Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator. And it may work in the short term, but in the long term, it always drives customers to other platforms.
I think they simply believe they're large enough player to make such calls unilaterally, and that the rest of the industry will follow. And I fear they might be right - such decisions enter into the calculations of more "commoditized" vendors like peripheral manufacturers when they design next iterations of their products.
I mean, that's why removing the headphone jack is such a big deal even for people not using iPhones. Not just because we sympathize with iPhone owners - but because Apple is big enough to make this stupidity a new standard everywhere.
Apple isn’t quite big enough to force an industry change in personal computers.
PC’s have been slowly adopting it. Give it a couple of more years.
If the end result is that you can't tell if plugging into your friend's charger is going to blow up your phone (or video game console), I think USB-C is going to fall apart.
The problem with the USB-C standard is that USB-A now transcends far beyond the personal computer industry. It's now a power adapter standard for mobile phones and all sorts of gizmos, gadgets and accessories for the home and car. USB-A isn't going anywhere for a long time.
I don't think that's true. USB became ubiquitous because literally every PC included it after 1998. Yes, it might have helped that USB also worked with Macs, unlike previous connectors.
In many cases it's arguable whether Apple forced a change or it was a case of Apple "skating where the puck is going" and doing something that was inevitably going to happen given time.
Similarly, if Tesla never existed the electric car would still have been an inevitability. Perhaps it would have taken another decade to emerge. Perhaps two decades. But it would have eventually. On electric propulsion, Tesla is most definitely just "skating where the puck is going."
In both cases—Tesla and Apple—they're not just skating where the puck is going, they're also in control of the puck, even if only a little bit.
[0] And thinking about it further, I shouldn't have conceded the assumption that USB's dominance was inevitable. It seems that way in hindsight but was it really? It could have fizzled like Firewire. It is entirely possible that new incremental standards—perhaps an ultra-fast nine pin serial port protocol—could have filled the gap before another connector emerged to dominate.
Often these technologies are stuck until there is a first big adopter. Now Google, Apple Macs, and most of Android is behind USB-C for instance, there will be a lot more accessories that use it. Right now IMHO it is being held back mostly by cost - micro-usb and an A to micro-B cable are still the cheapest parts.
* Safari - might seem unnecessary, but it's a lot of the web
* Discord - I hear they have a Linux version in alpha, but...alpha
* iTerm - best there is after years, why the hell can't Linux win at this?!
* 1Password - guess I use the CLI? ugh.
* iTunes - largely used for watching movies
* Messages - This is surprisingly nice to have on the desktop
* Microsoft Outlook - guess you are forced to use the web client
* Xcode - heh
* Spotify
* Hipchat
* Zoom
* Skype
I'm of course not including the apps I use less often but really like when I need them, like Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, Keynote, Excel/Numbers, OmniGraffle, Sketch, and Things.
I think Linux is safe from me, except as the system I have next to my daily driver, and which I use for Windows (when I need to look at something there) and dual boot for Tensorflow.
For office I use WPS office (word/excel/power point). It has tabs for documents and I have never had document compatibility issues (like I have had with libre office). I believe office 2013 runs under Wine too if you really need office.
I prefer the web clients for email anyway.
I use wavebox to integrate web based chat and email with the operating system for notifications.
Safari uses WebKit so it's very similar to the engine chrome uses - but Google forked at some point.
Deepin Terminal is an amazing terminal.
Can't help you with Xcode unless you switch programming languages :)
It would be great if Adobe released Linux versions of their products.
I don't do much video editing but I think there are good options on Linux.
Try it as a challenge I think you might be pleasantly surprised - if you use all the above apps how far Linux has come. Most of these apps work on Mac as well so you may find a few new good tools.
Safari - either Google Chrome or Chromium (depending on how open you like things) can keep pace with Safari in terms of general usability and extension ecosystem. At worst I think you'd find the experience on par, but when I owned a Mac, I found Google Chrome to be more performant than Safari on the regular, and its Linux build is just as quick. A lot of Linux folks recommend Firefox as well but I still am not convinced it beats Chrome in terms of out-of-the-box magical "Just Works" factor.
