
2. release a keyboard that a large proportion of customers dislike from an ergonomic perspective – this is a disaster in itself as most keyboard from most makers keep most users mostly happy – that’s the quality bar – .. but there’s more..
3. release a keyboard that fails under normal conditions – through dust, thermal distortion and other factors. apple will never release stats but indications are:
– quote from apple staff “the repair rooms are full of them”
– three, yes three, class action lawsuits
– half-scientific surveys show failure rates of 40% within the first year – from eg corporations that issues hundreds find about 40% fail within 12months
4. release a design that’s not meant to be used. take the 2016/17 nTB MacBook Pro – which has a fast CPU which you can’t use because thermal throttling kicks in pretty soon to prevent overheating – you may as well use a 5 year old laptop (which I went back to)
5. Touch Bar – breaks all common rules of UX deign .. looking away from the screen to the keyboard to press a virtual button which. you can’t feel with just your fingers.. disaster from a useability perspective but great for adverts and looking nice on the sales bench
6. OS updates over the last few years have not been about security or performance or efficiency or broadening the application base. They’ve been about emojis and night modes and iTunes syncing. Have you seen phoronix’ periodic benchmarks – it is clear Apple make no attempt to tune the underlying OS. You may retort and point to APFS. How many years is it that it still can’t be used on spinning disk or hybrid disks? It’s not a priority.
Apple devices are not meant to be used. They are meant to be appreciated and worshiped from a distance, or worn so others can appreciate your purchase.
Apple, A Fashion Company Based in California.
I agree with everything you said, which makes me really wish you wouldn’t also reference Phoronix
Even APFS – it’s there in macOS on SSDs because they made it for iOS, and ported it back to macOS. it’s not like they created it for prime use on macOS.
I agree with the rest of this post. It makes me sad really, I want to still like Apple. But they are killing me right now.
I fail to see why being developed for iOS makes APFS a bad thing. If anything, HFS+ has sorely needed a replacement. After all, it has it’s roots in the Hierarchal File System first used in 1985.
Missed the point. It’s fine, but it wasn’t created due to any effort to improve macOS
That was the point.
…why recreate the wheel? macOS and iOS are based on the same kernel, so file systems should be fairly portable between the two. The real question is why it took so long for macOS to get it.
macOS received it at it’s first release after it was finished.
It was beta in Sierra (Sept 2016), finished and added to iOS 10.3 in March of 2017, then made default in High Sierra in Sept 2017, the next release.
That doesn’t seem at all peculiar to me.
You are still missing the point. The conversation is about how macOS and Mac hardware have been deprioritized, and how the fact that features are mostly being ported from iOS, rather than made first for macOS demonstrates that.
I guess it’s because of corporate bullshit and all teams fighting with each other. I suspect team X developed APFS, but they didn’t want to “sell” it to the macos team. Knowing corporate retardness, mac team probably doesn’t even get source code for APFS or any chip spefications, APFS gets binary only SDK for iOS, and iOS kernel team doesn’t get iPhone JTAG access, but they maintain the BSP. My colleagues from another company had to reverse engineer chip specs because chip developers inside the same company didnt want to give them any documentation, but required them to develop driver for linux … (facepalm)
Edited 2018-06-17 07:07 UTC
Though APFS is not stricly a HSF+ replacement – HSF+ is still used on spinning disks / APFS can’t be used on them…
The failure isn’t just with Cook, but he doesn’t seem to understand the real PRO customers. He doesn’t get that developers, graphics designers, video editors and others need fast, up-to-date CPUs and GPUs to get their jobs done. He only thinks about facebook, surfing the web, maybe email.
The macbook pro should become the macbook for regular people and they should build a new fast platform for real users. Similarly, bump the Mac Pro and Mac Mini desktops. If they can’t figure out a case design, go back to the mac pro case from the 2010 period. Those were great and upgradable.
Those old 2010 units were great – I’d take more thickness to get better batter life. Plus, if you need to defend yourself a heavier, thicker MacBook will be quite handy!
