Apple’s Next Laptops Could Be More iPhone Than Mac | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s Next Laptops Could Be More iPhone Than Mac

wsj.com

42 pointsboramalper40 comments

I've been figuring for a couple years now I'd have to abandon macs once my air dies. Apple seems bound and determined to shun developers and instead sell facebook machines.

I am a developer and I love using a Mac. The stock terminal app has improved so much over the last few years that switching to any flavor of Linux always leaves me wanting Mac OS. It also seems like >90% of the developers at all of the companies I’ve worked use Macs. I’m sure that’s not the case for everyone but that’s been my experience. What has Apple done to make you feel this way? What am I missing?

Disclaimer: my current laptop still has an ESC key also I used to work for Apple

Well, for example, Mac OS still ships with a version of Bash from 2007, while in the meantime I can now run pretty much most major Linux distributions in Windows without the need for any VM.

I love my Mac. I do. But, every new release is a little more locked down and a little more proprietary. Gatekeeper and code signing keep getting nudged a little closer to mandatory. For example, if you build your own GDB, you can't use it to debug without going through steps to sign it. dtrace no longer works correctly without additional steps. OpenGL has now been deprecated.

I love my Mac. I've been using them since the original Mac 128k. But, I feel like the writing's on the wall, and in ten to twenty years, the Mac will be a locked down platform like iOS. I hope I'm wrong, but... I've been getting comfortable with Linux on the desktop, in case I'm not.

Few things - not updating hardware for years, pretty much no innovation on the desktop (both, hardware and software), getting rid of ports on recent laptops, not having touch screens, horrible cables [1], etc...

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple+broken+cable&t=ffab&iax=imag...

The same people who complain about hardware updates nearly always say, in the next breath, that they're using a Mac from five years ago.

I'd like to see steady updates too, but perhaps we should all admit that updates aren't as essential as they used to be.

I an still using a 2010 11” MacBook Air because there is no equivalent in the modern product range. I just want something light and portable for capturing photos from my cameras, culling the obviously crap ones, and transferring the remainder to storage.

The 12” MacBook provides most of the functionality I want at three times the price. I can’t (for example) plug it in to power and storage at the same time without spending even more money on USB-C infrastructure.

"I an still using a 2010 11” MacBook Air because there is no equivalent in the modern product range."

So basically, you're agreeing with me: you're continuing to use an old product because it still meets your needs. You'd prefer that it had better specs, but not so much that you're willing to switch to anything else.

There was a time (not so long ago) that using an 8-year-old laptop would be unthinkable. Now it's maybe kind of an annoyance. That's my point.

It’s more than an annoyance: macOS barely fits onto the 11” MBA SSD. There’s no room for a camera load of raw images. All my operations now require me having external storage in addition to my camera or SD card reader.

I have resorted to carrying a wallet full of SD cards, swapping those out, then doing a bulk import when I get back to hotel/home/camp. The use case for the MBA (photo culling while having a coffee break or while travelling) is no longer possible for me.

I would love an incremental update to the MBA which just gave me more SSD, more RAM, a faster processor without tripling the price.

It is not that the old product still meets my needs, so much as there is no equivalent product in the new range.

Apple doesn't make horrible cables, iffy anecdotal gif-evidence notwithstanding. Apple's reputation is quite decidedly for making high-quality cables.

"No innovation on the desktop" doesn't really mean anything. Who else is "innovating on the desktop" right now?

"Getting rid of ports" can also be interpreted as "moving to new and superior ports". Apple has always been brutal in weeding out obsolete interfaces and introducing new ones.

Every single Apple wire I've ever had up until the past couple years have all been trash. Whatever that white coating was only ever intended to look good in commercials. I never had a single wire ever fray on me besides theirs. It seems like they may have finally fixed the problem they've had for a decade since my latest replacement power brick seems to be going stronger than all the other wires, but I am probably just lucky so far

They’ve actually changed all the wires a few years ago: they feel more plasticky and are much sturdier.

I don't know what high quality cables you're talking about. Apple's cables are the only cables in my life which decay themselves without any interaction. I never saw this phenomenon nor before nor after. And I'm talking about video iPod, iPhone 4S, iPad 3, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro. I owned all those devices and all cables broke after 1-2 years of use. Thankfully, cheap Chinese cables work flawlessly, so it wasn't a problem for old iDevices (didn't have to find lightning cable replacements yet). But it was a big problem for macbooks with their terribly overpriced PSUs.

seen both sides of this. have had years of mostly ... mid-to-bad cable experiences. had some friends who seemingly never had issues with their stuff tell me i must be 'doing something' with mine ('using too much' or 'being abusive'?). Then... a few years ago, they started having their cables break/fail/burn. They 'get it' now. And... I've known other people who've never or rarely had issues. The impression is that Apple is one company and everything goes through the same level of QA. My experiences seem to indicate that's not true, at least with cabling.

I mean come on, unless you have been living under rock you should know about the Keyboard - Somehow they manage to make a keyboard only be reliable enough for 1 year. And you have to pay insane fees to have it replaced. And they make a fuss about it only fails in less then 5% cases anyway. Um... We expect Keyboard failure to be less then 1% for every manufacture these days. And even more so for Apple. May be even 0.01% or 0.1% after 5 years? There are still lots of people using Mac from 5, 6 or even 7 years ago, how many of them have had keyboard issues ever? That is excluding how the key depth issues and they manage to make the keyboard so loud to deceive its user that it has clicked.

