Wherefore art thou Macintosh?
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> Beatrice: Why, how now, cousin! wherefore sink you down? (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/much_ado/full.html)
When your cousin faints, would anybody ask where they have just fainted?
There are many places in Shakespeare that are unreadable to a modern-English speaker without explanatory footnotes, but this isn't one of them.
What they should do is have better integration, they should have one operating system that would work like Ubuntu convergence. There is plenty potential in iPhone that is untapped.
Apple needs to make sure the iOS dev experience is good. I do think that they consider that a much greater audience counts as well.
> But Apple’s immune system was suppressed. It allowed a disruptor to emerge from within. Apple gave birth to its future by suppressing the reaction to that new seemingly parasitic organism. It took an immense willpower to allow this to happen.
It's strange that they're criticizing Apple for successfully making a product, the iPhone, that can take off a lot of your PC work, browse/emails/basic things.
Clearly Apple is trying forge a distinctly Macbook Pro path for themselves without diving into phone/tablet territory. Until we have more reviews and impressions from the touch bar out in the wild it's a bit early to write off that effort.
Disagree. There is much we can surmise and deduce from what we already know.
It runs the WatchOS, which to me seems like a singularly bone-headed decision. Why on earth would they choose to segregate it from the laptop in such a fashion, and use the OS from one of their worst products, to boot? To me these things clearly indicate bad management or lack of vision at the helm.
I haven't developed for WatchOS, but I believe its SDK is a simplified version of Cocoa Touch, so it shouldn't be difficult for current iOS/macOS devs to grasp.
Reasons why it'd make sense to use that processor
* it's their lowest power chip with the capabilities
* it's already optimized for touch interactions
* it has security enclave built in, which is processor specific
* it allows for a secure separation between the touch id & the web cam from the processor
The last point especially resonates with me. So many web cams get hacked, and getting a wall between the internet and my webcam sounds like a good thing.
So much for Apple's vaunted innovation.
What gives you this impression? Looking at the metrics available, it looks like the Apple Watch is doing well, as is the newest MacBook Pro.
"Apple Watch revenue totaled $6 billion in its first 12 months of availability."[0]
"Apple Inc. sold twice as many Watches as iPhones in each device’s debut year."[1]
"And we are proud to tell you that so far our online store has had more orders for the new MacBook Pro than any other pro notebook before." -- Phil Schiller [2]
"The new MacBook Pro has only been available for purchase for about six hours, but shipping estimates on the machine have already slipped from two to three weeks to three to four weeks,"[3]
This last could be interpreted as Apple having drastically underestimated the stock they needed to have on hand, purposely limited stock so they could make these kinds of quotes, had supply chain issues that prevented them from having the stock they wanted, or didn't want to have large stock on hand, in preference to more JIT delivery.
Happy to be corrected if you have other information.
[0]: http://bgr.com/2016/04/26/apple-watch-sales-vs-rolex/
[1]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-watch-with-sizable-sales-c...
[2]: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/02/phil-schiller-new-macboo...
[3]: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/27/macbook-pro-shipping-est...
Sure that people are buying MacBook Pro after waiting for so many years..... Your reference from macrumors may be not most objective. Just on HackerNews there was multiple articles with less than enthusiastic views.
Apple became iPhone company, they relase new versions every year. Dell can release like 20 new laptops models but apple need 4 years to relase one ????
[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3152514/Apple...
If Apple keep releasing new versions of Macs in last three years, put more effort in operating system they would make more money than on iWatch. Just look on sales of new MacBook...
Instead of focusing in core business like personal computers now they have platform that is widely inconsistent. They now lose PC market to Windows, iPhone is losing emerging markets and they are behind in innovation: VR, AR, AI...
As for HN multiple articles with "less than enthusiastic views", yeah, there have been a lot of them. Apple products are pretty much guaranteed to be a polarizing topic. There's been a lot of comments associated with those articles as well. I personally like to dig into it and see what points are being made on all sides, take into account my own biases (Apple user since System 5), and look for facts that can confirm or deny the points being made. I take the views in the articles submitted to Hacker News and the comments as, for the most part, anecdotal views of a small, opinionated, sometimes thoughtful, demographic. If I counted up the number of people who have commented on Apple-related articles, I estimate it's fewer than 5000. I don't know how that correlates with the entire consumer market, but I strongly doubt it's representative.
