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Apple’s 2016 in review

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Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#231

Post by jsz0 »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #84
nardi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's less about coming up with good ideas/questions and more about having the "idealized user." A user with extremely good taste that can guide development. And put that user in charge of everything.

How does the current Apple identify the correct idealised user when they don't seem to share the required taste? They need to relearn and engage in user discovery and questioning until they realise what niches they occupy and their use cases and needs. I doubt Apple's former lead would ever have put out a Mac that needs a dongle to connect to iPhone but not Android. I doubt he'd have killed Apple monitors as an iMac…

> I doubt Apple's former lead would ever have put out a Mac that needs a dongle to connect to iPhone

The original iPod was incompatible with many Macs still in use at the time that lacked FireWire ports.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#232

Post by gomox »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #57
tsujamin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm onto charger 4 now I think? Usually have to replace it every ~12 months due to either cable sheath detatching from the inner cable and then splitting as I wind it up. Atleast two of them have also shorted out or only charged my macbook tl;dr they're pretty trash, but maybe so are other chargers.

Why not just patch the cable with some electrical tape? Buying an entire charger just because the cable is fraying seems excessive.

I've tried this and not long after doing it, the cable started fraying at the end of the taped section (and this despite the fact that I took some time to make sure the tape was properly placed, and tapered towards the cable). This is besides having a separate charger for home and work, and never coiling the work cable (that goes in the bag) around the power adapter.

There really is something wrong with the stupid cable. It's unthinkable that any of my other non-apple cables would do this.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#233

Post by j2bax »

majormajor wrote: post #59
aresant wrote: post #33

Apple is the world's most profitable business - twice the profits of #2 (JP Morgan Chase) and almost a 4x magnitude over Google.(1) I agree with the author's final assessment - "meets expectations with some areas that need improvement" - and I think this is the key. They are stoking the fire, keeping it burning, but clearly their focus seems to be diminished on their core business. And even companies of this scale ne…

Apple should absolutely be investing big into future product categories, as they have done in the past. However, with revenue and profit levels where they are, it's baffling to see them seem to devote less resources in an absolute sense (not just a proportional one) to existing money-makers. Mac laptops are big sellers. iPhones are big sellers. Yet the refreshes get more and more basic, and the software quality seems…

AR is still a category without an elegant 'Apple' solution, to its detriment. As they did with smartphones when the technology was at a place to support such a game changing device I could see them defining/kickstarting the AR category when mobile processors can handle it.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#234

Post by lsadam0 »

yoz-y wrote: post #229
lsadam0 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtual Machines. If you use VM's, 16gb is likely going to be a problem. I, quite easily, hit it all the time. It has nothing to do with being 'professional enough'. The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.

Bollocks, I have a 16GB ram MBP from 2014, running a VM all the time and compiling on both the VM and the host OS. No problems there. The 32GB might be more comfortable for some, but I have hard time figuring out how something so exclusive has now become a necessity.

> The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.

This was a very important part of your comment. It's good that 16gb isn't an issue for you, but for some of us, it is.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#235

Post by gm-conspiracy »

twright0 wrote: post #96

> But here’s the problem: sitting in this niche of excluded users are some of Apple’s strongest supporters, the influencers that create word of mouth... I see this point made a lot, especially on Hacker News whenever this general topic comes up. I'm just curious: what evidence is there to support this point of view? I'm as frustrated as the next software engineer that the new Macbook Pros aren't targeted at me or use…

Probably the people Apple relies on to make the software that encourages the "buy-in" of the ecosystem in the first place.

People are not buying iPhones to spend the majority of the the time using the built-in native apps of iOS.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#236

Post by lukevers »

stirner wrote: post #220

I've seen very little discussion here of the battery issues with the new MBP, which in my opinion is the most offensive example of Apple's decline in quality. Lucky users are reporting 9 hour battery life, while others are getting 4-5. Nobody is getting the promised 10 hour battery life from their $1,500+ laptops.

In regards to the battery life, I was excited to see "9 hours remaining" the first time I turned the new MBP on. Realistically, I get about 3-5 depending on what I'm doing.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#237

Post by mikeash »

danieltillett wrote: post #133
nicolas_t wrote: post #114

I went from almost never needing to restart my mac (with Snow Leopard) to having to restart it a couple of times a week with Sierra. The UI just becomes totally unresponsive (the cursor stops moving, the time in the menu bar stops ticking and the spinning wheel stops spinning) and needs a restart. And I don't even have things like SIMBL installed (I used to with snow leopard, not anymore). I just have Karabiner eleme…

This. The thing that made the MacOS ecosystem worth the pain and sacrifice was the quality and things "just working". What I don't understand is Apple has more than 10 times the developer resources they had 10 years ago yet quality has gone backwards. Do you really need to be a Stalin to ensure your company makes quality software?

They're stuck conforming to an artificial schedule of once a year major releases. They won't let themselves take the time they need to get things right anymore. It's no surprise quality has gone down.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#238

Post by yoz-y »

lsadam0 wrote: post #234
yoz-y wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bollocks, I have a 16GB ram MBP from 2014, running a VM all the time and compiling on both the VM and the host OS. No problems there. The 32GB might be more comfortable for some, but I have hard time figuring out how something so exclusive has now become a necessity.

> The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing. This was a very important part of your comment. It's good that 16gb isn't an issue for you, but for some of us, it is.

One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop. Scouring the web for some time shows me that in 2015 it was quite hard to get a non-gaming laptop with 32GB of ram. Now, there are quite a lot of voices that cry that it is some bare minimum.

To me it seems that more people now prefer laptops to desktops and it is annoying to sacrifice performance for portability. The lack of a truly powerful desktop Mac definitely is not helping in this regard either.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#239

Post by angry_octet »

twright0 wrote: post #145
musha68k wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even want to know how much revenue I brought Apple by "word of mouth" alone as I've been one of the gazillion fevered and outspoken Unix converts (Darwin fan since 2004). Friends, family and random people in every potential "evangelizable" context – don't even get me started on how many fellow netizens, students, sysadmins and developers I actively tipped over as well (these often were the hardest actually).…

I can definitely believe that you, as an individual, have driven tens of thousands of dollars in sales Apple's way over the last decade. But even if we assume that there are tens of thousands of people doing the same thing as you (as effectively as you) for the same reasons, that adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars, which is three orders of magnitude below Apple's sales per year, and your impact is stretched o…

I'm sure we each overestimate our importance. Plenty of my non tech friends went out and bought tech without asking me, heck they probably know i'd tell them not to buy that windows phone on a plan but they did anyway because it came with free spotify.

I think the better insight is that our needs, for practicality and occasional updates, are quite common. Its nice to add more memory or disk without needing a new machine. It would be nice to have a replaceable battery in my laptop. Apple is screwing up all these simple things.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#240

Post by dtougas »

matt4077 wrote: post #198
richardboegli wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Macbook Pro was meant to be for Power Users?

I have no idea what these self-annoited "professionals" do, but it's actually quite difficult to get the MacBook Pro to its limits. Doing webdev or using Xcode it's hard to ever notice any delay. But maybe I'm just a noob who isn't professional enough to suddenly discover that life just isn't worth it without 32GB of RAM.

For me, it is not just what the MacBook Pro can do now, but what it will be able to do in three or four years. When I buy my computers, I am looking for something that will last several years. That means having the memory and storage capacity for the future, not just what I need today. Apple is making these things like iPhones, and probably hoping that we will buy a new one every two years.

I have older MacBook Pros that I upgraded the RAM, and upgraded the storage (both capacity and speed), and they still work strong. When I am done with them, I pass them down to my kids.

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