Mac’s share falls to five-year low | Hacker News Reader

Mac’s share falls to five-year low

computerworld.com

132 pointsdanjoc134 comments

I keeping hearing the narrative from this crowd that the MBP is on its way out of being in vogue for developers, but I don't buy it at all.

First of all, this is market share up to the release of the new MBP. It's not surprising that their market share has been slipping given that up to this point they haven't released a significant update to the MBP since 2013.

But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development. Believe me I used to use a PC not too long ago and nothing would work because OS software is designed to run on top of a NIX environment. I recently had to go through this exercise with a colleague who was in denial. But over time, it ends up the same: software built to run on Linux servers runs best under an environment that is designed more like Linux. He now owns a MBP.

So Windows is out (for non .NET devs). That leaves us with what, Linux itself as the OS? Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands. I use macOS because I don't have time to hunt for drivers, trying to understand an obscure error discussed in a long forum thread or having all my software no longer work just because I updated a package. I've already tried that twice once with Gentoo and then with Ubuntu years later hoping it would be different. I know plenty of others who have as well. Ultimately we have jobs and we need to debug our own software.

Which brings us back to the Mac. I fully expect this release to be their Windows 8 moment, a beta event from which they will recover from given time for hardware to catch up. Not every release can be a stellar event. Give it time.

Agreed. If the rumored terraced batteries (that couldn't make it in time for this year's release) come through, coupled with ostensible efficiency improvements in the next gen of processors, GPUs etc, we might be able to reach that hallowed 10 hour mark again.

Well, that and hopefully there's a price drop with the second gen of touchbar MacBooks (not holding my breath there)

> I used to use a PC not too long ago and nothing would work

Was this before or after the Windows 10 WSL environment was released? I think that has done a lot to change developers' views on doing ＊NIX development on Windows.

For me it was before Windows 10 WSL, but for my colleague it was after. It was very early on right after it was announced, of course. He tried using the Ubuntu on Windows stuff to run a Nodejs app but ran into weird filesystem issues. We didn't have time to be one of the first to figure out why, so it was back to the Mac for him.

why would you do ＊NIX development on anything other than the actual kit the code is going to be running on?

It's important to ensure that the software you're developing runs as expected in the production environment. That does not mean that the development environment and the production environment need to be the same. For example, it's very likely that the development tools you're using will (or should) not be deployed. This extends to anything else about the development environment, as long as you're able to consistently deploy the software to the production environment.

This also assumes that there is only one production environment. Some software is expected to work on different architectures or OSes, some quite dissimilar to each other. For example, some software runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. A developer (or development team), probably has (and should have) access to all of these environments for testing, but likely does development in the one they're most comfortable with.

Isn't that what I just said? that the development machines os and hard ware should be identical.

I have worked on projects where we brought the dev / test and live from the same production run so the hardware was identical down to the MB rev

why would you do ＊NIX development on anything other than the actual kit the code is going to be running on?

I understand this to mean that you think that the dev environment should be identical to the production environment. Am I misunderstanding?

Assuming I'm understanding you correctly, no, I don't think what you said and what I expressed are the same at all.

A developer (or development team), probably has (and should have) access to all of these environments for testing, but likely does development in the one they're most comfortable with.

If you are saying that development in a different environment is okay, but a dev should do testing in a production-equivalent environment, then we agree. I don't see that distinction in what you've written.

If I'm misunderstanding or misrepresenting what you're saying, please do correct me, as that's not my intent.

Great point. I recently bought the new MBP with Touchbar and was hesitant for the myriad reasons that were previously mentioned.

Before I pulled the trigger I went to setup my dev environment on a fresh Linux partition at home (mainly a windows machine). I was fighting things all over the place to get it to a state of usefulness and productivity. I spent too much time doing this and still kept running into little issues here and there when needing to install certain things, run particular apps, and getting to switch over to a different workflow. I couldn't afford wasting this much time in the office.

I ordered up the new MBP, installed everything, setup time machine, and bam within a few moments and pulls, npm commands, etc I was fully functional. Very little issues and it felt incredibly good. My biggest gripe was ordering a few adapters but now that doesn't pose any more issues to me.

How do you like not having a real escape key?

I don't have the new MBP, but how often do you really use the escape key? I'm use solely vim for my development work and I almost never encounter a need to use the escape key.

How do you exit insert mode?

Using caps lock as escape is pretty common. I think there is a virtual escape button on the touch bar.

There is a virtual escape. Personally, I have "jk" mapped to escape (whereas Caps Lock is rebound to Control system-wide).

How did you accomplish this without an external program?

Which, "jk" or Caps Lock? The "jk" mapping is just in Vim. As for Caps Lock, if you go to System Preferences, and the Keyboard prefpane, there's a button "Modifier Keys…" in the lower-right corner that lets you remap the modifier keys (including Caps Lock) to other modifiers. So I just use that to remap Caps Lock to Control.

I will disagree because difficulty of dev env setup highly depends on dev stack and most of them are easier to configure on linux. First of all on Linux you have to know what you are doing. Linux is first and foremost a system build by sysadmins for sysadmins. Of course a lot of stuff was done by developers but to properly manage dev environment installed on linux you have to be at least partially sysadmin. If you are looking to install full dev stack as all in one package then look elsewhere

I think he did which was OSX

> the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development.

Interesting...

> Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands.

Oh...

Quick question, when was the last time you did it?

Currently I have three full time Linux boxes:

* Custom PC build I did myself

* System76 Galago UltraPro

* Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

Oddly enough, the one that gave me the most issues was the Dell supported XPS 13 DE but I didn't have to do a thing, just waited for driver updates from Dell which I could install via:

> sudo apt-get update

> sudo apt-get upgrade

But at the end of it I have a Linux laptop with premium build quality, 8 hour battery life (with 4K screen), and an external battery pack that easily extends my battery to a full day of work before needing an outlet.

My company gave me a Mac, but literally every other computer I personally own, right down to the Dell T710 server I have is running Linux (Ubuntu 14.04.3 specifically) without issue.

I don't expect Linux to take over the Desktop market. But for Developers I see the current MBP as just another reason to seriously consider just getting a Linux laptop from an OEM like Dell or a niche player like System76.

Let's face it, this MBP just highlights the fact that its target market is not developers or power users. Which is fine, and it probably can be a successful product with or without us...

The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated. Particularly for work machines, I don't have time to compile and install just to get my box up and running. Mac worked for me for this reason, I presume the reasons are the same for many. You like the freedom and power your boxes allot you, I like the simple operation of the mac. My problem is Macs are quickly becoming more work with all of there services and issues. When I start having to search for drivers online I might consider switching to Linux, but this won't be a cure all, because I deal too much in graphics.

