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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

For a company that targets Professionals, some Apple policies seems rather hostile towards them.

> targets Professionals

All we know, there's a word "pro" in marketing materials (includes product names). Who they actually target with that is Apple's internal affairs, and everyone should judge for himself, whether it matches one's requirements.

Some people are fine with X limitation, but that doesn't mean they aren't "serious" users.

Some people find limitation X to be a deal breaker, but that doesn't invalidate "pro" status of everyone else.

>> targets Professionals

> All we know, there's a word "pro" in marketing materials (includes product names). Who they actually target with that is Apple's internal affairs, and everyone should judge for himself, whether it matches one's requirements.

So nowadays Apple's "pro" is more like the "pro" in Playstation Pro.

More to the point, it's like the "pro" in iPad Pro.

Unfortunately, in this case the "pro" is the admin who has to manage the Mac fleet or the developer who has to use a Mac at their place of employment. This is all being due to their widespread popularity as "pro" devices.

If Apple plays fast and loose with this as a marketing term only, when will this "pro" market open to competition? I suppose it already has, judging from this article.

Except it's not. At least not until someone starts making aluminum unibody laptops with Retina displays running some enterprise Linux distro in which everything on the desktop "just works" including printing and networking.

Printing and networking in Linux is a solved problem. HiDPI is going through a growing pains, and some things for enterprises are better on Linux than macOS (have you seen what FreeIPA can do? You can have Kerberos+OTP authenticated VPN, for example).

What's wrong with all the PC laptops is an attention to detail. Just have look at the recent Dell XPS thread. I mean - coil whine? In 2016? Seriously?

Audio, monitor detection, battery life, etc. are not solved problems though. Linux is mostly fine, but there is still a lot of little things that makes it "painful" to use on a day to day basis.

I admit that last few years my experience with Linux is limited to T and X-series Thinkpads. On them, almost everything worked out of the box, including the fingerprint reader and WWAN networking. The only thing that I found not installed out-of-the box was tlp (power management daemon, it relates to battery life you mentioned). After a 'dnf install tlp tlp-rdw' it was solved too and that takes care of the almost qualifier in the previous sentence.

The other issue I had was with external monitor was, that the primary display for the login screen was the built-in display, not the external monitor (that's my subjective preference. After login, the arrangement was according to user preferences).

Both certainly not earth shattering. If other laptops or computers have more serious problems, that's issue to be solved by their manufacturer. They are selling their wares to you, after all, why would you accept incomplete support?

Why Retina?

15" HP Spectre x360. UHD display. Option for double the max RAM in the new MBP. Several other nifty features, including an aluminum body and somewhat replaceable components without all of the glue nonsense you'll see in Apple products.

Good point. Frankly I feel like the retina screens hurt my eyes more than others. But it always seemed like one of the big Mac selling points.

I think by "professional" they do not really mean "power user" or "developer", but the stereotypically computer-illiterate user who happens to be a professional in a different field.

Exactly. They mean someone like a design professional who is just a usual computer illiterate user who knows Photoshop.

I would argue that "pro" doesn't mean "user in an aggressively locked down IT department."

I am a pro and I never need this.

Not all pros work in large enterprises, but a large portion of them do.

My employer (a 20,000+ employee healthcare system) issues me a MacBook Pro, but the client techs have to do heroics do manage it, compared to the Thinkpads that are normally issued. I'm happy to have the choice (I actually like the Thinkpad hardware better, but OSX is better suited to my workflow as a developer compared to Windows), but Apple certainly isn't making it easy. If they keep doing these sorts of shenanigans, it won't be long before I'm adapting my workflow to Windows 10 on a T460.

Yikes. As a professional, I'd never submit to someone else controlling the tools I use to ply my trade, and in my entire career I've never had to. Even when I've worked for large orgs (40k+ employees), Developers have always been root on their own machines, which were never managed centrally.

Do you seriously beg some tech to allow you to install the tools you need, or allow you to load kexts to instrument system calls for debugging, etc? That sounds demeaning.

No, I get root access. But I still need centrally-provisioned tools in order to access the VPN, email, etc.—basically, the non-development parts of my job.

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