Jobs was against dogma. It’s a changing world and the perspective and input of the young is valuable. What exactly are you moving on to? Ubuntu? Windows? Behind macOS is the most valuable company in the world adding fixes, features and security patches. There isn’t any other computing solution today that can deliver what Apple does.
I can't see Linux (or other GNU-desktop-nixlike) becoming a full-time macOS replacement for me because no DE works the way I'd like it to. You've got KDE (Windowslike), GNOME (what if iPadOS were adapted into a desktop OS), XFCE (middle ground between Windows and Classic Mac OS), and Cinnamon (Classic Windowslike), and Pantheon (what if iPadOS looked like Mac OS X Mavericks). None that are an obvious choice for someo…
Maybe someone should make a Linux distro with a DE preconfigured to work "the Mac way", kind of like Linux Mint is preconfigured to be "the Windows way".
I got my dad a Mac about 10 years ago, and never got into the experience. I mean I got it for him, used a couple of days to tell him where was everything, delivered and then came back to my trusted thinkpad with i3. About a year and a half I got a macbook from my employer even as a replacement from a T480 which was awful because of thermal throttling. After a couple of months, I got the m1 macbook air as my personal…
Yeah… I mean I love the “don’t have to think about anything” experience of all Apple products. That’s the reason why I use their stuff.
But at least in the last couple of years before the M1, the number of things that were just plain annoying… it really made me look for an alternative. And really… there isn’t one. Windows is so annoying to use and even the Linux fanatics I work with manage to run into trouble like once a month. And yeah it’s fixable trouble. But I really don’t want to deal with that shit. I want a useful trackpad, a useable browser and a usable mail program. I want my laptop to reliably suspend and wake up. I want, if there has to be a kernel crash, that I get all my windows back in the state I left it. That really doesn’t sound like too much. And yet it is.
And the worst part: Apple knows it. There is now quite a number of subpar experiences (looking at you Apple Music App) that they can just get away with.
The key point in this Twitter rant is that the SWEs who understood the Mac (and NEXTSTEP, for that matter) have aged out. Most everyone has retired or moved onto other opportunities. There's very few of them left at Apple. And they're often overruled by younger managers. Apple is hiring tons of fresh new SWEs who have no understanding, nor desire to understand "The Mac Way". I'm not saying this is right or wrong, the…
Moved on to where? Windows has adverts in the start menu! Desktop Linux GUI is still painful and really only suitable for those who love to tinker. Since I moved to Mac from Windows I’m thankful for macOS even if it could be better, it’s still much more usable than the alternatives. I find myself spending more time on my professional work and less time fixing driver issues or fighting annoying in OS ads.
I am the "analysis software coordinator" for a nuclear physics experiment (MUSE). The software framework we use was originally developed by me, on a macbook pro, mainly, targeting both MacOS and Linux. We have to onboard new students regularly, and it's quite a software stack to compile (Geant4, root, helper libs, our framework). 5-10 years ago, I was happy if a new student was on Mac. Slap homebrew on it, install the dependencies, install the software. Pretty straight forward. But now, it get more and more brittle. New xcode? Better start downloading new versions and recompile everything, and pray that it works. Now I am actually happy if somebody brings a windows laptop. Slap on WSL, install ubuntu, just works. The number of students we had who used linux already on their laptop I can count on one hand with no fingers :(, but our new postdoc directly ran into an opengl problem on AMD which makes the gpu restart.... So from that perspective, Windows+WSL, with all its warts, comes closest to usable.
Putting myself in Apple's shoes: I just don't see the financial incentive to invest a whole lot in the native GUI story for the Mac in 2022 Regular people mostly use iOS. Many don't have traditional computers at all. That was originally the Mac's core market. It still has a strong professional market- but many of the serious professional tools (Adobe, Blender, IDEA, etc) use their own custom in-house GUI frameworks,…
This.
People just are not building, crafting and using desktop apps specifically for Mac anymore.