> The second you compile one package to get any of those boxes to work, for me, the pro-linux box argument is negated.

This seems a strange things to say considering everyone I know who uses a Mac for dev uses homebrew, which compiles as part of the install.

Homebrew tries to download a binary for pretty much every package, and only rarely compiles from source.

True. It used to be like that at the beginning, but now it's rare.

The "to get any of those boxes to work" part is, I think, the key part of that quoted statement. Homebrew may compile things (if there is no binary download available), but you don't need Homebrew to make your Mac functional.

I guess I implied it in my comment, but I'll explicitly say it here:

> I did not search for, manually install, or otherwise fiddle with drivers for any of my current 3 personal machines.

I have done so many times in the past, but not for these three[1].

This is particularly true for the System76 which not only had drivers pre-installed and the repository configured, but also had no issues out of the box...or ever in my case.

Dell had the drivers installed and the repo pre-configured...but out of the box there were some bugs in various drivers at release...but again for me it was a matter of waiting for a fix and just doing a regular `apt-get` update process...none of the typical online support forum crawling I typically am used to.

Don't get me wrong, there are many other things that might dissuade you from going the Linux route, but driver headaches of old are largely gone, especially if you get a laptop/desktop with OEM support.

[1] Aside for the aforementioned `update` and `upgrade` combination using the `apt-get` packaging system...but the relevant repositories were already configured (or configured automatically as is the case for custom build).

My machine wouldn't boot anymore because I followed apt's suggestion to run apt-get autoremove.

There are many packages and apps out there that get released but are far from stable, and no easy way for non-devs (as in Linux devs) to opt out of unstable software.

I don't charge a crazy amount of money, but 2 hours are a long time to waste for a developer, and I've wasted many times that with Xenial. That, while being someone used to using the terminal and installing and configuring server software on a daily basis.

Xubuntu is now my first choice operating system. I have it on 2 desktops (one Dell for work and my home desktop). It also works great on an old Lenovo X-series and a Dell latitude. I can honestly say that the one machine I need to keep Windows 10 on for work causes me hours more grief than my Ubuntu-based machines.

For me, the biggest annoyance is having Office365 at work and not being able to use things like Skype etc natively. The web apps are OK and I mostly don't notice, but there are times I wish Ubuntu got the kind of software support from MS that macOS has.

I just switched from Macs to a Fedora desktop and never compiled anything. Maybe I've been lucky, but my Lenovo and Dell desktops and my old IBM and new Asus laptops run with no issues.

I'm capable of solving most linux driver issues, but I've been pretty impressed that I haven't needed to during my switch. Again, maybe I've been lucky.

I was a little disappointed that installing nodejs requires a magic shell script but it didn't require any effort on my part beyond setting similar things up on Mac with Brew (or Brew itself) Otherwise, Fedora's app store has covered my needs. That said, I don't do any graphics work, so maybe you're going to run in to issue I haven't.

I have spent more time dealing with compiling from the source and handling weird package interactions on osx than on any linux system I've used recently. At least the Linux system will come with a standard package manager that supports major developer tools.

> Quick question, when was the last time you did it?

Gentoo was circa 2005 and Ubuntu was circa 2012. I spent months trying to make it work, but it was too much. Software ran slower, installing package updates was like playing Minesweeper and worst of all, I had to use Wine. A friend of mine tried it as recently as 2014, then gave up as expected.

> Currently I have three full time Linux boxes:

I'm glad it works for you. Maybe you have more experience with Linux than I? Or maybe more patience? Or time? Or maybe I'm wrong? Regardless, for my multiple attempts over the course of months trying to make it work, I couldn't stand it. I'm sure others can and I would encourage them to try, at the very least just for the experience.

> Let's face it, this MBP just highlights the fact that its target market is not developers or power users.

That may be your opinion. Time will tell if its a trend. Given the way things stand today, I don't really see it being the case, at least in the short term. I'm waiting for the next release.

> Gentoo was circa 2005 and Ubuntu was circa 2012. I spent months trying to make it work, but it was too much. Software ran slower, installing package updates was like playing Minesweeper and worst of all, I had to use Wine. A friend of mine tried it as recently as 2014, then gave up as expected.

Ah cool! The reason I asked is that a lot has changed in the last four years or so. Dell's Sputnik (http://www.dell.com/developers) program is the one that specifically comes to my mind. But it is possible to buy a variety of Dell workstation models with Linux pre-installed with support. And according to the recent new product blog (https://bartongeorge.io/2017/01/09/welcome-the-new-ubuntu-ba...) the Sputnik project only released the first 13" DE a little less than 4 years ago.

So I was asking since I thought it might be neat to know about some of the changes in the landscape (provided you haven't attempted in a while :) ...)

Edit: Forgot to mention, that Dell's efforts generally improve the Linux driver ecosystem as well since they upstream their drivers to the kernel:

> as many drivers developed for the laptop are "upstreamed" to the Linux kernel [1]

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/3046115/linux/love-linux-du...

You're right, I haven't tried it recently since it became the norm for OEMs to release computers pre-loaded with Linux. Once bitten, twice shy as they say.

Installing Linux distros were only half the battle for me however. Maybe that's changed too or maybe it was because I was always trying to force everything to run on top of KDE. I'll definitely keep an eye on this development, but my expectations are that it won't change the landscape much. Who knows.

Totally fair, I myself only recently gave Linux on the laptop a try again (last 2 years or so). For a long time I had limited Linux to desktop use, but was pleasantly surprised by System76 and Dell so I feel compelled to spread the word.

At any rate, as I say in another comment, there are definitely many other things that might dissuade you from going the Linux route (gaming being my personal challenge). I was just trying to comment on the massive improvement in the driver space in recent years.

> Maybe you have more experience with Linux than I? Or maybe more patience? Or time? Or maybe I'm wrong? Regardless, for my multiple attempts over the course of months trying to make it work, I couldn't stand it.

Or... maybe different expectations? I never had audio 'just work' on various linux laptops from 2002-2008. Playing some music (amarok, whatever), then the IM client (pidgin or whatever) would make a ping, and ... music would stop. Not possible to play again until killing IM client. Oh wait... dude, don't use pulse! Use ALSA! No, wait... use the latest dev build of pulse! just upgrade your entire system! No... dude, just grab a binary from this site...

Holy crap, you want to plug in an external monitor? xrandr, kxrandr, go edit config files, install some new Xorg libs, etc.

Coming from that world, the Macbook world "just works". Yes, it's gotten a bit worse over time (2016 letdowns, etc). But I still have colleagues who spend far too much time making basic stuff work in various linuxes.