Trackpad - Finally enough people are coming out and said the amount of false positive on its extremely large trackpad is driving them insane. Yes, even 1% false positive is crap. You don't want to have your trackpad disrupt your workflow few times a day when you are typing.

The USB-C / Thunderbolt bolt frying peripherals with high voltage.

There was a comment below about people are using 5-6 years ago hardware because it is good enough and hardware update are no longer important. That is like so far from truth.

These people wanted an upgrade, but there is absolutely nothing in the product line they could upgrade into. You bought a Mac mini and want something faster, may be with SSD at least? No, not unless you move to iMac. I mean heck even iMac still ships with HDD in 2018. MacBook Air upgrade without the crappy keyboard, the current Air doesn't offer any upgrade and its Screen is still crap. A TN FHD screen, doesn't even have to be retina, cost less then $10 more in BOM cost.

We can, in the old days try hard to spin whatever Apple has pumped out are Great in one sense or another. Now they are not, they don't care about it enough. The attention to details is no longer there, and they are still charging a lot for it.

Genuine question: What makes you love the default terminal so much?

I recently had to switch from Ubuntu to a Mac when switching jobs and it feels like everyone is using iTerm2 instead of stock.

For me (coming from Ubuntu) having cmd/ctrl switched for most default keybindings, but not for terminal signals (ctr-c and ctrl-d for cancel/terminate) and no middle-click copy are huge painpoints when working with any terminal in mac.

The first thing I did when I worked on a mac was switch to using iTerm. Strange that you like the default one so much, honestly. Why?

But yea, I wish linux distros had something like iTerm. Guake/ Terminator/ whatever just aren't as good.

I miss the MacOS software ecosystem in general. Beautiful, easy to use native apps that you're happy to pay for because they just work. I fear that culture will be lost with no place to go when MacOS goes away.

They did about the same with designers and video people before they started sharting on developers.

They are steadily paring away all of their target demographics until only users who are seeking a status symbol are left. I wonder how that will work out for them.

It's working out great for them. Not as great for me, but that's not their problem. I'll be exploring other options.

It’s not their problem _yet_

Same here.

> The company announced that its initial wave of 7nm chips will be available first to its data-center customers—who are driving its greatest revenue growth—not to the companies that build laptops and tablets.

Intel said nothing of the sort, in large part because their upcoming process is called "10nm".

And complete their long slow transition from making computers to making appliances for web browsing and word processing

They don't care much about web browsing and care far less about word processing. They are making appliances as interfaces to services, with as many of the services as possible being ways to buy things from Apple. I'm not saying this to be cynical. I'm being quite literal that that is their business plan.

For most romantics that should be enough. Essentially the same thing as a iPad with keyboard.

ios is still to limited when it comes to usb storage but when that is "fixed" i belive 80% of all computer users could be satisfied with IOS.

Neglecting the fact that users want torrent software and the likes.

Are you expecting iOS? I'm sure that they'll ship macOS. There were rumors about internal ARM build of macOS years ago.

Really, I don't get why they just can't keep on doing incremental updates to the machines they have. I am still using a Macbook Air 2012. I am actually waiting for the successor to come out. This machine with 8GB and 512GB SSD is fine as it is. It might be boring but from what I know it is also what the majority of developers (or other users) want or need. Maybe NVM if there has to be some innovation. And maybe put some effort into keeping (or improving) the build quality. Can't be so hard. Oh, and fix the damn power supply cables for that matter (Magsafe is great but what about those cables)!

Looks like my dream of having an MacBook Pro 15'' with octa-core Intel processors that support AVX512 and an Nvidia graphics card with which you can run CUDA will never come true. Now I just wish they could keep the Unix kernel of macOS, cuz I don't want a bigger iPad.

iOS is also sitting atop Unix.

No paywall: https://outline.com/SBXeKp

And it works with reader mode. Bless your soul, child.

That link showed nothing on my browser, but entering directly the WSJ article url on https://outline.com redirected to your url and displayed correctly.

Paywalled again. With 'could be' in the title rather than 'will'.

From this I guess they are guessing this based on the fact that Apple have been slow to update their laptops recently?

So one day soon Apple are going to come out with new computers that are a radical departure from the past, the x86 gone and their own chips powering the next generation of MacBooks?

Sounds great but in the same timescale Google are going to bring out something that is an Operating System but not as we know it, with A.I. baked in. Should be interesting times.

https://outline.com/ works well to get past most paywalls. There's a chrome extension version as well.

Thank you! Web search for WSJ bypass has been mostly failing lately.

Downvoting you for being helpful is a bit uncharitable, +1

Glad it helped! No idea why I'm being downvoted. I have no affiliation FYI - I post about it every so often here literally because so many people complain about paywalls...

How/why does Outline work?

Not fully sure but likely takes advantage of facebook/google hacks, clean machines/IP for limited articles, maybe other things, to get the full article and then extracts the text/images into a reader-like view. Bonus of no ads too.

No idea why you are being downvoted, thanks a lot for this. Some days it feels like half of HN's front page is paywalled, and you can't even tell until you try reading each one.

Not sure why you're being downvoted either - can someone please explain?

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