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Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

9to5mac.com

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Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#221

Post by narrator »

astrodust wrote: post #174
Joeri wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With apple's recent behavior, the updates may not be upgrades, but trade-offs.

I think they're having trouble finding their way in the post-PC world. Jobs knew this day was coming, that the PC would take a back seat to other devices, and brought up the analogy of Apple as BMW: The German company started out building motorcycles and while car sales soon vastly eclipsed that, they continued making really good bikes. It was a point of pride for them. If Apple goes back to that approach, of making…

It's not a post-PC world. It's more like a Kaby Lake has the same performance as Sky Lake world and Intel is not able to figure out process technology beyond 14nm world. Apple could put an Nvidia 1080 and a Skylake i7 in the pro and an i5 in the mini. I guess and that would be a decent upgrade. Nothing super exciting, but decent. The next refresh is going to be even more depressing than this one if Intel doesn't figure out new process technology.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#222

Post by kalleboo »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #68
feross wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion. The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-…

It's a good quote, but I feel it reflects a time when I didn't also need to run a stack of Redis, RabbitMQ, Postgres and webserver apps on my development box.

As long as the data-sets are test-sized and you're not simulating thousands of simultaneous users, that stuff should be no problem even for very modest computers.

The performance issues come when you're running each of those in it's own virtual machine, and all the overhead and tooling that comes with that.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#223

Post by jessaustin »

eecc wrote: post #147
r00fus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why local and not cloud/vps?

Why bother with a "pro" device at all, just get a chromebook and call it a day. Except there's a ton of premium stuff you can do more easily locally, and it's all stuff that hasn't been productized down to cheap web-office quality standards

Many of us have done just that...

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#224

Post by srazzaque »

thesumofall wrote: post #57

I think the good news here is that PC and Mac are back on par again. Even for demanding users of mainstream use cases (office, development, ...) both platforms offer great products. Personally, I have an MacBook Air 13" at home and a Lenovo X1 Carbon at work. Both have their unique strengths and weaknesses but they are both great laptops. Windows has done a great leap forward as has PC hardware. If I were in the mark…

I'd agree with this. Whilst 9-5mac and its readership will be focussed on what Apple is doing right/wrong, this may be ignoring the fact that competitors are offering genuinely compelling products.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#225

Post by supernovae »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #117
supernovae wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't ditch "metro".. its just UWP.. they were sued because metro was apparently copyrighted. UWP is good.. wish devs would embrace it but to be honest, the dev community is up the asses of iOS so deep they can't see the forrest form the trees.. Windows 10 has 400million + users and growing and Xbox One has 25 million devices... come on devs.. write some (good) apps please! C# is actually kind of fun too

I think we are talking past one another here. I've been a Windows developer longer than I've been a Mac developer, and write C# on a daily basis. Microsoft _did_ ditch the all-metro approach they took with Windows 8. You start up your PC and you see the familiar desktop. There's a start menu, even if it's different, with live tiles and all. It feels like an improvement, not like an alien intrusion. But the biggest di…

The start bar is a simplification of the start page. Its one single option to turn it back into a start page.

As for the full screen stuff, that was fixed in 8.1..

I'm not even sure what we're debating anymore. You're just obfuscating the truth that the reality is Windows 10 is ALL about 'metro' just under the premise of UWP.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#226

Post by supernovae »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #55
supernovae wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft didn't ditch "metro".. its just UWP.. they were sued because metro was apparently copyrighted. UWP is good.. wish devs would embrace it but to be honest, the dev community is up the asses of iOS so deep they can't see the forrest form the trees.. Windows 10 has 400million + users and growing and Xbox One has 25 million devices... come on devs.. write some (good) apps please! C# is actually kind of fun too

UWP takes away a lot from the platform though, like compilation via the DLR, and deploying can take an hour or so of building (I went through a nightmare experience trying to demo on a surfacehub, worked in the end, but damn). I want to like it (Win2D in particular is nice for my needs), but the execution has been lacking.

the "iron" languages never got much adoption though.. perhaps if .net had gone open source before ironpython, ironruby and iron. this would have been more important.