This is normally the point in the story where people either say "you did it wrong" or "yeah, dude, i feel your pain - it used to be bad, but... ubuntu 'just works' and is great now'. Trouble is, I heard that years ago too ("hey yeah, it used to suck, but it's better now") and... it wasn't any better. After going through various laptops (cheap and expensive) never having a decent "just works" experience (out of the box: printer, wifi, external monitor, audio in/out, playing dvd movies and writing to dvd all just working)... I gave up.

For people with different expectations (thinking that rebooting your session to edit an Xconfig file to get multi monitor support is acceptable, for example), they'll never believe there's anything wrong.

I generally agree. But I'm not confident they'll change. They may have withdrawn support too quick, but what do they gain out of doubling down their efforts (especially if the market is just developers)?

I've really been surprised hearing pretty popular projects that have been around for 20+ years still have issues on Windows (like Python). Working in VFX there are a lot of domain-specific open source projects that "support" Windows, but have out of date build instructions and break often just because most of the development is done in Linux.

I really think Linux on the desktop's biggest problem is having third-parties caring about it (which is a chicken/egg issue) and people's familiarity. If you need Photoshop or your trackpad driver won't work--you're out of luck. Any of the troubleshooting or debugging I've experienced hasn't been any more difficult in Windows vs Linux other than my familiarity with how the OS works. I find troubleshooting Windows much more difficult because my familiarity has atrophied since I haven't used it heavily in years.

I do think there's hope for Windows with the Linux Bash shell, docker, and virtual environments. It has always been a bit sloppy to use your current OS as your development environment.

Personally, I just want good hardware with support and I'll probably move to Linux. Battery life, a good track pad, high DPI screen (and support for it), and build quality are the major things I haven't found yet and would really convince me.

"Just developers"

Developers are not trivial. Good developers lead to good apps, which lead to a better ecosystem. The technically savvy are also the ones who set the trends about what the rest of the curve adopts.

This is only going to grow more true as creative work (coding, design, etc) becomes a larger and larger part of our economy.

Apple Developers are a prerequisite for a good Apple third-party ecosystem. Especially if you expect the software to be idiomatic to the platform.

But in this case we're talking about web developers or developers for open source server software--not Apple desktop or iOS software. For a very long time Perl and Apache served the web while Photoshop and Illustrator ran fine on a different platform. Windows had both IIS and Adobe products but still didn't overtake Linux and OSX. Yeah, there is some bleed over to regular users and yes, losing them might be the downfall of Apple's desktop computer. But it's less than 30% of their business and the growth potential just isn't that high. My expectation is for them to milk the current situation with minimal investment (while trying to keep the perception of relevance) so they can focus on the "next big thing." I think they pushed things a bit too hard and people noticed, but I don't think they'll change course. They'll just try and change perception.

I would love for them to double-down and heavily invest in desktops and laptops, but I just don't expect it because I don't see a business case for them to.

Apple is one of the largest companies in the world. Apple can and should be capable of robustly investing in both its desktop line and its paradigm-shifting blue sky projects.

Thinking otherwise is dangerously closed minded. Apple's products are more than just the sum of their individual parts. They exist as an ecosystem that gets strengthened every time one of their products can create value through interconnection. E.g. the value of an iPhone goes up when owners of it can seamlessly integrate calls or watch videos through the phone on their Mac OS X or Apple TV device.

Thinking these other, less profitable lines of Apple's business don't matter, or should just be milked for revenue is dangerous thinking that will lead to long term decline. Bleeding some money to keep the hardcore happy, so that those hardcore continue to set trends influencing what the rest of the general public wants, is a solid strategy that Apple should be pursuing.

The Mac OS X computing line one of the golden eggs of Apple -- granted not their shiniest any more thanks to the iPhone -- but still one of their golden eggs. It would be idiotic for them to allow that goose to die.

> I fully expect this release to be their Windows 8 moment

I get what you are saying and somewhat agree that naysayers are an overly represented demographically.... but...

Apple has for 5 years been operating without strong direction. By many accounts it appears to be flailing, simply living off it's cache and tech R+D created from the 3 decades of Job's rule.

It's clear Apple still makes the best hardware so that isn't in question. I do question, how they intend to stop the slow drain of talent from the company and users. They aren't supporting pros the way they did in the 80s 90s and 2000s. All the pros in movies, music, and graphic design used to use Macs. With the introduction of OS X programmers had a home. That was a strong component for influencing their coolness factor. No more. Apple alienated all of them with expensive outdated options like trashcan Mac Pro, and overly expensive unjustified new MBP. Logic isn't keeping up, FCP isn't keeping up, hardware specs aren't keeping up. iCloud is limited and isn't keeping up.

This isn't a Windows 8 moment, this a late Windows XP moment. There is a slow drain that has started. We are approaching Windows Vista when everyone really gets turned off by how broken and discombobulated every product and service gets with the current lack of strong leadership.

I do question, how they intend to stop the slow drain of talent from the company and users. They aren't supporting pros the way they did in the 80s 90s and 2000s...That was a strong component for influencing their coolness factor.

It used to be that creators doing cool things on macs was a chief driver of the Mac image. Now it seems more like it's wannabes and douchebags latching onto this former cool image, taking over as the chief drivers of image.

The MAC version of Unix diferers considerably from Linux.

There is plenty of OS software for PC's.

I think your trying to defend Apple when they seem to be disengaging from the "professional" market

I find myself increasingly disenchanted with Apple's products. The removal of the iPhone7 headphone jack was an absolute disaster from my perspective.

The new MBPs with their 16GB memory limit, their removal of the esc key, and their useless touch bar, all have me looking enviously to other hardware platforms.

Recently, I tried to burn a DVD on my iMac running Sierra using the built-in Disk Utility. Apparently, Apple ripped out the DVD burning feature in that app because they're moving away from having an optical drive in all their newer products. Please don't compare the elimination of the optical drive to the elimination of the floppy on the original iMac. The floppy had one use, and Apple was boldly showing us we could do without it. DVDs, CDs, and Blu-Ray have other uses beyond just software and application data. They're still all over our consumer electronics and need to be supported as first-class citizens on a computer that attempts to be so media friendly otherwise.

To me, this is starting to feel like Apple felt in the early 1990's when their leadership appeared to be lost. I'm not optimistic that they're going to start making the sequence of good decisions that they'd need to in order to regain my personal trust in their products.

> Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it before or has way too much time on their hands.

I switched to Arch Linux in 2015 after about 10 years of Apple.

