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How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

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Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#271
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firewire is very much alive in my house. Why is it "dead"? Why do I have to upgrade?

You don't have to upgrade. Don't upgrade... but if you do, there are adapters for you that will allow you to continue using your old gear.

It's not just hardware. Apple has officially abandoned Firewire protocol maintenance. We're okay at the moment, but how many more MacOS upgrades will we have where Firewire still works?

And I'm not an outlier case. There are a lot of audio professionals and semi-pros that depend on old Firewire interfaces. These were Apple's market for selling high-end laptops! This is basically just disregard for your oldest and frankly most profitable customers. If I didn't feel like a new MBP would actually be sacrificing functionality, I'd probably have upgraded already. Instead, I'm considering a platform switch. That's bad.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#272

I have the same feeling about iPhone in general as I do for my Mac, as I do for my (gathering dust) Apple Watch. Maybe we are experiencing the beginning of the decline of this system class. The question could be: what could Apple do to re-energize this ecosystem and take it to its next level? Or to invent the next class of systems?

> The question could be: what could Apple do to re-energize this ecosystem and take it to its next level? Maybe you are asking the wrong question. Apple Computer is gone (2007). Maybe they don't want to re-energize their computer company roots. That would be looking backwards and Apple as a company doesn't look backwards very often (their recent book was a strange departure). Maybe Apple's future is entirely in the c…

> Doesn't Cook use an iPad Pro as his primary computer?

If he does, then he has a silent, unseen team of people who smooth over the rough edges for him. As a multinational megacorporation CEO who travels the world, I'm surprised he hasn't encountered the following oversights unless someone else is hitting these and silently behind the scenes working around them for him, instead of getting them fixed. In my mind's eye, he primarily interacts with his main device via voice to an assistant team and he uses the device mostly on a consumption as opposed to a content producing role (with the exception of email), and they run into these annoyances; those times that he directly interacts with the device to key in data, in my imagination he relies on that team to fix up inconsistencies or partial workarounds.

1. Key in a phone number, select a label; all the labels are in the order entered, not alphabetically sorted (or better, sorted by a user-customized sort).

2. Key in a calendar appointment, set a timezone; the timezone search never remembers previous timezones you selected, only displays the results of the search default, wasting the user's time to key in the timezone over and over again, and wasting all the screen space on whitespace. Breaks consistency with Calendar's Recents display of locations.

3. Contact information is based upon incorrect first-last name model; search on "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" for all the incorrect assumptions Contacts embeds, for which users devise time-wasting workarounds.

4. In Calendar, setting Travel Time based upon Location still (on flagship iOS 10.2, iPhone 7, unlocked model) takes a very long time (sometimes as long as about a minute) instead of caching the previous 10-20 results, immediately displaying the travel time for them if any of the Location pairs' have a side that matches the currently selected Location, and filling in from the background as the search unobtrusively continues. Used to lock up Calendar and crash it about half of the time, but under 10.2 seems to return "Cannot Provide Directions: Network lost." error now with the same frequency. This happens because the feature depends upon a reliable network connection to function, and any disruption, poor latency, or just plain slow bandwidth seems to knock it off its feet instead of gracefully degrading to a best guess that is refined in the background with suitable visual cues and notifications.

5. No way to cut/copy and paste Calendar events.

6. Developers aren't invited in to build on top of Contacts and Calendar datastores to enhance with company-specific extensions. Instead, they must build the entire Contacts and Calendar user experience from scratch and try to replace it, or let users waste their time keying in that information into the Comments field.

There are lots of odd little omissions and oversights like these accreting over the years. Internal promotions at big organizations like this are not built on top of fixing these, so they are allowed to fester and gradually pollute the user experience until they become hygiene issues with the platform. A way to address this is a CEO-sponsored group who is charged with fixing these, and the members of the group are granted fast-track promotion status in exchange for addressing these issues. For Apple, this should be treated as an ongoing critical area to address, because it pierces their "Just Works" veil; the only way to keep up that customer stickiness for that sobriquet is superb attention to detail.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#273

Hardware is not the only problem Apple has right now vis-a-vis developers. Apple's flagship IDE, XCode, is also lagging behind, at least when talking about C++ development, but even Swift doesn't get too much love it seems. Having used it since at least version 5, XCode 8 has been a frustrating experience for me starting from day one, when it defaulted to Swift version 3.0 and so broke all of the existing Swift proje…

> with no way to downgrade to previous XCode version.

