What I mean is twofold:
- They're paying much less attention to the "Unixy stuff" than they used to. Old versions of common things take forever to be updated. Compatibility has always been shit, but it is getting worse. SIP means a number of things I tend to modify, can't be, without hassle[1].
- With a workstation, I expect to be able tailor it specifically to my work requirements. This is becoming increasingly difficult at the proliferation of "cloud" daemons increases and they lock down the system - the documentation for most of the daemons ranges from "sucks" to "nonexistent", so it isn't clear if any given one needed for stable operation or if it yet another thing related to trying to sell me music or some such[2]. Reverting the machine to a state where "root" means "root" is rather difficult (See SIP).
Apple's focus is on chasing the flavor-of-the-month social features and keeping up with the GOOGs. Which makes sense - the set of people buying that stuff is much larger than the workstation market. But it means they don't care so much about it, and make choices like letting the core OS get as buggy and unstable as it has become.
It is mostly fine for me. I built a nice king-hell PC running Debian that I'm very happy with. I didn't think I would, but after my last MBP died unexpectedly, I ended up buying a bottom-rung used Air because I'm hopelessly dependant on OmniFocus and a couple other OS X only productivity tools, and I sync my phone local-only. So it tends to live in the dining room, where I work on my schedule and read mail via ssh over breakfast.
So yeah, Apple still has a place for me, but it is peripheral. I spent mid-4 figures on building a PC this year, and mid-3 on that MBA. And I'm thinking about what I really need out of OmniFocus, and how much of that I can build myself.
[1] This is a good thing for many people, but I expect full control of my machines, and I do occasionally sketchy things like patching Safari. The problem with SIP is that I only need full control sporadically, and not for long, but it is a serious PITA to disable/enable. So it just stays disabled.
[2] One example of many is `parsecd`. No man page. Googling about shows that a lot of people think it to be related to location-based lookups for Siri data. Despite the fact that Siri is disabled on my box, it ran and asked for network access all the time, until I disabled it. Now, WTF is 'LaterAgent', and why is it in my process table?