Most of my dotfiles just continued working, so i could have been up and running for work within hours (basically make emacs, zsh and a browser run). But I decided to spent a weekend on configuring AwesomeWM, keyboard layouts and other handy stuff to really adapt the machine to me.

I update the whole system about once a week and so far run into less problems than with homebrew.

If you are not heavily reliant on proprietary GUI-tools, I don't see much problems in switching from OSX to Linux as long as you verify beforehand that your laptop is well supported.

I think microsoft is well aware of this "issue". And they seems to be working towards it as proven by the recent Windows Subsystem for Linux https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_gui...

Microsoft will hopefully start throwing punch in that direction by trying to "win developers back" by increasing the POSIX compatibility layer. How long till we see a complete "homebrew" for windows ?

If the POSIX subsystem is "good enough" we might see a shift towards microsoft.

I use a GNU/Linux system, and never had to hunt for drivers, or had any problems with package updates. And I'm not exactly the kind of user who enjoys rolling up his sleeves and tinkering with the system until it sort of works. When I say I had no problems, it really means no problems.

The one thing that macOS has going for it is the Trackpad's gestures, which I don't think have any counterpart on non-Apple systems, but even that doesn't matter much anymore as my workflow has become mostly keyboard-driven.

I was going to make a similar comment.

I tried for the third time last year, and the truth is that if you're switching to Linux because the Mac is too expensive, if you take into account all the hours you waste because of bugs or half-backed apps, Linux is 10 times more expensive.

I use Linux for servers and I would never even consider using anything else. On the desktop? No way. It's just not ready, if you value your time and it's not an hobby for you.

As someone who uses Linux at work without any issues whatsoever I have to ask: What are these crazy Linux bugs people are talking about?

And why does it always happen to macbook users?

My machine wouldn't boot anymore because I followed apt's suggestion to run apt-get autoremove.

There are many packages and apps out there that get released but are far from stable, and no easy way for non-devs (as in Linux devs) to opt out of unstable software.

I'm not your average MacBook user, either. I use Linux on the server on a daily basis.

If I waste 2 hours because of something like this--which doesn't involve experimenting with config files or deleting random files, but just doing regular maintainance--it's a big deal for me and my clients.

autoremove removes packages that are no longer used and should not affect anything.

However, if you have messed with your system (eg manually copied some software or edited a configuration you should not have touched) then autoremove may remove things the system now needs to boot.

How do I know this? Because I once did exactly that (to be fair, apt-get told me this could happen and asked for a second confirmation)

I know what it should do, and I use it regularly.

That one time, it triggered or caused Xenial to stop working correctly.

> I know what it should do, and I use it regularly.

Kind if off-topic, but I have to ask. Why do you use autoremove regularly? The amount of storage that is wasted it negligible so I barely bother with it, even inside vms and containers which often have tiny filesystems.

> Kind if off-topic, but I have to ask. Why do you use autoremove regularly? The amount of storage that is wasted it negligible so I barely bother with it

I have lots of VMs that I update pretty regularly for clients. Many time I just chain the command after apt-get upgrade.

Do you have similar issues when using Linux for servers?

Nope. There's nothing better than Linux for running a server.

> But getting to the point, the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development...

The Mac ecosystem has been about as ingrained into OS development for over 10 years at this point.

In fact, my observation is that it is now less integrated than it was 5 years ago. I've been trying to build some OS software from source over the last year on Mavericks and then El Capitan and it's quite the minefield. Seems to be something in the shift to clang and issues of versioning with a variety of libraries. "Use hombrew" is the watchword, but the funny thing is that even if you don't use it and start going looking for help with build failure messages... the first results are still advice on the incantations that might (or might not) get homebrew to take care of it, and people still get stuck (finding info at a layer of abstraction down from homebrew seems increasingly difficult).

It got me thinking about running Linux on various PPC macs 'round about the millenium shift -- that wasn't exactly butter-smooth experience, but I think I spent less time on driver issues than I have tracking down the causes of open source build problems on OS X this year.

Meanwhile, there's the Windows 10 compatibility layer. None of the Windows dressing has impressed me much since XP, and a lot of commodity PC hardware is shoddy. But it looks to me like MS is really attempting to offer the same value proposition for developers who find a unix environment helpful -- workstation that will run your popular suite of desktop apps and give you that nix-y feeling. I can't help but be intrigued.

For my personal purchases I've bought nothing* but Apple hardware for around two decades. But the next machine I buy will likely be a PC laptop selected for use with Linux and Win 10. Think I owe it to myself to try.

From my experience, Mac's brew package manager ecosystem is actually quite unstable and prone to breaking. I know a few developers who believe that Linux's apt-get is generally more stable.

People compare the two (and I guess they both describe themselves as "package managers") but I see the use-cases as very different. Apt is what the whole OS is built around and managed by the system administrator while Homebrew is only for a subset of things and almost always managed by a user.

I've been using Homebrew for years and the consensus I've seen has almost always been positive. The only time I've had issues is where I removed dependencies but didn't rebuild the package. I've heard about multi-user issues with Homebrew but have never personally used it like that. I wouldn't describe it as "quite unstable."

I build Node.JS apps and Cordova apps all day long on Windows 10.

What's your problem?

   the Mac ecosystem is now ingrained into open source development.

Where do you get this from, other than screenshots with red-orange-green buttons in the window decoration on github?

   software built to run on Linux servers runs best
   under an environment that is designed more like Linux.
   He now owns a MBP.

And what does he run on that machine? If he uses it to run 'software built to run on Linux servers' he might just run Linux on the thing and be done with it. It is what I'd do, minus the MBP that is.

   That leaves us with what, Linux itself as the OS

Indeed, for the stated purpose of developing software which is to run on Linux I'd certainly use Linux.

   Anyone who suggests doing this either hasn't done it 
   before or has way too much time on their hands.

I do have a lot of time on my hands, part of which is due to my use of Linux. Integrated package management which actually works, servers which only ever go down to upgrade the kernel or because of physical damage (lightning strikes, etc), no forced upgrade path, no planned obsolescence, no need to hunt the 'net for drivers (where did you get the idea from that Linux users still need to do that? Times have changed since I started using Linux, back in 1992...). As an added bonus I can install Linux on anything I want, try that with MacOS and you'll soon know what it really means to 'hunt for drivers' or 'understand an obscure error discussed in a long forum thread'. And before you ask why you'd want to install MacOS on something else beside that which carries the Apple logo, realise that the deeper you buy yourself into the Apple world, the harder it will be for you to buy yourself out again when Apple finally decides your niche is not the market they should serve.