Say what you want about Steve Jobs, he had vision and knew how to market it. He^aEURTMs sorry missed at Apple.
Considering their profits and profit margins, they could afford to be more responsive to current technologies.
I guess all of their resources are being used to advance software processing to the squeeze the least-crappy photos from the $26 cameras used in $900 iPhones…
I think it’s due to what happens to all very successful companies with lots of cash in the bank: complacency.
They aren’t under pressure to excel, and it shows. There are so many little flaws and bugs which have crept in, that MacOS is clearly no longer tested properly or worked on by people who care. Silly example: when the screen blanks after interactivity, instead of showing the lock screen, it shows the actual desktop and permits a certain degree of interactivity before stopping input. If I hit Esc, it shows the lock screen, and I can log back in. But the sheer insecurity of having the lock screen not work properly is absurd. And this is a fully up to date 2015 MBP.
I find that amusing.
The stated reason of Apple migrating years ago to a X86 platform was the relative stagnation of PowerPC development, with Steve Jobs openly blaming IBM for it.
Now that Apple can update yearly their entire desktop lineup if they wanted to, since everything inside it is pretty much commodity off-the-shelf X86-64 hardware, they don’t.
Yes but Steve Jobs doesn’t run the company anymore. It’s run by an accountant and starts resembling the company Jobs found when he returned to Apple: Ruthless focus on quick margins, letting Mac hardware stagnate, software falling behind competitors in features and quality (back then it was Microsoft, now it’s Google).
Sure they now sell enough iPhones to never run out of cash, still doesn’t negate what I said.
This is the same exact feeling and actions that Apple was doing before they switched all their hardware to a new form factor after years of stagnation during the PowerMac era.
while they might be ready to switch to ARM and get insane battery performance and MAYBE break compatibility with most linux and unix-like distros that can run on the devices in the process, there’s a chance that no one will bite if they don’t do it smartly.
I’m all for ARM on mobile and desktops, but that’s a segment of computers that has not been used outside of embedded systems much so it’s literally a brand new world.
I personally would love this, it would make Intel shit their pants, and on the mobile space alone, longer battery life without a lot of electronic baggage would be great as long as there’s IBM-like compatibility between systems (modern one that is).
It’s probably already making Intel shit their pants.
Honestly, the idea that they might switch to their own CPU/GPU is the first promising news I’ve heard in a while. Better news would be giving up on that stupid ass touch bar. Even better news would be if they get their photo copiers out, and copy the Surface Book.
Even Microsoft is switching to ARM – and Linux is already all over ARM. I hope they keep bootcamp around for dual booting Windows, but I doubt they’ll do that in the first iterations.
Apple lost my business when it took them too damn long to ship something with Kaby Lake, and then when they did, it was those hobbled pieces of crap with the touchbar and a shoddy keyboard.
I had been holding out for over a year, waiting for an update…. hoping it would come and be nothing more than an incremental bump over the late 2013 MBPs.
My current Dell precision hardware is totally on par with that MBP in form and function.
Sadly, Linux still sucks as a desktop. I had to stop expecting things to be smooth. Once I gave up on my expectations of things going smoothly, and working well, it became pretty easy to work with. But that first couple weeks, I was kinda mad at myself.
Now when I’m watching coworkers bemoan aspects of their newer macs, I don’t mind so much.
I really hope they release something awesome. I’d love for them to take my money in exchange for a computing experience like I had from 2013 to 2016.
If I went with Windows, I’d probably go Razer Blade, or Surface Book. They are both pretty sexy.
Also been looking at the Pixel Books, but not sure if I can work effectively with ChromeOS.
“…sadly, Linux still sucks as a desktop…”. Try MX-Linux. It might just surprise you at how good and fast it is. It did me.
That’s my major problem with linux:
Everytime you say you have a problem with it, the answer is always “You use the wrong distro!”
Never mind ALL distros have the same crap GPU drivers underneath. I don’t care if it boots 3.567 seconds faster if it makes graphics look like crap. Then there is the audio mess…
Edited 2018-06-17 11:02 UTC
I guess each to their own. I had the total opposite experience.
