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Comment by macinjosh | Hacker News Reader

This reminded me of Steve Jobs' comparison of the Mac to trucks. Not everyone has a truck but a lot of people need them to do their job. As more and more people move to mainly using mobile devices (including tablets) for the majority of their computing needs I think the truck (i.e. mac) business will continue to be slow and plodding. Developers are the only people Apple really needs to make Macs for and that's a pretty small market in the grand scheme. Creatives doing photography, 3D, video, etc. have long left for other platforms. I don't expect things to get much better.

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I think Apple needs to be very careful about not loosing the developers.

Because if Android/Linux someday becomes they best developer platform (however unlikely), Apple will have real trouble. When the good developers loose interest in a platform it becomes very difficult for it to survive.

And good developers results in not just good apps. It's also recommendations to friends, support when something doesn't work or needs to be explained, and it's advertising that's much more powerful than the advertising you can buy.

All the money and ads Microsoft put into MS Phone did nothing because it didn't bring developers. Same with Blackberry and Nokia because those platforms were never developer friendly.

I think Linux has been the best developer platform for a long time.

Not if you want to target the most profitable mobile platform....

Fair point

On the condition that you're a web developer or develop exclusively for unix servers.

Very true

+lose/losing

I think they've lost many of them already aside from those who need to stay on MacOS because that or iOS is what they're writing for. Hence the tone of so many of these articles.

How long are the rest going to wait on disappointing refreshes that move in the wrong (or no) direction? It's too hard to be enthusiastic about the platform in the way you could around the time of 17" Macbooks.

That's a huge losing strategy Apple has taken for years. Locking people into hardware with proprietary software that doesn't make even basic good-faith attempts at cross-platform compatibility.

The only reasons there's an occasional older-generation video editor working on a mac is because of a. inertia and b. proRes. That video format is finally workable on PC thanks to FFmpeg, but it uses terminal tools (or a couple very terrible GUIs written by the community) and it's going to finally nail that coffin shut.

That and the fact that proRes is technically already obsolete. There are already better options that are cross-platform, but "best practices" is often a code-word for tradition. It will change in time.

The whole purpose of a video codec is to share video across platforms. That's what a codec is. ProRes being locked into mac hardware was a real dick move, and a lot of video people back in the day didn't recognize it and got all smug about how capable their mac was. Yeah, it runs anything except proRes because other developers understand that codecs need to be widely compatible. Apple was the only one who didn't get that memo.

"Because if Android/Linux someday becomes they best developer platform (however unlikely)"

Google should release a Chromebook optimized for best Android development experience.

And best web development experience.

> Creatives doing photography, 3D, video, etc. have long left for other platforms.

Is this really a thing? I recently started dabbling in digital comic book art, using Krita and a Wacom-clone drawing tablet on a Windows PC. As I interact with others in the community on Discord and web boards and so forth, I get the "filthy casual" vibe for not using Adobe on a MacBook even as an absolute beginner.

Maybe you're hanging around the wrong boards.

Yeah. If you only do photography or graphic design, there’s not much reason to move. But, if you’re doing high-end video editing, you can get a more suitable PC for 1/3 the price of a suitable Mac Pro. And if you’re using games engines or 3D software, there’s not even a discussion to have.

I think Adobe has a deal with Apple (and possibly Microsoft) which entices them away from delivering Photoshop for Linux, but I hear it runs well in Wine!

Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia has proven to be the thorn that any concerned spectator would have expected it to be. I think I was in high school at the time (loose guess). I used Adobe products for a good 10 years professionally after college and can attest that the Adobe software has essentially not changed beyond file format support and lock-in features. EDIT: Media Encoder is nice (now) but a good decade later than it should have been. The very recent improvements to After Effects sound useful but again too little too late. They appear to only be responding when competition appears.

> I think Adobe has a deal with Apple (and possibly Microsoft) which entices them away from delivering Photoshop for Linux

Surely you're joking, right? The deal they have is that approximately 0% of people use Linux.

I’m not joking, but I was explicit in my lack of certainty so I hope that speaks for itself.

Your reasoning is convincing enough as it stands, and falls in line with their approach of only adding new features when competition appears.

It happens in stages. People doing low-spec 2d work like Illustrator are still on macs. That's fine, macs will handle that and it's still important work that has to be done. But eventually they are going to see the economy of doing it on different hardware through their relations with other members of the pipeline.

Once you have to crunch some 4k video or run a dynamics simulation, you switch to PC. The price difference between a mac pro workstation and a similar homebuilt is just completely insane, and four years later the homebuilt will be upgraded with new stuff and the mac pro will be literally worth more as metal recycling. There are practically no apple users in mograph anymore, even though just about all mograph artists started on mac.

Keep in mind that the people on discord and web boards or whatever are amateur hobbyists. I don't say that as a slur, it's a stage we all go through and I remember that stage fondly. In some ways it's the best stage. But they have not had to deal with economics yet. That will make them re-think their hardware elitism.

What you are saying makes sense but it also means that Macs shouldn't get thinner and prettier but more utilitarian with upgradeable parts, plenty of ports and so on. I guess Apple doesn't know anymore who Macs are really for.

A good, durable, keyboard, twice the battery life, lots of storage, memory, maintainable, and still easy to lug around? I'm gonna swoon...

Right. The ‘Thin Wars’ have been killing us from the start, and I’m not even sure anyone is fighting in them besides Apple.

I don't know. My last 2 PC laptops have been incredibly thin yet still don't have the spec-suck that you see with apple offerings. Current Dell XPS 13 Dev Edition and an HP Spectre x360 both managed to be light, while still having great processors, plenty of Ram, fast nvme drives, good battery life and 4K displays with touchscreens. Both managed to have more than 1 port. Being less thin certainly gives you more room for "stuff" but I don't think lack of it is what's causing mac to fall behind.

> Creatives doing photography, 3D, video, etc. have long left for other platforms.

Since when? Every person I know in these industries still use Macs.

What does Apple expect their own, internal developers to use? Don't they have a self-interest in their own consumption of their own product.

> Developers are the only people Apple really needs to make Macs for and that's a pretty small market in the grand scheme. Creatives doing photography, 3D, video, etc. have long left for other platforms. I don't expect things to get much better.

Apple alienated the creatives and it seems like they've started alienating the developers, too.

If the Mac platform becomes nothing more than part of a development kit for iOS apps (sort of like developer version of a video game console [1]), it will be a sad day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_development_kit

> Creatives doing photography, 3D, video, etc. have long left for other platforms.

I agree for 3D, but for video, photography, graphic design, audio, etc, the Mac is still going strong from what I've seen.

Don't trucks transport something like 80% of all the goods in the world at some point?

The Ford F-series trucks are the best selling vehicles in the US. People want trucks.

The trucks Steve Jobs was referring to are not pickup trucks, but the big things you see hauling freight on the highway.

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