That ship has sailed. They either use their own frameworks and build on all 3 platforms, or use Electron. On a lot of daily things people use iOS.
I am thinking what apps I actually use on my Mac the most.
It’s Chrome, VSCode, Terminal.
I still use Preview a lot though… I hope the Swift pushers won’t touch that. If they screw up Preview, I don’t know what I’ll do. Preview is amazing honestly.
Your parents, kids et cetera aren't power users though. Macs used to be for professionals, but Apple started seriously chasing the consumer demographic with the original iMac.
> Macs used to be for professionals Makes you wonder who is then buying these expensive MacBook Pros, Mac Studios and Mac Pros. I guess it's those grandmas needing 28 cores for their recipes.
Seems like you're joking but I know far too many people who have bought a garbage $300 windows laptop, absolutely hated it, then they bought a $2000 MacBook Pro.
They always mention how much nicer the Mac is than their old Windows laptop but never mention that they bought a bargain-bin Windows laptop and a modern flagship Mac.
Even if I try to advise them to to just get a Windows laptop in the $800 range or so, they pretty much always go with a Mac because it feels like the safe purchase.
Putting myself in Apple's shoes: I just don't see the financial incentive to invest a whole lot in the native GUI story for the Mac in 2022 Regular people mostly use iOS. Many don't have traditional computers at all. That was originally the Mac's core market. It still has a strong professional market- but many of the serious professional tools (Adobe, Blender, IDEA, etc) use their own custom in-house GUI frameworks,…
This. Ableton still works great on Mac, so do all the plugins I use. Logic Pro is still excellent, and I assume final cut is too. I often find these rants a bit surreal.
Jobs was against dogma. It’s a changing world and the perspective and input of the young is valuable. What exactly are you moving on to? Ubuntu? Windows? Behind macOS is the most valuable company in the world adding fixes, features and security patches. There isn’t any other computing solution today that can deliver what Apple does.
I moved on to Windows 10 and FreeBSD after many years on the Mac (I refused to upgrade my Macs beyond Mojave), but this is an interim solution for me since neither Windows 10 nor existing FOSS desktops match even Mac OS X Tiger when it comes to the user experience. My long-term solution is building my own desktop environment that is inspired by the classic Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, but also takes ideas fr…
That sounds amazing! Can you build it on top of Linux so I can run it on Asahi Linux on a MacBook? I refuse to use a laptop that isn’t running an Apple M-series chip now. Intel/AMD have a long, long way to go to catch up and they don’t seem to have any interest in doing so.
Jobs was against dogma. It’s a changing world and the perspective and input of the young is valuable. What exactly are you moving on to? Ubuntu? Windows? Behind macOS is the most valuable company in the world adding fixes, features and security patches. There isn’t any other computing solution today that can deliver what Apple does.
I moved on to Windows 10 and FreeBSD after many years on the Mac (I refused to upgrade my Macs beyond Mojave), but this is an interim solution for me since neither Windows 10 nor existing FOSS desktops match even Mac OS X Tiger when it comes to the user experience. My long-term solution is building my own desktop environment that is inspired by the classic Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, but also takes ideas fr…
That sounds amazing, please do a show hn when you decide to release it, I’d love to use something that’s closer to classic Mac OS HIG.
I don't use a single Apple product. What am I missing?
Remember 2000-2005 Microsoft that tried to lock you into Internet Explorer and was deeply into this thing called "trusted computing"? That's what you're missing. You're required to sign in for updates so they can track you. No software patches without monitoring, I guess. No way to remove iTunes or stop Safari from trying to take over again and again. Even if you don't want music to open that way. Steve Balmer would…
> It shouldn't be difficult to navigate to a directory via a path
Command-Shift-G my friend.
> or run a program
Spotlight? (Command-space)
Or Mission Control? (Control-space for me, but I think I customized that)
> have the file browser automatically resize its icon view
You want a window to automatically make the icons bigger if you resize the window to be bigger? No idea how to make that happen.