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Osborning the Mac, or not

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Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#101

Post by specialist »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #45
greedo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. Mac revenue was roughly $25 BILLION dollars in 2019. The idea that they don't care about it is simply wrong. Same with the idea that they don't care about marketshare. Of course they care more about iDevices than the Mac. It brings in roughly 5x as much money as the Mac. But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.

This was my argument for why Apple shouldn't have killed Aperture. Sure, it was a tiny percentage of Apple's business, but it was beloved by customers and independently profitable—more profitable than plenty of entire businesses. Apple still killed it.

Yup.

Apple is the best (large org) at marshaling resources, focus, priorities, pushing the envelope. It's been fantastic.

But every decision has consequences. They abandon beloved products. They deprioritorize code quality.

I wish they'd find a better balance, or clever new org strategies. Spinoff abandoned products. A separate cleanup crew to address technical debt, fix bugs. (I'm sure there's plenty of other devs, like me, who revel in house cleaning.)

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#102

Post by slantyyz »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #45
greedo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ridiculous. Mac revenue was roughly $25 BILLION dollars in 2019. The idea that they don't care about it is simply wrong. Same with the idea that they don't care about marketshare. Of course they care more about iDevices than the Mac. It brings in roughly 5x as much money as the Mac. But Apple can chew gum and walk at the same time.

This was my argument for why Apple shouldn't have killed Aperture. Sure, it was a tiny percentage of Apple's business, but it was beloved by customers and independently profitable—more profitable than plenty of entire businesses. Apple still killed it.

Man, Aperture was really good, and I loved the fact that if you bought it from the Mac App store, you got to install it on up to 5 computers, which was a bigger deal back then than it is now.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#103

Post by Mindwipe »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #54
torstenvl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has never pulled off a transition like this before. None of your examples involved going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture. Transitioning to x86 brought additional customers who prefer Mac but also need to run Windows or Linux or who do x86 development. Transitioning away from it may lose them.

68k to PPC was exactly "going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture". ARM today is waaaaaaaaaaaay more popular than PowerPC ever was, and nearly infinitely more popular than when Apple switched from 68k, and 68k was very popular back then.

> 68k to PPC was exactly "going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture".

And Apple nearly went bankrupt.

(Not saying Apple is in any danger of going bankrupt, but it's not a successful transition story.)

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#104

Post by kstenerud »

te_chris wrote: post #100
kstenerud wrote: post #97

It's actually a brilliant move by Apple. After the new machines are released, all Mac app store apps will just magically work because they were recompiled behind the scenes by Apple to run on ARM. Only independent releases (stuff not in the app store) will have to deal with the shit show, which will also push more developers to the Apple tax. For regular Mac users (who are already using the app store for everything),…

Given a large proportion of premium mac sales are to people in the creative industries using specialist software distributed outside the app store, I don't think your intuition is correct on this one.

What percentage of the mac user population are they? 5%? 10%?

80% of mac users are like my mother-in-law: The Mac is a machine that does their taxes, emails, word processing, small business stuff, browsing, movie watching, and sometimes video chat if they're not doing that on their phone.

And if a company that depends on the creative industry is selling its software outside of Apple channels, I'm sure they'll have the foresight and budget to make sure their software works on the new machines.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#105

Post by slantyyz »

jedberg wrote: post #19

Everyone here is very positive that the transition will go smoothly based on their last few transitions being fairly successful. I'm a bit more skeptical. Back then, their desktop/laptop business line was much more important to them. They needed it to go well. They were also a niche player and couldn't afford to lose more market share to PCs/Windows. But now, they barely care about their desktop/laptop revenue (being…

>> their last few transitions being fairly successful.

Their last transition is specifically what brought me to the Mac after having been away for a decade.

I switched to Mac exactly because they were going x86, because I knew I'd be able to virtualize Windows (although it took a year to happen), which was a win-win for me. I'm guessing a lot of people who used Windows at work plus developers on Linux wanting a nice GUI (remember, we're talking mid to late 2000s) were responsible for a lot of Mac growth back then.

I have to wonder how many people will switch back if x86 were to get totally abandoned.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#106

Post by saagarjha »

kstenerud wrote: post #97

It's actually a brilliant move by Apple. After the new machines are released, all Mac app store apps will just magically work because they were recompiled behind the scenes by Apple to run on ARM. Only independent releases (stuff not in the app store) will have to deal with the shit show, which will also push more developers to the Apple tax. For regular Mac users (who are already using the app store for everything),…

> After the new machines are released, all Mac app store apps will just magically work because they were recompiled behind the scenes by Apple to run on ARM.

That would be really magical; this is essentially impossible.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#107

Post by Kipters »

zeveb wrote: post #95
renaudg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the Mac and iDevices revenue streams are not as independent as you imply. Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well. Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for cr…

> Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developer How many, though, and would they really switch to Windows or Linux, or retire from the industry? Apple has always — or at least since 1984 — had an incredibly loyal fanbase. I think that the sort of slights which would make me leave a platform just roll of their collective back.

Since they released their 2016 lineup there has been a shift from Macs to Linux and Windows (just look at how many "I left macOS for {X}" have been published here on HN)

Windows is also making a very compelling argument with WSL2

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#108

Post by te_chris »

kstenerud wrote: post #104
te_chris wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a large proportion of premium mac sales are to people in the creative industries using specialist software distributed outside the app store, I don't think your intuition is correct on this one.

What percentage of the mac user population are they? 5%? 10%? 80% of mac users are like my mother-in-law: The Mac is a machine that does their taxes, emails, word processing, small business stuff, browsing, movie watching, and sometimes video chat if they're not doing that on their phone. And if a company that depends on the creative industry is selling its software outside of Apple channels, I'm sure they'll have th…

If apple loses the creative industries they lose a lot more than points of market share.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#109

Post by whywhywhywhy »

mpweiher wrote: post #90
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think that's not nearly as important anymore I used Macs during Classic to OSX and PPC to Intel transitions but I'd argue it's actually way more important this time. Back during previous transitions fully native apps were really the only option but now... Almost all modern actively developed software on Macs is just electron wrappers Only a few exceptions of actively developed cocoa apps come to mind, Sketch,…

> it's actually way more important this time. How so? All the old legacy apps that nobody wants to (or can) recompile were just jettisoned in the 64 bit transition, as TFA duly noted. "In retrospect, the move to 64-bit software may have been made not just for its own sake, but in contemplation of the ARM transition."

32 bit is going back a lot longer, although my machine which I haven't upgraded to Catalina still has a few 32bit applications kicking around on it including one that I was using in my professional work only 6 months ago.

Plenty of 64 bit software exists that isn't being updated often or at all anymore.

Re: Osborning the Mac, or not

#110

Post by timw4mail »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #54
torstenvl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has never pulled off a transition like this before. None of your examples involved going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture. Transitioning to x86 brought additional customers who prefer Mac but also need to run Windows or Linux or who do x86 development. Transitioning away from it may lose them.

68k to PPC was exactly "going from a popular architecture with broad software support to a less-popular architecture". ARM today is waaaaaaaaaaaay more popular than PowerPC ever was, and nearly infinitely more popular than when Apple switched from 68k, and 68k was very popular back then.

68k was also a dead end. It was very popular, in computers, video game consoles, etc. But it also never got up to ~100MHz.

Going to PowerPC was the only real option at the time.

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