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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

There’s been constant whining that Apple doesn’t care about the Mac and has abandoned the platform, the line is stagnating and they don’t sell any models anybody wants to buy because they’re all terrible and everybody will buy big ass Windows laptops with proper keyboards, 32GB RAM and an escape key for EMACS.

Except for actual customers that are buying Macs by the truckload, that is.

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Yes that was Microsoft all the way into the 2000s. Power users are the canary in the coalmine. Once you lose them they are gone. With power users gone your computing problem devolves to creating common denominator apps / platforms. Lack of interesting work eventually catches up with the company since it becomes progressively harder to hire top talent since there is no compelling "mission" or "vision" anymore.

Having thought about this, I guess there are different concepts here

a. Apple as a business b. Apple as a force that shapes the future of computing

By any metric they are doing a great job of a, on the second I think they could do a lot more.

Interesting comment, I can see that is a reasonable concern. But where are power users going to go? Windows has been a mess for a full decade now. Microsoft’s management of the platform has been a joke. Maybe they’re turning a corner with it, but maybe not. It’s really hard to say. There are some real concerns with the Mac hardware, but whereas with the OS there’s one version and that’s it, for hardware they always have a range of options available and can experiment on certain lines while still offering an alternative. It’s a lot harder to pivot the OS the same way.

To be honest, there is no compelling alternative out there at the moment. The only possible contenders currently if they are to ever materialize are Google and Microsoft (Companies that have a proven track record of doing both software and hardware at Apples scale). Chances of someone coming up and beating Apple at their current game seem unlikely. What is likely however is that some one comes up with a better and more compelling definition of "computing" and Apple fails to react to that in a timely manner because they are too busy working on a thinner version of their current hardware lineup.

Losing Chris Lattner was a real shame on that score, but Apple does seem to be an organisation that can walk and chew gum at the same time. They have top flight hardware guys and top flight software guys and I don't see the software guys losing focus because of something the hardware guys are doing. On the contrary the two sids of the business seems to constantly challenge each other push the envelope that bit further.

There are risks. They don't seem to think AR or VR headsets are worth pursuing. I happen to think they are right and they are correctly avoiding an expensive and distracting technological cul de sac, but one of these days there is a chance they will call something like that wrong and miss something important.

Wait, what about an escape key for EMACS?

My heavy emacs use is the reason I didn't mind getting the touch bar. It's vim users I'd expect to be annoyed...

Pretty sure that's the joke

Yeah, I remapped ESC to the caps lock key a long time ago!

Its kind of sad that professionals will have to look elsewhere for a laptop. At least there is the new thinkpad retro! Oh wait...

Alternately you could remap esc to caps lock and get used to it in like 48 hours

What if I don't want to"get used to" my brand new $2500 laptop? Is it too much to ask for some convenience for the user?

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