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The Mac Platform Decline

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Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#81

Post by stock_toaster »

jasonjei wrote: post #78
stock_toaster wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. R&D has seen big increases[1] (from around $3B under Jobs to now around $12B) in spend under Cook. I don't know that doing that lines up with a "focus on immediate short-term bottom line improvements rather than long-term investments". [1]: http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2016/5/11/apple-rd-reveals-... (linked for the graphs, not the article's hypothesis)

Microsoft, I'm sure, also threw a lot of R&D money at things. I just think the money under Jobs's Apple was directed more wisely.

Looks[1] like from it went from $7B in 2004, to $11B in 2014 when ballmer left. So a 2x increase in 10 years vs over a 5x increase in 4 years.

Regardless, I still don't think that jives with the claim that Cook is focusing solely on short term returns. The "concern" about increased R&D outlay, by some big shareholders during earnings calls, has even been interesting to hear. The responses by Cook et al. have seemed pretty consistent too -- we are focusing on lots of long term projects.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267806/expenditure-on-re...

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#82

Post by trurl »

jasonjei wrote: post #77
zepto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing people say things about how the Mac is sidelining serious developers and content producers, but I haven't seen any actual argument as to why this is so. Can you explain?

TouchBar killed the tactile ESC key. People using vim or BootCamp and/or Linux, Windows, VMware, or Photoshop are in for a more difficult ride. So instead of having access to ESC/Func keys, we can type emoji or use Apple Pay. The hardware on all Macs are updated on a very infrequent basis as mentioned in the article. GPUs sold with machines today are often the same as ones sold years ago. Apple killed their external…

I really think too many people are making a big deal of the TouchBar. I'm a vim user, and when the first rumors of it surfaced earlier this year I switched ESC to capslock and after a day or so adapted just fine.

I don't know that I really need any of the things TouchBar offers, but it seems to be unreasonably vilified without no one actually using it.

For me the key issue is the performance, which no amount of key remapping can solve.

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#83

Post by matt4077 »

There's a basic premise this article gets wrong: that there is a tradeoff between the Mac platform and the iUniverse. That's just not true, at least not on the 5-years plus timescales that we've been hearing these complaints. The most valuable company in the world can certainly afford staffing the Mac division with what they had back in 2000 or so or whenever people believe they were at their best. And the Mac business is without doubt profitable and that's the only thing that counts. We're not even talking about "innovation" issues anyway, where Apple may be constrained by not cloning SJ or JI. Note people don't want innovation (no floppy, no headphone, no F9) but rather simple grunt work like updating the chipsets.

I don't have any coherent theory. I'd say it's a combination of:

- Mac Pro: possibly waiting for something that then didn't turn out as expected? It's a segment that may actually be obsolete in that anything you can't do on an iMac happens on a cluster? I mean – what's there besides video editing and chrome compiling, two things the iMac is absolutely capable of.

- MacBooks: There's a minority complaining very loudly, who just! can't! work! professionally(!!) without 32GB of RAM and F7 – and they're real professionals by the way, not like those unprofessional hipster-wannabes.

Meanwhile, there have been quite a few advances but it's just not exciting any more: SSDs have had the most significant performance impact since the Pentium. Battery life has reached the point of diminishing returns (as has battery durability). Retina displays are on the level of vector fonts in terms of UI improvements. No idea about wide-gamut colors, but I certainly thought "why didn't this catch on 16 years ago?". A modern Apple trackpad is the hoverboard my fingers have been making memes about for a decade. Build quality and durability at the highest they have ever been, and if IFixIt complains, it's because YouDontHaveToAnymore.

Software is a different story maybe, but a large part of that may just be that it's solved. It's a stable, safe, fast, pretty OS. The Apple applications have seen a bunch of stumbles, indeed. But even Photos does what I actually need and there are alternatives for all of them.

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#84

Post by eknkc »

Chyzwar wrote: post #41
nkw wrote: post #11

I think most of the statements in the article are true, the problem is there is not (right now) a superior alternative. Yes, Microsoft is trying with the surface, Linux I'm sure has come far, but there is simply not any alternative that can realistically compete with the Mac platform right now. There is simply no pressure on Apple to dedicate further resources to this area, because there is not much for them to gain.…

Linux is already superior for developers. You servers all running Linux, all dev tools are first released in Linux, everything just work with most hardware. For professional like video editing, photography, CADs, audio etc Windows is better when you can buy better hardware for the same price as Mac. There is no reason to by Mac when most hardware is terribly outdated and you don't know when next upgrade will happen.

I'm doing web dev on macOS. Tried to plan how I'd work on Linux desktop if I ditched Mac and it doesn't look that bright actually.

- I basically can't stand the usability linux desktop environments. But this is subjective.

