Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End of OS X

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 589 posts

Re: The End of OS X

#231

Post by ARandomerDude »

mstade wrote: post #148
lordleft wrote: post #64

I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix combined with the consumer focus alluded to in the article. I still adore the craftsmanship of the latest Macbooks, but my 2015 Macbook felt like the apex of Mac's design. It was the kind of device that was such a pleasure to develop on. You could leverage the power of Unix…

I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus is why I'm wholly invested in the Apple ecosystem. I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?

For me, the React Native experience has been instructive. Android is quick and easy to develop, debug, and deploy. The iOS side includes multiple hoops, constant frustration stemming from XCode, long app release times, and minutes-long builds for production-size apps.

Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release.

Re: The End of OS X

#232

Post by dhagz »

pdonis wrote: post #196
parasubvert wrote: post #84

I personally think that the MacBook Pro 16 inch is the world’s best laptop, and look forward to see what the next generations can do. But the whole point has been MacOS. I’m not sure what to think of the changes. If they stabilize the mess that was Catalina, then they’re doing the right things, even with the increased iOS-ification of the Mac. If they just slap more Windows 8 style touch gloss on deep and unresolvabl…

> Linux is only free if your time has no value. Linux has cost me less time than either Windows or OS X. But that's me; everyone's personal workload and usage pattern is different. My experience with OS X was that any time I tried to color outside the lines, the system worked against me, and that cost me more time. (My experience with Windows has generally been that it just sucks.) I haven't had that experience with…

For me, I can spend an entire day tweaking every bit of config in my environment, from my editors/IDEs all the way to my desktop environment/window manager (which of those would I even want to use? That's a week - at least - each to evaluate and twiddle with configuration). Hell, I could spend months evaluating which distribution I want to use.

And sure, I'm doing productive work in there as well, but probably less than I do on my Mac. I still spend too much time tweaking my dev environment and switching between vim and emacs and IDEs, but that's all I really can choose between, which saves time to do actual productive work.

Re: The End of OS X

#233

Post by metalforever »

brightball wrote: post #88
lordleft wrote: post #64

I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix combined with the consumer focus alluded to in the article. I still adore the craftsmanship of the latest Macbooks, but my 2015 Macbook felt like the apex of Mac's design. It was the kind of device that was such a pleasure to develop on. You could leverage the power of Unix…

Every time there’s a new Apple announcement, I’m happier and happier that I switched to Linux a couple of years ago. Power users want freedom and control of their own machines and hardware. The moment that Apple started soldering parts into place, I started looking elsewhere because it was a signal of the thought process.

No, this is not what I want, and I’m a power user. I want my machine to solve my problems and not get in my way when I am creating solutions. I do not want to be messing around with the internals, I have better things to do . I pay for it to just work in an environment I hope is vaguely private.

Re: The End of OS X

#234

Post by Not_John »

i switched 2002 from a Mac Powerbook G3 "Wall Street" to Windows. I will switch to a Mac again at the end of the Year when a Mac with an Apple Chip comes to Market. Exciting Times :)

Re: The End of OS X

#235

Post by chongli »

wwweston wrote: post #214
crystaln wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a developer and power user. I am incredibly happy with every update from Apple. Unix with good design is exactly what I want from my OS. Sure I can't disassemble my laptop and change the hardware. I have no desire at all to do that. I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this, although I imagine there are a tiny fraction of users who would and you may be among them.

> I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts. And Apple used to make it pretty easy to do this, and enough people did that there was a subeconomy of vendors selling for this purpose, al…

Being able to swap out RAM and storage and battery from factory-provided can extend the lifetime (and even increase the performance capacity) of a given machine at nothing more than the cost of the new parts.

It isn't just the cost of new parts. It's also the cost of those parts being larger in order to accommodate user-accessibility and replacement. When everything is surface-mounted on the PCB it can be made a lot smaller. This allows Apple to shrink the laptop as well as allocate more space for the battery.

No one is asking for phones where we can swap out the RAM and storage. Why do we want this from laptops? I'm typing this on a 2020 Air which I configured with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. I really don't anticipate a need to upgrade either of these things before the machine reaches end of life anyway.

Re: The End of OS X

#236

Post by jmull »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #17

> what the company perceives as a weakness: the paucity of apps in the Mac App Store. I think that the issue with the Mac App store, is that it imposes restrictions on a once-free-for-all development environment. I know many app developers that have abandoned it, after giving it a damn fair shake. Mac developers just got used to being able to wander all over the house, poking their noses into whatever they liked. iOS…

> I suspect that non-App Store apps for the Mac may be seeing the twilight.

