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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

I keep having this fantasy that Jobs would never have stood for the erosion of the pro level products into thin clients, like the new MBP, the lack of updates to the Mac Pro line, retrograde motion on the Mini, etc.

But seeing this, and the 4-5 perfunctory lines devoted at the end to the entire Mac line, makes me realize that's probably just a fantasy after all. This is where Apple has been going for awhile apparently.

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That the Macs are not given as much attention doesn't surprise me. It seems 'fitting' that they would gravitate toward the current MacBook end of the spectrum considering that a huge amount of users don't really need much more than that. Cutting out the middle-ground (MacBook Air) makes a certain amount of sense.

But I expected that they'd keep a high-performance developer-focused MacBook (the Pro) for all those guys who are actually making the iOS/MacOS apps. And part of me hoped they'd show some love for that target audience.

On the other hand, who am I kidding. As I'm getting more and more into 'native' development and as my laptop is showing its age when I use Xcode, I'll probably eventually cave and get a MacBook Pro because I can't do my work without it.

It's just not nice, I guess. But then Apple isn't particularly known for being nice, so it makes business-sense. iOS/MacOS devs will still get their new machines, even if they end up feeling fleeced.

I think in the long run Apple will try to move developers over to iPad Pro. Rudimentary Xcode functionality is already in place on iOS.

Interesting. I find it hard to see how they could pull that off, but who knows...

I had a buddy who dreamed about this when the iPad first came out.

Swift Playgrounds is a first step in that direction. There's still a lot of work to do, but you can technically write Swift on an iPad right now, so why not just add an IDE that will compile directly to device (no simulator required).

Would I be surprised to see this happen for an iPad 'Pro' a few years down the line? Nope, not at all, especially given how Apple touted that the Pro cpu specs can take on tasks once reserved for "workstations and PCs".

I'm more thinking about multitasking and all that. For things like web development I usually have open:

- photoshop/illustrator/sketch - a bunch of chrome tabs for research and one with dev tools open - sometimes safari for testing - a task app to keep track of what needs doing - multiple screens so I can use one for reference/research and the other for work

I suppose much of that could work on an iPad Pro assuming it can keep that much stuff in memory and assuming that I can use a keyboard to task-switch. But the multiple screens could be an issue.

I can't fathom doing all of my web dev Photoshop work without a cursor and mouse. A pen seems fine for art projects, but for tasks requiring pixel precision?

I could certainly see them adding developer capabilities to the iPad Pro.

But I have a hard time understanding why they would bother trying to move developers, which to me implies removing dev capabilities from the Mac (how?) or killing the Mac line entirely (why?).

I wouldn't put it past them. They believe themselves to be market makers.

PC and laptop sales are in a free fall and the prices will trend toward zero profit. It's Apple planning to exit a dying form factor.

It's hardly surprising. I mean, since when has Apple done anything to show love for the developers on their platforms? Developers are locked in because Apple has the highest paying userbase, not because they provide the best tools.

Sadly it's hard to blame them when you look at Google and Microsoft. Both had much better development environments and got crushed in revenue.

Are Google's development environments better than what Apple offers?

I mean, they don't have a platform to run their development tools on. You can't really run them on Android, I mean, I guess you could, but the same issues with trying to use an iPad. Chromebook? Maybe? With some work, but not out of the box.

Microsoft certainly has good dev tools, while I don't care for Windows in general, I do appreciate the good tooling when I'm at my day job.

> Are Google's development environments better than what Apple offers?

I'd also like to hear from people who have developed for both platforms.

> Microsoft certainly has good dev tools, while I don't care for Windows in general, I do appreciate the good tooling when I'm at my day job.

Interesting. I do get that impression and it's one reason I'm open to eventually moving to a Microsoft product again for my development work. Is it currently possible to do iOS development exclusively on a Microsoft laptop/environment? Or at least could I get away with using a remotely-controlled Mac Mini for some of the Xcode stuff?

I don't do iOS development so I can't say, I've only toyed with it, and on my Mac at home.

I will say, VS2015 has options for creating iOS projects, but I haven't tried using them and don't know the limitations (irrelevant to my day job, I use VS for C# and sneaking in bits of F# when I can for internal applications targeting Windows desktop).

It most likely uses Xamarin, a C# tool for making iOS apps. It gets the job done, and I made a full commercial app for work using it years ago (and I bet it's more solid now). It's kinda cool because most of the Xamarin functions are almost direct wrappers for iOS functions, so you could look something up in Objective-C and 90% of the time know how to do it using Xamarin.

