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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>But recently, I realized I’d gotten tired of Apple’s attitude toward the desktop. The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago, and Apple’s updates to the platform have been incredibly small.

So, like creating a full blown new programming language (Swift)? Or a full new filesystem (AFS)? Integration of Cloud storage directly to the desktop? Siri on the desktop? Saving RAM through memory compression? Continuity to transfer work across desktop and mobile (and different desktops) seamlessly? All things added in the last few years, with few of them still ongoing.

Sure -- they've totally abandoned it /s.

>Take a look at Sierra: the only feature of note is Siri, which is half-baked as it is, and the things that did get ported over from iOS are half-done too.

That's hardly "the only feature of note". But even so, I wouldn't want Apple to continue to change much in OS X, except refining things.

>and so I was tempted away in early 2013 when Apple released its second-generation 15" Retina MacBook Pro.

So, you're merely 3 years of the platform, but have an opinion on how Apple "pivoted its attention" regarding OS released based on just a couple of OSes? Because I've been here since 10.2 and most releases weren't about breakthrough features, but refinement and minor changes (often regressions).

If it discussed the state of Mac Pro and Mac Mini the post would actually have a leg to stand...

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>So, like creating a full blown new programming language (Swift)?

Byproduct of Apple's work on mobile.

> Or a full new filesystem (AFS)?

Byproduct of Apple's work on mobile.

> Siri on the desktop?

Byproduct of mobile again! (By the way, ask Siri on Mac to set an alarm or interact with homekit!)

But, I take your point. I tried to mostly detail Apple's lack of attention for developers, but perhaps missed the emphasis on that there in the post. Microsoft is really trying with developers and it's readily apparent.

"Byproduct of mobile." If you need evidence:

Swift appeared in IOS first and still is not great on the desktop at all.

APFS (not AFS) is the default in IOS, and still in feature preview and pretty unusable in 10.12. It's "expected" it will be released for desktop in 2017

Siri on the desktop is mostly useless, as said here.

Right - that's simply a result of what I say in the post about Apple focusing on iOS first, then letting the byproduct of that filter down into OS X. That's a end-result of the Mac team being merged into the iOS team. Maybe it's not bad, but it just means slower overall progress.

For APFS, I don't buy that it has anything to do with prioritizing one operating system or the other. APFS wasn't ready when Sierra was released, which is why it was included as a beta with limited functionality. It seems to be ready now, so it will be included in the next version of iOS (10.3), which is still in beta, and presumably the next major release of macOS.

The only difference is that it's being released in a minor update to iOS but will probably wait for a major update to macOS. But that makes sense, because macOS allows the user to customize partitions and filesystems, and allows running other operating systems - including Boot Camp, which Apple itself must provide drivers for, and Linux, which is waiting on Apple releasing documentation for their filesystem, as they have promised to do. By contrast, iOS has the same partition layout on every single device and no cross-OS compatibility concerns. Thus APFS on macOS requires more work and has greater risk of failure. For both reasons, regardless of Apple's priorities, it would be logical to start with iOS. Even if Apple did add stable APFS support to a minor macOS update, they probably want to auto-convert users to APFS eventually, but doing so in a minor update would definitely piss off technical users; they could make it opt-in to start with, but it's easier to just wait.

The next version of macOS is only a few months away; really not a big deal.

(I agree that Apple seems to be prioritizing iOS in some areas; I just don't think APFS is one of them.)

>Swift appeared in IOS first

Which makes perfect sense. We talk to our phones all the time anyway, and hands-free is crucial. For desktop, not so much.

>APFS (not AFS) is the default in IOS, and still in feature preview and pretty unusable in 10.12. It's "expected" it will be released for desktop in 2017

Which makes perfect sense. A constrained environment without an exposed filesystem like iOS is easier to convert to a new FS. A full blown desktop OS not so much. That's why it needs much more testing and development to deliver the latter.

But they ARE doing this testing and development.

(Btw, APFS is not "the default in iOS" yet. It will be when 10.3 is released -- it is still in beta atm).