- Our designers use a lot of mac software. I sometimes need to work with Sketch, Photoshop etc. Even if it's in read only fashion.

- Our team lives in Slack. Turns out these is no decent slack app for linux and I'd have to use the web app. No thanks.

Development generally requires collaboration with other people. I can't see myself easily working with non developers on a Linux desktop. I run Linux servers because only the developers touch them.

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#85

Post by trurl »

eknkc wrote: post #76
trurl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because serious developers require computers with more horsepower (CPU, GPU, memory, etc.) than Apple is providing? 16GB is nowhere near enough for my work. And I can't seriously justify buying a iMac or MacPro at this point when their hardware is so out of date.

Not arguing, just curious. What type of work are you in?

I am building a next generation database system.

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#86

Post by baby »

jeffehobbs wrote: post #73

This recent round of updates made me consider what I need from a "work" machine. For me, it comes down to three items: * Can I code on this machine? This means at minimum three tasks: write, deploy and test code. This also connotes a lot of things, including but not limited to access to a non-unobfucated file system. * Can I view all file formats easily and successfully? This includes formats like XML and json which…

> XML and json which are not typically meant to be viewed by a human

XML and json are meant to be viewed by a human. Those are visual encodings a contrario to binary encodings.

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#87

Post by bane »

monkmartinez wrote: post #54
bane wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is fighting too many competitors at the moment. It used to just be Microsoft, but Google's dominance in smartphones and slow but constant pressure in tablets and "good enough for most people" laptops is causing the company to lose focus. Microsoft also traditionally didn't have a credible hardware story, giving Apple a complete vertical integration story. Now both major competitors are vertically integrating (M…

The problem with the iPad Pro is that it is still an iPad. Look at the metrics of iPad sales[1], down 15% or so. There is no compelling reason to upgrade iPads on a year over year basis for most people that have them. Everyone else bought a Kindle or Asus or here for $100 and called it a day. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/26/iphone-ipad-and-mac-sales-...

This seems to speak to a larger problem for Apple of identifying their "Pro" markets and going after them. The iPad Pro seems to do a reasonable job targeting visual artists in the hardware, but the software isn't there yet.

Notionally speaking, what would a Pro work environment look like using tablets? I'd argue that Pro software tends to be hard to use and complicated -- but highly efficient in that domain, and this has been a struggle for Apple to get...and fundamentally there should be some kind of solution for cobbling together several iPads and a couple peripherals into some kind of workstation, where the iPads can do dual duty as both reconfigurable low-latency interfaces and displays for various parts of a pro-oriented workflow.

Or at the very least offer real support for pro workflows with a Mac as the main computer and the iPads acting as interfaces.

You sort of see some of this in things like DJ setups [1], but you'll notice none of these solutions lets you just use more iPads as additional screens/interfaces.

I write music as a hobby, and I wouldn't even know what to do with a single screen for it, and I feel cramped on two. I'd love to be able to get a tablet device, connect it to "the studio" and now it handles EQ or provides some virtual knobs, or gives me a spectrogram or something. And the system just sort of makes it work. A half dozen interfaces/displays would be great.

I also enjoy photography, why not have one display showing a gallery, one showing the before edits, and one showing what I'm editing, with one or two providing common edit controls?

But this interconnecting magic is simply missing.

1 - https://www.algoriddim.com/hardware

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#88

Post by IBM »

jasonjei wrote: post #78
stock_toaster wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. R&D has seen big increases[1] (from around $3B under Jobs to now around $12B) in spend under Cook. I don't know that doing that lines up with a "focus on immediate short-term bottom line improvements rather than long-term investments". [1]: http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2016/5/11/apple-rd-reveals-... (linked for the graphs, not the article's hypothesis)

Microsoft, I'm sure, also threw a lot of R&D money at things. I just think the money under Jobs's Apple was directed more wisely.

As an outsider you can only tell if the R&D money was spent wisely in retrospect.

Re: The Mac Platform Decline

#90

Post by jalfresi »

lloeki wrote: post #65
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the losses of Magsafe and the 3.5" headphone socket will go down as the point Apple finally lost it. Magsafe was such a perfect example of Apple doing small innovation, utterly brilliantly; if they've ditched it purely to save half a millimetre off thickness, it's all the proof I need that the lunatics have taken over.

Magsafe was genius but had known reliability issues on the long run, making charging increasingly finicky with time.

Agreed, if there is one thing that Apple are absolutely appalling at its power supplies. The amount of power supplies I've bought over the years, at £60 a pop is about 7, for two laptops over 7 years! And they ALL fail in the same way, with the either mag safe end fraying and sparking! or the cable cracking and exposing wires at the power block end (because of the stupid design decision to force a right angle bend when wrapping the cable around the pop-out cable hooks...)
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