Hacker News Reader

It's a mental lock in now a days.

Most people don't realize but the vast majority of Video Editing was Windows based till about 2010 when Final Cut was considered best in class (I can't stand Final Cut myself but to each their own...) The vast majority of video editing is now Premier due to Apple's handling of Final Cut Pro and the lack of support for the Mac Pro (They usually sit in back rooms as expensive file servers) Also most people mentally think that somehow Apple is better for design but the software runs just as well on Windows.

The iPhone and the money spent on software is what is keeping people these days. But whenever I talk with my friends they are certainly not thrilled and zealots of Macs anymore. The vast majority of my video editing friends are getting really frustrated with what they call the ceiling. Do you really want to be editing full time on a lap top? The Mac Pro isn't a real solution for full time editors.

It's also display quality. If you're doing design work you can use a MacBook pro and be pretty sure that the color is accurate with no calibration. If you switch platforms you have to sort out the enterprise and gaming displays, which have totally different selling points (price and responsiveness, respectively). Getting a good display and accurate color on a Windows machine requires a lot more knowledge and effort. This is definitely less true since Apple abandoned their display line (one more bit of evidence that Apple doesn't care about the professionals that established their brand anymore).

Those Apple mirrors (err, thunderbolt displays) were definitely not close to color accurate. The macbooks are okay I guess?

When I worked at a major printing company, they were not using Macs because people would THINK they were color accurate when they were very much not, and we had a bunch of calibrated Dell monitors around specifically for that purpose.

So definitely more of an urban legend than anything. Apple displays are reasonable, they're decent IPS panels, but they're middle of the road if anything.

I own my own calibrator. I calibrate every monitor I use for Video. I have never seen a accurate monitor in the wild yet. The funny thing is I can get a horrible cheap monitor to be calibrated in a dark room and it is better than anything not calibrated.

People need to buy calibrators. I use the open source ColorHug it runs on Linux so I actually use a live cd and do the calibration. http://www.hughski.com/

My partner does photography and has a Datacolor Spyder 4, which I of course borrow to calibrate all my monitors. At work I have a 30" IPS and next to it vertically an old 24" tn-film. After calibration, they are very close color-wise and they both are very enjoyable for reading code. The tn panel has worse viewing angles and about ~80% of sRGB, but after calibration it is absolutely much nicer even for development.

I calibrate my monitors with DisplayCAL[0] on Linux.

There should be one calibrator in every office, the difference it makes is enormous.

[0] https://displaycal.net/

I'm not sure I agree with this. Or at least it goes too far to say that it's a mental lock in.

Yeah Apple is making some very bad mistakes in their software quality, but there are two things that are very essential to the Mac experience that still make it the most straightforward choice.

One key advantage Macs have over Windows is that they run Unix. You can open a terminal and be involved with most of the Linux/Unix monoculture that exists and have access to much the same tools. No VMs and all the hassle they bring to take into account, mostly at least.

One key advantage Macs have over Linuxes is the availability of good quality graphical software. If you like a GUI for Git, the best are available on Mac. It has OmniGraffle, which many regard as amongst the best diagramming software out there. It runs a very decent version of Microsoft Office. Many would argue that - especially for developers - the software ecosystem for Macs is even superior to Windows. And add on top of that is that this also runs on a still mostly flawless out-of-the-box experience.

Sure, I bet most people could switch to Linux or Windows if they wanted to go through some effort. But it's more than a mental lock-in, you give too little credit to the Mac ecosystem. It might not be the obvious best place to be anymore, but it's still great value. As was pointed out before, this seems to be something that Apple is okay with.

I really hope Apple feels this security incident steps up their game - they deserve all the hate they get for this. But the Mac value proposition will barely change for most people, as sad as that may be.

Please note as disclaimer that although I do use Macs sometimes, I spend most of my time on Windows and Linux systems.