But there are some hiccups with Xamarin, and I'd rather just code native now for iOS only (there's a lot more jobs for native iOS developers than Xamarin, although React Native is a good bet nowadays too). If I was doing cross-platform with Android, I'd either do React Native or I'd consider Xamarin again.

No they don't. I'll take Xcode errors over a Gradle confit any day.

Done development for both here.

On Dev Tools / Programming:

I'd have to say Google's Tools are 100x better than they used to be. Android Studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA and they've done a decent job of getting emulator performance where it needs to be on good hardware.

That being said, I think Swift was a huge win to Apple developers who were unhappy with Objective-C. Xcode and the iOS simulator are still way ahead of Google's tools on performance.

On SDKs:

This is where Google is really blowing it and where Apple shines. Apple's SDKs tend to be well thought out and well documented.

Android's SDKs on the other hand are poorly documented and are fragmented into a mess. To expand a bit, there are new SDKs for new features on new hardware and tons of "compatibility" SDKs that have to be used to bring modern features to your app if you want to support old Android releases (you have to).

Android's SDKs show both a lack of direction and a rush to patch up the fragmentation mess. This isn't a knock at their hardware (Pixel, etc), which looks nice. There's just a general lack of coherency among their APIs and no clear path on how they're going to fix it.

TLDR; It's fair to say Google is making progress making their developer's lives better but Apple (and it's community developed SDKs) still make a better developer platform and a better software to develop with.

I develop for both iOS and Android. Its night and day difference between the two developer tools. XCode is absolute garbage and get worse year after year. Android Studio is excellent and keeps getting better. Things which were traditionally not great with Android dev are being fixed. Like faster ADB, good emulators, faster built times, Kotlin. I could go into more details, but I would rather be a full time Android developer than a full time iOS developer. The things iOS development really has going for it is, iOS users are more willing to spend money and the there are very few unique devices. Most apps even start out just targeting a single screen size, the iPhone 6. You can't do that if you are targeting the desktop or Android.

> Are Google's development environments better than what Apple offers?

They're really not that great. Android Studio is a hacked-up version of IntelliJ that doesn't feel like a unified experience. Error highlighting often gets out of sync until I rebuild the whole project. Design preview sometimes stops updating, displays an error overlay with a stack trace, and requires manual refreshing and rebuilding to fix. Updating various Google components can be a series of manual clicks and restarts. Gradle sometimes goes out of sync and requires manual rejiggering to get working again. And so on.

> Microsoft certainly has good dev tools

If any one of the Big Three really gets developer tooling, it's Microsoft. Visual Studio is an absolute joy to use, and it has the best Vim integration of any non-Vim editor I've tried. C# is getting better and better with every release; I wish I could use it everywhere.

I'd kill for Visual Studio for OSX and while I haven't used C# much, I loved TypeScript and Delphi, so I guess I'm a bit of a fan of Anders Hejlsberg.

Visual studio code is really worth giving a try these days. It ain't the full fledged thing but it is gaining features rapidly. The user base is great and extensions are exploding. It might actually become my standard editor on macs. Disclaimer: 80% of my professional time I spend on Windows having VS + resharper available. Up to this day nothing beats that combo for me if it comes to coding/development.

When I'm talking about development environments, I'm talking beyond just the IDE.

Would you rather work with Java , C#, or Objective-C?

Would you rather work with a open-source frameworks or a closed-source ones?

Would you rather have to wait a week and pass an arbitrary review of your application for every release, or be able to publish directly to customers?

Would you like to be able to distribute test builds directly to customers?

Would you like the option to architect your app as more than one process?

There's been improvement on some of these (Swift is promising, XCode is actually pretty good now, Google and Apple's review process has converged), but as an iOS dev I've constantly been jealous of my Android teammates since they can do things like "use a modern language", "inspect the framework to see if that behavior is intentional", or "send a test build directly to that customer", or "run their app in the background" or "use interprocess communication".

Java is a modern framework? i think Swift is much more modern (and faster). Also, I submitted an app yesterday at 2PM and it was in store at 10PM. Sounds fine to me if it keeps the crap out of the app store. Battery lifetime and sandboxing is important to me, as it is to many phone users, and multi-process applications make both of it harder to achieve. Why do you need it anyways?

> Sounds fine to me if it keeps the crap out of the app store.

Hahaha. Oh, were you being serious?

"Would you rather work with Java , C#, or Objective-C?"

In my particular case, Objective C, of course, because it is much better as an interface to c++ or c.

We do multimedia, audio, video and image processing. Java is not an update but going backwards in lots of things compared to c there.

We have to tolerate Google terrible tools for this as we port our software for Android.

Most of these criticisms are outdated.

