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Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

latimes.com

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Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#501

Post by dgoldstein »

S4M wrote: post #457
pyre wrote: 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.

I'm not an Apple user myself, but isn't what you describe something good for web developers as it ensures that your users can only have one version of Safari, as opposite to lots of older versions of Chrome, Firefox and IE?

No it's pretty bad for web developers - everyone stuck on old versions of Safari just since they don't want the new os (or sometimes are on services that aren't supported any more). Whereas there's not much difference between someone on chrome 43 and 46, and chrome auto updates aggressively so we can ignore anything Safari and IE are basically in the same boat of users being on old oses also being stuck on aging browsers. It's just that IE has been so much worse that we haven't had time to start complaining about Safari, but don't worry, that's coming very soon.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#502

Post by dgoldstein »

S4M wrote: post #457
pyre wrote: 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.

I'm not an Apple user myself, but isn't what you describe something good for web developers as it ensures that your users can only have one version of Safari, as opposite to lots of older versions of Chrome, Firefox and IE?

No it's pretty bad for web developers - everyone stuck on old versions of Safari just since they don't want the new os (or sometimes are on services that aren't supported any more). Whereas there's not much difference between someone on chrome 43 and 46, and chrome auto updates aggressively so we can ignore anything Safari and IE are basically in the same boat of users being on old oses also being stuck on aging browsers. It's just that IE has been so much worse that we haven't had time to start complaining about Safari, but don't worry, that's coming very soon.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#503

Post by lhl »

hackercomplex wrote: post #494
lhl wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, locate is not even comparable to what Spotlight does. Do a search for mdfind(1) to get an idea of what is does. Recoll is the only thing I found on Linux being actively developed that comes close, but it's definitely not as polished or flexible. I'm primarily running Arch these days, but there are some things that Linux just has no good equivalent for.

But at what cost ? What about the mdworker slowdown effect which can quite arbitrarily bring your workflow to a standstill ? On your hardware does mdworker increase the probability of experiencing a "beachball of doom" depending on what else you have running ?

Yeah, I've had occasional mdworker issues, which was much more of an issue on battery-life than anything else. I had a bunch of launchctl shortcuts to disable a number of things when in battery mode (especially since Yosemite seemed like a big regression). What finally got me to switch, however, was mostly the out of control explosion network usage. I made a list of the network services that would run unbidden on my system: https://randomfoo.hackpad.com/OS-X-vs-Linux-JlyTLOwSWOG

(Ironically, by far the worst offender was Google's ksfetch - it had a psychic ability to know when I was on an airplane, and start its unkill9able update process (again, launchctl)).

Of course, there are costs for running Linux on the desktop as well. My original Ubuntu setup had many problems (its kernels were not Skylake friendly last year) and eventually apt got into a crazy situation with some ppa's (never a problem on my servers, since I run LTS exclusively). I ended up switching to Arch, and got it working how I liked, but not without a literal month of yak-shaving. I documented it here: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Arch-Linux-Install-Uf1RAzNYBU3 I've been poking around with Linux since the mid-90s, but even I can't help but shake my head at some of these things.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#504

Post by anonyfox »

pyre wrote: post #257
bphogan wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 corpo…

> Well, Chrome tends to be ahead of the curve on a lot of things

True. Memory/CPU/Battery-usage ist painfully high.

Better Performance? Even scrolling on bigger websites is sluggish at best. The only point of having chrome installed on my machine is because of it's DevTools... but I'm playing a lot with firefox Dev-Edition lately which seems to be superior here.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#505

Post by tajen »

sondr3 wrote: post #382
tajen wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - As a bonus, in that OS, all apps would be webkit/js-based. But I'm dreaming. Oh good heavens no, that's the absolute last thing I want from a OS.

Because? Because it's slow? Or because it's weakly typed? See it that way: Everyone and their todler can program in js, including experts of PHP, Java, Nodejs. With thousands devs, we'd see an explosion of apps, and many good quality ones in the marketplace. If there's a way we can embed V8 at an X Server level, open all OS APIs to js, sandbox while still optimizing the RAM resources, assist with the type-checking, the benefits would be huge.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#506

Post by alexchantavy »

jjoonathan wrote: post #306
nostrademons wrote: post #159

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…

> anyone who used the whole integrated Apple software suite and never looked elsewhere has been missing out on some seriously nice features this whole time Ditto for anyone not using the Apple ecosystem. Better tested drivers installed by default, no OS license hassles, no issues created by malfunctioning (or maliciously functioning) antivirus, top download sites weren't infested with malware (no hunt for the real DL…

>truly awesome platform-specific-at-first apps (subethaedit, quicksilver, textmate, coda),

I've had the same thought in my head for a long time now but haven't been able to put it the way you did; completely agree. There was also a time when OSX supported things like .psd previews, built-in *.iso mounting, and unzipping capabilities right out of the box when Win XP didn't.

