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How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

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Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#191

Post by coldtea »

kobeya wrote: post #133
coldtea wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are gamer targeted systems that are better specs than anything apple ever made Which is irrelevant. I don't a "gamer system". I want thin, light, excellent construction, and good battery life, great trackpad, and a good enough CPU/GPU to achieve all that. Comparable Mac and PC systems for that cost $2000 and way up...

Sure. But the post I was replying to said $3500-$4200.

Yeah, but he also wanted the 1TB ultra-fast SSD option. The comparable standalone SSD modules at that speed go for $800 or so.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#192

Post by kitsunesoba »

cookiecaper wrote: post #101
weaksauce wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of affordable storage in the retina and up laptops and even desktops has been a deal breaker for me. I am on a five year old mbp and am seriously considering a hackintosh to be a daily driver. That's a whole big can of worms though.

Can you identify specifically the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems? I've spent considerable time using all 3 major OSes as daily drivers and while each platform has perks, I've never felt a strong commitment to OS X for daily use. I'm curious what many people feel is so crucial about it that they'd consider switching to the massively unstable Hackint…

For me at least it's a lot of little things, including but not limited to:

- The plethora of excellent native apps made by indie/small company on macOS. The platform has attracted small time high quality developers as far back as the pre-OS X days and it still does, mostly. Apps like this are considerably more rare on Windows, and while indie is the name of the desktop Linux game, quality and consistency are huge issues there.

- The workflow. macOS is built to deal with lots of loose, oddly sized windows scattered around which is great for how I work, especially when hooked up to a 27" monitor. Windows' window management starts to breaks down if you don't maximize everything and doesn't allow you to manage windows on a per-application basis. Under macOS you can tell your computer, "Close all windows belonging to TextEdit, but don't quit TextEdit", while Windows cannot offer that sort of control. I also really like having a single, fixed global menubar over a smattering of redundant bars attached to individual windows. There's also the key binds built into every native text field and the way the OS additively stacks key shortcuts and all sorts of other little things.

Linux can be customized to be semi-Maclike but getting all the details right is damn near impossible short of writing an entirely new desktop environment, and even then you're eventually going to find your efforts thwarted by some third party app that where for some reason or another the developer has found it necessary to use some oddball UI toolkit or to do otherwise do odd things that don't play nice with your meticulously arranged desktop.

I'm currently dual booting hackintoshed Sierra and Windows 10 on my tower (keeping windows for games) and in the past have exclusively run several Linux distributions with numerous different desktop setups. At the end of the day I'm facing a productivity loss by switching to either of the alternative platforms.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#193

Post by protomyth »

bjarneh wrote: post #2

The lack of attention could perhaps be caused by the death of the man who brought the attention?

I'm also starting to suspect that Scott Forstall wasn't really the problem, and that the firing of Sal Soghoian is just another symptom of not getting the Mac.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#194

Post by jawngee »

_delirium wrote: post #74
colept wrote: post #54

This is where the Hackintosh market has thrived. For desktop users, size of the machine is not nearly as important as raw. computational. power. The iMac was good in its time but that time was half a decade ago. The Mac Pro was supposed to be the revolution for Mac desktops, but they neglected it for too long. And since you can't upgrade it yourself that shiny new Mac depreciates exponentially and even more so when s…

A maxed out current iMac is a pretty competitive workstation machine imo. Not especially cheap , but not prohibitive for a company. The top of the line is currently a 4.0 GHz quad-core i7 w/ 32 GB RAM (27" model w/ the memory and CPU upgrades). I have that on my desk at work and am quite happy with it.

It's not competitive at all to a hackintosh.

I have an i7 overclocked to 4.6 GHz, 64GB of RAM, 6GB GPU and it was almost $1400 cheaper. It took maybe a day and a half to put together (the last PC I put together out of parts was a pentium). Everything works, including Thunderbolt 3.

It's also way better looking, imho.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#196

Post by elliotec »

autoreleasepool wrote: post #106

After being an Apple "Loyalist" for over 15 years, I recently sold my rMBP and built a desktop (i7 4790k, GTX 1080, 16Gb DDR3 @ 2933Mhz). It was by far the best hardware decision I have ever made. Building the system was an absolute blast. Plus, I now have an extremely powerful PC with first class Linux support, tons of I/O ports, and no vendor lock in. The best part is it cost me about 1/3 of the price of a (maxed-o…

This is what I did, never been happier. My current desktop is the most used and useful possession I've ever had.