I agree it makes sense.

But it also indicates that Apple isn't really designing for the Mac as the author points out.

I mean, Siri is the biggest feature Apple is touting for Sierra (http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra/). And as you point out, it's something that doesn't even make all that much sense on the Mac.

>But it also indicates that Apple isn't really designing for the Mac as the author points out.

Maybe they don't but I don't see them doing anything major on the iOS side either. Both platforms are quite mature by now anyway.

(And Apple was never about revolutionary new designs and jumps. Back in the day of the iPod and early MBPs etc, we cheered and waited anxiously for at best incremental changes -- now it has USB, now it has a different touch wheel, now it has a color screen, now it has wifi, now it does video, etc, year over year).

>And as you point out, it's something that doesn't even make all that much sense on the Mac.

Yes, but people (and pundits) have been asking for it all the same to appear on the Mac anyway.

And "talking to your computer" has been a thing from the times of 50's sci-fi stories even.

Apple was never about revolutionary new designs and jumps.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple

I'm sure they'll figure it out at some point, but the mystique of Apple only releasing something when it was "ready" has been over for a while now. So not only did it come later, it was less evolved than the Windows implementation a year prior. Cortana felt useful from day one for various tasks. Siri? Only in a subset cases.

Siri is a humiliating embarrassment. There is no other way to describe it. The only time I ever use it is for comedic relief, or to demonstrate the obvious superiority of either Google's, Microsoft's, or Amazon's implementations. To Apple, it's just another in a long series of marketing-driven features rolled out into some perceived white space in the competitive landscape and then abandoned. It's ridiculous that something so potentially game-changing to enable non-technical users, which is theoretically the market Apple thinks it owns, has gotten such short shrift at Apple, even in the face of growing (and superior) competition.

> The only time I ever use it is for comedic relief, or to demonstrate the obvious superiority of either Google's, Microsoft's, or Amazon's implementations.

Curious here - can you give some examples? Siri seems to work better (on friends' devices) than "OK Google" on my Moto X.

I don't know how well Cortana works, but Siri works very well for English. It is passable in Swedish for every-day language (like "påminn mig att köpa mjölk ägg och smör" will be fine) whereas anything remotely technical or heaven forbid English will be a jumbled mess. Google is understandably leaps and bounds ahead of Apple, and it's not surprising that there is essentially nothing in the field of machine learning coming out of Apple, whereas Google is basically _the_ ML company on Earth right now.

I may be in the minority here, but I find Siri just about as annoying as the old Clippit thingie in Microsoft Office. It's the first thing I turn off.

Yeah our desktops are just the thing we use to make those, no big deal really

> APFS (not AFS) is the default in IOS

Well, it will be when that beta iOS is released.

Besides, it makes sense for any sort of file system to be released first in such a limited manner.

Uh You realize they make more phones than desktops, right? By like a factor of 10 at least :)

So the limited manner would be to release it to desktop?

In what sense is Swift not great on the desktop at all?

"Byproduct of mobile" doesn't really say much -- if anything.

They support all three on Desktop systems, and they have features and APIs for both that only make sense on desktop systems too.

It says a lot.

The desktop isnt a phone. Forcing phone features into a desktop and slowly turning the desktop into iOS is not a good thing.

We were just fine without an app store. Just fine. I cant think of any of the "use this mobile feature on your desktop" that provides any real value...

>Forcing phone features into a desktop and slowly turning the desktop into iOS is not a good thing.

Siri, maybe, but there's nothing about an FS or a programming language like Swift that makes them a "phone feature". Same for memory compression (which only exists on the Mac IIRC) and continuity (which would be useful even if it only worked from Mac to Mac).

If anything Apple has adamantly refused to "force phone features into a desktop", and only ports stuff that makes sense -- that's sort of what Microsoft did, trying to merge e.g. tablet and desktop platforms in the same UI.

>We were just fine without an app store. Just fine.

Well, I'm much much better WITH an app store. Why wouldn't I want one? I might want some more features out of the Mac App Store (like the ability to demo an app) but I very much want to have it.