This is part of what initially got me to become a big Mac fan, but as time goes on it seems that there are fewer of these unique advantages as modern Windows becomes more competitive. This also makes me all the more disappointed to see Apple's apparent lack of OSX advancement and shortfalls in reliability/usability.

The interesting thing for me is that I never would have thought that Windows would ever be competitive with Mac again for my attention, but the feel of sloppiness in Apple software is slowly moving me back in the other direction. Once Windows has things you mentioned like better platform-first apps, emacs bindings, and a better shell, I think I might fully commit to that switch.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#507

Post by sawwit »

simmons wrote: post #42
skorecky wrote: post #2

I think there is a decline in the quality of Apple's software. However I think there is a correlation between the amount of users and complaints / bugs found. Now that Apple has a large and growing user base the seeming quality is also degrading. However I could be wrong, just my opinion. Personally I haven't had as many issues as described in the article e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me. However the bigges…

> e.g. Preview has always worked fine for me. That's the first thing that went through my mind when I read the complaint about Preview crashing. Then I got to thinking about how Preview can eat up a lot of memory in certain situations (maybe large complex documents rendered to retina framebuffers), so maybe it's a memory issue. Journalists may not be as likely as people like me to insist on ridiculous amounts of RAM.

There is a huge memory leak in Preview since El Capitan and the display of PDFs sometimes fails when you zoom in. I have no idea how many users are affected by this, but it seems strange that Apple hasn't fixed it yet. Perhaps it is just a tricky bug.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#508

Post by kagamine »

Caballeras wrote: post #427
kalleboo wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone clearly lives in the US... Probably in the Bay Area. edit: just tested Apple Maps with a couple searches I did in Google Maps yesterday. Searched for the carrier shops for the two biggest carriers in my country. First search took me to Australia. The other ones found nothing in my city (there are probably at least 10-20 of each carrier in this town) and zoomed out to country level. Still completely and utterl…

According to this article http://fortune.com/2015/06/16/apple-google-maps-ios/ Apples maps is used by Apple iPhone users more then Google Maps. So it's hard to believe it's as bad as you claim.

Apple Maps over Google Maps on a phone every time for me, and I live in Norway, not in the US.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#509

Post by microtonal »

hackercomplex wrote: post #494
lhl wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, locate is not even comparable to what Spotlight does. Do a search for mdfind(1) to get an idea of what is does. Recoll is the only thing I found on Linux being actively developed that comes close, but it's definitely not as polished or flexible. I'm primarily running Arch these days, but there are some things that Linux just has no good equivalent for.

But at what cost ? What about the mdworker slowdown effect which can quite arbitrarily bring your workflow to a standstill ? On your hardware does mdworker increase the probability of experiencing a "beachball of doom" depending on what else you have running ?

I think I only had a noticeable mdworker problem (stuck process) once in my nine years of using Macs. Maybe I'm lucky to have had SSDs for a long time, but mdworker is something I rarely notice (in contrast to storedownloadd and others).

I think I use Spotlight almost a couple of dozen times each day to find documents, applications, and sometimes e-mails. So the productivity gains outnumber the marginal cost enormously.

Also, there is a healthy ecosystem around Spotlight. E.g., I use Alfred, which allows you to define use/custom workflows.

BTW. If you use Alfred, this is one of the nicest workflows I found recently: https://github.com/bevesce/unicode-symbols-search

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#510

Post by lhl »

rayiner wrote: post #100
mmastrac wrote: 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…

ThinkPad screens have been getting better. I'm actually pretty happy with contrast/brightness of the FHD IPS on my X250 (color gamut definitely could be better, but at least it doesn't do dynamic contrast like recent Dells), but the new screens, like the X1 Yoga's new OLED screen looks fantastic (I believe that'll be a 100% Adobe RGB screen).

Whenever I switch back and forth, I'm always shocked by how many PC laptops do trackpads so terribly when the Macbooks have been out there for years now.

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