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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

#131

Post by jsjohnst »

greedo wrote: post #95
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…

The issue with that is that eventually that Mac Pro won't support the latest versions of macOS. It looks like it just made the cut for Sierra.

> It looks like it just made the cut for Sierra

I honestly highly doubt that. As I indicated in my post, there's very little new instructions / capabilities in Haswell and newer cores outside TDP reductions for a general purpose OS. There's a couple new AVX instructions and some crypto instructions, but outside that, I can't think of much (admittedly I'm no expert though) that macOS would need that would warrant cutting support.

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

#132

Post by nkkollaw »

pfranz wrote: post #118
nkkollaw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My machine wouldn't boot anymore because I followed apt's suggestion to run apt-get autoremove. There are many packages and apps out there that get released but are far from stable, and no easy way for non-devs (as in Linux devs) to opt out of unstable software. I'm not your average MacBook user, either. I use Linux on the server on a daily basis. If I waste 2 hours because of something like this--which doesn't invol…

Do you have similar issues when using Linux for servers?

Nope. There's nothing better than Linux for running a server.

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

#133

Post by vijucat »

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 wouldn't bother with building one myself, either; it's a huge time investment, not to mention the art of thermal paste application, cuts from sharp motherboard edges, and losing my BIOS settings to static electricity (although I totally appreciated the end-result of being able to upgrade my CPU and Windows accepting the hardware upgrade, bless Microsoft).

My assertion was more about the huge number of other people that seem enthused about it.

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

#134

Post by dijit »

CamelCaseName wrote: post #130
dijit wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I'm fairly new to ycombinator so perhaps I missed it, but can you link me again to this more expensive but equivalent laptop?

Hey man, no worries: http://i.imgur.com/Gjnr0sw.png

This is a screenshot of a similarly specced Dell Precision 5510 (which is being replaced with a 5520 hence a 30% discount)

Here is the product page to see for yourself.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...

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

#135

Post by dkonofalski »

edblarney wrote: post #126
dkonofalski wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking a bunch of nonsense here. Apple hired Angela Ahrendts to be SVP of Apple Retail. That's why her experience with Burberry was important. She has nothing to do with the tech and development side, only retail. On the other side, Jony Ive isn't just a designer any more than Stephen Hawking is just a scientist . Ive is an industrial designer with heavy, diverse engineering background. His entire purpose is…

"You seem to be confusing Apple Retail for Apple as a whole." You seem to misunderstand what Apple is actually selling, what 'Marketing' is and why a 'Designer' is the #2 guy at the company (or was). They are a 'luxury brand' in the 'consumer products' segment - they are not a technology company. [1] "I have always thought of Apple as a luxury brand," said Greg Furman, founder and chairman of The Luxury Marketing Cou…

No, they sell computers, tablets, phones, and digital watches - all tech products. The reason why a "designer" (and I have no idea why you're putting that in quotes) is #2 at the company is because his hands literally touch every product line that they sell. And your dismissal of them as a "luxury brand" (again, no idea why you have quotes) is as ignorant as dismissing Lexus as not being a car company. A "luxury brand" just means that you're not paying for the basic use of the product but for some luxury provided by the product. With Apple you're paying for the luxury of seamlessness and reliability of their technology products. I'm not even going to get into how "consumer products" means nothing except to differentiate who they sell their products to. By that metric, General Mills, Dell, and Ford are all in the "consumer products" segment.

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

#136

Post by dkonofalski »

dijit wrote: post #134
CamelCaseName wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly new to ycombinator so perhaps I missed it, but can you link me again to this more expensive but equivalent laptop?

Hey man, no worries: http://i.imgur.com/Gjnr0sw.png This is a screenshot of a similarly specced Dell Precision 5510 (which is being replaced with a 5520 hence a 30% discount) Here is the product page to see for yourself. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...

...Just ignore all the other differences between to the two laptops.

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

#137

Post by Patrick_Devine »

coldtea wrote: post #98
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If the touchbar is so amazing, why didn't Apple have the courage to just replace the entire keyboard with one big OLED display? Obviously this is no argument. It basically is: If cake is so amazing why don't we eat cake or day? Cake is indeed amazing to have in moderation, but it's also not the best thing to solely eat. We could thrive on just greens and meet maybe, but we'd do worse with just cake. Standard alphan…

To make it cheaper, maybe they could just do half the keyboard. Say split it between 5-6, t-y, g-h, and b-n and just make the left half with an OLED screen. The best part is they could then sell you a new MBP in two years which has a full OLED keyboard when the prices have come down.

Back to reality, the problem is that more than 5% of common people use those function key buttons on a daily basis, and they need that haptic feedback. I want my computer's volume, playback and brightness controls to be easily accessible. I also want to be able to use my escape key. I don't want to have to switch to some other application in order to turn the volume down or pause my music when I'm interrupted by someone, and it's nice to be able to control the screen brightness without having to switch applications in order to do so.

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

#138

Post by Fnoord »

eridius wrote: post #124
58028641 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using caps lock as escape is pretty common. I think there is a virtual escape button on the touch bar.

There is a virtual escape. Personally, I have "jk" mapped to escape (whereas Caps Lock is rebound to Control system-wide).

How did you accomplish this without an external program?

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

#139

Post by Fnoord »

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.

> I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer.

Microsoft wasn't thinking much about web developers during their monopoly of Internet Explorer. Or, well, they might've had thoughts. But no love.

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

#140

Post by eridius »

Fnoord wrote: post #138
eridius wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a virtual escape. Personally, I have "jk" mapped to escape (whereas Caps Lock is rebound to Control system-wide).

How did you accomplish this without an external program?

Which, "jk" or Caps Lock? The "jk" mapping is just in Vim. As for Caps Lock, if you go to System Preferences, and the Keyboard prefpane, there's a button "Modifier Keys…" in the lower-right corner that lets you remap the modifier keys (including Caps Lock) to other modifiers. So I just use that to remap Caps Lock to Control.
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