And in no way is an app store a "mobile feature". App stores, (and app repos) existed way before they appeared on mobile phones, for one.

> Same for memory compression (which only exists on the Mac IIRC) and continuity (which would be useful even if it only worked from Mac to Mac).

Windows 10 has memory compression.

"On the Mac" as opposed to "also on iOS".

And Linux too since Dec 2012.

And of course, Android (Cyanogenmod had it in 2010 or so)

Huh? Is that enabled automatically, or do I need to flip a switch?

If the mac allowed the "store" to have more than one source, allowed usage via cli and gui and didn't require a 30% cut most of your software would probably come from the store and it would be a good thing.

They'd have to remove the account requirement too. Just `appstore install foo`.

Maybe the could just offer a way to download the apps via the internet, and then open some kind of image container and move a file to the Applications folder.

This is inherently inferior as you are requiring the user to make the distinction between safe and unsafe software each and every time they install software something users are notoriously bad at.

Additionally it makes it hard for 2 apps to specify libraries required meaning each must include whatever they require AND either updates are manual, read nonexistent, or each app includes its own nagging update mechanism.

An account could be required for installation of non free software while still allowing installation of free software without it.

> We were just fine without an app store

You were just fine. Don't speak for everyone.

Finding applications on the internet is a dangerous endeavour if you are inexperienced. Many people get tricked by popups suggesting their computer is broken and they need to download a "cleaner app". Many people get tricked by the fake Download buttons. Many people just use whatever the first link on Google.

And then once they are tricked they then proliferate their passwords, email addresses, credit cards etc all over the internet.

App Stores IMHO are a must have for most people.

I think a pretty good summary is about 3 years ago Microsoft realized it had a couple of failed stratagies.

1) Catering to casual. Xbox one launch is probably the best example. They wanted to become the home media center so the entire launch and discussion was centered around sports streaming and social media. + Kinect.

2) Desperately trying to get a foothold in mobile.

I think they realized people weren't going for either. Sony focusing on games and hardware killed it initially in sales, and still kind of does. Apple and Android had two corners of the market and MS could make a space for a third.

They pivoted, targeted "professionals" and that's what you see in their approach for Xbox & PC. I think it's overall good, but saying Apple abandoned developer is sort of desparate fear mongering.

Apple's strategy has always been pretty consistent, focus a lot of resources on making a good ecosystem. More recently it seems that's changed to "focus a lot of resources on making the best systems, and allow for a great ecosystem" with sponsoring third party monitors, and apple's home automation front.

I think it's still a pretty good strategy, but with windows catching up with some "pro" features like their own premium desktops and laptops and adding in old features like "workspaces" people jump to say Apple "abandoned" them when they're still kind of sticking to the same successful strategy.

If you'll look even further back in the Mac OS history, you'll see that they didn't really care about developers back then. Their entire focus was media and publishing with education on the side. I think it hurt them in the long run as they've always lagged behind with software and gaming and they only managed to make some headway in the PC market when they devoted resources towards making life easier for developers.

I've always liked Mac OS better than Windows and even though Windows 10 is finally a usable system for development, I still don't trust Microsoft. I've been burned too many times with a promising system that then gets hobbled by ORMs adding their own Adware and other BS, by Microsoft caving into the bean counters and hobbling their systems in order to fight Chinese piracy, and by some C-suite managers bright idea that they should to waste resources on some "Synergy" play instead of just making the OS, and other products, better.

At the core, you still have an ecosystem where the people making the computers can't make enough money on their own because Microsoft and the chip makers are squeezing them. Which makes for a sorry experience in the long run, even if Apple has its own problems.

By that logic, isn't iOS byproduct of OS X? I think people are overblowing the situation. I still rember Snow Leopard being best desktop OS I have ever used, but Sierra is still far far in front of Windows, and I realized that just when I sat in front of the computer with Windows 10 on it.

