Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#61

Post by bane » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:46 AM UTC

yakult wrote: post #44

lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

I would go a bit further: I want my state to be inside a seamless hardware agnostic VM, that I can access anywhere through public terminals that I only partially trust. I would have the option of either having my storage with me that I plug in, or in the cloud and I just provide 2fa. My device would have a cpu/gpu/etc befitting a mobile device, and the most barebones / untrusted terminals would just be screen/inputs/…

Turns out these are kind of available today

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

https://liquidsky.tv/

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

etc.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#62

Post by callalex » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:48 AM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #22

jasoncchild wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastically dramatic assessment! I'm curious just what aspects of the pre-iPhone Apple were preferable?

Off the top of my head I can think of a couple: 1) OSX was a viable operating system that was first class in the Apple ecosystem. 2) Laptops and desktops that were actually better than the competition including models geared toward power users.

I agree but on the viable operating system part, I think it's important not to discount the impressive research that has gone into the power saving and security aspects of the Darwin kernel, as well as innovations in saving of application state and state sharing between devices

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#63

Post by pducks32 » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:51 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #57

shmerl wrote: post #24

OK, if they are so committed, where is OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan support? Why is Safari so behind that it's now called "the new IE"? Talk is cheap, let them actually do something.

Safari is far behind ? Utter nonsense. The team simply has different priorities in particular security and battery life which means some eg service workers take longer to implement (if at all). That's why on my Mac unlike Chrome and Firefox, Safari isn't a memory hog that chews through battery life like it's nobody's business.

I love Safari. The battery life is fantastic and the experience is fantastic.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#64

Post by shmerl » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:52 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #57

shmerl wrote: post #24

OK, if they are so committed, where is OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan support? Why is Safari so behind that it's now called "the new IE"? Talk is cheap, let them actually do something.

Safari is far behind ? Utter nonsense. The team simply has different priorities in particular security and battery life which means some eg service workers take longer to implement (if at all). That's why on my Mac unlike Chrome and Firefox, Safari isn't a memory hog that chews through battery life like it's nobody's business.

Pretty poor excuse. Apple has enough money to work on many things in parallel. So if they choke their browser development team, it means they are behind. Basically, it's barely important for them altogether.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#65

Post by patrickg_zill » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:52 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #26

What I really want is for my state (SSD, RAM, maybe the CPU, but probably not the GPU) to be easily detachable from my human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, display). I want to be able to use a desktop in one place, then unplug a small unit which contains the aforementioned state (i.e. the equivalent of a sleeping laptop but with no keyboard or display), carry that someplace else, plug it in to a different set of…

Sun did something similar with their Sun Ray hardware and software.

You could close a session with a number of apps open, go to some other location, and login with a different Sun Ray located there, and your session just as you left it would be there, no rebooting or loss of state (assuming that the Sun Ray was somehow connected or federated to the same server that had your login details and apps).

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#66

Post by gurneyHaleck » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:53 AM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #42

jasoncchild wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I've not much personal experience of pre-iPhone Apple. I'm curious about why OSX is no longer viable.

OSX/MacOS is still viable but it doesn't receive the attention it once did. It feels second-rate compared to the mobile OS. I get the feeling one day Apple is going to release the new MacBook and it will just be an iPad with a keyboard.

An iPad with a keyboard. God help us all.

And looking back on ye olden MacOS 9, prior to OSX, there were things that just felt nice about the interface that no longer hold sway.

Clicking on an icon gave an immediate response. The mouse cursor felt more precise. Compare to these nightmarish touchpad/button slabs (and worse still, touchscreens), mouse movement and pointer precision were lightyears beyond the way things seem to work lately.

I have to retry things a solid 1/3 of the time, because some kind of gesture or taptic garbage tripped me up, and pushed me into an unintended outcome. I have to focus, and concentrate on finessing my hand motions and pressure or I am punished by mistakes that need an undo. When I'm in a rush, life is hell. This makes me hate life.

No zealously decorative animations meant (on an unstressed system with low CPU/RAM load) the menus flashed before you like lightning. Text was crisp, unshaded pixels, with no font smoothing. There were no transparency overlays, and so everything was high contrast. Nothing was EVER lagged by network traffic except browser images and FTP/SMB shares. (and doom deathmatches)

Most of this was also true of Windows 2000 at the time.

Had operating systems stood frozen (particularly GUIs), while terabytes of disk space, gigabytes of RAM and dozens of CPU cores had inflated our hardware resources, I've often held the belief that we'd like our computers more, and fewer people would be as obnoxiously incompetant with computers as we see. I'm probably wrong, but the idea feels right.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#67

Post by EduardoBautista » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:53 AM UTC

sliken wrote: post #59

I'm sure 6 months ago apple would have said they are working on "great" laptops. But we ended up with half ish the battery life promised, 16GB ram max, and needing dongles to connect to monitors, mouse, cameras, or external disks.

That dongle situation will be resolved in a year and for the better.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#68

Post by joesb » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

dpcx wrote: post #23

mtrpcic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "only ruin remains" is a fair statement to say about Apple, when the causes you're lamenting are the saving grace that got them to be a $300B+ company from effectively the brink of death.

"In the end." They're still riding high from iTunes and iPhone. I'm personally a fan of Apple, but who knows where this ship ends up.

A: This fortuneteller I knew is so amazing, he predicted that my dad would die and my dad is dead now!

B: When did he predict that?

A: May be like 30 years ago, but the point is "in the end" my dad died. Who would have thought that the end will come to him someday?

Your "in the end" prediction will always be true, unless Apple exists until the end of the universe.

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#69

Post by elastic_church » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 4:00 AM UTC

rbritton wrote: post #14

nodesocket wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean really the only component you're ever going to be able to upgrade is RAM right? Are you suggesting it should be possible to swap out CPUs in iMacs?

Upgradeability also includes things like the hard drive and card expansion slots. Those both let you extend the useful life of a computer a bit.

card expansion slots lol. have you seen the new macbook pro?

Re: Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

#70

Post by elastic_church » Tue, Dec 20, 2016, 4:01 AM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #55

The statement doesn't mention the outdated, underpowered, and overpriced Mac Pro specifically, which would have been helpful to the Mac faithful. A few folks I know in the video space switched to Windows because you can build a rendering rig that's over twice as powerful for less than half the price.

its okay for Apple, everyone that doesn't do any video rendering buys Macs because they still think they're better at it.