IRecognition: I am no longer Apple's Target Market

I just bought a MacBook Air last week, after a 2 year break without a Mac laptop. I had been using Lion and Mountain Lion on a Mac Mini, but the last week or so have been a revelation for me. Crazy battery life (about 9 hours of normal programming), full screen apps with swiping to switch between them, fast fast fast at everyday operations thanks to the SSD, the whole thing is at the same time a major turn towards iDevice-ification, and a giant leap forward in usability for laptops.

I wonder how many people worrying about iOS-ification are:

a) running Lion, where the transition was still in mid-course, or

b) using a desktop, where the design decisions aren't so obviously right (my Mac Mini for example has a huge monitor, hence I'm less inclined to use full-screen apps)

In case a), there were definite weakness in Lion. Full-screen apps hadn't yet made their near-global appearance, and Spaces was ... weird. These problems have been shaken out in Mountain Lion. For b) it seems to me that OSX has been optimised for the laptop environment, where screen real-estate is limited. If you aren't using full-screen as your standard app config, you're missing out on some of what makes Mountain Lion a great experience).

When I compare all of this to the laptop I use at work, a Dell running Fedora, there is no comparison. My Mac is a far, far better development machine (well, aside from the fact that brew is weak sauce compared to a full-blown yum, but then this is not news). It's not a question of there being pros and cons on each side, my Mac is simply better for pretty much any metric I care to imagine.

Which is not to say that some people may not have genuine grievances with the current Mac platform. I just wanted to add my own personal experience - going from being mildly disappointed by Lion to completely wowed by Mountain Lion.

That's a nonanswer; the majority of users does not know what the hell that is, and the people that do are going to think twice about disabling system-wide security to run some app.

Couldn't disagree more. I'm very happy with Apple's current software/hardware products. Won't bother to go into detail since the author doesn't go into detail much with his gripes either. Not worth the keystrokes. (semi related I'm downright giddy about the new iTunes. I think it's a great sign of where Apple's desktop software is heading)

"When parents want to edit HD videos of their kids taken with their camcorder they will not run to their iPad to do it..."

On the contrary, the video editors on iPhone and iPad are hugely popular, and if we expand to include photos, the iOS photo editing dominance is staggering. Hordes of users began editing and publishing photos who never had.

With iPad 1 I still traveled with my MBP17. With iPad 2 I started to wish I could leave it at home.

With iPad 3, the Logitech Ultraslim keyboard, and the extra screen resolution (with multitasking gestures enabled to slide right/left between running apps), I now leave the MBP at home and use iSSH to manage servers and network, Google Apps for business tasks, Diet Coda and Koder for code editing and review, iPhoto and iMovie for media editing (I shoot Nikon D3 and it even keeps NEF+JPG as managed pairs), and iCab for web apps needing file uploads and downloads. If I run into a task I need a desktop for, say, to build an iOS app or test a web app in Windows 8, I VNC in.

All told, the frustration of doing everyday tasks with the iPad 3 and Logitech Ultraslim Keyboard cover has gotten low enough I leave the laptop at home even on extended trips, so it's certainly viable as the main machine for people whose job isn't as computing oriented or content creation oriented as mine.

I don't think it's useless. The fan boy phenomenon (of any type) is one of the more difficult and frustrating things in tech to deal with. Somebody who likes some company a lot, and buys their gadgets and thinks the stuff the company makes is swell, but is able to afford the fact that their company does do things wrongly sometimes is not a fan boy -- they're a fan and I don't think anybody has a problem with fans.

People who act as consistent apologists, who's identity is made up of their allegiance to this company and who react with shock and indignation that anybody could even propose that the company they've devoted a significant part of their psyche and lives to, could in any way be flawed...are fan boys. And they bring discourse to a halt by increasing the noise in a conversation to the point entire forums become useless, and actual fans get caught up in the crossfire...it's really frustrating and annoying.

And if you read all that and thought I was talking about Apple then you've missed the point. This exists as a kind of mixed-identification phenomenon exists across a broad spectrum of milieus. Car brands, politics, religion, etc. And it's to the benefit of these brands that they identify and recruit the people who are susceptible to fan boyism and use them as a deep pool of loyal customers and a passive defense to their organization's operations. Why try and spend time fighting off stories of negative aspects of your company when you have a million fan boys who'll do it for you?

And it's the constant noise they introduce, either in the form of an echo chamber of reinforcing good feeling but content free interactions or in the form of constant nonsensical diatribes and willfully ignorant defenses of their brand identity, that's why it's important for any on-line community to try and either turn fan boys into rational thinkers -- to separate the person's identity from the brand -- or drive them from the community.

HN is a place that needs signal, not noise. And fan boys bring only the loudest sort of static possible.