I've been an enterprise developer on windows since XP (now on 10) and I don't think they've come very far in terms of what's going on with your dev pc. I still wouldn't want to use my dev machine for anything but development because of how much shit the .Net dev environment does to your system.

Don't get me wrong, Azure is blazing amazing, and so is .NET in general, but when your enterprise IDE still hasn't found a way to function properly when the "documents" folder is on a network share, then you've got ways to go.

This is the entire reason I do the majority of development in a VM. There needs to be installed so much software, that is deeply integrated into Windows, that I don't want any of it on my daily workhorse.

WSL is also a byproduct of their failed attempt to run android apps on windows phone, and it's the most interesting thing they released recently at least for me.

> Microsoft is really trying with developers and it's readily apparent.

Which has been their approach for a very long time - let's not forget that Ballmer speech. From what I have heard, Apple puts minimal effort into XCode; the iPhone lead dev here was throwing around all forms of cuss words trying to get CI set up.

XCode is a sometimes excellent, sometimes shaky experience, still far ahead of Android Studio until the past 6 months or so. The API design of iOS is also still second to none, and part of the reason I continue to develop for Apple platforms. I use XCode Server for CI without issue, another team uses Jenkins happily. Apple's hardware can be fairly neglected, but the experience of being a developer in their ecosystem is still very pleasant overall.

I'm a professional developer, I don't want a new toy language. I'm buying a powerful laptop, I don't want cloud storage. I want the possibility to dual boot or share drives with other operating systems, I don't need a new proprietary filesystem. I don't want compressed memory, I want 32GB of RAM. And while I'm at it, I want a laptop with a real keyboard, not keys that have so little travel they feel like a touchscreen.

In short, Apple is spending a lot of effort making features that I, as a professional developer and 20 year Mac user, don't want.

>I'm a professional developer, I don't want a new toy language.

First, there's nothing "toy: about Swift. It's a full featured language on par with Rust, Go, etc.

Second, whether some random web dev or embedded C dev or Java dev wants Swift or not is irrelevant to its intended audience and utility. It's not for "professional developers" in general, it's for Mac/iOS application developers, and thus, for Mac/iOS users (that benefit as a side-effect from developers having a modern/better language to implement stuff).

>I'm buying a powerful laptop, I don't want cloud storage.

So? Millions of users do want it, judging from the huge popularity of Dropbox, Google Drive, MS implementation of the same, etc.

>I want the possibility to dual boot or share drives with other operating systems, I don't need a new proprietary filesystem.

Again, irrelevant. Lots of Mac users, and tons of pundits HAVE asked for a "new proprietary filesystem" to replace HFS+ and Apple obliged.

And whether you can "dual boot" or "share drives" is orthogonal to whatever OS X has a new native filesystem. You can still format the rest of the hard disk on another fs to dual boot, and you can still share drives with other systems in NTFS, xFAT, etc.

>I don't want compressed memory, I want 32GB of RAM.

And I want a pony unicorn. But until Intel delivers boards that accept 32GB low-power RAM of the kind that goes into Apple laptops, we're not gonna get it. And Intel gives late 2017 / early 2018 as the date for those. (Existing PC laptops with 32 GB ram merely sacrifice battery life using regular high power drawing RAM -- and even those are far and few between).

(And of course compressed memory helps whether you have 16 or eventually 32GB of ram)

>In short, Apple is spending a lot of effort making features that I, as a professional developer and 20 year Mac user, don't want.

Well, as a 15 year Mac user and 20 years professional developer, I do want those things.

I don't particularly care for the touch strip though -- I'd prefer it to be OLED physical buttons giving both tactile feel AND changeable inscriptions.

First, there's nothing "toy: about Swift. It's a full featured language on par with Rust, Go, etc.

That's some amazing CoolAid you've got there. But I'll grant you that it's on the same level with a bunch of other new languages that also aren't in general use for serious long term products yet.

But until Intel delivers boards that accept 32GB low-power RAM of the kind that goes into Apple laptops, we're not gonna get it.

Yeah, wouldn't it be great if Apple made this happen? That's the kind of innovation I want to see.

