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Comment by Void_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm really hoping this is just a phase. Hoping that Apple will reduce prices of new laptops and we'll be back to normal.

Right now everybody is using Macs. Walk into the Bay Area coffee shop, you see Macs everywhere. I love that.

I build desktop software for Macs (focuslist.co). My apps are prettier than any others. They are easier and faster to use. This is the reason why people pay me $5 while they can get the job done with paper and pen.

This is thanks to Mac as a platform. Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award. That's why Mac apps are the best.

Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away. We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff. Ugh.

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The USB-C ports and the processor + RAM limitations will be fixed by time.

As soon as Intel rolls out their full Kaby Lake line, the Macbook Pro will get a rev that will improve speed and permit 32GB of RAM. Counting in design and manufacturing time, that could be about a year from now.

And USB-C is clearly the future for connectors. In a year or two a lot more peripherals will be shipping with USB-C as the default cord.

This is why Apple carries a huge amount of cash around on their books: so that they can make long-term decisions even if it hurts in the short term.

> As soon as Intel rolls out their full Kaby Lake line, the Macbook Pro will get a rev that will improve speed and permit 32GB of RAM.

Can you comment on why you think this is true? A cursory look at Kaby Lake does not seem to indicate any sort of intrinsic change that would allow the MBP to have more memory.

I believe that Kaby Lake brings support for LPDDR4, whereas Skylake doesn't have it. Apple only uses LPDDR on its laptops, so you can't get 32 GB as this would mean DDR4 and higher power consumption.

Optimism

KBL supports LPDDR4 and SKL doesn't. The current Macbook runs SKL.

I think you're mostly right. The RAM problem will go away. The USB-C thing I think is a total misnomer; it's clearly the future of connectors.

My biggest problem is the obsession with "Thin and Light" crippling system specs. I get that a 11-13" laptop isn't gonna have the best GPU in the world, but I'd like a decent one in my 15" 'Pro' model please...and I'll take a little less thin and light to get it.

This is even more true on desktop. I don't really care about how bulbous you make the back of my iMac or Mac Pro, just give me SLI GTX1080s.

I get it, I'm the niche, I'm a gamer with a Mac, but I still exist.

> Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award.

Well, thats kind of a narcissistic statement. How many people develop for Windows? How many for Linux? How many for Mac? oh.

I try to make my software as beautiful as I can, and keep a simple and usable UX. There are developers who don't care about guidelines, or design. That's not a platform fault, is just that there are developers who just want the job done, even in a ugly fashion.

But is the desktop Mac app market still profitable? i.e. are you able to sustain yourself with this app?

I'm not sure you've done enough macOS/iOS development to know where that feeling comes from. In every Apple developer conference, in much of the UI API, and in input from the community, the idea of creating beautiful apps is something that gets repeated over and over until it is ingrained in us. It has nothing to do with trying to be better looking than other platforms but rather trying to match the aesthetics and quality of other apps on the same platform. People tend to notice when your one utility app stands out as the ugly duckling on macOS/iOS.

I'm fine with that. My problem is statements like this:

"Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away."

As if all the world's high quality apps are only developed on and for the Mac.

> "There are developers who don't care about guidelines, or design. That's not a platform fault, is just that there are developers who just want the job done, even in a ugly fashion."

And that is the biggest problem in software world, that's why our computers are full of half-baked, ugly, poor documented and uncompatible programs - because someone "just wanted to get job done".

That someone usually is the product manager.

Maybe I'm stepping on a mine here, but almost all software Unix Hater's Handbook is talking about was created solely by developers.

> Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away.

Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.

> We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff.

Now that is indeed a real issue, and yes, ugh.

Edit: I've misread the original, sorry, so adding a few things: if you're using the default apps or the ones built for that specific environment only, you're good to go with GTK3, QT, whatever. The trouble comes when you mix these, but that is true even for the MacOS. Personally I really dislike the approach of Chrome, not giving a s* how it _should_ look like to look at least a little native.