> One key advantage Macs have over Windows is that they run Unix. You can open a terminal and be involved with most of the Linux/Unix monoculture that exists and have access to much the same tools. No VMs and all the hassle they bring to take into account, mostly at least.

Thankfully we are getting there with "Windows Subsystem for Linux." I am using the OpenSUSE subsystem which you can install in the Windows 10 store. It isn't perfect but it sure is getting closer.

> Thankfully we are getting there with "Windows Subsystem for Linux."

But then you have to run Windows. I still prefer MacOS by a large margin. I would move to Linux, but I want Photoshop and more of that without having to start a Windows VM.

Windows 10 and Windows 8 have really moved the OS forward in my opinion.

> Also most people mentally think that somehow Apple is better for design but the software runs just as well on Windows.

Back in the PowerPC days, a large part of every keynote was getting Phil on to press the spacebar so we could all see how much slower Photoshop was at making the poster for Inspector Gadget. Can't help but feel like this was where a lot of people cut their teeth on this opinion. While Mac OS 9 and its users (niners) are a tiny minority now, I suspect a lot of those shops moved to Mac OS X.

> PowerPC days

But that was all a lie about the speed of Macs. It was absolutely smoke and mirrors. Intel CPU blew the doors off the Power PC. Case in point, Apple switched from Power PC to Intel and saw a huge speed increase. The "Cult of Mac" was 100% anti-Intel and people would tell me that the G5 Power PC was the fastest personal computer you could buy. All lies and dishonesty. Apple for years caused huge animosity of "Apple Fanboys" vs Intel.

While you don't believe you are locked in, I don't believe that you as a programmer "power user" are the majority that Apple cares about.

I believe not only that for the majority of users there is a level of software lock-in, but further there is a high level of psychological lock-in, where users get used to and comfortable with Apple's design strength, which is Apple's main offering.

As people get more comfortable and more older it is easy to say that people get more resistant to change.

>These days, where is the lock-in?

Photos, apps purchased, and iMessage are overwhelmingly the reasons I don't see people switch. All their kids photos, etc, are stored away and they'd have to figure out how to nicely export them. iMessage is seemless for them across devices while an alternative like Hangouts doesn't have the market penetration—it isn't ubiquitously used even among just Android users. Apps purchased I added to the list because often people don't think about it, but if you mention "re-buying all your apps" you see the frown appear on their face.

Without directly disagreeing with your post, I think there is a slight OS lock-in, in the fact that the MS alternative is a horrible piece of burning wreckage. Anybody that had to put up with the autoupdate experience in Windows 10 (oh, you were doing something important? Never mind, I'll just hog your network in random intervals for like an hour without you having a way to stop me and then I'll take 2 hours to apply the patches before the reboot), can understand that Apple was playing without serious competition for some years now.

There are many lock-ins, first there is iMessage, second there are some apps that still work only on Mac OS X I don't remember the name of the software but I once was sent a design file and was only able to open it on a Mac OS X software (there was a windows alternative but it didn't allow me to edit the file as needed). Another example is XCode, you need a Mac to properly create iPhone apps. For programming, there are also issues with symbolic links on Windows.

I personally prefer Windows, but as a software developer I had to buy a Mac, I grew tired of having to always power-on a Mac OS X virtual machine. My job is so much easier now then it was on windows.

iMessages is the lock-in. It is the primary reason why I switched to the iPhone.

I have the macbook pro, iphone, watch, airpods, and they all work pretty great together. It's a cohesive experience that is going to be really hard for me to break out of it.

iMessage is a huge lock-in for non-technical users. They are just obsessed with it on iOS. You can find tons of forum posts with people throwing fits that XYZ Android phone doesn't have iMessage.

This might me valid for the US. Anecdotally, where I live (Switzerland/central Europe) almost nobody uses iMessage, and WhatsApp is the big dominator.

I used WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and Skype on my phone in the past two hours. Obviously no iMessage because I'm on Android. Maybe my friends with an iPhone use only iMessage between them (I doubt it) but the network effect is all for WhatsApp and Messenger where I live (Italy). Probably nobody switches to Apple because of iMessage here, but it could be a lock in if you really use it.