As for the bulk of the rest of your points, developers and common Mac users have different priorities, and your opinions are not mine. Who better represents professional developers will take time to find out.

You want Apple to make their own CPUs?

No, I want Apple to do what they've done in the past and get Intel to do something for them. http://mrob.com/pub/comp/mac-models.html#intel_special

>Yeah, wouldn't it be great if Apple made this happen? That's the kind of innovation I want to see.

Adding something with marginal utility for the majority of their users (since even pros can do just fine with 16GB) just because some insignificant minority runs multiple VMs on their Macs?

That's not the kind of innovation Apple was ever, ever, interested in.

As a Linux/Windows developer, Swift remains a toy language as it cannot be used to do develop useful applications for Linux and Windows, where I make all of my money.

As a Linux/Windows developer, you probably are not the primary target audience of Swift.

As a developer for Apple platforms, am I right to consider C# or Java toy languages, too?

There are thousands of Apple and Android C# apps (see Xamarin).

Which, again, is besides the point. The parent was mocking the idea that just because a language doesn't support a platform it can be called a "toy language".

C# that he mentioned wouldn't be toy languages even if there were 0 Apple and Android C# apps. It would just be a totally professional Windows language with no Android/iOS support.

C# was professional even when it only supported Windows (and partially FreeBSD), before Mono came along...

> C# was professional even when it only supported Windows (and partially FreeBSD), before Mono came along...

As well as the decade-plus when Mono existed but wasn't owned by Microsoft, making cross-platform support merely incidental or even a negative from Microsoft's perspective.

There are many Java apps for Mac and Apple used to provide its own implementation of the JRE.

>As a Linux/Windows developer

As a Linux/Windows developer you are not the target audience (which I already addressed).

Besides, just because you can't use it, it doesn't make it a toy language, just a language that doesn't have support (or full support) for Linux.

A toy language has a specific meaning, it's not a generic work for "language I can't use professionally on my platform/industry".

I can't use Forth to make web apps either, which is were I make all of my money, but it's not a toy language by any means.

Yes, it's wrong to be dismissive like that. But no, "toy language" does not have a specific meaning. It is a slang insult, not a proper technical term.

Seems like a bit much to say that it's a toy language because it can't (currently) be used to write Linux or Windows applications. There's probably tens of thousands of developers at least making a living developing Swift applications. I bet there's more people making money writing Swift than Haskell and Lisp combined.

> You can still format the rest of the hard disk on another fs to dual boot, and you can still share drives with other systems in NTFS, xFAT, etc.

Until that other OS has support for the new proprietary filesystem, it won't be able to read it. Since Apple and Microsoft categorically refuse to implement any of the many featureful existing filesystems, one is stuck with archaic NTFS (with no file permissions) or FAT (with less than 4gb files) to keep data.

>Since Apple and Microsoft categorically refuse to implement any of the many featureful existing filesystems, one is stuck with archaic NTFS (with no file permissions) or FAT (with less than 4gb files) to keep data.

xFAT which I already mentioned is supported and doesn't have a 4GB limitation. You can have up to 128 pebibytes (which should be enough for everybody: that's ~144 petabytes).

> which should be enough for everybody

I've heard these words so often that they've lost any meaning to me. :)

Why do you think there’s no file permissions in NTFS?

In NTFS, each file or directory can have arbitrary access control list specifying granted and denied permissions for users and groups.

Those lists are typically inherited down the directory hierarchy, but that inheritance can be stopped.

> So? Millions of users do want it, judging from the huge popularity of Dropbox

Yet just about everyone uses local FS with cloud for backup or sharing of a small subset. Giving us an odd cloud first strategy seems more suited for a phone or severely storage constrained devices.

> Again, irrelevant. Lots of Mac users, and tons of pundits HAVE asked for a "new proprietary filesystem" to replace HFS+

Seem to remember that most of that conversation was of ZFS. They even got a long way into the ZFS port before abandoning. HFS+ has been getting long in the tooth for years, so a better FS is long overdue! So now we're getting APFS that explicitly doesn't checksum user data[0]! With current storage size, that's disappointing to understate it hugely.

