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Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

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Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for a tool contributing towards six figures of income for me annually. That's an insane ROI. EDIT: I know people who spend more than that on Starbucks each month.

That's not a realistic comparison... My acculated sum of every webapplication i use is (outside of my business ofc): - 9 € / month ( Google Play Music) - 3 € / month ( Netflix shared with 3 other people) - 3€ / month for Google Apps ( actually, this is business... But i also use the mail for private use..) = 15 € / month. If i'm not mistaking, you're OS X device costs you 4 times more every month then the sum of ever…

>If i'm not mistaking, you're OS X device costs you 4 times more every month then the sum of every online webservice i use.

Well.. you need something to run those things on

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#252
post #3

It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years. My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically repla…

Comparable laptops aren't really any better. The rMBP is a lot more repairable than say the Surface Book (which won't let you even open the case without possibly cracking the display). At least Apple has a battery replacement service at an advertised price--what'll Dell charge you to replace the non-servicable battery in the XPS13 or XPS15? And no other PC laptop hits that right sweet spot of power/battery/display qu…

Many business class laptops are modular enough to replace the hard drives.

I swapped the DVD player out on an elitebook for a second 500 GB SSD.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#253

It's kinda weird to read commentators talking as if this was the end of a golden age of Apple. From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attrac…

> From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. I think the main problem is not the application software (aside from iTunes and Apple Maps) - the main problem is the OS level software. During the "golden age" of apple, apps would just work. Didn't matter if it you were using Apple-provided software or "better" 3rd party stuff - crashing, lagging, stuttering was minimal. Now, many users are seeing…

When was this golden age?

I've been a Mac user for about 10 years and it was never better than now, probably the opposite. Every edition had bunch of bugs I hated. Before then I regularly tested Mac for local computer magazine and it didn't look better either. I even managed to freeze Mac OSX 10.1 with first mouse click when it arrived in our lab.

Before then we had lots of fun looking at ways you could hang by that time absurdly obsolete old Mac OS....

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. I think the main problem is not the application software (aside from iTunes and Apple Maps) - the main problem is the OS level software. During the "golden age" of apple, apps would just work. Didn't matter if it you were using Apple-provided software or "better" 3rd party stuff - crashing, lagging, stuttering was minimal. Now, many users are seeing…

Really? This sounds way too empirical... And: have you ever used the first versions of OS X? Have you ever heard about MobileMe?

My thoughts after reading through this thread from 5 days ago on Apple's declining software quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071

I had actually never heard of MobileMe before reading that thread...somehow I was busy/oblivious enough not to have ever used it.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some Google products that I like, but I don't think I've ever had a good experience with Hangouts. Maybe it's rose tinted lenses, but it seems like multi-person video chatting with screen sharing has been getting uniformly worse ever since iChat AV. More recently, there are online alternatives like https://appear.in/ that I've been happy with, and which don't require you to install a browser plugin like Han…

The primary feature of messaging software is "all my friends are on it". As an ex-Googler, all my friends are on Hangouts. I think that on a technical level, WhatsApp is the best messaging software on the market. It at least features reliable message delivery, something that both Hangouts and iMessage have yet to get down. But its usage is largely limited to my Indian friends here in the U.S, which makes it of limite…

I think the Hangouts development team is dead or something.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#256
post #230
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While on OS X you can replace everything easily to craft the experience you need, on iOS, it's not as much of an option, sadly. Also, I don't really like Google's desktop offerings - or the lack of them - everything is a webapp, and they just don't work as well as proper desktop software would have. I am so annoyed by the random reloads Chrome apps do, and the utter disrespect they have for multiple desktops.

The most frustrating part for me is that CMD-Tab'ing to, say, Hangouts will show me the Hangouts window. Now if I try to CMD-Tab to Chrome, it stays on the Hangouts window even though they are trying to treat them as separate applications (it's own application icon in the CMD-Tab bar, and a separate application menu from Chrome). This frustrates me on a daily basis.