I honestly don't think most iPhone owners in Europe even understand that iMessage is not SMS.

I'm not sure the correlation is technical proficiency by itself, I think it's based upon a critical mass of your social circles using iMessage or not using iMessage. If you choose to, you can probably make a correlation between "technical savviness" and a user's choice between Android and Apple, but I don't think that is a deciding factor in who uses iMessage.

The reason people throw fits is because the experience between a group messaging together on iMessage is exceptional - this experience breaks down when even one of your friends in the chat doesn't have an Apple product. They aren't able to send or receive the majority of the "chat add ons" iMessage provides. I'm sure making the bubbles green vs. blue only helps to stoke the "us vs. them" fire.

I consider myself to be a reasonably technical user and still prefer to message with iMessage since I know the experience will be the same for everyone I'm chatting with. Yes, we _could_ all start using WhatsApp et al, but if 8/9 of our group message is on iMessage, why would we?

There are a few "quality of life" tools on OSX that I use, like Alfred that I haven't seen a Linux equivalent.

But you're right, I could probably switch to Linux and be fairly happy.

As for Alfred replacement... How about [Albert](https://github.com/albertlauncher/albert)?

Mac is also easier to use for non technical users. I bought my mom a Mac and she can plays with the "system preferences." Good luck showing her Control Panel on windows.

The Apple Store is a huge deal for non-technical users as well.

Apple's sales per square foot in their stores is really high. Having some place to take your computer to when you need help is extremely valuable for a lot of people. Why don't Samsung, Dell, Lenovo, and HP all have their own stores in every neighborhood that has an Apple store? Is the Apple store only successful because of the iPhone?

The lock-in is Messages, at least for a lot of people.

I'd wager the number of people using Messages on macOS is really not that high. Most people are content to message using their phone.

iMessage absolutely is a lock-in for iOS, though.

Why's iMessage a lock-in? I have an iPhone but I wasn't aware I'd lose anything (significant) by switching to Android (or whatever).

The biggest thing I lost in a similar switch was ANY old conversation with somebody who was an iMessage user. Where they reply to a conversation and think they are just texting you, but actually they are sending iMessages that you just aren’t receiving. Especially on, for example, family group texts, people just find the old conversation and continue it from the previous year or whatever. Lots of times when I was on windows phone or had iMessage switched off, I’d only get the parts of the conversation coming from non-iMessage users. A good example is random family members who use android texting me reactions to an original text or picture I didn’t get. It’s really dumb. Maybe there’s something I could have done about it in my own settings, but instead I ended up switching back to iPhone recently. Not just for that reason but it sure was nice to get messages properly again. But also more sensitive stuff like somebody sharing pictures of items related to planning a funeral.

It's not well publicised but, if you know anyone who's moved away from iOS they can remove their phone number from iMessage here;

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage/

Thanks, that is really interesting. I hadn’t read that page, but I had disabled iMessage from the phone settings, which is how I first noticed the issue. Maybe I was not thorough enough, (it says to disable FaceTime too, which I didn’t/don’t want to disable) because it never corrected itself.

I have also heard that if you complain and drill down enough in the support funnel on this issue that eventually the best answer will be "change your phone number". Now that's what you call lock in.

For photography on Linux you gotta check out Darktable. It's actually very very good as a Lightroom replacement for RAW workflow.

I second this. The only feature that I can immediately think of that locks me in the mac eco-system is the convenience of airdropping files with my wife. Apart from this, with most of my stuff on the cloud, there won't even be a migration process if I decide to switch to Windows.

I have a lot of software I bought on the App Stores for Mac and iOS, hundreds, maybe even over a thousand dollars' worth. If I switch platforms, I can't use that software any more.

The lock in is definitely less, but for me:

- Large iPhoto library - Easy syncing with multiple iPhones (notes, photos etc) - Xcode for iOS development