> until Intel delivers boards that accept 32GB low-power RAM

It's funny, if Apple had not significantly reduced the Wh of MBP batteries in the latest generation we could easily have had both. Probably a longer overall life. Teardowns show a lot of empty space around current batteries.

[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2016/06/19/apfs-part5/#apfs-data

>Giving us an odd cloud first strategy seems more suited for a phone or severely storage constrained devices.

What "odd cloud first strategy"? Cloud is just ANOTHER option, not a "first" or privileged one. To the point that Apple also includes a whole new local filesystem (in beta) with Sierra.

>Seem to remember that most of that conversation was of ZFS. They even got a long way into the ZFS port before abandoning.

Oracle bought Sun and poisoned the area with patents and threats.

>It's funny, if Apple had not significantly reduced the Wh of MBP batteries in the latest generation we could easily have had both.

No, we really couldn't. At best we'd have a 10% or so larger battery space. The impact of RAM (there whether you use 32GB or fewer for a task or not) is much larger.

To comment on Apple's "cloud first" strategy, while they do provide local file storage in their APIs, their guideline suggests avoiding creating an option for storing local files since users "expect all of their files to be available on all of their devices." (https://developer.apple.com/ios/human-interface-guidelines/i...)

> Yet just about everyone uses local FS with cloud for backup or sharing of a small subset.

In most cases, not because they want to, but because that's how current software works. Both Dropbox and Google Drive focus on having their own special folder that gets synced; syncing the OS desktop and documents folders is possible but only with special configuration (on both Windows and macOS).

Cloud first makes perfect sense no matter how much or how little storage you have. It prevents you from losing data if your device is lost or damaged, and if you have multiple devices it allows accessing all your data from any device. If anything, its usefulness depends more on internet connection speed.

I do think Apple's specific cloud storage offerings could be improved for large devices. Currently the highest tier of iCloud storage is 2TB, which costs $20/mo; that's only twice as large as my MacBook Pro's SSD, and fairly expensive. But it's the same price/GB as both Google Drive and Dropbox, so it can't be that much of a ripoff...

> First, there's nothing "toy: about Swift. It's a full featured language on par with Rust, Go, etc.

A language with no promises of stability counts as a "toy" in my mind (I understand that this can be subjective, just providing my opinion).

Say what you want about Objective-C, but at least Apple stuck with basic syntax decisions.

That kind of oversimplifies things. From my reading of the Swift mailing list, many things you would consider "basic syntax decisions" will have a profound impact on the stabilisation of the ABI.

Migrating is a pain, but I'll take the Swift migration pain over the maintenance of old Objective-C code any day. Even on large projects.

Glad you agree the keyboard sucks

> I want the possibility to dual boot or share drives with other operating systems, I don't need a new proprietary filesystem.

Then you're in luck. APFS isn't proprietary, as Apple's website claims that "Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format specification when Apple File System is released for macOS in 2017." So there will be nothing preventing drivers from being written for other operating systems, though of course it will require someone to actually do the work. In return you get a FS that improves on HFS+ in reliability, performance, and features (volumes). If there is enough interest I imagine it might even compete with btrfs for use as a root volume for Linux installations… though there probably won't be.

You may criticize Apple for not open sourcing their implementation of APFS, though I'm holding out hope they will do so eventually. An open source implementation would definitely be useful as a starting point for drivers for other operating systems, but to be fair, it would still require someone to spend the time to port it. Apple's HFS+ driver is open source as part of xnu, but Linux hfsplus doesn't support journaling which was added in 2002. That's not Apple's fault.

What about patents?

I haven't heard any statements suggesting that APFS is patented or that Apple wants to charge for licensing it, but it's possible. We'll see what happens when 10.13 is released...

APFS isn't proprietary, as Apple's website claims that "Apple plans to document and publish the APFS volume format specification

Great. ... anyone else still waiting for the open FaceTime API announced in public on stage by Steve Jobs?