I don't have a Chromebook, but seriously considering it if I can use Dropbox and a terminal on it for dev.

I still have a MBP for work, but it has become a chore to use especially with Sierra breaking everything (iCloud is now incapable of working with our company's security software or something)

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#197

Post by 72deluxe »

mtw wrote: post #163
deedubaya wrote: post #13

I still think macOS/OSX provides the best user experience for personal computing. It's the lack of substantial hardware updates which is driving users away. If creatives are going to pay a premium for a Mac, there should be something to differentiate it between the competition besides the privilege to run macOS. Heck, it should have something to differentiate it from the last model! I'll still recommend Macs for my f…

Agree but software-wise, macOS also begins to show bugs and be annoying. Not at all like Windows but with their lack of focus, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ubuntu or Win10 become better in 2,3 years

Let's hope Apple stops changing the expose behaviour every single release. One weird regression with Sierra is that expose/overview requires you to move your cursor to the top of the screen to display the different desktops after showing. It's stupid. I have ctrl-up mapped to show expose and the inability to view the different desktops straight away is insane. Who thought removing this from El Capitan / Mavericks (whatever it was) was a good idea??

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#198

Post by taude »

I'd happily have a 15" MBPro that weights a little more and has a better transitory-period port selection (USB-C along with the ports my prior MBPro has), and upgradable RAM and SSD storage. The difference between a 4 or 5 pound desktop replacement laptop isn't important to me, even in the situation where I'm always using it on the road. Apple is optimizing the wrong things here. These optimizations could probably be done on the AIR line, though, without much negativity, though.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#199

Post by makecheck »

Apple clearly did make major investments in the Mac, it’s just that their investments were not even relevant to most Mac users, and not even apparent to everyone else.

For instance, there is clearly extensive support for Touch Bar in many built-in Mac Apps, and the API that was created just for this one device is impressive. And yet, to see this extensive support for Touch Bar, you often have to select a “Customize Touch Bar…” command! The defaults expose very little, making the Touch Bar appear far less helpful than it could be. Also, it is really questionable to distract so many software teams to support this one feature, which probably kept all of those teams from implementing more obvious improvements that people actually asked for.

If I were managing this and I could see that hardware was going to be delayed, I would consider shifting more resources into the macOS to develop a series of “awesome” new features (heck, make this the year that you develop a real Finder). That way, although you’re announcing modest improvements to hardware, you can still say “look at all this great new stuff!” and boost the platform. Instead, they developed extensive software that a tiny fraction of their Macs can even use, while simultaneously putting it in a product that few people want to buy, further limiting its usefulness.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#200

Post by lmm »

electic wrote: post #37
beat wrote: post #16

My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music. It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I d…

I did take a close look at the Surface Pro. Sorry, the build quality is nowhere near a MacBook Pro. Secondly, I found the touch screen very gimmicky. I tried using it for a week and found that my hand just hurt lifting it up repeatedly and also hated switching context from the keyboard to the screen. Not to mention, the screen was full of smudge marks after awhile. To be honest, I really found myself using the keyboa…

> I did take a close look at the Surface Pro. Sorry, the build quality is nowhere near a MacBook Pro.

Shrug, not my experience.

> Secondly, I found the touch screen very gimmicky. I tried using it for a week and found that my hand just hurt lifting it up repeatedly and also hated switching context from the keyboard to the screen.

Don't force the touchscreen. Just use it when it makes sense. I've found it's a very natural way to press buttons (because you can just... press the button), particularly when I'm using the keyboard (e.g. filling in a multi-page form, or writing generally) - must nicer than pushing a pointer around to the right place. And it's nice when dragging and dropping, and there are a few games that play nicely that way. And being able to draw/write on it is very nice occasionally. But sure, most of the time I don't use the touchscreen. But even if you ignore the touch aspect, it's a beautiful screen. I've also fallen in love with 3:2 - it seems to strike the right balance between vertical space for development and rectangular enough for watching movies on. At least for me.

> Not to mention, the screen was full of smudge marks after awhile.

That seems like something that shouldn't be happening, assuming your hands were clean? It doesn't happen on mine.

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