I simply find Windows and OSX fighting me every which way they can. Linux (and even more so FreeBSD) works exactly the way I expect and everything just keeps ticking. My two desktop FreeBSD systems have initially had FreeBSD 9.0 installed, and I’ve upgraded them (not a reinstall) over the years as new FreeBSD versions get releases. Everything just keeps ticking happily.
Apples sales figures accounts for Apple’s high priority for it’s mobile-computing (iPhone) sector and much lower priority for it’s desktop-computing sector.
While unix-software-development wise I support OSX/Linux/FreeBSD, OSX was always my primary development platform and Linux/FreeBSD being secondary targets. Now that OpenGL is “dead” in Apple’s eyes (future being “Metal”), Linux is now my primary development target while FreeBSD being my secondary target for all things OpenGL. I still use my 2009 iMac for development of non-graphics (numeric/database) programs.
I had hoped Apple would release a “fat” version of their mac-mini having a modular design being able to swap in/out {GPU, CPU} that spans a few tech generations and with modern OpenGL support.
Alas, that was just a naive dream.
From the 1980’s, Apple was known for it’s multimedia-centricness.
Strangely, they never stepped up to make the platform a real player in the gaming market.
This is why I’ll NEVER understand why companies will gladly port to the Mac, but won’t port to Linux, that has A) newer openGL/Vulkan, B) better hardware support.
They port to mac because they port for paying customers.
Who are these paying customers that have ‘gaming capable’ Macs?
The ol’ ‘They have a free OS with all free utilities because they are too cheap to buy software’ bull crap. The opposite is probably true, because Linux users aren’t forking out for the OS, Applications, etc, we have more disposable income for gaming.
Humble Bundle stats consistently showed more Mac sales than Linux. They’re a bit old now, but the most recent stats I could find (2016), show roughly double the number of Mac sales compared to Linux: http://cheesetalks.net/humble/
Valve stats say otherwise,
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Surv…
Indeed, only a dream. I’m a FreeBSD man myself, but own a Mackbook Pro, and my wife has used two iMacs. When I tried to use her external Apple CD-ROM drive, initially I couldn’t get it to work. A quick Google search revealed that Apple purposely crippled the device to only work with Apple drivers. FreeBSD and Linux had a small hack to tigger the CD-ROM to initialise. Such bullsh*t I cannot stand! I will NOT buy another Apple device ever. Custom built and modular PC’s all the way from now on.
Edited 2018-06-19 08:15 UTC
They pulled that same stunt with their USB to ethernet adapter. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a USB ethernet adapter that wasn’t standard, at least within the past decade. Like the DVD drive, there is a way to get it to work, but still…
So many people say that Apple’s quality is going down, and that they used to buy their laptops for their quality.
I tend to think of it more like this; Apple’s quality was okay. The majority of other laptop makers were shit. There were certainly others out there that made quality build with their laptops, but were still 1k or more cheaper than the equivalent Apple hardware. The Asus Zenbooks (even though some models are hit and miss, just like the Macbook Pros) are some with some great quality. The old IBM ones were usually tanks that’d never die.
Asus even did something innovative with their new UX580 and stuck a touch screen where the touchpad normally is. Far better idea than the cheesy touchbar!
I’ve always been amazed that Apple fanbois will shell out three to four times the cost of a modern up-to-date PC for years old hardware because it’s pretty! Apple lost it the day Steve Jobs passed away.
Honestly i’m quite tired of people continually complaining of Apple hardware. Sure it’s not cutting edge and some devices (macmini) are ridiculously outdated.
But…:
1) a six years old laptop with SSD does perfectly the job 90% of users need. Only a tiny minority needs cutting edge technology and that minority is not apple target market.
2) you do not like apple hardware ? simple: do not buy it . Do you think apple cares of few commenter’s complaining on techie forums ? Do you really want to send a message ? then do not buy apple stuff and live you life happily.