That was six years ago :)

The rumor is that Apple changed its mind due to the VirnetX patent lawsuit, which forced it to switch FaceTime from P2P to relaying all calls through a central server. But who knows if that's the whole story. I'd still like to see an open FaceTime.

>Great. ... anyone else still waiting for the open FaceTime API announced in public on stage by Steve Jobs?

Only people who missed the part that some other company took them to court over a BS patent on it and won, so they couldn't finally do it.

Meanwhile, they HAVE opensourced other stuff, including Swift, in the meanwhile, so it's not like they have some big history of backtracking on open sourcing promises...

> I'm a professional developer, I don't want a new toy language

Why do you think Swift is a toy language?

I'm way more than three years with the Mac platform, and I have similar concerns. The impression I get is that Apple are not particularly interested in the computer market as opposed to the mobile (phone/tablet) market.

I think it is a question of emphasis. You've focused on the OS, but not all the innovation was in the OS itself. Remember when they added iLife? That was a big deal. Software you had to pay for on Windows was bundled free, and it was good. Everyone used iPhoto, iMovie was nice, GarageBand was awesome, although probably not everyone needed it.

(Good lord, just checked, iLife debuted (minus GarageBand) on 10.1. Evidently, I've been using MacBooks longer than I realized.)

The sense that they have an exciting vision and plan for the future of how people use and relate to the computer is gone. That sort of vision and the innovation that goes with it is reserved for the mobile space now.

They are still fine computers, particularly the notebooks, but the mobile products are driving the process now. I do think that is a shame.

> Integration of Cloud storage directly to the desktop?

This was done extremely poorly, though. Among the big sync providers (Dropbox, Sync, Box, Google), iCloud Drive is easily the worst.

The iOS app looks like something an intern cooked up. Hardly any iOS apps can read or write from the drive. There's no way to share anything in your drive. There's no way to share anything into your drive, either.

While Apple introduced the ability for your Documents folder to be stored in iCloud, macOS has completely lost control of the Documents folder in a very Microsofty way: Mine has turned into a rubbish heap of various application data that I didn't ask for. Savegames, virtual machines, "My Music", "Microsoft User Data", etc. — it's so unusable that I ended up hiding the entire folder and creating a new one that I could use for, you know, documents.

The iCloud services that are hidden away from the user seem pretty great, but the way Apple decide to expose the Drive is terrible. It's almost like they don't want users to actually use the drive.

> "My Music", "Microsoft User Data", etc.

Neither of these are Apple's doing - obviously in the case of "Microsoft User Data", and I don't know what "My Music" is but Apple's software puts music in ~/Music. (Heh, it seems I have a "My Music" in Documents, as well as "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Games"… not sure whether this is Wine or VMware's doing, or whether they're there for the same reason as on your system.)

Applications are not supposed to use random subdirectories of Documents (that's what Library/Application Support is for), and in the case of sandboxed Mac App Store apps, can't. But I don't know what you want Apple to do about random unsandboxed third party apps deciding to do it anyway. I guess if the Mac App Store had been more of a success, more apps would be sandboxed, but still…

I guess it would be nice if macOS made it easy to sync custom (existing) folders to iCloud rather than just desktop and documents. But if you're starting from scratch, you can just create the folder under iCloud Drive and drag it to Finder favorites. If you're a CLI user, add a symlink in the home directory or whatever.

I agree iCloud Drive on iOS is really inconsistent and awkward, and it would be nice if you could share folders with other users. I don't know what you mean by "no way to share into your drive", though. You can add arbitrary files to iCloud Drive from the share menu (and you can access arbitrary files from the iCloud Drive app).

My Music etc., are made by Apple. My Music is Garage Band, I believe. My Videos would be iMovie, I believe. I think savegames end up in Documents because they are considered to be "documents" as opposed to app state (which would go under ~/Library/Application Support), but I'm not sure what the Apple guidelines are.