I think his point was that the Apple/Mac ethos foster high quality design and attention to detail, which is applied when developers build apps for the Mac.

To be fair, so does elementaryOS. They really try to encourage developers to adopt their HIG.[1]

So much so that most developers using or targeting elementaryOS integrate their design really well.[2] For those that don't but still use GTK3, they also integrate quite well out of the box.

[1] - https://elementary.io/docs/human-interface-guidelines

[2] - https://quassy.github.io/elementary-apps/apps/

They meant "apps that are high quality", not "apps for high-quality desktops".

Not really.

GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.

How thorough of a survey have you done?

I have used Gtk+, wxWidgets, Qt, KDeveloper, once upon a time between 1995 and around 2004.

Still use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and of course, some of our servers run it. Last time I used Qt in anger was 5.3, while trying to do a mobile project that I eventually ported to pure native APIs.

Do you know of any other frameworks, besides those that cover all of these ones?

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

Nope. Desktop application development in Linux is indeed pretty terrible. I was honestly just curious as to your background.

Read my comment above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854556)

GTK? QT? And, since we're talking elementary, Vala?

Not really, they don't even cover half of these ones

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

Not to mention the related GUI tooling.

Where is Instruments on QtCreator, for example.

You have valgrind and many other tools instead of "Instruments".

The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale.

[1] https://developer.gnome.org/references

None of them has the polish of a full working desktop stack like macOS.

Once upon a time, around 2000-2, I did some minor contributions to Gtkmm.

Yeah. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12854983

I know GNU/Linux since 1995, eventually one gets tired of being part of the 3% desktop usage.

I'm still young and naive :P

GTK has been fairly hostile to non-Gnome usage since the GTK 3 era; they keep on breaking backwards compatibility for applications that use it, don't care about whether apps can be used on non-Gnome desktop environments, etc. I don't think it's all that polished either.

I instantly believe you, based on my experience of the fiasco that is Gnome 3, but can you share some examples of this?

Have fun reading,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10757985

Wish I hadn't asked now. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Because most people using linux on the desktop (thus the development target) value functionality over aesthetics.

Do I like it when things are pretty? Sure.

Do I need them to be pretty to get shit done? No

>value functionality over aesthetics.

Not much in that department, either. Nothing that beats the proprietary software staples, especially for creatives, that I happen to use: no Cubase, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Lots of apps ranging from "close but no cigar" to "why even try?".

If you're a developer, almost all the killer apps support Linux first. But you're right that this is the deal breaker

I am a developer and most of my killer tools have their place on macOS and Windows.

Compiling or getting the latest version of any kind of CLI dev tools on either platforms is considerably more difficult than Linux.

Not all developers care about UNIX CLI tools.

I care about CLI tools developed for macOS and Windows in mind, that take advantage of the respective OS APIs.

LLVM and vim work amazingly well on OS X.

Considering vim has no required dependencies, I would be very concerned if it didn't work on OS X.

> Because most people using linux on the desktop (thus the development target) value functionality over aesthetics.

I know that is what drove me away.

Most just want a window manager for xterms.

Designers get bashed because they don't know what people want.

Performance on GUIs gets bashed, because what matters is doing xterms over remote X connections.

> Most just want a window manager for xterms.

Glances at 2nd and 3rd monitors

Well I can't argue there.

To hell with it, we need a shell which can handle multiple displays and scale tmux on them! :)

GTK+ supports both of those languages. Also, macOS's "tooling" is XCode, so Linux's tooling is superior by default.

If you think that, then you don't have any idea of what a fully working desktop stack for GUI developers looks like.

GTK+ is no competition for these APIs:

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

well the not-fully-working desktop stack for Linux devs seems to work just fine for them. I've certainly never had a problem with it. I've never had a problem with the Apple kit either but it's nothing to write home about. The only thing I've seen Apple do that I did think was really cool is the package signing.

