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Rank the 50 best Apple products

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Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#41

Post by amelius »

addaon wrote: post #37
amelius wrote: post #27

The M1 chip is not an Apple product.

In the same sense that potato chips are not a Lay’s product, because you can’t buy a potato chip, only a bag of them, and it’s not reasonable to assess the chip independently from the packaging in which it is sold, so the packaged chip is the product under discussion? Because that’s… extreme.

That's a weird comparison because if you wanted to buy just the M1 chip you are forced to buy a chassis, motherboard, screen, keyboard, memory, etc. which may cost more than the chip to begin with. Also the chip comes with zero documentation.

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#42

Post by addaon »

amelius wrote: post #41
addaon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same sense that potato chips are not a Lay’s product, because you can’t buy a potato chip, only a bag of them, and it’s not reasonable to assess the chip independently from the packaging in which it is sold, so the packaged chip is the product under discussion? Because that’s… extreme.

That's a weird comparison because if you wanted to buy just the M1 chip you are forced to buy a chassis, motherboard, screen, keyboard, memory, etc. which may cost more than the chip to begin with. Also the chip comes with zero documentation.

If you just want a potato chip you also need to buy the packaging. It’s documentation is also lacking.

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#43

Post by snowwrestler »

mingus88 wrote: post #22
tempoponet wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right for the same reason that the original iPhone outranks the iPhone 3Gs.

These subjective evals are why community reviews are garbage. Personally I think the 3GS is a better product. I know a few folk who returned their original iPhone because the headphone jack didn’t allow their headphones to connect, and there were obvious limitations that weren’t addressed until the 3GS The iPhone was revolutionary no argument. But that doesn’t mean later revs were not better products for their time.

I think the 4 was really where it took off. It’s remembered for the antenna PR mess, but it was the first mix of speed and features that made me and many many colleagues say “this could be better than my BlackBerry.” And it was!

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#44

Post by snowwrestler »

yalogin wrote: post #25

This just shows the hold Apple has on our collective minds. No such showboating for ibm, Microsoft, Amazon or Google. May be Google and Amazon are still young relatively. IBM totally is out of tech people’s minds and they themselves think of them as a consulting company.

I believe the Google equivalent would be one of the “Google Product Graveyard” websites, sadly.

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#45

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

snowwrestler wrote: post #40
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #24

Live rankings currently have Mac OS X first... h... how? Apple make so so much wonderful hardware! They always have. Their software on the other hand is near universally awful. I love my Macbook, but my gosh, I do not love whatever the latest flavour of macOS is that Apple have decided to throw on their update servers this year. It just so happens that I also enjoy Unix, so I spend a lot of my time in a terminal - bu…

I want to speak up for OS X. When it came out, and for years afterward, it hit an amazing sweet spot of looks cool, runs browsers well, runs MS well, runs Adobe well, full Unix shell, added great new features every year. There is a reason it became extremely popular with web devs, as the web was taking over the economy. A closed local firewall blocking all inbound by default. Spotlight indexing. Time Machine backups.…

I'll definitely give you Rosetta, and even more so Rosetta 2. Spotlight too, at least in principle, but it has had its fair share of dodgy behavior over the years. I'm not really sure about the others.

There's certainly always been fantastic software available for Mac. However, it was almost never built by Apple. It sort of felt like someone one day needed a FireWire port, so they bought a Macintosh. Then they must have told a close friend working at Macromedia they needed some software - and it was all just inertia from then on.

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#46

Post by amelius »

addaon wrote: post #42
amelius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a weird comparison because if you wanted to buy just the M1 chip you are forced to buy a chassis, motherboard, screen, keyboard, memory, etc. which may cost more than the chip to begin with. Also the chip comes with zero documentation.

If you just want a potato chip you also need to buy the packaging. It’s documentation is also lacking.

M1 chip does not have a product manager. It is an internal component.

The Lays chip has a product manager.

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#47

Post by FeloniousHam »

genthree wrote: post #30
stackghost wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 40. IBM hasn't been even remotely relevant to me since I was in elementary school, and only then because we had IBM-brand machines in the computer lab where we pretended to work while surreptitiously playing Oregon Trail. I honestly don't even know what they do any more. Whatever happened to IBM happened eons ago in tech years.

They haven't been relevant to anything user-facing at all since they sold the Thinkpad line, and their "golden age" was over by ~2000. Their hardware was awesome in the '80s and '90s, truly great stuff, but they've been mostly out of that game for about 25 years, and totally out for what, almost 20? Quite a few people on this site were born after the last piece of IBM hardware they might have appreciated was manufact…

> Microsoft's best work is also pretty damn far in the past, at this point.

I would almost reflexily agree except for VSCode. It about the most perfect piece of software (to the point where now there aren't any user facing feature updates) I've ever used, and I use it all day everyday. It's absurdly flexible, excellent defaults--it really, actually improved my view of MS from somewhere subterranean to a height of respect.

I'd include WSL, but thats kind of backhanded praise and it is frustratingly slow a lot of the time.

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#48

Post by amelius »

yalogin wrote: post #25

This just shows the hold Apple has on our collective minds. No such showboating for ibm, Microsoft, Amazon or Google. May be Google and Amazon are still young relatively. IBM totally is out of tech people’s minds and they themselves think of them as a consulting company.

> This just shows the hold Apple has on our collective minds.

Speak for yourself ;)

Re: Rank the 50 best Apple products

#50

Post by kps »

Molitor5901 wrote: post #4

QuickTime and FaceTime are useful but I never thought of them as especially innovative. HyperCard, OSX, the phones, those really moved things forward independently of the rest of the industry. Perhaps I don't appreciate the software side enough.

QuickTime, when new, was at the forefront of mass-market digital media. The ‘Time’ part referred to synchronized video and audio playback.
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