   I fully expect this release to be their Windows 8 moment

I think this is more comparable to their Mac Pro moment, or maybe their Macbook Air moment.

PSA: This "news" comes courtesy of a company called Net Applications, which I've never heard of before. Looks like they're a web analytics firm. So take this with a huge grain of salt, because they can't actually see real user share, all they can see is the share of people who browse to their clients' sites.

Hmm yeah, for some reason I conflated them with NetApp, the storage company. Glad I double-checked – I haven't heard of Net Applications either.

So what would be the best way to estimate OS market share? Stopping short from including household OS usage in worldwide census?

I'm not sure, but you could start by asking someone who's in a position to observe a much larger portion of internet usage. For example, I bet CloudFlare could collect some interesting statistics.

While CloudFlare would be a much better source, I think it's not so bad to compare a large number of sites, with their previous selves.

And it's being covered by ComputerWorld. Say no more. Thanks to "free" industry-supported publications like this -- designed to make non-technical management feel good about following the Microsoft/Cisco/Oracle status quo -- my efforts to integrate Linux into my company's operations in the 90's was very frustrating.

The client list is fairly impressive: http://www.netapplications.com/about/?scrollTo=clients

Not convinced, though, that the data used here is the real data from these client's main web properties.

Also see the relative growth of /r/buildapc vs. /r/apple: http://redditmetrics.com/r/buildapc#compare=apple (click on Total Subscribers). March 2013 was the crossover point.

I'm trying to compare Apple on it's own turf here (tapping into the enthusiasm of retail / consumer folks). That's a lot of mindshare lost, IMHO, by defining themselves as the "Bose of computer hardware".

Important mindshare at that: young people. Once these young folks struggle with BSODs, fiddling with BIOS settings, NVidia drivers, screwdrivers and thermal paste, and get a rig up and running, it becomes an addiction. I find it ironic that it is the very opposite of what Apple offers, a trouble-free "It just works" experience, that is the appealing factor of /r/buildapc.

The one thing they should have learned from Steve is: everything has a context; it's OK to change your opinion.

I'm not sure I believe your assertion that building a PC makes people love it for life— I built a PC in high school, then switched over to a Macbook for college and haven't looked back.

Now that fiddling with computers is my job, it's less appealing as a hobby.

Agree. I used to build PCs as well. I even had a review site that received 2MM uniques a month and manufacturers would send me motherboards and top end video cards, for free, to review. I loved making PCs but would I trade my Macbook Pro and go back to a PC/Windows setup, no.

I don't imagine anyone would want to go thru that. Getting a case, fiddling with screws, power supplies, Video Card, and CPUs. Even worse, it is highly error prone. Do something wrong and POOF that 800 dollar CPU you bought is toast.

Arguably, you a trading the chance to lose 800 with a guaranteed loss of around that much, just by paying the Apple premium.

800 is the tip of the iceberg. There is a lot that "just works" in an Apple ecosystem.

I was briefly an Macbook Pro user for four months (recently went back in late Dec.) could you talk a bit more about features that "just work" in Apple?

I also built a PC and then went straight to using laptops and now a macbook pro

I wouldn't bother with building one myself, either; it's a huge time investment, not to mention the art of thermal paste application, cuts from sharp motherboard edges, and losing my BIOS settings to static electricity (although I totally appreciated the end-result of being able to upgrade my CPU and Windows accepting the hardware upgrade, bless Microsoft).

My assertion was more about the huge number of other people that seem enthused about it.

I was all in with apple and went there for pc building help after the weak macbook update. I can get all the pcie ssds and ram upgrades I want now. Skylake integrated graphics somehow drives a 4k display snappier than a max 2015 macbook pro. Windows 10 isn't bad after you give up on the idea of multitouch trackpad and get a nice clicky-pointy mouse. I am thrilled with getting better performance for my needs at 1/4th the price with the freedom to incorporate any new technology that comes out. The best part about going pc is that this i5 cpu with stock cooler is completely silent compared to the macbook pro that revs up like a jet engine whenever anything is connected to it. My only complaint about the pc world is that all the high end stuff is brightly colored plastic when I'm looking for brushed aluminum.

Been in both camps. I finally built my own PC after a decade or so of using Macs to be able to play games.

Whether this was a reflection of overall PC slowdown, I don't know but Apple execs need to make some course corrections sooner rather than later.

The apparent neglect of developers with respect to some of the changes (and non-changes) in the laptop and desktop lines seems to be giving many developers pause and concern.

The Mac Pro is in such bad state that it appears it's worth just building a Hackintosh desktop to avoid buying such old hardware. I'm still running a Mid 2010 Mac Pro because the new trash can model wasn't compelling and it's since sat without upgrades since introduction.

This is true, but I'd guess that having a nice Mac Pro isn't going to gain them market share. The market they're losing is probably the low end (where cost difference is higher).

Lexus offers the LFA because it attracts enthusiasts and media to enhance the brand and to ensure the pleb models have a higher perceived value.

Apple offering an extremely obsolete Mac Pro filters down from a brand standpoint, it hurts them by turning former ambassadors against them (such as myself), and by losing third party support for professional software when the customer base starts asking for alternatives because the hardware is too obsolete.

Sure, the volume is definitely in the low end. But the cost difference has always been there, and they used to have higher market share.

They're losing 2 things:

1. Exclusivity of really good hardware and software. They're still among the best in hardware, but a nice 'ultrabook' (like a Surface Book, XPS 13, or X1 Carbon) running Windows 10 is comparable to a Mac in ways that an Inspiron 6400 running Windows XP or Vista just wasn't comparable to a 2007 Macbook Pro running OS X 10.5.

2. The dedication of the high end. The developers on this site are a tiny market, for certain. But we're the people our families and friends go to for computer questions (for better or for worse). The artists and especially the musicians and videographers which the Mac Pro used to attract are more trendsetters. If enough high schoolers watch their favorite Youtubers editing on their Mac Pros, and ask their uncle to look up from reading HN on his Macbook Pro to recommend a laptop, that effect can have a powerful impact on the low end.

The 2010 Mac Pro is also very upgradeable (and fairly cheaply too). I upgraded mine from a 2.4ghz 8-core to a 3.3ghz 12-core w/ 128gb RAM, very very fast SSD, USB3, and much improved graphics card (driving five displays). The only thing it's lacking that I'd want is Thunderbolt really. Yes, newer processors are a little faster, but the main benefit of Haswell and later CPUs is much lower TDP for mostly same-ish performance. For my usage, I'm much less concerned about power usage / heat, so it doesn't effect me much.

Who do you use for upgrading it? I have one sitting around that I'd love to upgrade but always found the secondary upgrade market hard to navigate.