Considering the MacBook Pro was just announced on October 27 (10 days ago), there are few hard numbers out there, and very few people have actually used the Touch Bar at all, much less in anger. That doesn't mean people aren't entitled to their opinions, but it does mean we should take the lack of hands-on experience into account. macrumors.com is one of the few places that has some actual numbers out there at this time. I'll take those numbers over opinion pieces. If you know of other numbers out there, please do share. I want to know more about this (which is why I'm participating in this discussion).
From the article you posted:
"Slice's figures are unofficial and based on electronic receipts sent to email addresses following a purchase."
Also, I don't see a dateline on the article (if I missed it, please share), but I believe it's from well over a year ago, based on the age of the comments. I would weight the Wall Street Journal from April 2016[0] more heavily than Slice some time in 2015. As for publishing sales figures, you're right: it doesn't look like Apple breaks out Apple Watch sales from its other devices.
Also, note that the WSJ article is from before the release of the Watch Series 2.
Please note that I am not arguing that the Apple watch is a huge success, or that it's perfect: I'm arguing it's not a flop.
[0]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-watch-with-sizable-sales-c...
As for Apple vs Dell: They've always been very different companies. The closest they've been was likely during the Gil Amelio years when Apple produced a dizzyingly confusing array of Macintosh desktops, and nearly killed the company. Also look at the comparative success of Dell vs Apple. What is the value of the "20 new laptop models" Dell releases each year? What is the profit for the company? Sure, all things being equal, I'd like Apple to rev hardware more frequently than they've been. I think, given Apple's priorities, they released the best MacBook Pro they could at this time. There are people who aren't happy with the tradeoffs they made. There's still a huge demand for what they did release.
None of this, in my eyes, supports the idea that the Apple Watch is a flop or that there is not much enthusiasm for the new Mac.
(In addition to that quote, I've listened to several podcasts with him, and he's a huge believer in view that big companies have to be willing to sacrifice their existing products to survive).
It's not indirectness that lends itself to muscle memory but rather staticness. To illustrate this, consider a keyboard that randomly switched between Dvorak and QWERTY. This keyboard would not lend itself to muscle memory at all, despite being as indirect as a normal keyboard.
I think the touchbar could be beneficial in the muscle memory sense if it remains static within an application. At that point it simply becomes a more easily looked up version of Fn key shortcuts (but with potentially poorer tactile feel).
Before disagreeing, ask yourself what every single piece of iPhone software was written on.
Someone has to make the software and you ignore developers at your peril.
Having to have an overpriced piece of hardware in the loop in order to run software to compile other software for a third piece of hardware is, to use the German, verrückt.
So it doesn't matter that Apple ignores them.
As people leave the platform, the amount of revenue it makes the company diminishes.
As the revenue earned from Macs diminishes, its importance to the company diminishes and they put less resources towards it.
As its importance to the company diminishes and it gets less resources, the quality diminishes.
As the quality diminishes, they lose other developers also.
It's a slow decline that will take maybe 5-10 years.
I'm trying to keep an open mind here, and I'm really hoping people come with revolutionary input experiences, but at this point in time that paragraph sounds completely ludicrous to me.
It's weird to hear people waxing poetic about touch nowadays, because now that we've all been using touch interfaces for several years, we all should be realizing that they aren't necessarily that awesome. We've all by now used a map app that, as nice as the touch interface was, just didn't quite gel in terms of whether we were zooming, panning, twisting, or trying to select a single location. We should all be able to observe that the act of using a touch interface also means that we must block the line-of-sight to that same interface, meaning both that the touch thing we are interacting with can't feed back in the most natural place to do so, and that touch interfaces must be very large to accommodate the lack of precision. We must all have dealt with the accidental dialing brought on by the touch interface that can't distinguish between fingers and buttocks, or the stray emails we deleted in the act of simply picking up our phone, or the accidental order placed when we tried to clean a drop of water or a speck of dust off the screen. And I don't care how good you are with that touch keyboard, you'd be better on something that could have custom-built haptic feedback, and ideally, haptic feedback you can "feel" without triggering inputs, too. Touch screens are still the best solution for mobile, but they are clearly not "all that".
