Mac’s share falls to five-year low • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by nkkollaw » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:04 PM UTC

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 was going to make a similar comment.

I tried for the third time last year, and the truth is that if you're switching to Linux because the Mac is too expensive, if you take into account all the hours you waste because of bugs or half-backed apps, Linux is 10 times more expensive.

I use Linux for servers and I would never even consider using anything else. On the desktop? No way. It's just not ready, if you value your time and it's not an hobby for you.

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

#82

Post by hcal » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:06 PM UTC

fritzw wrote: post #57

gshulegaard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development. Interesting... > Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands. Oh... Quick question, when was the last time you did it? Currently I have three full time Linux boxes: * Custom PC build I did myself * System76 Galago UltraPro * Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Oddly enough, the one that gave me the mos…

The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. Particularly for work machines, I don't have time to compile and install just to get my box up and running. Mac worked for me for this reason, I presume the reasons are the same for many. You like the freedom and power your boxes allot you, I like the simple operation of the mac. My problem is Macs are…

I just switched from Macs to a Fedora desktop and never compiled anything. Maybe I've been lucky, but my Lenovo and Dell desktops and my old IBM and new Asus laptops run with no issues.

I'm capable of solving most linux driver issues, but I've been pretty impressed that I haven't needed to during my switch. Again, maybe I've been lucky.

I was a little disappointed that installing nodejs requires a magic shell script but it didn't require any effort on my part beyond setting similar things up on Mac with Brew (or Brew itself) Otherwise, Fedora's app store has covered my needs. That said, I don't do any graphics work, so maybe you're going to run in to issue I haven't.

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

#83

Post by wwweston » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:07 PM UTC

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…

> But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development...

The Mac ecosystem has been about as ingrained into OS development for over 10 years at this point.

In fact, my observation is that it is now less integrated than it was 5 years ago. I've been trying to build some OS software from source over the last year on Mavericks and then El Capitan and it's quite the minefield. Seems to be something in the shift to clang and issues of versioning with a variety of libraries. "Use hombrew" is the watchword, but the funny thing is that even if you don't use it and start going looking for help with build failure messages... the first results are still advice on the incantations that might (or might not) get homebrew to take care of it, and people still get stuck (finding info at a layer of abstraction down from homebrew seems increasingly difficult).

It got me thinking about running Linux on various PPC macs 'round about the millenium shift -- that wasn't exactly butter-smooth experience, but I think I spent less time on driver issues than I have tracking down the causes of open source build problems on OS X this year.

Meanwhile, there's the Windows 10 compatibility layer. None of the Windows dressing has impressed me much since XP, and a lot of commodity PC hardware is shoddy. But it looks to me like MS is really attempting to offer the same value proposition for developers who find a unix environment helpful -- workstation that will run your popular suite of desktop apps and give you that nix-y feeling. I can't help but be intrigued.

For my personal purchases I've bought nothing* but Apple hardware for around two decades. But the next machine I buy will likely be a PC laptop selected for use with Linux and Win 10. Think I owe it to myself to try.

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

#84

Post by antoniuschan99 » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:08 PM UTC

8draco8 wrote: post #62

SnowingXIV wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iss…

I will disagree because difficulty of dev env setup highly depends on dev stack and most of them are easier to configure on linux. First of all on Linux you have to know what you are doing. Linux is first and foremost a system build by sysadmins for sysadmins. Of course a lot of stuff was done by developers but to properly manage dev environment installed on linux you have to be at least partially sysadmin. If you ar…

I think he did which was OSX

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

#85

Post by Patrick_Devine » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:09 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #12

zzzcpan wrote: post #9

This overall slowdown could be the reason why Apple made a gimmick for newcomers, i.e. the touch bar. They needed to try to boost sales.

They don't think like that. "Let's make a gimmick for newcomers". They just legitimately thought it was great and will it enough to impress people and shut them up about the late revamp of the MBP line. And it could be good, with certain provisions, but not will all the other BS coming with it. The main issue is it seems nobody at the top could see this -- and I mean see this when they said ok initially, because sure…

If the touchbar is so amazing, why didn't Apple have the courage to just replace the entire keyboard with one big OLED display?

You can easily see how the touchbar comes across as being gimmicky. Lenovo already ditched their touch bar on the X1 Carbon (2nd generation) because it was a terrible idea. Buttons are useful, particularly for people who touch type.

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

#86

Post by alphaomegacode » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:11 PM UTC

sounds wrote: post #16

alphaomegacode wrote: post #3

Whether this was a reflection of overall PC slowdown, I don't know but Apple execs need to make some course corrections sooner rather than later. The apparent neglect of developers with respect to some of the changes (and non-changes) in the laptop and desktop lines seems to be giving many developers pause and concern.

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…

That first line was an excellent "quote" (the developers! developers! developers! line).

Yes, Ballmer said that but with Nadella, Microsoft seems to have focused once again on developers as a main influencer and buying segment. Although it's probably fair to say that Microsoft has courted the dev community for quite a while with things like ActiveX, VBA, FrontPage (eek! lol) and other technologies built-in to their products.

You're also probably quite accurate that devs loved Apple maybe even more than Apple loved devs. The UNIX underbelly of OSX was great for many developers and the build quality of their hardware and software. But with their purposeful neglect of Applescript and even browser engine choice on iOS, there are many small razor cuts that Apple seems to be ignoring.

I still like the company and some of their products but the perception from the business press, developer community and maybe even users of mistakes in hardware and software are taking some of the shine off. And for a company seen as a standard-bearer in tech, that should be cause for concern for Apple execs.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

mcroft wrote: post #71

fritzw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. Particularly for work machines, I don't have time to compile and install just to get my box up and running. Mac worked for me for this reason, I presume the reasons are the same for many. You like the freedom and power your boxes allot you, I like the simple operation of the mac. My problem is Macs are…

Xubuntu is now my first choice operating system. I have it on 2 desktops (one Dell for work and my home desktop). It also works great on an old Lenovo X-series and a Dell latitude. I can honestly say that the one machine I need to keep Windows 10 on for work causes me hours more grief than my Ubuntu-based machines. For me, the biggest annoyance is having Office365 at work and not being able to use things like Skype e…

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by nkkollaw » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:12 PM UTC

robotmlg wrote: post #64

eikenberry wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. This seems a strange things to say considering everyone I know who uses a Mac for dev uses homebrew, which compiles as part of the install.

Homebrew tries to download a binary for pretty much every package, and only rarely compiles from source.

True. It used to be like that at the beginning, but now it's rare.

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

#89

Post by alphaomegacode » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

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.

One company I worked for, we architected on Microsoft with no looking back during the dotcom boom of the late 90s, early 2000s. Within about 3-4 years after that, the transition was made wholly to open source such as Python, Linux, PHP after a lot of little frustrations piled up such as the licensing models for our backend servers, dev tools and so forth.

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

#90

Post by kelseydh » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

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…

From my experience, Mac's brew package manager ecosystem is actually quite unstable and prone to breaking. I know a few developers who believe that Linux's apt-get is generally more stable.