The Mac Platform Decline

> think you can expect to see "artist workstations" emerge as a category with tools wrapped around a computer to help in their content creation

It's already emerging. Did you see the Surface Studio and the cute little knob that they demoed by using it to change colors in a paint program? That presentation was basically Microsoft looking at artists with sexy bedroom eyes, like Apple used to a decade ago. I'd be carrying a Surface 4 Pro around in my bag right now and leaving my Air/Wacom tablet at home if the Surface's NTrig stylus worked properly with Adobe Illustrator.

Next month Wacom's supposed to release their MobileStudio Pro, which has similar specs and a nice cushy Wacom pen instead of a shitty hard NTrig stylus. Which I think a hell of a lot of artists are gonna try out; their previous efforts in this space were overpriced, overweight, and underpowered, but this one looks good in the specs.

There is also supposedly a new generation of styli coming out soon that will all adhere to a single standard, so an artist can go buy a Surface clone from whoever and feel confident that she can also go buy a super-nice stylus, the same way a programmer can feel confident they can get a super-awesome keyboard if they want that. Surface clones are not being marketed to artists, but we are definitely ogling them if we have the funds, and as prices drop more of us will probably end up with one.

I agree it worries me. I've been with the Mac since OS X came out. The focus on more professional users like myself seems to have started a decline beginning with Snow Leopard.

Of course I understand the rational. It is a small chunk of Apple revenue now, but can't there be some solution to this?

What if they simply outsourced the professional products to other companies? I know the clone makers was a disaster for Apple, but they can do it smarter this time, by specifically only allow the clones to sell computers at the high performance and high end. The consumer grade computers and laptops should be Apple only.

Fortunately for me I see that a lot of Linux distros have gotten a lot more OS X like over the years to if I got to switch there are actually systems out there which somewhat resemble what I am used to.

Still Linux simply doesn't have the same breath of quality desktop applications available as the Mac today. Every time I use Linux I get reminded that while I might be able to get all the functionality I need, it is too often served up in a package or UI which is extremely kludgy and poorly thought out.

You can buy a dell xps 15 today that comes with: 3840 x 2160 display / 1tb pcie solid state disk / nvidia gtx 960m (crucial for developing cuda programs and prototyping deep learning on your laptop) / 32g ram. For $2340 (ten percent off coupon at the top of the page). I'm not sure if this link will work: http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/productdetails/xps-15-9550-la...

And this thing comes with regular usb ports and an hdmi port instead of usb-c nonsense so I don't have to immediately drop $250 in dongles just to keep the capabilities I already have.

My problem with a macbook is because you simply can't upgrade anything, you have to prepay for all the disk you want to use for the next 3-4 years. Add them screwing us on magsafe, and I would need $400 plus in extra chargers and dongles (hdmi/dvi/vga so I can connect to whatever random projector / tv I run into), etc. As some snark on twitter said, we should call our new giant kit of cables to make macbooks usable a courage of cables.

I just can't believe these people have the giant balls to roll out a $3k+ laptop that you can't connect an iphone 7 or iphone 7 headphones to without purchasing $50 in adapters.

I'm sitting here hoping linux gets usable fast enough that I'll have something to transition to. I need a unix-ish box that was working power management/audio/the ability to plug into whatever random projector or tv I encounter and assume it will work.

edit: just to be clear, my complaint really isn't about pricing of macbooks. I mean, cheaper is better, but I'm comfortable spending $3k on a laptop. I just need a laptop that has 32g or more of ram, and that connects to my peripherals without hundreds of dollars of dongles that I have to carry around. That laptop better last 3-4 years though. If Dell can profitably sell the above for $2400, apple should be able to very profitably sell the same specs for $3200.

Apple processors and improvements in industrial engineering happened before Cook took the helm. You could argue those were under Jobs's watch...

And yes the increase of revenue in services is safe, stable bet. But offering music and email and image storage doesn't seem to be be groundbreaking services to me.

If you mean my development computer, I use a 2012 rMBP with 16GB RAM. For production we generally run on EC2 or GCE.

The biggest limitation is RAM, but in the near future we may start using the GPU too. Between the database, middleware above the database, an IDB, a web browser, etc. macOS decides to start compressing pages rather aggressively when I run unit tests. If the IDE gets compressed, pretty much the only solution is to restart.

I could switch to Linux development, but aside from Linux laptop support generally being poor, macOS just works so I can spend more time working instead of fighting with my computer's configuration. Still, I am very seriously considering getting a Linux desktop in the near future, because I'm just tired of waiting for Apple.