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Mac’s share falls to five-year low

computerworld.com

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Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#41

Post by jsjohnst »

carlmcqueen wrote: post #37
jsjohnst wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2010 Mac Pro is also very upgradeable (and fairly cheaply too). I upgraded mine from a 2.4ghz 8-core to a 3.3ghz 12-core w/ 128gb RAM, very very fast SSD, USB3, and much improved graphics card (driving five displays). The only thing it's lacking that I'd want is Thunderbolt really. Yes, newer processors are a little faster, but the main benefit of Haswell and later CPUs is much lower TDP for mostly same-ish perfo…

Who do you use for upgrading it? I have one sitting around that I'd love to upgrade but always found the secondary upgrade market hard to navigate.

I did it myself, buying parts mostly on Amazon, after doing a bit of research. If you want specific part numbers / buy links, let me know.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#42

Post by derefr »

jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

> I used to use a PC not too long ago and nothing would work

Was this before or after the Windows 10 WSL environment was released? I think that has done a lot to change developers' views on doing ＊NIX development on Windows.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#43

Post by tyfon »

fjarlq wrote: post #13
fjarlq wrote: post #11

Why does StatCounter disagree? They find OS X user share currently at an all-time high of 11%: http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-monthly-200807-2016...

StatCounter's answer to that question: http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#net-apps

This stuck out for me, but I might be wrong:

Net Apps base their stats on unique visitors per site per day. ("We 'count' unique visitors to our network sites, and only count one unique visit to each network site per day.") We [StatCounter] base our stats on page views

So if an os x user read more pages than a linux user on a specific site, that same user will have more "weight" in the statcounter analysis.

Basically.. different methods that actually measures different things.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#44

Post by dijit »

edblarney wrote: post #27
dijit wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an odd sentiment to hear on HN. We are usually technical people, surely we can see past "spec" as the only differentiator of two laptops. Apple are priced like a high-end business quality laptop. (except upgrades are a higher mark-up) if you compare laptops based on the quality of their build Apple laptops are quite competitive.[0] That's before you factor in little things that don't seem to make it to busine…

Apple is definitely a fashion brand - and their marketing tactics and positioning are mostly aspirational - the underlying commodity is tech. This is why Apple hired Angela Andrents - who's background is 100% fashion (she re-built Burberry) and 0% technology. Think about that for a moment: the hired their #1 marketing person with ZERO tech background :). Who is the 'other' most powerful person at Apple? It's Johhny I…

It's not a zero-sum game, you can have talented designers and talented engineers working on the same product, as long as they are willing to actually work together.

I evidenced an example of a laptop which is equivalent build quality (but is $1,000 more expensive at the same spec without discounts.)

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#45

Post by pjmlp »

Eridrus wrote: post #18
sounds wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that Windows (somewhat famously) gets is "developers! developers! developers!" Apple has a passionate, loyal developer community. Developers who create iOS apps use OS X machines to do it. They spend almost twice as much on an OS X machine (vs. a Windows machine) to get over the barrier to entry. Apple has never made anywhere close to the same investment in their developers that their developers have made i…

I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer. They have been recovering mindshare lately, but it's the same back and forth. It's less clear that developer mindshare even matters as much these days when the web is the real desktop platform for most software.

Depends on the developers you talk to.

As someone whose Windows dev experience goes back to Windows 3.0, I was thrilled with WinRT, having Visual C++ finally catching up with C++ Builder and .NET finally going properly native as it should have been since .NET 1.0.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#46

Post by jameslk »

derefr wrote: post #42
jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

> I used to use a PC not too long ago and nothing would work Was this before or after the Windows 10 WSL environment was released? I think that has done a lot to change developers' views on doing ＊NIX development on Windows.

For me it was before Windows 10 WSL, but for my colleague it was after. It was very early on right after it was announced, of course. He tried using the Ubuntu on Windows stuff to run a Nodejs app but ran into weird filesystem issues. We didn't have time to be one of the first to figure out why, so it was back to the Mac for him.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#47

Post by idobai »

jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

> So Windows is out (for non .NET devs). That leaves us with what, Linux itself as the OS? Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands. I use macOS because I don't have time to hunt for drivers, trying to understand an obscure error discussed in a long forum thread or having all my software no longer work just because I updated a package.

Sounds like you either haven't done anything on linux or trying to spread FUD. Downloading a driver isn't rocket science. Especially if you're a developer...

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#48

Post by eecks »

akgerber wrote: post #32
vijucat wrote: post #22

Also see the relative growth of /r/buildapc vs. /r/apple: http://redditmetrics.com/r/buildapc#compare=apple (click on Total Subscribers). March 2013 was the crossover point. I'm trying to compare Apple on it's own turf here (tapping into the enthusiasm of retail / consumer folks). That's a lot of mindshare lost, IMHO, by defining themselves as the "Bose of computer hardware". Important mindshare at that: young people…

I'm not sure I believe your assertion that building a PC makes people love it for life— I built a PC in high school, then switched over to a Macbook for college and haven't looked back. Now that fiddling with computers is my job, it's less appealing as a hobby.

I also built a PC and then went straight to using laptops and now a macbook pro

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#49

Post by eecks »

themihai wrote: post #4

They are expensive and underpowered. I used to get the top of the line macbook but it's not worth it anymore. It's starts to look like the John Sculley era. If it wasn't for the pro audio support I would jump on the linux boat.

My mid-2015 macbook pro is still better than the competition in my eyes - with some exceptions like the new Surface books but they are in the same price range.

Re: Mac’s share falls to five-year low

#50

Post by SnowingXIV »

jameslk wrote: post #36

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all. First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013. But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingr…

Great point. I recently bought the new MBP with Touchbar and was hesitant for the myriad reasons that were previously mentioned.

Before I pulled the trigger I went to setup my dev environment on a fresh Linux partition at home (mainly a windows machine). I was fighting things all over the place to get it to a state of usefulness and productivity. I spent too much time doing this and still kept running into little issues here and there when needing to install certain things, run particular apps, and getting to switch over to a different workflow. I couldn't afford wasting this much time in the office.

I ordered up the new MBP, installed everything, setup time machine, and bam within a few moments and pulls, npm commands, etc I was fully functional. Very little issues and it felt incredibly good. My biggest gripe was ordering a few adapters but now that doesn't pose any more issues to me.

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