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Apple’s 2016 in review

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321–330 of 408 posts

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#321
post #250

seriously, if you have a problem with apple, don't use it. There are thousands of other vendors. Instead of posting dribble on the web...

Not really. There's one other major phone OS out there (Android), with the majority of phones made by less than a dozen companies. Linux and Windows are the only other choices when it comes to operating systems for computers, and few companies manufacture high-end laptops with acceptable quality. The only company selling everything is probably Microsoft, where you can buy a laptop from the manufacturer of the OS. But…

No, you have alternatives you enumerated.

Yes, they are not as good as Apple. What's new? Isn't the thread and the author shitting on Apple?

If he is, and you all are, then it's because you have something better.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#322
post #304
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of the problems you mentioned sound like previously undetected hardware issues or possibly an issue with a kernel extension. Sierra, like its predecessors back to 10.0, does not need to be restarted except for updates in normal usage – but the symptoms you describe are characteristic examples of a hardware failure (halting animations suggests it's not I/O but something like the CPU/GPU or a kernel extension). Si…

I've experienced these UI hangs. It's the OS reacting poorly to memory pressure.

Parts of the UI hanging can be memory pressure (or, at least in the past, things like network issues with e.g. LDAP or network home directories) but I've never seen that halt animations, mouse motion, or stop the clock from updating.

I do agree that Apple needs to get better at I/O scheduling – even with an SSD the experience is less responsive than BeOS was on 90s PC hardware — but the animation loop has typically been a reliable diagnostic cue in my experience for distinguishing between swapping / disk failure and other issues.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#323
post #5

How do they fix this? They need to do more talking — and even more listening — with their users. Engage with the influencers. Sit down and find out what their developers need that the current products don’t offer. Find out what is making their users unhappy. Asking people what they want will give you predictable results: complaints about any kind of change and positive feedback about shiny-looking features that demo…

Bottom line is Apple has forgotten they are a computer company first and a lifestyle company second. This year they tried to be a lifestyle company first and it was a huge mistake. They'll fix it, I give Tim Cook 3.5 years to right the ship or he'll be gone and they'll try to get someone who can.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#324
post #280
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well a computer with enough GPU performance to work with VR would be a nice start. Apple don't currently have anything available other than hacking an eGPU set up together. The "current" Mac Pro is over 3 (4?) years old now. Users can't upgrade it because of the proprietary GPU cards and Apple don't seem able to keep it relevant themselves. It's difficult to have a professional relationship with a supplier where the…

VR is a subset of PC gaming right now, and Apple has never offered hardware sufficient for high-end PC gaming.

GPU nowadays is almost a misnomer. They are more like supercharged versions of the old "floating-point calculation" chips. As such, they have plenty of applications beyond VR - bitcoin, data analysis, encryption etc etc etc.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#325

> Defining products by the spreadsheet: A big percentage of complaints over the new MacBook Pro devices is that they ignore the needs of the “power” user. The problem? This group is fairly small and have needs living well towards the end of the bell curve. The problem with ignoring this niche is because these users are either developers or big influencers. They help with the ongoing success of the App Store as well a…

My household has been Mac-only for about 20 years, but I finally gave up waiting for a decent Mac Pro or a powerful Mac Mini. Last year I put together a PC for about $1500 [1] which looks great and completely demolishes any Mac for GPU-heavy tasks, thanks to its Nvidia GTX 1070. The build was super-easy (my 10 year-old daughter did half of it) and the machine worked perfectly the first time I powered it on. And, much to my surprise, Windows 10 really isn't bad.

I still use a MacBook Pro for most of my development work, but all gaming and video stuff is now PC, and I can't see myself going back. The ability to easily upgrade individual parts on an as-needed basis is just too appealing.

I still prefer MacOS to Windows, but if MacOS is the only thing a $2500+ Mac Pro brings to the table in 2017--compared to 2017 PC hardware--it really isn't enough anymore.

