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Tim Cook assures employees that Apple is committed to the Mac

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

#121

Post by pdimitar »

quicklyfrozen wrote: post #112
pdimitar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been an Apple user but I feel you. For me the most baffling part is that a company with supposed hundreds of billions in cash reserves is just sitting on their bottom ignoring a good chunk of their users. I've heard some news that they fired a lot of QA engineers as well but I have no clue if that's true or not. It does make a lot of sense to keep a strong hold of your market even if you are struggling. Ev…

More then 90% of that cash is overseas, and Apple is not going to bring it back to the US. (Maybe at some point they'll move engineering where the cash is so they can put more of it to use.)

Having in mind the huge HQ they are building in USA then I'd guess it won't happen.

This makes it even more mystifying for me -- are they just gonna sit on top of their Smaug level of treasure?

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

#122

Post by tzhenghao »

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…

Yeah, I really like that idea. Here's a writeup I had quite a while ago. Not sure if it's in any way similar to yours, but I guess we're trying to address a similar problem here

https://medium.com/@tzhenghao/why-your-smartphone-is-soon-be...

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

#123

Post by shmerl »

threeseed wrote: post #90
shmerl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you talking about ? It's not an excuse but deliberate design choices. That is why Safari is by far the best browser on the Mac.

Well, it doesn't matter if it's deliberate or simply lack of thought because of low priority. It is behind in the end. And if it is indeed deliberate - too bad. I don't expect Apple to change for the better until their upper management is replaced. Then may be they'll start moving and even add support for free codecs and allow using alternative browsers on iOS.

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

#124

Post by BoorishBears »

taigeair wrote: post #110
enjo wrote: post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

Could you elaborate on its impact on how you do development? One reason I still have a mac is because it's so developer friendly. Linux is very time-consuming to make things work with and is incompatible with various hardware. Also some mac software is great.

I have a Zenbook.

Windows for development isn't nearly as convinent as OSX. Yes there's lots of customization you can do to make it bearable. Powershell isn't as awful as CMD, but projects aren't supporting Powershell as much as bash any time this decade AFAIK.

The Linux subsystem works, but the flow between Windows and Linux is lacking.

I tried Linux. Linux doesn't handle my mix of high DPI and normal DPI monitors (every month I'm told Wayland is going to support it "soon") so I can't use it. I know that sounds silly, but my monitors are a huge part of how I work. Not supporting my workspace is pretty much a non-starter. But to seal the deal it also crashed going to sleep a few times.

So I installed OSX... on my Zenbook. Because somehow OS X managed to handle my hardware better than Ubuntu had (bar the stock wireless card), and it was developer friendly.

I prefer brew to apt-get. Yes, apt-get is vastly more powerful, but I never had brew fail on me because a previous install had messed up.

OS X also has a lot of mindshare. Tooling tends tend to progress from Linux and OS X in ease of use before entering a gulf and reaching Windows eventually.

I got my copy of OSX legitimately, but to me it's telling I essentially had to go to "bootleg OSX" to get my hardware and software experiences in sync. OS X even supports the touchscreen as a mouse, not that I ever used the touchscreen on a laptop that only supports the laptop form factor and no others...

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

#125

Post by enjo »

taigeair wrote: post #110
enjo wrote: post #17

The latest rev pushed me to a PC for the first time in like 15 years. It's partly because I didn't love the new Macbook Pro, but also cause hey..change is fun sometimes. I'm very happy with my new Surface Book. I never thought I'd like the touchscreen as much as I do. I LOVE being able to go to tablet mode for calls and stuff where I sort of want to just wander around. The pen has completely changed how I do flow-cha…

Could you elaborate on its impact on how you do development? One reason I still have a mac is because it's so developer friendly. Linux is very time-consuming to make things work with and is incompatible with various hardware. Also some mac software is great.

Windows 10 have built a very impressive Linux compatibility layer. It's not a VM, they are executing native ELF binaries using the windows kernel. They run a version of Ubuntu 14.04 on top of it that most notably includes package management. It's currently missing upstart, so some things don't work nicely, but MOST things work just fine. I believe upstart is available on some preview versions now. Everything on our development stack (largely python) worked straight out of the box.

So on windows I have a real bash shell. I have dpkg. I effectively have Ubuntu. I can provision my machine using the ansible scripts we use to provision our production machines (took only minor updates to make them work).

There are some missing pieces. Docker doesn't work from within the linux subsystem. Upstart doesn't work. There is some weirdness related to how you interact with the windows environment from the linux subsystem. For instance I had to install a hack to allow me to open files in sublime from within the linux subsystem.

It's a mixed bag. You have a real Ubuntu environment with real package management, which is awesome (as opposed to homebrew). Yet some things that work on OS X don't work quite as seamlessly on Windows.

I think for most developers, it's probably going to work pretty damn nicely tho.

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

#126

Post by ryanlol »

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.

> The team simply has different priorities in particular security

IDK, I see people linking me safari PoCs far more often than other browsers. What leads you to believe they're doing better than Chrome?

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

#127

Post by bluejekyll »

yakult wrote: post #79
bane wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's all niche ptoducts with no reach, though. I'd like something mass-consumer-oriented and ubiquous, so I can actually get (roughly) the same experience everywhere from bus stops and coffee shops to my office. The current situation is like pre-ipod mp3 players: the tech is all there, the ux and marketing effort is not.

I think the network bandwidth isn't there yet either. Latency will always be a constant that we'll have to deal with as well.

VMs are great, but clientside rending/editing, etc, will probably always be best, where it's only IO for storange/persistence that goes to the cloud.

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

#129

Post by nishs »

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.

I'm not challenging your argument, but have you seen Safari Technology Preview [1]? It seems to be under healthy development; for instance, recently it became the first browser to support all ES2015/16/17 features [2]. So it may be just that the standard Safari release is behind.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133135

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

#130

Post by comex »

rocky1138 wrote: post #116
CamperBob2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the first clue might have been when they changed the company's name to remove the word "Computer."

This is also a good indicator: “I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore?" Tim Cook told the paper during a trip to visit Apple's flagship store in London for the debut of its powerful big-screen tablet, the new iPad Pro. "No really," he said, "why would you buy one?” http://fortune.com/2015/11/10/apple-ceo-tim-cook-pc/

No offense, but this is like one of those false stories in politics that keeps spreading no matter what the fact checkers say. I've seen that quote posted on HN like five times now. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Tim Cook isn't actually so undisciplined that he would call an entire product line of his company useless in an interview.

In Apple's world, "PC" means Windows PC; the Mac is not a "PC". As Gruber noted[1], remember the ad campaign - "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC..."

[1] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/10/31/cook-why-would-y...

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