Hence why no one bothers with desktop GNU/Linux, as for many even Electron apps are good enough.

"well the not-fully-working desktop stack for Linux devs seems to work just fine for them"

Because they don't care about stuff like GUI. And it shows.

Sorry, but this old argument never washed with me. Certainly before Gnome 3 and Unity, the UX was considerably nicer than on my Mac, and in fact those old DEs are still much nicer to use than Yosemite, and the new ones are much worse precisely because they abandoned good design in favour of the Apple kool-aid.

I'm going to leave it there before the mist descends, but basically as far as I'm concerned Apple couldn't design a paper bag without fucking it up.

Where Linux sucked was in the distros' constant "improvement" of core features that weren't broken in order to be first past the post. For example PulseAudio was introduced before it actually worked with most hardware configurations, and nobody cared about the cool new features it came with. Ubuntu deciding to adopt KDE4 before it was ready for general release was another stupid decision. In fact, I'm basically talking about Ubuntu and Gnome.

> GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.

Qt alone exceeds the feature set, has more GUI tooling, and is multi-platform. That's just Qt, and the same could be said for GTK. I'm not slinging mud at Obj-c and the frameworks Apple maintains, but they are not unique snowflakes without equal.

Sorry but no,

https://developer.apple.com/reference/

I can find tons of entries without parity in Qt.

And their current trend to invent a different flavor of JavaScript every few releases, no thanks.

I don't know why, but MacOS feels more high-quality than the other desktops. I use Unity on all my computers and haven't run MacOS in years, but I think there's more "tearing" in Linux WMs. Things just don't feel like they stick together as much, sometimes the decorations will hang, the menus will disappear, there are blank icons in my notification bar, etc.

It looks great in screenshots, but the feeling is much inferior, a fact I lament.

I know exactly what you mean. Are the technical issues because of X or because of design decisions? I have to think it's because of X because I haven't seen an OS GUI that was as stable and as predictable as Windows/OSX. Edit: Or put another way, I always run into weird graphical/display issues using Linux desktop flavors, whether they've been on a desktop PC or in a VM.

Massive +1 to this. And enabling vsync manually in any flavor of linux I've ever used makes the framerate tank.

I don't know what magic MacOS does under the hood, but no other linux distro I've EVER used comes close, with the possible exception of Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome is ugly as sin.

> Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.

Sure, but since last time I've started KDE, I got a ton of segfaults errors coming from all over the place (and not just nepomuk)... Well, if the desktop is fine but the wifi interface or the notification tray is segfaulting, I'm just gonna throw the whole thing.

> Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops.

well... no. Speaking as long-time Linux user who tried all of this and in the end using i3 to avoid constant stream of bugs from DE.

> This is thanks to Mac as a platform. Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award. That's why Mac apps are the best.

This may be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read on HN.

I've read far worse and all I meant by that comment is praise to other Mac developers.

No offence intended but I took a look at your website (which is very neat and tidy BTW), and looked at the screenshots but I do not see how your app (consisting of mainly a listview control) is "prettier than any others".

I can see how having a simple UI with few controls on it can sometimes be translated as "pretty" in certain circles, but simply having few features and few controls doesn't magically mean your app is top of the pile on the entire Earth regarding "prettiness". It is quite an assertion to make.

EDIT: Again, this is not meant offensively but was more of a response to the assertion that the app is prettier than ANY others.

Furthermore, I certainly agree with the rest of the comment where they state that more attention is paid to UI etc. on MacOS than other platforms, typically.

Didn't mean to come out too proud.

Really this is just what users have been telling me last 6 months. "I bought it because it looks good."

Guess they're just used to worse.

That's good then (and it does look neat). I wasn't meaning to sound too critical either, my apologies.

Out of interest, how did you market it / raise awareness of it?

You could quite easily make an application that looks like that in either GTK or Qt and fits with the current desktop theme on Linux

I mean, sure - the design is pretty, but OSX has been terrible for me quality wise. I know what you mean about pretty, but currently i'm feeling like i need to pick between pretty (OSX) and stable (Linux).