I'd take Swift 3 over any of those languages in a heartbeat.

In most cases, as a consumer, I want the framework to work well and be well-documented and well-maintained, all of which are provided by Apple.

We haven't waited a week for reviews for years. I submitted an app this afternoon and it was approved this evening. Review times are faster than Kindle store by far and marginally slower than Play at this point.

TestFlight supports 2k public beta testers, and has excellent built-in distribution, tracking, and support mechanisms (and is free).

I work with Android devs every day, and to be frank, they are jealous of us.

iOS is by far the best mobile platform out there, in terms of its development environment. The problem is that everyone is using the crippled version of it.

Cydia/Theos/Cycript were developed by two people and they come together so much better than that shitty Xcode stack it blows my mind. They are so good that iOS being closed source isn't even a con anymore. They are probably the most underrated tools in existence; most people haven't heard of them (let alone regularly use them) because the industry doesn't see un-jailed iOS as an lucrative market. It's a damn shame.

This is foreshadowed in section 1:

  – Post PC products now 66% of our revenues
  – iPad outsold Mac within 6 months
  – Post PC era = more mobile (smaller, thinner, lighter) + communications + apps + cloud services
  – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …

Emphasis on "just another client".

Still questionable. Steve could have allowed the Mac to become "just another client," sure, but it could've been a professional-focused client. The fact that all your data was moving to the cloud for easier access isn't a negation of bringing that data back down to a more capable machine for production.

I mean, the post-PC era came, but it's not like our collective productivity went off a cliff with it, nor that the majority of our productivity moved to mobile. It's just moved to non-Apple platforms.

That section was more about the PC shifting away from being the hub through which all your devices are connected. It implies that PC sales are no longer crucial in order to "lock customers" into their ecosystem, but it's clear that he still wanted to create valuable products that would be tied together.

  – we invented Digital Hub concept
  – PC as hub for all your digital assets
  – contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, videos
  – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud

This was 5 years ago. Since then, iPad sales have declined and iPhone sales are flat. iCloud did _not_ become the consumer's single hub for all devices. Amazon Echo created a new device category and Siri did not take over the world. IoT is fragmented chaos. One can imagine that Jobs would have adjusted his 2011 strategy in response to the changing market.

If Jobs faced a choice of promoting "Apple PC as digital hub" or "non-Apple cloud(s) as aggregate digital hub", which would be better? Apple has thrived by integrating hardware and software. In the "cloud", this integration advantage is lost as Microsoft aggressively ports their apps to Azure cloud + iOS devices. Jobs could have read the writing on the cloud and repositioned the Mac as IoT digital hub and cloud cache, via macOS Sierra Server ($20 in the Mac App Store, but could use some love, http://www.apple.com/macos/server/).

> iCloud did _not_ become the consumer's single hub for all devices

Are you sure? I now keep only a small portion of the music I own on my phone. The rest is in my iCloud account. I don't keep any video on my devices (other than what I record with the camera). It's all on iCloud. I use my AppleTV to watch movies, television shows, and listen to music, and it all streams from the cloud. While I don't keep my photos in the cloud because I value security, most iOS users do.

iCloud has its issues, but people using iOS are using it for most of their digital media.

Did you miss all the "be better than Google"? He seemed intensely scared of them, to the point where he wanted Apple to focus 100% on beating them. Google doesn't do laptop/desktop computers (until this year with the pixel). We are seeing this version of Apple come to fruition; all-in on mobile and consumer software services.

Job's fear of Google is justified. He sees the dwindling PC sales and knows that they're not the future. He sees Google as a threat because they don't even bother with PCs, they're a cloud first company and Job's knows that's where Apple needs to go next to avoid losing relevance.

It seems pretty obvious today but 6 years ago that was pretty forward thinking.

I'm sure "scared of them" played some part, but "angry at them" played a larger one. This wasn't too long after Google blind-sided Apple by entering the phone market, which SJ somehow thought was a betrayal. To be fair, they did so while Schmidt was actually still sitting on the board at Apple, which might be what really ticked Steve off.

And they did so with an OS based on a technology, er, "borrowed" from SUN and now owned by his great friend Larry Ellison.

Lots of straws on that camel...

It's not like Google helped Oracle continue to fail at having their own mobile platform. Jonathan Schwartz, SUN CEO at the time, witnessed in support of Google, as he encouraged them to use it. The whole point was to open more technologies to foster creative ideas, while Apple continues to cherry pick from for their "locked users".

And don't forget that Google's Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board at the time... he would literally be asked to leave the room when they discussed the iPhone.

