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Apple’s 2016 in review

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Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#341

Post by srathi »

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…

Same here. Even worse, the issue happened so frequently that I had to reinstall a fresh copy of Sierra. Frustrating!

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#342

Post by leoc »

loosescrews wrote: post #27
panic wrote: 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…

Steve was a notoriously hard person to work with. Realistically, anyone who Steve was likely to name as his successor would be a follower, someone who went along with whatever Steve said and told him what he wanted to hear. What Apple needed was another person like Steve, but unfortunately, by letting Steve select that person, they ended up with someone completely unlike Steve.

That doesn't really seem to be so: Scott Forstall was only fired after Jobs had left, while Cook and Ive are not really shrinking violets either. And in fact it seems that some of the missteps of the post-Jobs era, such as the too-early Apple Watch, were the result of Ive's assertiveness. The central problem seems to be two-headed: Jobs' succession plan seems to have been to put in place a Forstall/Ive/Cook trumvirate, but that arrangement went the way of most triumvirates; and to the extent that one person is in charge at Apple, that person (Cook) wasn't a "product guy" in the Jobs era and seems unable or unwilling to take on SJ's role as hands-on product monarch. Add to that Ive's apparent (and fairly understandable) increasing boredom with having to iterate away on the same old core Apple products for another large chunk of his life, combined with his increased political untameability in the post-Jobs era (what will the stock do if he announces his departure?)

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#343

Post by Xixi »

mikeash wrote: post #237
danieltillett wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quality usually don't go up when releasing less frequently, quite the opposite. The more you change things, the more likely you are to have severe bugs. When Apple was releasing major OS upgrades less frequently, you usually had to wait until a .4 or .5 point upgrade to have something usable.

The first release of macOS Sierra (10.12.0) was vastly more usable than the first release of MacOS X Snow Leopard (10.6.0). I should know: I transitioned to Snow Leopard on release and practically nothing was running on it. I think it's the only time in my life I reverted to the previous version of macOS... It didn't prevent Snow Leopard to become one of the best OS, in the end.

The problem is that Apple is shipping things that aren't right/ready, but this should be independent from the release schedule.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#344

Post by FireBeyond »

72deluxe wrote: post #242
tompi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up with Windows, switched to to OSX and got an iphone 6 years ago, it was amazing. Apple made me love my job, programming on my MBP was awesome. Now it's exactly that, no added advantage, but regressions. Same on iOS in my opinion. Time to move on.

Move on to what though? Windows 10 is never up to date for me. Linux decides to reinvent the UI paradigm every couple of years or are still running X for maximum battery usage

It's a challenge. Given that most of my work is operations for Linux systems, containers, Kubernetes - either to bare metal in my garage, AWS or GCE, it could be (reasonably) argued that maybe I should be running that on my local system.

I just got the Kaby Lake XPS 13 Developer Edition. If you want to be cutting edge and "refined", you'll have issues. By cutting edge I mean things like:

XPS13DE ships with Ubuntu 16.04, kernel 4.4. Switching to an external DP/TB3 monitor kernel panics. Switching to 16.10, kernel 4.8 makes Network Manager unhappy.

Using the Kensington SD4600P dock I bought (because the Dell docks are, to all reviews, horrible, and buggy), you can't run multiple displays except through Windows - OS X, Linux, ChromeOS can only drive one.

Not major issues, to be sure - but they do challenge where I want to be, a 'just works' experience (that I -used- to have with Apple, but less and less so recently), neat and polished (it is so nice to just put my laptop in a vertical dock at my desk, plug in a single USB C and get:

- power to my laptop

- 4K DP

- external keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc

all from that one little cable.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#345

Post by castis »

bergers89 wrote: post #244

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...

Your nice blanket statement can easily apply to anything without even trying.

If you have a problem with apple hate, don't comment on it. There are thousands of other threads to reply to instead of adding to the existing dribble.

My last 3 jobs, I've been issued an MBP. I'm not really given a choice, it's just considered standard issue at this point. Should we all just accept things we'd don't necessarily like, or is it alright with you if we have a collective conversation?