What? The Apple Xcode downloads page lets you manually download every version of Xcode going back to at least 2008. I mean: I clearly love to complain about Apple, and I am shocked anyone uses Xcode at all for any reason, but the only thing keeping you from downgrading versions of Xcode is really old copies have GUI issues on newer versions of OS X... Apple at least got that right.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#274
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably due to the improved storage iops of a PCIe flash drive more than the CPU.

And more available memory, letting the OS cache more files in RAM.

the 2011s may not have offered it as configured by apple, but they will use 16g ram if you buy 8g dimms.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#275
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. One of the big selling points of Macs was that they weren't running Microsoft Virus Studio, and didn't turn into a filthy pit of malware when handed to someone without a degree in computer security. Chromebooks are probably more secure than Macs.

Do they all still have abysmal screen resolutions? All the ones I keep seeing have resolutions from the 1990s.

The one I got my mother has 1920x1280. I set that as a minimum requirement, because the cheap Windows junker I bought her four years ago had that resolution.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#276
post #24

More than a single event, it is the string of events which create the disappointment. While Apple is indeed bound by Intels schedule for CPU upgrades, this would not prevent Apple from regular other components in their devices. A computer like the Mini should get yearly updates - and there is no good reason to solder in the memory. While it kept the very same design, it went from a quad-core i7 to a dual-core, with f…

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.

I just built a Mini-ITX Hackintosh (dual-booting Windows 10 and Sierra) that is running great if you have any questions or interest concerning the parts I used.

They're way better now than they were a few years ago thanks to UEFI installations. No more having to do a complete backup prior to updates and having to fix all your kexts/drivers, or a complete reinstall for upgrading to the next OSX/MacOS major release. The biggest problem I have is needing to use a $6 USB adapter for sound, but it's so trivial compared to past headaches.

I was originally looking into buying a Mac Pro. I spent less than $1000 on this build, and got something much, much better than a $4k+ maxed-out Mac Pro or 2016 MBP, plus with the ability to upgrade storage, GPU, and RAM.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the touchscreen on my Surface Pro and don't find it gimmicky. It's very useful, especially to scroll while reading an article, or to use it in "tablet mode," or just to hit buttons on command prompts. I don't use it for everything, but it is good at making small efficiency improvements in my overall life with my computer. Not accusing you of anything, but I suspect if Apple released a laptop with a touc…

>It's very useful, especially to scroll while reading an article I don't understand why someone using a laptop would want to scroll by lifting their arm up to the screen, rather than just moving two fingers on the touchpad where their hand is already resting.

I think a lot of this depends on the individual. My natural preference is to use the touch screen. It's not about what's "better" in absolute terms, but what requires the least amount of thought/brain power for the person (my guess is that time is a major factor of the cost calculation - it's quicker to do what is natural). The cost of hand motions isn't significant by comparison.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#278
post #49
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…

If I can figure out how to run Vagrant on one You could ssh into another computer.

I may wind up doing just that, or using Koding or Cloud9 or some other cloud-based dev environment. My work tends to want a 2gb vagrant instance, and even a DigitalOcean VM starts getting me into the price range of a cloud dev environment.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#279
post #207
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 couldn't agree more. The Surface Pro and Surface Book are in a completely different (lower) category of build quality compared to the new MBP. Also, the touchpads on the Surface products are nowhere near as good as I was led to expect from online comments. The Surface touchpads are passable at best by late 2016 standards and, again, are in a different category than the new MBP trackpads.

I have a retina Macbook Pro (15") that I absolutely love, but I have to say the touchpad on the new MacBook Pros just doesn't feel right to me. I've played with them in the store, and maybe I could get used to it, but its mostly the size. It just seems overly large and my palms end up on it. Although to be honest I use my MacBook with a couple of dell p2715q's hooked to it, and I use a magic trackpad and keyboard separately now.

Re: How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

#280

The big problem with Apples professional lineup is it's lack of GPU upgrades and power. Along with supporting the GPU manufactures by adopting standards and improving them. I'm tired of them and others blaming intel. x86 is no longer where huge increases in computing power will really come from-- we all clearly see this due to the laws of physics. Parallelizing computation for all its problems, is the future, and GPU…

> What Apple needs to do is make the mac lineup based modular components. E.g. "Here is a box you can slide a video card into

Like Razer has?

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