> Google doesn't do laptop/desktop computers

They do:

"Google Chromebooks outsell Apple Macs" (May 2016)

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-chromebooks-outsell-ap...

You could look at it in another way though. This is not a will, it's a meeting agenda; Mac didn't need to be discussed at Top100 because Jobs knew the dynamics of that market inside out, there was nothing to discuss.

The overall direction of travel and the emphasis on i-devices were pretty clear, yes, but it was uncharted territory so that's what had to be assessed. The view of the PC as home hub was still there, for example - that's now been ditched in the Apple world, considering Apple TV is an also-ran and iMac / MacMini are effectively dead. Steve might not have done that, not like this anyway.

> Mac didn't need to be discussed at Top100 because Jobs knew the dynamics of that market inside out, there was nothing to discuss.

Did we read the same email? Half of the "Strategy" bullet points relate direclty to the PC and it's role. He points out that Apple is the inventor of the Digital Hub concept with the PC being the hub. He goes on to say that the concept has since evolved to the Cloud being the hub, not the PC, but Apple hasn't evolved and is in danger of losing out if they do not transition away from the PC to cloud. He specifically says the PC is just another client.

    – Post PC era- Apple is the first company to get here
    – Post PC products now 66% of our revenues
    – iPad outsold Mac within 6 months
    – Post PC era = more mobile (smaller, thinner, lighter) + communications + apps + cloud services
    – we invented Digital Hub concept
    – PC as hub for all your digital assets
    – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud
    – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …
    – Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator’s dilemma)

The bullet points and the fact that Apple dropped "Computer" from it's name to focus on Consumer Electronics should give you an understanding of Apple's strategy and how they see the PC. They're clearly moving away from the Pro Tools segment that supported them for so long and they run the risk of being the next Sony CE when someone else invents the next iPod.

I don't disagree, my remark was more shaded by the MBP debacle: there is nothing in that email saying "our pro tools should suck from now on". There is an emphasis on i-devices and cloud (and lock-in...), of course, and on new strategies, which is what has to be hashed out; but there would have been no need to hash out what a great Pro laptop is or what a great desktop is, since Steve would have seen a few in his time. He's had quite a few run-ins with his developer ecosystem throughout the years, so he knew pretty well what you can and cannot sell to that crowd.

I'm not sure suck is right word, they're just catering to a different market. The new MBPs seem to be targeted at the "prosumer" market and not actual professional market. It's almost as if Apple is abandoning the segment that kept them alive pre-iPod. It makes you wonder if they're going to introduce an actual professional line again.

I mean what do the actual Apple Developer use as their daily drivers?

There won't be a Mac in another five years, Pro or otherwise. Didn't anyone notice that they dropped "Computer" from their company name, concurrently with the release of their iOS product line? They don't want to be in the commodity appliance business, and that's what computers are.

I mean what do the actual Apple Developer use as their daily drivers?

Many people see this as a relevant question for some reason, but I'm not sure why. You don't need a Sony branded PC to develop for the PS4, or a Microsoft branded PC to develop for the Xbox. You still need a Mac to develop for iOS and OSX, but there's no technical reason for that. It's a wholly-artificial constraint imposed by Apple... one that could go away tomorrow with a stroke of Tim Cook's pen.

If that were the case then why continue trying to innovate the computer? If the Post PC Era and their embrace of consumer electronics means they plan to abandon the PC then why bother investing in innovating it? Why not make moves to push users off their hardware? Allow OSX to be virtualized or release XCode for Linux or PC?

If that were the case then why continue trying to innovate the computer?

They don't innovate that much. They just duct-tape reference designs from Intel and other vendors together, like any other PC vendor.

It doesn't take much innovation to select a headphone jack or a USB jack in Altium and hit the Delete key.

There's surely valid criticism of the new MBPs, but calling them "thin clients" is patently ridiculous.

Yes of course. But the idea that it's the direction they're headed in was lifted straight from Steve's own words in the original post: "PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch"

> pro level products into thin clients

I guess Apple is skating to where the puck is going to be. I have a MBP and any serious computation is done on either EC2 or the cluster downstairs (a fairly sizable cluster).

I do think that they optimized for thinness to much in the new MBPs. If I were buying I'd buy an older MBP for the other other ports (SD card is going away but I don't know about the rest).

Just today I was at a Apple Store to get my iPhone replaced under warranty and I saw a customer asking about the delivery time for a Mac Pro. The genius said to him point blank that they couldn't order one for him. That means two things, it's getting updated soon or it's getting axed.

while I see nothing wrong with this perspective, my question would be: "But what should developers use from now and onwards?"

To make iOS apps you still need (and you always probably will) a mac.

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