With that being said, I believe its only a matter of time before Microsoft brings this to UWP as all the insider and developer surveys have been focusing on asking what other languages people use and want to be able to write in within the context of UWP (Xbox/Surface/Win10)

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#227

Post by innocentoldguy »

I agree that Apple is dropping the ball, but I still buy their laptops and phones because I'm an macOS whore. I hate Windows and Android, and BSD and Linux, and their myriad applications, don't sync with my phone. Also, there isn't anything equivalent to Apple's trackpads on PC laptops. At least not yet. If it weren't for macOS and Apple's superior trackpads, I would probably switch to something else though, since the hardware lineup leaves a lot to be desired nowadays.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#228

Post by Koshkin »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #198
neutronicus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Ultrabooks do you think are better bang for the buck?

My Asus UX305 has a very similar design to the 13" Air but a Core M CPU, no fans, and a great 1080p matte IPS display. The track pad is excellent as well. It cost me $600. That all being said, I switched from MacOS to Ubuntu a couple years ago because I was finding the increasingly frequent notifications and general ugliness/usability of newer MacOS versions were becoming very Windows XP-esque. I might very well be t…

Linux runs on UX305 very well. Tried Fedora/Gnome and have been running Slackware/KDE for a while now with no issues with either.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#229

Post by redwall_hp »

ageitgey wrote: post #186
capkutay wrote: post #86

The jury has been out on Tim Cook's performance as Apple CEO since he took over about 7 years ago. I think this new line of Macs is evidence that he's just too focussed on operations to the point where it's ruining their products. I'm guessing the move to consolidate the ports and kill the audio jack may make total sense internally at Apple when it comes to their 10-year manufacturing operations plan and really maxim…

> The jury has been out on Tim Cook's performance as Apple CEO since he took over about 7 years ago Not to nitpick too much, but Tim Cook only took over as Apple's CEO a little over 5 years ago.

It lines up perfectly with the decline of the MBP line. I have a 2011 model, and it's truly pathetic how little of substance has changed since then.

* Better processors (a given, under the continuous march of Intel)

* Minor GPU improvements, with a multi-year draught where you basically couldn't get a dedicated GPU unless you bought the absolutely most expensive unit.

* Higher resolution displays.

Meanwhile:

* They keep making the damn things thinner, at the expense of functionality.

* They ship with half the storage compared to five years ago. Yes, it's NAND. But you shouldn't have to spend $600 extra on a machine that already costs $2000 just to get to the point where you were five years ago. And with the $/GB cost of NAND as comparatively low as it is in recent years...

* All the ports are gone. First they killed the ethernet, and now they're down to four USB-C ports. All of your DisplayPort-based stuff you've accumulated is now useless, and you need an adapter to plug in a USB flash drive. I get that they think it's going to drive the market down that path, but would it have killed them to go 50/50?

* Hey, let's replace a perfectly useful row of keys that can be bound to things, and the all important escape key, with a shiny touch screen. Fuck touch typists, right?

* CPUs still throttle aggressively under load (especially in warmer climates). Thermal management is hard on laptops, but Apple generally opts to sacrifice performance for cosmetics.

* RAM has been consistently lacking for such an expensive machine. Considering the OS will make full use of it for caches when extra space is available, and that we live in an era of bloated web pages/browsers and garbage Electron software, the consistent lowballing of RAM is annoying.

Re: Mac sales declined nearly 10% last year as Lenovo, Dell and others gained ground

#230

Post by jsjohnst »

sangnoir wrote: post #130
flamedoge wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well.... depends. Apple invests heavily into making sure SW runs lean on metal

Only on newer hardware. Trust me, you don't want to be caught running the latest OS on older Apple hardware because it will run like molasses. If your hardware is the "minimum supported model" or the next most recent, you're better off not upgrading at all.

MacOS Sierra runs superbly on my 2012 rMBP. It's only a couple months shy of 4 years old.
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