Same on Linux. Google really needs to get a grip on that.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#257
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one thing about Safari is that upgrades seem to be tied to the OS. As a web developer, this makes testing things on different versions of Safari a bit difficult. Also, you have to upgrade the entire OS to get a new version of Safari, so if you were holding out on an OS upgrade you might be forced to upgrade if you need to test things on the latest version of Safari.

The alternative is that I need to have 30 versions of Chrome laying around because they update every week or two. Surely there has to be a middle ground. :)

Well, Chrome tends to be ahead of the curve on a lot of things. For example, you need to upgrade to El Capitan to get true flexbox support in Safari (or iOS9 on iOS devices). This coupled with the fact that Chrome users don't need to do an OS upgrade to get the latest version means that you don't need to do as much heavy testing on various versions of Chrome (in my experience... though it's not in a locked-down corporate environment).

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#258

>Mossberg pointed to "a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps." He fingered iTunes for the desktop ("I dread opening the thing"), and the Mail, Photos, and iCloud programs. As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I pur…

To whomever would hear it:

I want and need a deluxe Linux OS for which I would pay $200/year, which would do things well. This includes:

- Porting bugfixes forward (I dropped Ubuntu because they didn't port a bugfix from 12.x to 13.04 - After 2 days trying to recover my network auth, I asked a Mac to my boss).

- Designed for me, not for monkeys with big fingers who bring up Amazon results for every search (That's not why I dropped Ubuntu, but desktop developers aren't within the targets of Canonical),

- Who would hire and pay UX designers. I want the Mac OS X experience. I don't want to recompile my kernel. I want few features in the OS, but well-designed. I want people working days over days to fine-tune the mouse controls in the OS (the first warning that made me upset about Ubuntu). I want to hear the rumble of developers integrating Webkit with nice developer tools into an open-source chromium.

- I, developer, using IntelliJ IDEA, using apt-get/brew, I want to be the paying customer of that OS. I don't want my data be sold. I might want some cloud sync, but I don't want share buttons, especially when I watch porn (I'm absolutely serious). And I want the cloud parts of my OS to be under APL-Affero.

- Obviously those bugfixes must be sent back upstream to the OSS community. Ideally there would be half the money left to pay back, but let's start pessimistic.

- As a bonus, in that OS, all apps would be webkit/js-based. But I'm dreaming.

It is totally possible to charge for open-source, even the GPL says it. You can't prevent people from re-sharing the OS online, but you can offer upgrades to subscribed users only.

I wanted the Apple experience, but that's not coming back. Look what Nest did: They're selling a working thermostat for 3x the price. Tesla is selling electric cars for deluxe customers. I want to pay $200 per year, recurring, for a stable env with little novelty and many bugfixes, and I want to "deluxe". I want to purchase the feeling of being superior with my OS.

And I say that as a peson who earns €32.000 gross per year (France).

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#259

>Mossberg pointed to "a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps." He fingered iTunes for the desktop ("I dread opening the thing"), and the Mail, Photos, and iCloud programs. As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I pur…

Do you have any recommendations for a music player that isn't iTunes?

When I started using Android I subscribed to Google Play Music. It allowed me to upload my music collection, including songs that we're on Google Play. It's not matching, like Apple. It's literally just taking my music and allowing me to store it in the cloud and download it onto mobile devices. It's really handy so far and makes much more sense compared to iTunes. Plus there's no "sync" concept once you're there. You just download music out of your collection or you don't.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#260

It's kinda weird to read commentators talking as if this was the end of a golden age of Apple. From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attrac…

> It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attracted companies that really want to make it their bread-and-butter. I have a hard time with this. Apple products tend to lock you into apple software. If you want…

Note that iOS and OS X are very different systems. On OS X, you can replace everything with your preferred software just as easily as you could in Windows or Linux.
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