[1]: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/joshcarter/saved/Dq2kLk

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#326

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…

Most of my Sierra pain comes from plugging/unplugging my 27" Cinema Display on a 2013 MBP. Have to reboot to get them to sync again. In frustration I told my wife, "It's like XP all over again." (Not really but it's indeed a major pain to have a workflow that worked flawlessly for a decade to suddenly stop working.)

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the Surface Book stabilized yet? I really want to buy one but I keep hearing about their issues. My S3 is probably an abandoned puppy now but works really well... when it is working at all. MBPs are still the best computer one can get for a rock solid Windows experience; even the surface book trackpad (supposedly precision?) seems to not really compare to what comes on a MBP, and touch doesn't often fill in the g…

Personally, my experience with my Surface Book has been nothing but pleasure. I have the latest SB, and it's the best laptop I've had in a long time. It's well crafted, feels good working on it, and quick. And the battery life is awesome. I cannot express how impressed I've been with the battery life. And this isn't browsing the web. This is with Unity and Visual Studio open and actively working with it. Going back t…

Nice to see you had a good experience. For what it's worth, I'm not considering the new MBPs and I'm still dreaming of getting a surfacebook. As a previously long time Microsoft employee, I'm already quite used to windows. I just hope it doesn't come with a lot of heartache.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#328
post #323
post #5

How do they fix this? They need to do more talking — and even more listening — with their users. Engage with the influencers. Sit down and find out what their developers need that the current products don’t offer. Find out what is making their users unhappy. Asking people what they want will give you predictable results: complaints about any kind of change and positive feedback about shiny-looking features that demo…

Bottom line is Apple has forgotten they are a computer company first and a lifestyle company second. This year they tried to be a lifestyle company first and it was a huge mistake. They'll fix it, I give Tim Cook 3.5 years to right the ship or he'll be gone and they'll try to get someone who can.

No, bottom line is Apple have forgotten they're a company that sells awesome - or at least tries to - and have become a company that sells branded stuff, just like every other company selling branded stuff.

That (IMO) was the Jobs difference. He wanted game-changing awesome in everything - the PR, the advertising, the packaging, the launches, the personal story, the ecosystem, the design, and the product internals.

Sometimes he got that very wrong. Mostly he didn't. But I always felt that Jobs was absolutely consistent about the goal, even when his idea of awesome was as much of a miss than a hit. (As at NeXT.)

Cook doesn't understand awesome in the same way. He understands useful, more or less, and he understands incrementally better. But he's not obsessively and addictively dedicated to making things that are unexpectedly cool and insanely great - or at least as insanely great as they can be, given what's possible. Mostly he seems to want to make money by cutting production costs to raise margins - which is fine for a company, but not very exciting for anyone else.

The problem for Apple is that Jobs was one of a kind. Not only is there no one at Apple who can replace him, I'd be surprised if there's anyone in the entire industry. The only two people who are similarly obsessive, effective and obnoxious are Bezos and Musk, and they both have other plans.

And I'm not saying that as a fanboi, because Jobs was clearly an obnoxious asshole for far too much of his life. But credit where it's due - he was uniquely smart and talented.

Apple's best hope might be to keep a very close eye on the AI startup scene and see if they can talent-spot the next major player before he/she gets to billionaire status.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#329

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.

It's a non-starter for CUDA development, which is important to anyone doing serious GPU programming.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#330
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> One thing I would like to know is how we got here - that some NEED 32GB of RAM in a laptop

Inefficient programs with shiny GUIs.

OSX + GPU + Chrome + Hipchat alone consume over half of the available memory on my machine right now. And that's just the software which supports my development, no editors, compilers or VMs.

Start to throw in modern editors, VMs (software which behaves very poorly when swapped out), compilers that trade memory space to reduce CPU usage, or a JavaScript heavy website, and you're one errant command away from your machine becoming unusable as it starts swapping like mad.

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