I am disappointed with Apple’s disregard for the Macintosh. Their hardware is very finicky when compared to others. My 2012 MacBook Pro is running so slowly, I moved all my data to a 2009 ThinkPad T500 running generic Ubuntu which runs faster, booting in 18 seconds. (The MBP takes about 120 seconds to become functional.) And if the rumors are true that Apple wants to “merge” the MacOS and iOS, they didn’t learn much from Microsoft’s failed attempt at something similar with Windows and their phone. When the T500 gives up the ghost, Apple will not be on the top of the list as a replacement. This from a person with his original and bootable 128K Macintosh in the basement.
Supposedly Apple will release a new MacBook Air replacement as well as a new Mac Pro this year. One can only assume the rest will see an update as well. If they do it right it’ll be in time for the new academic year.
I am holding out hope… all I ever wanted was a reasonably priced replacement for my MacBook Air with a retina display, good battery life and a decent keyboard.
Don’t hold your breath …
The new Mac Pro is already delayed till 2019.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/5/17202710/apple-mac-pro-new-2019-re…
I am on my fourth laptop, to be honest i have been happy with the quality of each. My first 2 were Toshiba windows machines, when I needed to update my last Toshiba (which worked for a friend for a further 2 years) I was so sick of windows that i turned to Apple. My first Macbook was a lovely 17inch machine which lasted me for many years before I updated to a 2012 macbook pro.
I have really loved both Macs but I know that a new machine will be needed in the next 12 months or so. I am still happy with Mac os, but the hardware on offer from Apple is terrible.
I want a 2 in 1 device with a pen. Apple doesn^aEURTMt have one.
I want a powerful laptop that has the latest processors and heaps of RAM, Apple doesn^aEURTMt have one.
For the first time it is looking like I will move OS not because of a dislike of the OS but because the hardware choices are so poor.
I think this is happening on a daily basis as more and more users need to purchase a new computer.
I guess I should say I won’t:
1) Pay top dollar for older hardware
2) Pay extra for some fancy bar for which I have no use
3) Pay for a clearly flawed keyboard
4) Own a laptop for which I have to carry a dongle (whole point of a laptop is I have flexibility built in)
Looks like I am moving on Apple.
A big part of the problem is that there really aren’t many improvements in the processor line-up, and we’re going to have to get used to that. There are models with a few more cores, and some that clock a bit higher, but thermal limiting means that’s not going to help laptops. The power savings have essentially stopped. Things that can go parallel have a bit further to go: GPUs have improved a bit, but there’s a limit to how much they do for workstation laptops.
A lot depends on uses and needs, of course.
I had a laptop replacement a little while ago, and “upgraded” to the then-new 13″ MBP with the touch bar. Hated the keyboard, missed having an ESC key and it felt about as slow as my old 15-incher from three years before. So after a while I returned it to the IT pool and swapped to a modern Lenovo Carbon Yoga X thing with Windows 10. The keyboard is nicer, but that’s the only improvement. It doesn’t feel faster, and Windows 10 isn’t as much of an improvement as everyone’s been saying it is. Still objectively awful.
I think that the terrible truth is that making nice laptops must no longer be an economically viable undertaking, because no-one is doing it. I’ve mostly moved to a combination of servers, desktops and tablets for mobility, these days.
Steve is indeed missed but the “decline” of Apple hardware and or desktop is not Tim’s fault , this is just part of a long term strategy. Here is my take on this subject being a long time Apple converted.
Microsoft won the OS race and since software is always evolving and being deprecated they decided to not fight Microsoft and live to fight another day by focusing on new products and markets.
Take a look at Microsoft, Windows and Office are still the main source of revenue but even they wanted to get rid of all the baggage they have been carrying all this years (free Windows 10) they are desperate trying to find new markets and products but they have failed with most of them, even if they are actually good. Windows Phone was way better than Android but it failed, original surface (pixelsense) looked amazing yet it failed. Xbox division has been bleeding cash since the beginning, and they were actually thinking about selling it, and this E3 left us all wondering about their strategy, and what about Microsoft Zune.