Worse yet, is if i pick a stable variety of Linux, it's likely to not be pretty. The pretty Linux OSs (in my experience) tend to be at least as unstable as OSX. Ugh.

(Note: I upgraded to Sierra, crash or have weird crap happen ~4times a week)

edit: Why the downvote? Note that i explicitly stated this was my experience. Furthermore, i had the same experience when my Macbook Pro Retina was new, and came with OSX Mavericks. Both Mavericks and Sierra have gave me the impression that Apple releases unstable OSs for major versions, and need time to make it stable again.

Weird. I've been on MacBookPro since 2011 and have not experienced any crashes so far. What do you do to crash it?

Clearly something, but no idea what. I only use a small number of apps (iterm2, neovim, chrome, spotify, etc). Spend most of my day in iterm2, and avoid using new programs because i prefer cli programs.

Well, usually when an application crashes in macOS, it offers you send a crash report, so you should know what exactly crashed.

Not sure about the last crash reports (the os froze until i force restarted it), but other weirdness are things like the keyboard going apeshit. Spazzing out like a variety of buttons are being held down. That's happened 3 times since updating, never before. Another one is all input not working, etc. Both keyboard/pad related though, i assume there's a wonky driver in Sierra but i haven't researched it (and frankly don't want to atm).

I'm not complaining/etc, just saying i'm not getting a crash report on the last two items - and i'm unsure about if i received one the times the OS actually crashed.

Personal experiences of the Apple product that is negative is bad. Personal experiences of the Apple product that is positive is good.

Total phase. The "only Mac update for the next 3 years" meme is just fanning the drama flames. Once you back out of HN into the real world the vast majority of people aren't going to hop into a laptop using Linux. Maybe some will go back to Windows but I think Apple's brand is strong enough that majority would feel dirty buying a Dell, etc. It's akin to someone who usually buys clothes at high end boutiques opting to switch to Walmart because they don't like this season's line. You also need to consider how long the current crop of Mac books last. If you maxed one out over the last 3 years it's hard to even defend the need for a new one.

I don't really see any issue with Electron apps -- Slack and Atom, both Electron-based, are some really good looking apps that really get the job done.

For me, even as a Mac user, I avoid Mac-only apps as much as I possibly can because I want the freedom to switch platforms in the future. I will happily have all my apps be slightly less pretty if it means they work on any OS.

Slack is electron done right - it even has a background process which delivers notifications. But they generally integrate really badly into the UI.

I like Electron apps too, and I am running a handful of them as I type this message, but they are notorious for hogging system resources (especially memory).

I wish Electron apps would load faster. Pulling up a new window in VS Code is a 10 second endevour.

I'm with you but to be objective Apple hasn't done significant efforts for the pro market in last years. They have stated the future is in the iPad. Their pro line is stagnant or receding (where is Mac OS X server, Final Cut pro dumbed down, etc.).

Times are changing

> Times are changing

Times are always changing. Markets grow rapidly, and then they mature and growth gets flatter.

Specifically looking at Apple, while I agree that their focus has shifted away from the Mac platform somewhat and towards iOS, wasn't that to be expected with the huge growth in mobile and tablets over the last 10 years? Now, mobile growth is slowing[0] and tablet sales are flat/dropping[1].

Laptops aren't going anywhere... the vast majority of white collar workers use a laptop or desktop everyday. And while I can't predict what Apple is going to do (who can?), it seems unlikely that they'd completely drop a market that generated $5.7B in revenue in Q4 of 2016 [2].

[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-growth-is-slowing-... [1]: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/tablet-decline-q2-2016/ [2]: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial...

ETA: Btw, macOS Server is over here: http://www.apple.com/macos/server/

Cofeeshop people will still buy Macs, as well as those looking for status symbols. So there is no danger of Macs going away from demand side.