"Microsoft User Data" is apparently from earlier versions of Office. Newer versions will look for it in ~/Library/Preferences, and you can actually move the folder there to get rid of it. [1]

Here [2] is my Documents folder. It's 100% crap that I did not ask for.

As for sharing: This discussion was about macOS, although the same limitation applies to iOS: There's no way to share an iCloud Drive file directly. If you do right-click -> Share -> Email, you get an attachment that you need to send, even though the file is already reachable through the cloud. Every other competitor (Dropbox etc.) adds a "Copy Link" option to the Finder context menu.

[1] https://www.atulhost.com/remove-microsoft-user-data-from-doc...

[2] http://i.imgur.com/PvXbmJk.png

The current version of GarageBand saves projects under ~/Music/GarageBand by default. and iMovie uses an opaque "iMovie Library" in ~/Movies. I'm not sure about older versions, although from a quick Google it seems unlikely to me that it used those directories.

Apple's documentation[1] implies that applications are not supposed to use the documents directory themselves (only when the user selects it in the file picker).

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ge...

> Take a look at Sierra: the only feature of note is Siri, which is half-baked as it is, and the things that did get ported over from iOS are half-done too.

I agree 100% with your point. If you want pointless changes to the OS that means you have to relearn a lot just to keep doing what you were doing, then yes, Microsoft is what you want.

If you want small incremental improvements that don't move around common functions for no reason, then stick with Mac OS.

>>and so I was tempted away in early 2013 when Apple released its second-generation 15" Retina MacBook Pro.

>So, you're merely 3 years of the platform, but have an opinion on how Apple "pivoted its attention" regarding OS released based on just a couple of OSes? Because I've been here since 10.2 and most releases weren't about breakthrough features, but refinement and minor changes (often regressions).

Exactly. Sigh. Kids these days. That is like the complain about Webkit being the new IE, without actually experiencing Web Development during the IE era, and falsely claiming IE era means IE 7+, then later acknowledged he wasn't even doing Web Development in IE7! time. Anyway......

There are lots of new fans into the Apple Ecosystem since iPhone. And without the RDF from Steve they quickly lose sight of Apple's greatest strength. Apple is the master of iteration! Very rarely will you see a completely new product CAT being introduced. They just continue to iterate. Sometimes taking two steps forward and one step back.

I agree Apple have spend less time with Mac and specially Desktop in General, but most of the point in article were not convincing.

Amazing how people forget RAM compression and Metal. The latter prolonged my Air life by 2 years!

Actually I care more about OS performance rather than new features. Of course the only reason I don't want new features is because Apple refuses to release a screenless iMac where you can upgrade the RAM and hard drives easily.

Isn't that what a Mac Pro is? Screenless and upgradable hardware.

It's screenless, but I wouldn't call it upgradable when you compare it to the old metal Mac Pro

All of the things you mention as proof of Apple caring about the desktop are things I don't give a shit about. I needed _none_ of the things you list. Nor do any of the people I work with.

True, there probably isn't much the average user would like to change in OSX. But it would be okay if stuff was broken was fixed and stuff that was wonky got improved.

Er isn't AFS still essentially vapor ware at this point?

No? Pretty sure with the initial release they specifically said that they were taking their time in testing it thoroughly, but that they wanted some initial feedback from people. It's been in a preview mode available in MacOS for just shy of two years if I remember correctly, but they explicitly said from the beginning that they didn't advise people to use it for their main OS partitions or anything important for a while.

On iOS Apple switched it to being the default update quietly in a point release: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2017/01/ios-10-3-will-be-apple...

It actually shows marked performance improvements, but that's because it focuses on performance on the type of storage an iPhone uses.

>but that's because it focuses on performance on the type of storage an iPhone uses.

If that's solid state storage, then it's the same storage all Macs will also use in the future (and most models now).

No, it's almost ready. It's already in use in iOS 10.3, and signs point to a full rollout this year.

No, it has essentially already shipped with Sierra (only in demo mode for developers), and it's already on route with the final 10.3 iOS version (currently in beta) to become the official iOS FS.

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