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Apple Is Listening

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Re: Apple Is Listening

#331

Post by simonh »

DennisP wrote: post #230
simonh wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at Apple's sales and customer satisfaction ratings, I'm not quite sure you understand what the term Market Failure means.

Actually I think they fully understand it. "Market failure" does not mean that a company fails to sell something. Here's the definition: > Market failure is the economic situation defined by an inefficient distribution of goods and services in the free market...In traditional microeconomics, this is shown as a steady state disequilibrium in which the quantity supplied does not equal the quantity demanded. https://www…

So by that standard, any market situation in which a vendor makes high profit margins on a product in high demand would be a market failure. I really don’t think that’s what it means. The limited supply and subsequent high prices of Bugattis isn’t a market failure.

It seems to me it’s more like cases where poor infrastructure prevents distribution, or excessive regulation obstructs trade, preventing vendors and purchasers from linking up. That’s a problem on both sides. It’s an actual failure of the market itself.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#332

Post by scarface74 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #313
scarface74 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people with “modest means” need the Mac Pro? Like I said, my parents were the definition of middle class - a teacher and a factory worker - and I had a $4000 computer setup in 1992 going to college (see specs in another post). That would be $7300 inflation adjusted.

You're posting in bad faith. I didn't say "modest means." I said "more modest means" -- compared to a guy who made major cash thanks to an IPO. The vast majority of people on Earth, engineers included, have means more modest than that. Second, I never said "need." However, there are clearly a lot of folks who would benefit from top-tier desktop power (namely, developers) and would pay for it, but can't pay $6K. Like…

Even in 1992, that was way more expensive than the equivalent 386 PC with a better monitor. A laser printer was definitely not the norm.

But the Mac Pro wasn’t meant for your average developer. I doubt very many consumers would buy this at all. It’s aimed at businesses and professionals where a $6000 outlay is nothing. Do you really think after 2 years and building up an internal team of “pro users”, Apple didn’t design this product for its target market?

Apple didn’t say they were “listening to developers”. They said they were listening to pro users. Are developers a subset of that? Yes. Have a lot of high end developers gravitated toward the iMac Pro and high end iMacs? Yes.

If geeks were expecting Apple to cater to lower end needs, they haven’t been following Apple for the last two decades.

They aren’t asking ordinary users to shell out six grand. They even made the Mac Mini much more of a midrange computer than it was before.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#333

Post by wasdfff »

jasonkester wrote: post #147
colmvp wrote: post #10

Back in 2012, I bought the original rMBP. It fit everything I needed: it was thinner than my previous laptop as it had no optical drive, it was lightweight, it had a gorgeous screen, good enough keyboard, and seemed like a reasonable price for a higher end laptop work computer. I've used it everyday since 2012, and aside from the battery which I eventually replaced, it's been functioning without a hitch. From the 90s…

The worrying part is that in order to keep using the good MacBooks from the past, you need to keep them on the OS version that they shipped with. I have a 2012 MacBook Air that was crazy fast, weighed four grams, and even ran windows 7. Sure, the drive was small, but it was perfect. But some time in 2015 or so I made the terrible strategic blunder of upgrading to the latest OS version. Performance immediately dropped…

For that air you need to upgrade the hardware to modern specs. My 2012 mbp shipped with 4gb ram and currently flies on mojave as if it was shipped with it, because I replaced the hdd with an ssd and gave it 16gb of ram. The processor in this computer isn’t all that far off from the one in the brand new air, 7 years later.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#334

Post by coldtea »

pier25 wrote: post #311
coldtea wrote: post #261

Well, I'm not so sold on this. 1) Pro users wanted a replacement for the Mac Pro of yore. Instead they got something suitable only for high end pro studios, willing to pay $6k starting price for the new Pro (or are in need of a very-cheap-for-what-it-does (even-with-the-stand-included) but still very expensive reference quality monitor). Where's my $3K-$5K Mac Pro (basically a headless iMac Pro grade machine) for reg…

> now it's either the iMac Pro or, I dunno, the mini What about the 5K iMac? With an i9 it becomes a very powerful machine that describes your use case perfectly. It's not as repairable as a tower though, but neither are the iMac Pro or the Mini.

It's not upgradable (nor is the mini and iMac Pro) and like the iMac comes with a screen that can't be used on its own (when the computer part is old in 5-6 years).