A lot of people are perfectly happy using “old” computers but that is not sustainable business model specially with the economic crisis we are going trough (markets are not growing and there is a rampant inflation ). They all want a market were users are basically forced to upgrade constantly and that is why the desktop must be killed and be replaced with fragile non repairable and non upgradable products with limited software updatability).
Apple has been signaling the death of the desktop for quite a while, take a look at all the amazing software discontinued by Apple and recently they announced that they are going to allow running iOS apps on the Mac, why would you build Mac apps when you can do it for iOS and target more devices and costumers?
Apple is keeping the Mac line mostly for consumer and public relationships and I say mostly because they still need to figure out some things for the creative and software development environments, being able to self-host development on the iPad will be final nail in the coffin of MacOS.
Apple lost me when they took the line in port off of the Macbook Pros. This is a device I want to use for audio/video recording/media and you’re removing core functionality? There was no good reason for the move, it was pure bean counter. That and the move away from standards such as OpenGL, Vulkan, etc makes it less attractive. Sure a professional musician might use a USB sound card but as a hobbyist who is a professional working in IT I just want to plug my crap in and have it work. I don’t want to waste money on silly dongles. Once they removed that feature it was very easy to justify spending money on a unibody aluminium PC laptop and dumping Linux onto it. The march away from running any of the classic mac games is underway and the platform is going to be completely garbage in a few years time for anyone who isn’t satisfied with WINE for app compatibility.
Edited 2018-06-18 03:42 UTC
I’ve greatly enjoyed and benefited from the relatively stable and sane Mac ecosystem over the past 11 years after I bought my first Macbook. However, my 2013 13″ Macbook Pro had become too slow for my photography work in Lightroom and Photoshop. I started shopping for a new laptop and came to the conclusion that for my core work of working with large raw files in Lightroom, I could get much better value with a PC laptop with a hex core i7 and nvidia 1060. A somewhat comparable Macbook Pro would have to be a 15″ that cost at least $1000 more and didn’t match the PC in some specs. Yes, there were still some advantages to the Macbook, but that didn’t outweigh the advantages of the PC. If Apple had simply updated their Macbook Pros to more recent specs, they might have made a sale. As it is, I had to shift away from the world of Apple, at least for a while. It hasn’t gone unnoticed by my more tech savvy mac-using friends that Apple has slipped in quality control whether it be hardware or software. We almost have been forced by Apple to look at the PC/Windows world and perhaps bend PC/Linux to our will (despite the quirks). It’s certainly a sad state of affairs despite Apple’s incredible financial success with iphone/ipad.
Edited 2018-06-18 05:18 UTC
I am mac only since 1995 and owned many different apple hardware and compatible hardware ( in the clone period of apple) but I will not say that the new hardware sucks. Is for sure not answering the requirements of Pro users.
I am angry that all I can get is 16 Gb of ram and I am still holding on my Macbook Pro from 2015 because of the USB and SD ports but on the other side I have no alternative.
I am using mac for the perfect integration between OS and hardware. Ok is not the latest core something from intel but after 3 years it just works nice without any time spent on maintenance and drivers and shit like this.
On the other hand I use Windows 10 for testing and Linux for our servers.
Windows is getting better but is still not there yet. After 6 months of normal usage it gathers lots of crap files and it gets slower by the day. Also the driver problems are still there
So with this choice I get a much better hardware the the one from Apple but with an worse os integration.
Linux as a desktop platform is a lost cause, they did not changed to much over the last 15 years and the desktop is a mess. Also there is no Adobe on linux so 60% of the pro users can’t use Linux for work.
So if I want to change where do I go? I like the Razer laptop but then I can have a so and so OS from windows or a useless Desktop os from any Linux distribution.
And is let’s not forget the stupid iPad Pro that can not be used for Pro work in a business environment.
So if Apple is not going to release a new decent hardware I will end back on Windows an will not like the situation at all.