I did it myself, buying parts mostly on Amazon, after doing a bit of research. If you want specific part numbers / buy links, let me know.

The issue with that is that eventually that Mac Pro won't support the latest versions of macOS. It looks like it just made the cut for Sierra.

> It looks like it just made the cut for Sierra

I honestly highly doubt that. As I indicated in my post, there's very little new instructions / capabilities in Haswell and newer cores outside TDP reductions for a general purpose OS. There's a couple new AVX instructions and some crypto instructions, but outside that, I can't think of much (admittedly I'm no expert though) that macOS would need that would warrant cutting support.

One thing that Windows (somewhat famously) gets is "developers! developers! developers!"

Apple has a passionate, loyal developer community. Developers who create iOS apps use OS X machines to do it. They spend almost twice as much on an OS X machine (vs. a Windows machine) to get over the barrier to entry.

Apple has never made anywhere close to the same investment in their developers that their developers have made in Apple. Their mindset can be summarized as (I think):

1. iOS and OS X are "easy to develop on" (so Apple thinks) so WWDC is sufficient as far as developer relations. Lately even WWDC is an empty shell.

2. Huge software failures don't seem to touch Apple's revenue stream (e.g. Maps, iCloud, security exploits), which over time makes Apple more and more deaf to the realities of software outside their company.

3. Apple execs are "courageous" and visionary. The company has a very top-down culture.

I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer. They have been recovering mindshare lately, but it's the same back and forth. It's less clear that developer mindshare even matters as much these days when the web is the real desktop platform for most software.

Depends on the developers you talk to.

As someone whose Windows dev experience goes back to Windows 3.0, I was thrilled with WinRT, having Visual C++ finally catching up with C++ Builder and .NET finally going properly native as it should have been since .NET 1.0.

Yeah, but they also started a number of projects only to kill them later (eg Silverlight). This was very annoying for developers who had invested a lot of time.

Hopefully things will be more stable now.

One company I worked for, we architected on Microsoft with no looking back during the dotcom boom of the late 90s, early 2000s. Within about 3-4 years after that, the transition was made wholly to open source such as Python, Linux, PHP after a lot of little frustrations piled up such as the licensing models for our backend servers, dev tools and so forth.

> I think Microsoft forgot about developers for a while. The Windows 8 timeframe wasn't a great time to be a Microsoft developer.

Microsoft wasn't thinking much about web developers during their monopoly of Internet Explorer. Or, well, they might've had thoughts. But no love.

In what country do these cheap, professional developer machines exist? I'm shopping for a laptop now and to get a pro-grade (ie. no flex hinges), UHD screen, SSD, dGPU machine with enough battery life easily puts you into MBP prices.

Now, you could do dev work on something cheaper just like you could do dev work on raspberrypi but no one asked for that.

That first line was an excellent "quote" (the developers! developers! developers! line).

Yes, Ballmer said that but with Nadella, Microsoft seems to have focused once again on developers as a main influencer and buying segment. Although it's probably fair to say that Microsoft has courted the dev community for quite a while with things like ActiveX, VBA, FrontPage (eek! lol) and other technologies built-in to their products.

You're also probably quite accurate that devs loved Apple maybe even more than Apple loved devs. The UNIX underbelly of OSX was great for many developers and the build quality of their hardware and software. But with their purposeful neglect of Applescript and even browser engine choice on iOS, there are many small razor cuts that Apple seems to be ignoring.

I still like the company and some of their products but the perception from the business press, developer community and maybe even users of mistakes in hardware and software are taking some of the shine off. And for a company seen as a standard-bearer in tech, that should be cause for concern for Apple execs.

Why does StatCounter disagree? They find OS X user share currently at an all-time high of 11%: http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-monthly-200807-2016...

StatCounter's answer to that question: http://gs.statcounter.com/faq#net-apps

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My own site also shows OS X to be around 10-12%, similar to a year ago.

This stuck out for me, but I might be wrong:

Net Apps base their stats on unique visitors per site per day. ("We 'count' unique visitors to our network sites, and only count one unique visit to each network site per day.") We [StatCounter] base our stats on page views

So if an os x user read more pages than a linux user on a specific site, that same user will have more "weight" in the statcounter analysis.

Basically.. different methods that actually measures different things.

I can understand the fall, since I myself am torn or the subject. I am a huge fan of Apple laptops for two reasons: 1. I can do all my development on the same Unix environment I run Adobe and various DAWs on. 2. Apple's trackpads. Having said that, I've been considering a move back to my previous two-laptop setup; one Linux machine for development and general use, and one Windows machine (shudder) for Adobe and DAWs. I can get a PC with the same specs or better than a Mac, with memory capacities up to 32GB of RAM (twice what Apple offers), for around $1,000.00 less. I could also solve the problem of the vanishing hardware (e.g. ports, Esc key, etc.) by going this route.

However, I still like macOS a million times more than I like Windows. I'm not ready to switch yet, but I'm thinking about it. If Apple continues to neglect their Mac line, and fail to offer specs comparable to their competitors, my thoughts may turn into action. I imagine others are feeling the same way.

They are expensive and underpowered. I used to get the top of the line macbook but it's not worth it anymore. It's starts to look like the John Sculley era. If it wasn't for the pro audio support I would jump on the linux boat.

Apple prices like a luxury item: no sales etc..

But the thing is - tech is not like fashion. You can't just call it 'Gucci' and hold the plebes at bay with high prices.

It's utility - so when there is less utility, people will drop apple and go elsewhere.

If they want to keep luxury brand status they actually have to provide something of value.

This is an odd sentiment to hear on HN.

We are usually technical people, surely we can see past "spec" as the only differentiator of two laptops.

Apple are priced like a high-end business quality laptop. (except upgrades are a higher mark-up) if you compare laptops based on the quality of their build Apple laptops are quite competitive.[0]

That's before you factor in little things that don't seem to make it to business line laptops even like protection against USBKiller[1] and getting BIOS firmware updates 8 years after buying a laptop.[2]

It's disingenuous to compare an Apple Macbook with an Acer Aspire on things like specification without taking into account all the little things.

If you haven't noticed, spec selling has thoroughly destroyed the bottom end of the laptop market, it's super difficult today to get a decent quality laptop because manufacturers are just throwing out devices with high spec and corner cuts everywhere else.

I say this, as a person attempting to buy a Dell Precision 5520. I'm not an apple fanboy, but I appreciate quality. It's not a fashion label.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/Gjnr0sw.png

[1] http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/71174...

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201518

Apple is definitely a fashion brand - and their marketing tactics and positioning are mostly aspirational - the underlying commodity is tech.