I doubt it. There's literally no reason at all to transition macOS to be like iPadOS... since iPadOS already exists.

If they wanted to do that they could literally simply discontinue macOS and only sell devices with iPadOS. Boom, done. Of course, there are a million reasons to not do that, which is why macOS will continue to exist.

Re: The End of OS X

#237

Post by cortesoft »

mstade wrote: post #148
lordleft wrote: post #64

I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix combined with the consumer focus alluded to in the article. I still adore the craftsmanship of the latest Macbooks, but my 2015 Macbook felt like the apex of Mac's design. It was the kind of device that was such a pleasure to develop on. You could leverage the power of Unix…

I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus is why I'm wholly invested in the Apple ecosystem. I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?

I recently ran into some trouble with some tools installed in /usr/bin a while ago, and wanted to try making some changes.

Even with root, you can't touch /usr/bin. It took me way too long to try to figure out what was going on, and all the fixes were hacks.

Re: The End of OS X

#238

Post by oneplane »

fsflover wrote: post #200
oneplane wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I can't reply to the replies, I'll reply to myself: All of those points are fine, but they are points separate from a user using a device. If you want it for environmental reasons, say that. If you want it for freedom, say that. Both are valid reasons but don't have anything to do with someone using their machine, unless that 'usage' mains doing stuff with the insides. And before someone jumps in to tell that t…

I am not allowed to use a browser I want on iOS. Do you count this as “using their machine”? The reason is the lack of freedom to do what I want with the software.

Not sure what that has to do with hardware but I'll bite: users don't care. They don't know what a browser is, what a client is, or an URL or URI or address bar. They want a device that when they turn it on and type in 'tictoc dance dog' it shows them something that resembles what they had in mind. Doesn't matter if it runs WebKit or Gecko or if someone thought it'd be cool to emulate a trident-based engine on iOS on ARM in a custom browser.

Freedom 'to do what you want' has not had much to do with what works in the world of selling to the masses when it comes to user experience (and yes that is ironic).

Regarding 'using' and 'their' and 'machine': I meant an activity based scenario which is what most people see themselves doing. They mostly have no concept of ownership, actions or device semantics. The reason is simple: it's not needed to be a user and it's not needed to get the same results as other people in your group have. And for a lot of people all that matters is doing the same as the rest of the local group.

Edit number 3: you can apparently select your default protocol handler in iOS 14. I bet there are some double digit Google users that want that for Chrome, and a few sub-1% users that want FireFox. But that's still not freedom because they all use the same renderer and JS engine. On the other hand: it's unlikely that people care about that, and the people that do are not likely to run iOS at all. Luckily, you don't have to use iOS. Or a phone. So some aspects of freedom are unchanged.

Re: The End of OS X

#239

Post by wayneftw »

ashtonkem wrote: post #142
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #53

What I think a lot of us programmers miss is the experience of the end-users who are likely to buy a Mac. The fact of the matter is, 99.9% of people who buy a Mac are not going to know what subpixel hinting is. Or care too much that they can't delete Chess.app. To them, the Mac is nicer looking and easier to use than ever. Will iOS devs care? Not at all - developing for the Mac has become easier with Catalyst. It's e…

And I’ll continue to buy them. Why? Because I have better things to do with my time than fiddle with my OS, and because it’s still Unix like without having an awful user experience. And my employers will continue to buy macs for me for largely similar reasons. My last colleague who tried to use Linux literally never got their laptop to work with the WiFi authentication, so they had to wire in.

Been running Manjaro Linux for 2 years now on 2 desktop workstations and 1 laptop. No fiddling needed. Everything just works. (I had to install one utility called libinput-gestures to use multi-touch gestures on the laptop.)

Matter of fact, my life is easier with this setup than it ever was with macOS or Windows since every piece of software I need is in the package manager including official Chrome, Slack, Thunderbird, Zoom, Beyond Compare, VS Code, Node.js, .NET Core, Docker, MySQL Workbench, Azure Data Studio and many, many, many more...

I avoided Linux for years because every time I tried, it would break but Manjaro/XFCE never broke once on me. I can't recommend it enough. So glad I'm no longer a slave to Apple or Microsoft.

Post reply on HN