I think that the mention of "post Steve" jitters is largely false. OSX has never been perfect and has always had quirks. iTunes has never been a flawless interface and missteps happened while Steve was there (mobile me, etc). People seem to be misremembering apple as being perfect while Steve was there. For the most part, the people that make macs/iPhones, etc are the same as when Steve was there. Sure Steve was a great inspirer of polish and set the bar high, but he didn't create these things. Apple hasn't gone to shit since be died. I'm not even sure you could really say their trajectory has changed since he left. She seems like she gets bored with tech after a while, and she just wants to change so she is constructing a reason to switch.
I mortgaged my future with a Mac
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Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#22I mortgaged my future with KDE several years ago, and the KDE project "went off the rails" with v4. My usual ways of working weren't improved with new benefits - the entire rug was pulled out from under me. All my effort in learning KDE stuff, and putting my data in KDE apps was wasted, as I had to spend time to migrate all that data to other apps. I'm being somewhat sarcastic, but also honest - I used KDE as a prima…
You should've just waited a year or two and not upgraded to KDE 4. KDE 4.10 (the latest version) works just fine. That said, I'm an Xfce user, and I love it because things never change.
I didn't like the direction it was going at all. I tried it again last year in a VM - it's OK, but doesn't have whatever it was that attracted me to KDE3 (and 2 before that) in the first place.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#23Sitting here, still using a Mac as a dev/everything machine. I know Lion is supposed to suck and all, but my 2010 MBA still gets insane battery life under OS X, the tool chain is top-notch (Clang, LLVM, etc), there have been a ton of improvements under the hood (TLS support being a big one), and I actually appreciate full-screen XCode or Emacs given the 13" screen. Even Xcode seems to, in 4.6, be getting back to the stability levels of 3.x.
I'm not seeing it. This "Apple doesn't care about the Mac" "OS X is going downhill" griping is lost on me. Was 10.4 -> 10.5 really a much bigger change? Or 10.5 -> 10.6? OS X has always had very incremental, gradual changes, and now that it's pushing more than a decade old it's pretty mature and doesn't need to be revamped every other day. At the same time, for all the teeth gnashing about walled gardens, Apple still ships the thing with a terminal, there is XCode in the App Store, etc.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#24HN... why are you upvoting this to #1...? I say HN "is going downhill". There's so very little substance here.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#25The concluding sentence, "I'm not looking forward to the next couple of years in tech.", strikes me as incredibly odd. The technologies and software that we have available, whether you use Linux, OSX, or Windows, or anything else, has more potential than ever before. It seems like something to be excited about.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#26I would be able to stomach this vague, disjointed rant if it had a different title, something like "I am experiencing minor inconveniences as a result of wanting to switch computing platforms".
But why would she want to switch? Some of the best code editors are there for the Mac. Why fix it if it is not broken?
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS: sell your soul to Apple. Android: sell your soul to Google. The thing is, I already did the second one to a far greater degree than most people ever do. I'm not about to repeat it.
> Android: sell your soul to Google. Nobody is forcing you to use Google apps on an Android device. If the market decides that the Google experience is subpar, they will be replaced. This has already sort of happened with the Kindle Fire. It forced Google to respond with a better device (the Nexus 7).
In fact, you could unlock the bootloader on any Nexus device, load Cyanogenmod, and not deal with anything Google aside from the core OS, using fdroid to get free software apps.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#28It does not matter the platform you use. The data you use is far, far more important.
I use Windows 8, Linux, and Mac OSX boxes on a daily basis. I play music from all of them. I watch movies, view photos, and browse the web from all of them. I code on all of them.
The reason I'm able to do this is because I've relentlessly managed my data and set up systems to allow that data to be shared effectively between environments.
All of these people who say, "this OS is way better!" are missing the point. Each one does a good job at something. Here's a surface analysis:
Linux: Best for automation. LAMPP. Industrial strength box for administration, security, and development. Great performance. Has problems with applications that require advanced graphics or specific sets of drivers (read: games). Can accomplish almost all basic computing tasks without an issue. All of these things make it a great server OS and great for high performance applications too.
Mac: Best for consumption. Beautiful UI, intuitive software, merging of hardware and software. Has problems with any sort of software that requires performant hardware because hardware is far more expensive. Can accomplish almost all basic computing tasks without an issue. All of these things make it a great laptop OS.
Windows: Best for games. Good performance. Not as good performance as linux, but incredible driver support means that most users will see better performance on Windows. Can accomplish almost all basic computing tasks without an issue. Makes Windows by far the best gaming box, but also very comparable to other OS in other applications (except server role.)
The lesson here is: Use the right tool for the right job, and make your data tool agnostic.
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#29"So, I just sat there and lived the passive life of a consumer at home. I clicked around the web and read stuff. I talked to people online. I listened to my music and watched the latest cat videos. I watched a lot of TV. But I didn't write any code. Oh no."
nothing stops you from writing code on OSX. Plenty of people do it for their business. IOKit is strange coming from a Linux world, sure, but it works as well as you would expect. It's a pain but it's possible to write kexts and other low level osx stuff.
"All of my music is in iTunes, having been re-imported from the original CDs over a period of time. I can just re-rip all of it on my Linux box, but that's going to suck. Or, I can try to grovel around in their grungy database and try to make sense of it and "export" things, but I'm sure that will be even worse."
I don't understand the itunes complaint here. If you are leaving the mac ecosystem, the most you lose is the playlists -- the metadata is still stored in the individual files and VLC is perfectly competent in playing those files. It's not like itunes magically combined all the files in one big mess.
"Then there's my phone. How do you use one of these things without a computer upon which to sync your data and backups?"
Windows VM?
Re: I mortgaged my future with a Mac
#30It seems like backing up your media files to a Dropbox-like service instead of iCloud would solve the problem of being able to get your files from any device you want.
I'm not attached to any one device in particular because all of my content is stored on a third party that can be accessed from anywhere.
I could drop my Macbook Pro or iPhone 4 at any time and not feel like I'm missing something.
Good thing about Apple products is that they last awhile, my Macbook Pro is now 3 years old, and my iPhone 4 is 2 years old, and I haven't had any issues and don't plan on upgrading them until they break.