This is why Apple hired Angela Andrents - who's background is 100% fashion (she re-built Burberry) and 0% technology.

Think about that for a moment: the hired their #1 marketing person with ZERO tech background :).

Who is the 'other' most powerful person at Apple? It's Johhny Ive - a designer - who is very much in the vein of fashion/design, and understands that ethos.

Their store layouts, marketing, pricing strategies - all from luxury fashion.

Yes - the build 'quality' products - I agree - and their products are not too far off the spec pricing for similarly 'quality' gear.

BUT - I would argue that 'high end spec' is just not relevant for most applications even for development.

A decent, middle of the road PC would de-facto provide enough RAM/disk space+speed/CPU to do the job, so long as the form factor is robust enough (and there are a few) - I think they would do just fine.

This is a pretty crude but not unreasonable comparison:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-macbook-pro-13-...

The Macbook is 2x the price across 'mostly' equivalent measurements. (I understand there's more to it, but pragmatically, they are pretty close).

FYI - Luxury brands specifically price on the high end no matter what, they don't ever go on sale - and unlike most other consumer goods - the perception of value goes down if they ever hit mass market appeal. For luxury goods, there has to be an element of 'status' with the purchase, which is what Apple does very effectively, and obviously.

But it's not clothing - so they have to keep up the 'wow' factor, and be 'unquestionably the best', not just in benchmark measurements - but in aspirational terms.

Case and point: 'Siri' - what a useless thing. But they packaged it and sold it in a manner that 'wowed' the consumer market. 'It was the future!'. So this needs to continue in order to hold their pricing model.

That said, I don't think they're going to crash that far. I'm stuck on Mac, I don't want to go through the pain of switching, and eventually I'll bite the bullet and buy a new Mac, but for the first time in a long while I'm thinking of switching.

I'm not doubting that Apple products are pretty good, and that they are not too-too far off given their specs.

It's not a zero-sum game, you can have talented designers and talented engineers working on the same product, as long as they are willing to actually work together.

I evidenced an example of a laptop which is equivalent build quality (but is $1,000 more expensive at the same spec without discounts.)

I'm fairly new to ycombinator so perhaps I missed it, but can you link me again to this more expensive but equivalent laptop?

Hey man, no worries: http://i.imgur.com/Gjnr0sw.png

This is a screenshot of a similarly specced Dell Precision 5510 (which is being replaced with a 5520 hence a 30% discount)

Here is the product page to see for yourself.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-m5510-workstatio...

...Just ignore all the other differences between to the two laptops.

You're talking a bunch of nonsense here. Apple hired Angela Ahrendts to be SVP of Apple Retail. That's why her experience with Burberry was important. She has nothing to do with the tech and development side, only retail.

On the other side, Jony Ive isn't just a designer any more than Stephen Hawking is just a scientist. Ive is an industrial designer with heavy, diverse engineering background. His entire purpose is to find a way to cram specs into solidly designed products that support the hardware packed into them.

While Apple may be considered a luxury brand, they're definitely not a fashion brand. You seem to be confusing Apple Retail for Apple as a whole.

"You seem to be confusing Apple Retail for Apple as a whole."

You seem to misunderstand what Apple is actually selling, what 'Marketing' is and why a 'Designer' is the #2 guy at the company (or was).

They are a 'luxury brand' in the 'consumer products' segment - they are not a technology company. [1]

"I have always thought of Apple as a luxury brand," said Greg Furman, founder and chairman of The Luxury Marketing Council."

"Apple is not a technology company" [2]

The company stopped being a tech company over 10 years ago, and this might give you a hint as to why MacBooks have languished as they have moved onto wearables, and toying with cars.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/15/apple-is-a-luxury-brand-not-a...

[2] https://medium.com/chris-messina/silicon-valley-is-all-wrong...

No, they sell computers, tablets, phones, and digital watches - all tech products. The reason why a "designer" (and I have no idea why you're putting that in quotes) is #2 at the company is because his hands literally touch every product line that they sell. And your dismissal of them as a "luxury brand" (again, no idea why you have quotes) is as ignorant as dismissing Lexus as not being a car company. A "luxury brand" just means that you're not paying for the basic use of the product but for some luxury provided by the product. With Apple you're paying for the luxury of seamlessness and reliability of their technology products. I'm not even going to get into how "consumer products" means nothing except to differentiate who they sell their products to. By that metric, General Mills, Dell, and Ford are all in the "consumer products" segment.

You may compare apples to oranges because the CPU and other components may be slightly different(usually they are older and cheaper on the mac). It's a known fact that Apple has the highest(by far) margins on laptops.

Apple used to be priced and marketed as a high-end business quality laptop but now I feel it's marked more as a lifestyle product.

the CPU is on display for the precision 5510 in the screenshot.

That's the same CPU used in the high end 15" macbook pro. I'm failing to see how what you said holds true when the original price of the Dell is $1,000 higher than the Macbook. (with a smaller m.2 SSD, even.)

No doubt a substantial amount of that margin comes from the economies of scale where you only have a handful of SKUs with comparable sales to some of the PC manufacturers with many more SKUs combined.

The John Sculley era Apple was extremely successful. This was the era of the original Mac, Mac II lines, Quadras, Powerbooks, Quicktime, and Hypercard. And turned Apple from a million dollar company to billion dollar one.

Near the end they were in too many product categories with overlapping products. Management had lost the plot and it was showing in inventory, staff, and development. I know everyone likes to believe that Apple was always failing when Steve became iCEO but that was not the way it happened.

My mid-2015 macbook pro is still better than the competition in my eyes - with some exceptions like the new Surface books but they are in the same price range.

IBM for one is converting their laptops to mostly Macs, claiming to calls to support is way down compared with users of PCs (e.g., look at total cost of ownership -- TCO). IBM has software which helps to deploy Macs in the Enterprise.

The integration of Macs/ Mac OS with the iPhone / iPad eco-system is helpful as well. I use iMessage a lot on my Mac.

For those that need it, tech support is readily available in Apple stores.

IBM is selling enterprise Apple support, them claiming that the TCO is lower is like a car salesman telling you the TCO of their specific brand of vehicle is lower. Take it with a huge grain of salt. IBM has a vested interest in pushing Mac enterprise adoption.

I think it's as simple as better PC's and Macs that have not really improved and are just really expensive.

Certainly with laptops; PC laptops 4 years ago were really a cut below the macbook pro. PC laptops have improved so much in 4 years. And apple just gimped the latest mbp with a really bad keyboard and another $500 on the sticker.