The issue is that Apple is alienating early adopters by removing ports, charging double for obsolete hardware and introducing gimmicks instead of real innovation. And there is a decrease in OS quality from Apple.

Sidenote, that is indeed a pretty app! If i was sure i was staying on OSX (probably migrating to Linux), i'd purchase this! Shame i never found it sooner. I use a combination of Todoist and a Pomodoro timer on my phone.

Doesn't change the fact that Mac marketshare is around 7%. Just because they're targeting the coffee shop crowd doesn't mean everyone's using Macs.

In the USA it's 13.5%, and I'm willing to bet that in urban US areas it's even much higher. Here in London (UK) it has to be at least 20%-30%.

But yeah, not everyone's using Macs. It's the biggest vendor, but there are more non-Macs than Macs.

Another distinction to make is business vs private users. Unless something has changed recently, Macs are basically unheard of in offices (aside from maybe the receptionist), so if 50% of the market is businesses where there's 0% market share, "how many people use a Mac at the coffee shop" will overstate their overall market share by 50%.

I not sure about the office bit though. In my office there are some macs although they are a minority. I'm also not sure offices account for 50% of the computers.

But yeah, many other variables to consider. Age as well, it's mostly younger people in coffee shops.

Everyone at our company who isn't a developer is on a Mac...

Like with iOS, it's not just a question of market share, but of revenue share.

Questions to ask when deciding what platforms to support:

Of Android and iOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than $0.99?

Of Windows, Linux, and macOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than a few dollars?

Personally I think this is just a phase triggered by those that actually aren't developers invested into Apple, rather people that want UNIX with a pretty GUI.

I think the emphasis including that in the article on pretty is a fundamental misunderstanding of why developers like macOS.

For me and a lot of others what I really want is a UNIX that just works.

Meaning it just works with its hardware in all ways... audio and video playing, recording, editing and everything else all work very well, without having to recompile the kernel or hunt down and install alpha drivers without source hosted on sketchy sites, which is what drove me away from other UNIXes.

Also macOS is a good platform for developing native iOS apps. Why iOS and not Android? Mostly because the version adoption curve of Android is pretty bad.

The point is it's more about functionality and getting stuff done than it is about pretty. With other UNIXes there was always too much fighting with the system.

The single thing that keeps me with macOS is a universal key that is truly universal. Apps on mac are built around the command key. The windows key and the linux super key don't have anywhere near the consistency across applications that the command key does. `cmd + shift + [` flips through tabs in every application I have. In linux, it works only if I set up the keys for that application, and only if that application has the ability to set those keys. I spend more time in xkb config files than I do programming.

I had a very similar experience. I switched for the pretty fonts, and stayed for the key bindings. You can even add your own key bindings to (almost) any menu item in (almost) any Cocoa app using System Preferences. After I discovered that, I just dug in even more.

BetterTouchTool is also fantastic.

Yeah, everyone is over complicating the issue. Why is it so hard to understand that people want UNIX without the pain?

Unfortunately that doesn't exist apart from macOS right now.

Maybe because when I see people using UNIX systems in 2016, I can hardly see a difference with people using 21' monitors with Aix full with xterms in 1994, as if nothing has changed.

I want to dislike you for your statements of the truth, but I can't.

I'm a multi-plat guy who has a Macbook and a Windows machine. This makes me want to get a real open source initiative going on Windows to enable better UI assembly. Xaml is great but it has a ways to go.

>I'm really hoping this is just a phase. Hoping that Apple will reduce prices of new laptops and we'll be back to normal.

Because there's some price spike? If anything things are as cheap or expensive as ever.

Prices have climbed quite a bit. Seems like they jumped $200-300 when Retina was introduced, and now a similar increase for the Touch Bar.

But you have to realize that those applications on Macs are not for everyone. Which basically means that if Mac were to continue having their monopoly, developers like YOU would never look to provide the same kinds of services to people who prefer something else. Not everyone uses software that just because they look pretty.

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