I am really interested to see in 2017 Apple's product releases. Is iPhone 8 going to make me staying in iPhone? I already switched from Mac to Dell XPS and I am quite happy with it. I guess this year there will be many old Mac users that will be leaving Apple. Unless they do something drastic? But what could they do?
Apple’s 2016 in review
221–230 of 408 posts
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#222How do they fix this? They need to do more talking — and even more listening — with their users. Engage with the influencers. Sit down and find out what their developers need that the current products don’t offer. Find out what is making their users unhappy. Asking people what they want will give you predictable results: complaints about any kind of change and positive feedback about shiny-looking features that demo…
>Asking people what they want will give you...complaints. ..You'll end up pulled in a million directions
This sounds dismissive. I get what you're saying but user information is invaluable. I assume you mean, make sure you get information from your customers in a productive way. For example I've never known a dev who wasn't surprised watching a usability study.
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, and I used to think people were being careless... until I started working remotely from places like coffee shops where I had to bring my charger every day. Turns out the thinner MagSafe cable will fray after a while if you unpack and pack it on a daily basis. I bet it's due to winding the cord around the brick. I use the little legs you can flip out (they've been removed on the new charger). The last few m…
I can't find the document but Apple's official instructions for their chargers include winding around the pop-up plastic legs. I've never had a frayed cord since the days of the TiBook, but I have managed to break a leg on the adapter and crunch the connector when the laptop fell while connected. MagSafe, while a little pricier, has been more cost-effective for users compared to the truly unacceptable design that exi…
Apple got rid of both MagSafe and those pop up winding legs on the new MBP.
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the Macbook Pro was meant to be for Power Users?
I have no idea what these self-annoited "professionals" do, but it's actually quite difficult to get the MacBook Pro to its limits. Doing webdev or using Xcode it's hard to ever notice any delay. But maybe I'm just a noob who isn't professional enough to suddenly discover that life just isn't worth it without 32GB of RAM.
Virtual Machines. If you use VM's, 16gb is likely going to be a problem. I, quite easily, hit it all the time. It has nothing to do with being 'professional enough'. The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it come in the box? No. So you just bought a $900 phone, and a couple months later you bought a $2.5k+ computer, and oh, HAHAHAHAHA, the fucking cable you need isn't included. What type of user experience is that? As a side note: there's nothing wrong with usb-c. I can see why it's an improvement! But the reason apple are pricks is they didn't also throw in a single usb-a port so we can keep using the dozen devi…
> What type of user experience is that? It's one for people who pick up the new cable and get on with their lives.
People have issues with Apple's hardware decisions with their laptops, minis and Mac Pros that aren't addressed by a cable.
One paper cut issue is solved by buying a cable and they can t get by with their lives on the new or lack their of new hardware.
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a very clever analysis. Thanks for that, it makes a lot of sense. It also explains why it's shifted from being a computer company that makes gadgets (Jobs) is now becoming a gadget company that happens to make some computers as well (Cook). In all this, the gates are wide open for Microsoft to score some good points here towards devs.
How do you figure there has been a "shift" like you said? In 2007 Jobs was using the phrase "post-PC", and by the time he died in 2011, more than half of Apple's revenue was iPhone/iPad/etc. To me it seems that Cook is just continuing the trend.
Looks more like post-MBP
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is a company that is following the process they learned when Steve ran the show, without any clear understanding of why that process exists Apple created Apple University years before Steve died, to understand clearly why they became so successful. They even hired a top professor from an Ivy League university to run it. Whatever ails Apple these days is not caused by them not understanding how they became great…
Nope you don't get to pass the buck to "the world has changed". Nothing has changed. Power users are still there needing the best machines they can get. Apple is the one that has changed to cater to the lowest common denominator, this is a lack of understanding.
Please. Apple not catering to power users is not in any significant way what ails Apple today.
And Apple catering to what you describe as the lowest common denominator is what made them the largest company in the world. If that is a sickness, I wish I could be afflicted by it.
What changed was not so much the world (although it did), but Apple itself. Apple is now a huge company, but it still run as a small one, because that is what allowed them to different and let them to success. But there are reasons why no other large company is run like that, and the bigger Apple gets, the more those reasons begin to compound.
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think about this a lot too, and the question I have is – has there ever been a visionary who made his way to the top of the corporate ladder of ANY company, however enlightened? Would love to hear about it.
I think Satya Nadella, his vision has turned Microsoft around completely from a dull company to a company with vision for the future.
This makes me think of a sort of pendulum. Maybe what Apple needs now is to just be boring for a decade.
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no idea what these self-annoited "professionals" do, but it's actually quite difficult to get the MacBook Pro to its limits. Doing webdev or using Xcode it's hard to ever notice any delay. But maybe I'm just a noob who isn't professional enough to suddenly discover that life just isn't worth it without 32GB of RAM.
Virtual Machines. If you use VM's, 16gb is likely going to be a problem. I, quite easily, hit it all the time. It has nothing to do with being 'professional enough'. The nature of a dev's daily work can vary greatly with what kind of dev they are doing.
Bollocks, I have a 16GB ram MBP from 2014, running a VM all the time and compiling on both the VM and the host OS. No problems there. The 32GB might be more comfortable for some, but I have hard time figuring out how something so exclusive has now become a necessity.
Re: Apple’s 2016 in review
#230I find the recent turn of public opinion against Apple to be interesting. Two years ago people were writing about brilliant Tim Cook was, largely because of the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Which was Apple simply scaling up to product sizes that they had previously resisted in joining, but were common to the rest of the market. So was praise then wrong and overblown? Or is the current wave of discontent wrong…
> I think it's a bit of all three, but also a lot because this current unhappiness is driven by developers, who had expected Apple to treat the MBP- much less the Mac Pro- with greater care and respect. 2014 saw the introduction of Swift, and developers were happy.
Developer happiness relative to these parts is probably the most right. There was a lot going on for Apple the last few years for developers, and they were happy. The Mac Pro refresh cycle is something that always confuses me, like why would we expect faster refreshes with the new trash can Pro than the cheese grater? The point of that machine is that it's expensive and needs to last a long time. Annual cycles don't support that model. Yes, that means it gets outdated faster, but it's not like Xcode or Final Cut or ProTools or Adobe anything stop supporting the Pro a year after it's released. I have a MacBook Pro for work that has a four year refresh cycle. It sucks to see new, shiny ones coming out that I won't be eligible to get for a few more years (excuse me - next year, it's 2017 now), but that's corporate life.