Personally I'm hopeful. I think Apple does their best work when they're on their back foot. When they get to be the market leader (however you want to define that term) they get lazy. I wouldn't like to see a repeat of their situation in 1997, but it certainly did spur some big changes.

While I would agree with you a company is the sum of its people and right now the personnel at Apple has changed just way too much.

I'm not as hopeful - Apple will continue to be a behemoth, but I'm afraid the magic is gone. It may not go down the path of HP, but it will be closer to Dell in the future than to Apple at its Zenith.

Does this really matter?

I've also felt that recent mac desktop/laptop releases have been poor. But is it really important to satisfy the masses in this market? It seems like we're in a world where most people could be quite happy with doing most things on a phone or tablet.

That's not to say it isn't likely an important strategic market (after all it's the only platform you can develop iOS apps on). But having a large share of this market might not be important.

>It seems like we're in a world where most people could be quite happy with doing most things on a phone or tablet.

We're not those people, though, and we do care.

>That's not to say it isn't likely an important strategic market (after all it's the only platform you can develop iOS apps on). But having a large share of this market might not be important.

As long as people also have jobs, it will be.

The reason people make apps for iOS/macOS despite the small market share is because those users spend a disproportionate amount of money. As long as Apple keeps them there it doesn't matter.

But, if the people who are spending money are using Apple products because they enjoy the integration across the entire product line and they become disillusioned, the whole house of cards could come tumbling down. Alternatively, if people evangelizing Apple fall in this camp and stop recommending them, that could also have adverse affects. I don't know if this will happen, but it's a risk for them for sure.

In the end a killer iPhone can probably solve everything, but Mac users leaving is definitely a drag.

Oh please...this is like saying google shares fell. It's not like there is a new competitor that entered the marketplace or that mass mac users are jumping ship like a mass exodos for windows or Linux. It's because they haven't launched an iPod or iPhone. But I guess people gotta write to get those clicks these days..

This overall slowdown could be the reason why Apple made a gimmick for newcomers, i.e. the touch bar. They needed to try to boost sales.

They don't think like that. "Let's make a gimmick for newcomers".

They just legitimately thought it was great and will it enough to impress people and shut them up about the late revamp of the MBP line.

And it could be good, with certain provisions, but not will all the other BS coming with it.

The main issue is it seems nobody at the top could see this -- and I mean see this when they said ok initially, because surely they did know the issues before launching the machine, when it got to wider testing (before that it was only small teams that had seen the whole new laptop plus strip, as it their usual modus operandi).

If the touchbar is so amazing, why didn't Apple have the courage to just replace the entire keyboard with one big OLED display?

You can easily see how the touchbar comes across as being gimmicky. Lenovo already ditched their touch bar on the X1 Carbon (2nd generation) because it was a terrible idea. Buttons are useful, particularly for people who touch type.

>If the touchbar is so amazing, why didn't Apple have the courage to just replace the entire keyboard with one big OLED display?

Obviously this is no argument.

It basically is: If cake is so amazing why don't we eat cake or day?

Cake is indeed amazing to have in moderation, but it's also not the best thing to solely eat. We could thrive on just greens and meet maybe, but we'd do worse with just cake.

Standard alphanumeric keys are used far more often, and people rely on them far more than they do on function keys (common people, the 95% of users, don't use debuggers or vim). Without a great haptic feedback story that actually gives the sense of clicking it would be disaster.

Plus, it would be way costlier, and just give diminishing returns (since most of the time we just want the alphanumeric keys to be just that, whereas function keys already had a double life as controller keys for sound, etc).

Third, even if it was ergonomically perfect and likable, it will obviously be even more power hungry and expensive at this point.

To make it cheaper, maybe they could just do half the keyboard. Say split it between 5-6, t-y, g-h, and b-n and just make the left half with an OLED screen. The best part is they could then sell you a new MBP in two years which has a full OLED keyboard when the prices have come down.

Back to reality, the problem is that more than 5% of common people use those function key buttons on a daily basis, and they need that haptic feedback. I want my computer's volume, playback and brightness controls to be easily accessible. I also want to be able to use my escape key. I don't want to have to switch to some other application in order to turn the volume down or pause my music when I'm interrupted by someone, and it's nice to be able to control the screen brightness without having to switch applications in order to do so.

Funny enough, Lenovo Yoga Book is just that:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/12/lenovo-yoga-book-re...

> They just legitimately thought it was great

No, they seem to have actual UX professionals working for them, so obviously they understood pretty well who's experience they are hurting and for what reasons. This time it looks like the reasons came from marketing and this is nothing new, it often happens this way.

I encourage people unfamiliar with UX design to listen to Andrew Price's podcast with Duncan Macneil or his talk after that about Blender redesign, where he explained many things he got wrong in his first redesign idea and why.

I've personally experienced working on the inside of a "culture of secrecy" in political organizations, in business and as everyone in personal groups / family.

My personal opinion is that this model does not work by default, it's not a modus operandi that is conducive to 'progress' (whatever the metric, be it innovation, profit, or even just the will to do things adequately).

I'm pretty sure there are other key points but my observation is that you need a strong leader, usually at the origin of that culture, who's able to mesh all subgroups together at a high-level (since they don't work together on a normal basis). What you observe is that leader's dream team (trusted advisors and insiders to the 'secret') taking various roles at various places in the structure to glue it all and maintain the secret while furthering core goals.

You also want a non-negociable acceptance of the culture by the people working there, meaning that you just can't tolerate any internal politics/wars and everyone has to flock in line. It's only ever possible to jail teams like that if there's trust in management (because eventually this is your career...) and nobody questions the 'why' or 'how'. You just do your job as best you can and forget about your high-level vision: big boss will decide (pray he thinks better than thousands of field engineers, few men on earth should be trusted with such decision power). Often people won't even know why X or Y got fired. It's part of the fear necessary to such a culture. Divergence is like random cancer in a culture of secrecy because nobody knows the big picture.

I'm more and more of the opinion that the kind of Apple built by Steve Jobs was 100% in line with his own way of managing (culture of secrecy, dividing or even gut open too-powerful groups to maintain his absolute might/vision, etc.) If you look at Apple's execs they're great soldiers, but not much of campaign-waging generals in and out of themselves (more beta than alpha, so to speak, perfect for a Jobs but maybe not a Cook). And I think it's painfully obvious, from the outside at least, that Cook just isn't the man to rule this Apple: he either must change it or give the reigns to someone more like Jobs (clearly only the former is a realistic goal, even for the next CEO and the ones after that).

Obviously this is all speculation and I might be wrong, but there are so many blatant red signs that I have little doubt that there's this culture/management fit problem within Apple.

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