From this point of view, where mobile is the future but touch just happens to be along for that ride, bodging touch on to a laptop isn't that impressive and there's no reason to believe it's the wave of the future. I've actually got "touch" on my laptop, in the form of my trackpad, and for a 2D slab, I get rather a lot of distinct inputs out of it. Remember that everything I can use that for comfortably is one more opportunity that I don't need a "touchbar" for. (That's been my real criticism of the touchbar; it's not necessarily intrinsically a bad idea or fundamentally useless, it's that the list of things for which it is the best solution is rather short. And I'm not saying it's empty... just short. In particular, it's much shorter than the list of things that it could be used for, but for which it's not the best solution.)
Further, despite not particularly wanting it the laptop I'm typing this on has a full touchscreen. Mostly I remember this when I go to clean the screen of some bit of dust and my mouse cursor starts jumping around. I don't need it for much. Even when acquiring a button on the screen, the touchpad is faster than removing my hand from the keyboard and clicking. My touchpad already has several useful gestures, draining away the marginal utility of other touch interfaces. It's not that useful, even though it's sitting right in front of me. Now, it's not a 2-in-1, where I can at least see the use case, but, neither is the new Mac, right? It's just not that useful. Not useless, but not very useful.
It's not touch that's the future, it's mobile. The still-not-yet-mature-but-still-inevitable "mobile phone that docks to a desktop and provides its guts" will be a hybrid device, and the "touchiness" is irrelevant.
(Actually, now that I think of it this way, the Nintendo Switch may be the closest thing to a successful implementation of that I've seen in a while. Perhaps if that succeeds, it'll open the doors to computer versions of that idea.)
The reason your touchscreen on a laptop is mostly useless is because there’s no software designed to require both keyboard and touchscreen interaction. (Also because it’s sort of awkward and tiring to use a touchscreen which is propped up vertically in front of you, and requires moving your hands way off the keyboard, but let’s leave that aside for now.)
If you just take software written for a desktop PC from 1995, and slap a bunch of new input devices on the side, the new inputs are going to end up being useless sideshows.
I would love to have a desktop computer with a large upright screen in front of me and my hands on a split two-handed clicky–full-travel–switch keyboard with a 7–10 inch multitouch touchscreen in the middle which could be used for both pointer movement and direct interaction with on screen UI controls. But it would only be awesome if a large number of other people had exactly the same interface, and software authors spent several years writing software specifically intended to run on it.
This is my big fear with Apple’s new touchbar thing. Since it will only be on a fraction of customer machines, it can’t be relied on to exist and can therefore only be used as a secondary (redundant) input method, used to make certain actions more convenient.
This is the same reason that Steve Jobs wanted to take arrow keys off the original Macintosh. He feared that if they could fall back on keyboard input, software authors wouldn’t bother adopting the mouse.
Otherwise, I agree completely. I hate the phenomenon of touchscreen laptops. A.) I never use it intentionally, and usually go disable it in the OS or BIOS. B.) It's more expensive than a dumb screen.
Currently, but do you think this is the end game? Why not voice, gesture, eye tracking, or some as yet unachievable brain interface? The seemingly insurmountable defects you point out (lack of feedback without activation, hand obscuring the screen) would seem to imply that touch is never going to be the best universal interface.
My touchpad already has several useful gestures, draining away the marginal utility of other touch interfaces.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen built-in touchpads that integrate a screen, maybe modal between the displayed screen in miniature, a zoom of the cursor, and a menu space. Might it make more sense to integrate a display into the existing touch interface rather than adding a new (hard to reach) one? On the other hand, I've been surprised that my friends who use tablet interfaces for graphics work don't find the integrated screen approach (http://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-displays) to be compelling.
1. Too long.
2. That graph with the unlabelled red line was really distracting; I had no idea what to make of it. Similarly, the "Percent of Time Spent" had the key cut off on the right for me, so I just saw: Deskt, Mobile, Mobile. Be sure to adjust your browser width to see how you post looks at different widths, and use good graphs.
3. One thing that has to be helping Mac sales is this, yet it wasn't mentioned. IBM's had a lot of press about switching from Windows to macOS:
iPad = clipboard
Mac = desk
These profits are not available, they are MADE. Mostly by Apple.