Re: Apple Is Listening

#336

Post by oldgradstudent »

root_axis wrote: post #328
oldgradstudent wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a few people who work from home as freelancers in the visual effects industry around here. They are all rabid Apple fanboys/fangirls, owned pre-trashcan Mac Pros, but just couldn't stomach the trashcan version. They all switched to Hackintosh or Windows in the last few years. Even for technically challenged artists, it is not difficult because there are several technicians around here that install Hackintosh m…

> there are several technicians around here that install Hackintosh machines for this industry and update them from time to time. Their names are passed by word-of-mouth. Like I said, it can work, but relying on "word of mouth technicians" isn't very practical. There are also times when, after an update, things just break , and the "technician" may not even be able to fix the issue in a timely fashion, especially iss…

> but you're rolling the dice every time you update.

Definitely, they've all become paranoid about updates or installing anything which is not absolutely necessary. They are a version or two of macOS behind, and never update without confirming with the technician.

I shudder at the security implications, but I'm told it has become quite common after the trashcan came out.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#337

Post by majewsky »

nl wrote: post #325
kitsunesoba wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the mini and iMac (both varieties) is the GPU, which is too weak for many. External GPU via TB3 is a cool idea but it’s bottlenecked compared to raw PCI-E, which isn’t ideal. I personally don’t even care if it’s AMD instead of Nvidia, I just want stronger card options. The fact that the GPU in the top config iMac Pro is just on par with my now-old 980Ti really sours it. Note that I’m saying this as a…

The EGPUs do give pretty decent real world performance (although they are expensive). https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04...

Degoogled URL: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/blackmagic-egpu-pro-...

Re: Apple Is Listening

#338

Post by chipotle_coyote »

vbezhenar wrote: post #177
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people downvoting this comment, but...it's kind of true. The "kind of" part is this: Apple arguably built its culture first around the extremely hacker-friendly Apple II, then around the original Macintosh -- which was certainly expensive, but was very specifically pitched as "the computer for the rest of us." That segment is one that they're ironically a bit wobbly on right now. (The MacBook Air and the iMac a…

Flagship Mac Pro 2019 is likely to cost more than $50k. That's much more than $9k at 1990.

The prices I gave were the starting prices in 1990, so I think it's reasonable to compare them to the starting prices in 2019.

Re: Apple Is Listening

#339

Post by chipotle_coyote »

leoc wrote: post #122
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the lack of function keys; I've realized to my mild surprise that the only things I tend to use them with have been bits and bobs I remapped myself with Keyboard Maestro (I used to have F13 remapped to...something or other, for instance) and the occasional terminal app that uses function keys. I do use media keys, but I've found the Touch Bar is by and large just fine for that. (I don't really have muscl…

The lack of a mechanical Escape is nuts, yes. But Apple could and should have dealt with that by moving the Escape to somewhere else on the keyboard. In fact they should have done that anyway, as Escape is too remote on the far left of the far-away function row. Given the the MBP keyboard as it is, most users should probably remap Esc to the Caps Lock key, at least if they don't tend to hit Caps Lock by accident.

I used to remap caps lock as another control key, actually, but sure, they could put the escape key somewhere else. My muscle memory is for where the escape key is now.

(...but I actually remap caps lock to escape in my iPad's terminal client, ironically, because the Brydge hardware keyboard has no escape key at all!)

Re: Apple Is Listening

#340

Post by chipotle_coyote »

bitL wrote: post #176
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind the lack of function keys; I've realized to my mild surprise that the only things I tend to use them with have been bits and bobs I remapped myself with Keyboard Maestro (I used to have F13 remapped to...something or other, for instance) and the occasional terminal app that uses function keys. I do use media keys, but I've found the Touch Bar is by and large just fine for that. (I don't really have muscl…

There is this Karabiner software: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ It allows remapping keys, so you could e.g. remap the whole top row from ~, 1 to 0 to act as ESC, F1 to F10 when needed. Not ideal but better than touch bar.

I used Karabiner for a while, but didn't find a lot of incredible use for it in practice. Some people love it, though.

I'd have liked to have seen more apps try and do something with the touch bar, though. Amusingly, Apple's native Terminal.app does more work with it than many other apps I've seen -- it adds a virtual key that toggles the Option key between Option and Meta, adds a "Man page" button that will bring up the man page for the last-typed command, and lets you quickly change the theme of an existing terminal window.

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