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Open Letter to Tim Cook

petersphilo.org

61–70 of 233 posts

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#61
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new Macbooks are so close to being great it's annoying. The specs are fine by me and I'm neutral on the Touch Bar, but the price and lack of ports just makes them not worth it. While I'm glad Apple is trying to move the industry to use USB-C for everything, it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port. It's going to be at least 3-5 years until the industry uses USB-C and by that poin…

> it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port. Magsafe, USB Type A, HDMI, and Mini DisplayPort / Thunderbolt 1/2 are all literally too wide to fit within the width of the new laptop’s sides. They would have needed to make the whole laptop noticeably thicker or otherwise differently shaped to fit any of those. The headphone jack barely fits.

> They would have needed to make the whole laptop noticeably thicker

Or, they could have just stayed at the level of thickness Macbook Pros already had.

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>models now are 16gb of ram only Do you have a use for more than 16gb? Serious question.

I'm often noticing a ton of swapping going on, causing serious system-wide lag, when I have a few dozen Chrome tabs and two VM's running in addition to a few other standard programs which use a lot of memory (Slack). It's not hard to rub up against 16GB in a standard developer workflow.

Glad to know it's not just me that sees performance and memory issues with Slack...

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#64
post #44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PC meaning Personal Computer market, not the Windows/IBM PC.

And how are the dominant in that? They've got about 5% of the market share.

Great and valid point. My counter to that is that despite having only 5% of the market share they take home 45% of the profit. [1]

They also continue to erode the marketshare of the current leaders even as the overall PC market shrinks. [2]

[1] http://fortune.com/2013/04/16/pie-chart-of-the-day-apples-ov...

[2] http://www.siliconbeat.com/2015/10/09/report-apple-widens-sh...

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#65
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "models now are 16gb of ram only (can someone explain this one?)" "Apple told me MBP maxes out at 16GB RAM because LPDDR3 limit is 16GB/chip; Apple uses it because of performance/energy ratio." https://twitter.com/DanFrakes/status/791754757404626944 So basically, it needed to be thin and light ... because, Apple ... which limits the size of the battery. And more RAM would consume more energy, requiring the device t…

~~Older MBPs were thicker and could support 32GB. So Apple both cut away a little bit thickness for no reason, and then used that as an excuse to drop max RAM support? Something smells odd about that conclusion.~~ EDIT: No 32GB MBP ever existed. My bad.

They never could support 32GB of RAM AFAIK.

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#66
Meh. With $200B in liquid assets, Apple can do whatever it feels like. If it ever did find itself in the doghouse (unlikely), it could survive there for decades while it figured out how to recapture the mojo.

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are mostly concerned about: - 16GB max RAM - Function keys Personally I am only concerned about the RAM, I don't use the function keys ever and I can remap another key to replace ESC. I would have gladly forked over for a 32GB MBP, instead I just ordered an i7 ThinkPad x220, extra RAM and an SSD to see if I can do my day to day work on it before buying a top spec non-Apple X86 laptop.

Interesting tidbit, the x260, which is the current version of what the x220 was, has a limit of... 16 GB memory.

I know. I'd most likely buy a Dell XPS.

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#68
Because remember those popular Mac|Windows commercials from a few years ago? If you want a stodgy get-stuff-done kind of thing then you'll have to talk to some Microsoft nerds sporting antique crap like headphone jacks. Apple only cares about how hip you look, with your brand new airpods and all your disposable income.

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#69
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are mostly concerned about: - 16GB max RAM - Function keys Personally I am only concerned about the RAM, I don't use the function keys ever and I can remap another key to replace ESC. I would have gladly forked over for a 32GB MBP, instead I just ordered an i7 ThinkPad x220, extra RAM and an SSD to see if I can do my day to day work on it before buying a top spec non-Apple X86 laptop.

.

ctrl + [ changed my vi life.

Re: Open Letter to Tim Cook

#70
post #20

Best comment [1] I read a couple of days ago: >One thing constantly said to founders here is "don't let a vocal minority come in, tell you they love your product, and then turn into bullies that tell you how you should make said product. You never made it for them; they aren't your market. Don't get confused into thinking they are, just because they're loud." I think that about sums up the relationship between Apple…

For every rule of thumb there are exceptions. In this case, if you lose the professional market, which is more than just developers, also designers, photographers, videographers, architects, scientists, you risk a sort of negative network affect.

In most families and circles people go to the person in the group who knows the most about tech, usually professional user. This person will often recommend products they themselves value and are familiar with. Obviously I can't prove this effect was partly responsible for Apple's come back, but it's certainly true in all the social circles I'm a part of and I think a decent hypothesis.

I don't think anyone is asking for your number two reference. It's more that people simply want their use cases considered. In many cases they are not. You can argue that the key changes are not crucial, and that the USB ports are future looking. But what about the lack of 32gb ram? The lack of new processors? What about the sdcard reader (yes, consumers mostly use phones now and don't need it, but professional cameras are going to be using sdcards for the foreseeable future)?

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