IRecognition: I am no longer Apple's Target Market

Which Lapdock? The 500?

> Maybe I'm being naive but I believe discussion about stuff you don't like about a community-driven platform like HN might actually improve it.

In context. But when out of context, it won't. If anything, one could argue that if your comment does provide any value toward improving HN, then the article served a greater purpose, and as a result, was of value.

Regardless, actions speak louder than words.

> All I'm saying is that in the time I've been visiting HN, the information value of the articles upvoted on HN is going down.

That's the natural state of things. I've seen people say this for years now. It's a reoccurring theme. I do not know how long you've been visiting HN, but going just by your profile, I can assure you, 444 days ago, people were discussing how HN had gone down hill.

I believe a portion of that complaint is that when you first get here, it's new, and you haven't seen the articles being presented. After a while, you start to read the same thing over and over again. It becomes dull. And things start to stand out that you might not have noticed your first day.

> You are twisting my words.

No. It's just a misunderstanding. No twisting was intended.

> You say 'people enjoy different things' as if that justifies anything that gets posted on HN.

Actually, it does. HN is based on voting, and the members of HN enjoy reading many types of articles here. If something gets voted up, it's because a segment of the members want to read these types of things on HN. That you are uninterested in this specific topic does not mean it's outside of HN's accepted role.

> Lots of people enjoy reading about ponies, but you don't see a lot of articles about ponies on HN, and I don't think many people think that's a bad thing.

Don't be silly, the context is HN, making that point moot. The argument isn't about general wants and desires, but what people want to read here on HN.

Anyways, my point is, and was, you can either be a part of the problem, or part of the solution. If you want to see different articles, submit them! Ignore the ones that you aren't interested in. Flag articles that don't belong. You can either be a positive force, or a negative one.

Words have meaning. Being in a minority doesn't mean abnormal. You may not intend it to be a value judgement, but it clearly is when you're referring to a group of people. Perhaps in a clinical setting normal/abnormal doesn't have any perjorative qualities, but in normal day to day use it does.

Your question is also a non sequiter. Computer usage patterns aren't always correlated to either proficiency in programming or computer experience. For example, I know many commercial programmers who have the most simplistic understanding of their OS, be it Linux, OSX or Windows. They don't understand the difference between CISC/RISC, nor do they exhibit a greater facility with various application than non-programmers. As I've said before, computer knowledge is a continuum, and trying to pigeonhole users into neat categories is foolish. There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't. Neither are better than the other, and calling some normal with the subtext that they're inferior to computer geeks is elitist.

To address your points:

- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people.

- The whole-screen app stuff is a good idea, but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors, which many geeks use (the problem is: when you go full screen on one monitor, the other no longer shows anything by gray linen)

- Many features were removed for what seems to be no good reason, e.g. RSS feeds.

- Some iPad-like behaviors make little sense on a desktop, e.g. automatically closing Safari if idle for a while. It takes several seconds to open a web link just because it has to relaunch the application.

- Annoying for my company, Taodyne (3D presentations): stereoscopy used to be perfectly stable on 10.6, unstable since 10.7, to the point of causing kernel panics or system freezes regularly.

- Memory management has been a weak point since Rhapsody. In Rhapsody, you could crash the system simply by zooming in Preview. Today, you can still halt your top-of-the-line system to a crawl simply by running a process that eats all available memory. I'd much rather have an easy quota system where I can say "unless otherwise specified, no app can take more than 1/4th of available RAM". Or a paging system that makes smarter decisions and keeps the "interactive" stuff resident enough that I can still kill the offending process.

- Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears. Or the keyboard that sometimes forgets half the keys you type. Or Safari that stops refreshing part of the screen. Or moving a window across monitors that now causes the window and background icons to blink. And so on. Lion does not feel as polished as Snow Leopard.

Overall, I still like Apple products, but I definitely see them losing their edge on the software quality front. I think that Maps on iOS is just the most glaring example, but it's not the only one.

I think c3d is right in that Lion and Mountain Lion are slower than Snow Leopard if you don't have an SSD. It seems to me that recently Apple have been designing OSX with SSD-equipped computers as the target. They assume that you will have fast read times, and use algorithms to optimise that. For example, they 'deactivate' applications that aren't being used, because they know they can restart them from SSD very quickly, which in turn frees up physical RAM, which speeds the computer up elsewhere. The problem is that if you don't have an SSD, this decision is catastrophic for performance. As always, Apple are skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it is...