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#346

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

sdegutis wrote: post #291
chaostheory wrote: post #286

> 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…

Yep. They probably don't realize how big of a part "Word of Mouth" marketing plays in their sales. At every small business I've ever worked at, everyone praised the MBP highly, and if you didn't have one, you felt like you wanted and needed one. Especially because it Just Worked™, it was kind of this sleek and powerful tool that only people who know the value of their time had, because they weren't going to waste the…

> Yep. They probably don't realize how big of a part "Word of Mouth" marketing plays in their sales.

I'm not sure who would know better: Apple's marketing team, or a group of developers chatting on Hacker News.

Depending on the level of sophistication in Apple's marketing department, they might have a very clear, well-researched, quantitative model regarding just how much impact our word-of-mouth carries.

I wonder if some of our angst comes from the nagging fear that we (professional developers and photo/video editors) hold less clout than we thought, and that as a result, our tools in upcoming years will be more expensive and less useful.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#347

Post by eridius »

wl wrote: post #340
acdha wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> I've never seen that [memory pressure] halt animations, mouse motion, or stop the clock from updating. This is exactly what I've seen. If I catch it early enough and can get the UI to respond to me tabbing to the terminal, I can kill Safari's web content processes or whatever it is that's leaking memory and it goes away.

The only thing I've seen stop the clock (besides SystemUIServer itself hanging) is a forkbomb. But even that didn't stop the cursor. If the cursor is stopping, that indicates something more serious is going on.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#348

Post by eridius »

wyager wrote: post #55
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #8

In 2009 I bought my first Apple product: an 8GB 13" MacBook Pro that cost $3000 ($1000 for the extra 4gb, like a dumbass). Quite soon after I got an iPhone 3GS. Now every computer in the house (family of four) is an Apple. Every phone is an Apple. Even AirPlay was an influencing factor in selecting a hi-fi receiver (HTR7065). Apple TVs sit next to actual TVs. Yesterday I replaced our fleet of TimeCapsules and Airport…

> Now its just incremental phone updates. And the software side of those updates is bad . Apple hardware is probably better than ever. The mechanical engineering and precision involved blows away anyone else in consumer electronics. The new MacBooks and iPhones are truly works of art compared to the cheap injection-molded stuff everyone else is pumping out. But the software just keeps getting worse and worse. My iPho…

> My iPhone … regularly has strange graphics glitches and Springboard crashes

Sounds like a hardware fault. You should take it to an Apple Store and have them run a complete diagnostic. Heck, the next time you see the graphics glitches, take a picture of the screen, and depending on the nature of the glitch, that alone might warrant replacing the device regardless of what the hardware test comes up with.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#349

Post by leoc »

gutnor wrote: post #179
wineisfine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very clever analysis. Thanks for that, it makes a lot of sense. It also explains why it's shifted from being a computer company that makes gadgets (Jobs) is now becoming a gadget company that happens to make some computers as well (Cook). In all this, the gates are wide open for Microsoft to score some good points here towards devs.

Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along. The true value of Steve Jobs is the reality distortion field. That's really was is missing here with the new Mac. All the discutable decisions about the Mac that people complain about are just similar to the trends set under Jobs, the difference is that he would make the people believe that Apple was 100% behind the Mac. There would no n…

> Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along.

That's not the case: back in 2001 post-PC thinking was popular too, and Jobs stood out against it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmvmtmqqbeI . That's evidently why Jobs was so reluctant to make the iPod work with Windows PCs: his whole plan for the iPod was to have it sell his intended Digital Hub, the Mac. He did eventually come around to post-PC thinking of course, but only quite late: even in the D 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85PMSYAguZ8 he and Gates were quite resistant to it.

Re: Apple’s 2016 in review

#350

Post by chaostheory »

jdcarter wrote: post #325
chaostheory wrote: post #286

> 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…

Even when I was happy with Apple, OSX was never a good platform for games.
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