Discord - The client may be alpha, but this works just fine honestly. I've never had a problem. This is largely because the desktop app is Electron based, so it's running on a web browser anyway; it's very, very cross platform friendly. Slack too, if that's your thing.
iTerm - There are MANY good terminal clients for Linux. I personally use Terminator, which I find has a good balance of power features and stability. I particularly enjoy its terminal broadcasting implementation, but I'm in the unusual position of working on many parallel servers in tandem during my day job, so this feature is very important to me.
iTunes - If it's just for movie watching, I've found VLC to be perfectly servicable. mPlayer is also quite popular and there are many frontends.
Messages, Outlook - Here you've got a fair point. Outlook in particular is a pain point; there are workarounds to get it working in Thunderbird and Evolution, but they're just that - workarounds. Anything beyond basic email will need the web app; fortunately the web app isn't _terrible_, but yeah. Fair complaint.
Xcode - If your goal is to build Mac / iOS apps, there is no substitute thanks to Apple's EULA. For everything else, pick your poison; there are more code editors and IDEs on Linux than one can count, many of them excellent. Personally I'm happy with Sublime Text (paid, worth every penny) and a Terminator window, but I hear VSCode is also excellent, which is odd considering that's a Microsoft endeavor. (Now if we could just get them to port Outlook...)
Google Chrome's extension ecosystem is undoubtably far, far ahead of what Safari has. As for usability, and…
> I found Google Chrome to be more performant than Safari on the regular
People use Safari because it integrates so well with macOS, is performant, and doesn't kill resources (CPU, RAM, battery, you name it). No other browser comes close, even on other platforms. Apple's just spent too much time here optimizing their browser that nobody else can match it (maybe Edge on Windows?).
> There are MANY good terminal clients for Linux.
iTerm just has everything and the kitchen sink. Like, it has some flaws, but it just does so many things that I haven't seen any other emulator do. Plus the author is really smart (he's at the top of the comments currently, if you want to check his stuff out)
> Xcode
Xcode can be surprisingly nice for C/C++ development, when it decides it wants to work.
Check back with Konsole.
I don't think I know all features, but just the things I know it does, because I use them:
- Tabs, obviously. Movable between windows, too.
- Arbitrary in-window splitting (tiling)
- Monitors
- Broadcasting
- Signals
- Profiles, obviously.
- Copy stuff as HTML & export whole scrollback as HTML and also print it / convert to PDF
- Can basically configure everything
Edge feels like poor man's Safari. However the rest of Mac OS (in terms of GUI, not underlying OS) feels like poor man's Windows. :D
Even IE will at least provide a free VM image these days.
That depends on the environment. I assume you're talking about Outlook as a frontend for an enterprise Exchange setup?
If your mail server admin configures IMAP and SMTP correctly, it's a breeze to get it set up (you will need SSL though). Use "DOMAIN\user.name" as username together with your AD password (and for team/shared mailboxes, use DOMAIN\user.name\mailbox.name, where mailbox.name is the cn or sAMAccountName attribute of the mailbox AD entry). Thunderbird can handle everyday emailing as well as responding to calendar events that way; I'm not sure about integrating "real" calendar stuff. Auto-completion of mail addresses must be done separately in Thunderbird, you'll need the AD structure information (root DN, plus the DN of your AD account so you can log in).
What you'll miss is forwarding rules access, but that can be done via webmail if the need arises.
Discord works perfectly fine in a web browser. IIRC the platform-specific clients are just running a web browser themselves. Would rather use PWA then.
As for iTerm, you don't need that when you use i3 but perhaps you can specify the features you need.
1Password, I recommend Bitwarden. Cheaper, open source, you can even run an open source backend.
Messages, no idea why you want that. I only use WhatsApp for IM, and even that is just a web app.
For development I recommend Sublime Text. You can use it for free, though I did buy it (as someone else commented; worth every penny).
Skype for Linux is actually fallen behind to the other ports. Though I don't use Skype I heard complaints about that.
I do a ton of things in the browser, love the availability of a good Terminal at my fingertips (same as macOS), develop webapps and love the simple availability of a full local web server stack to develop on and so on. I use LibreOffice for my very few "Office" needs. I use Firefox as my primary browser (moved away from Chrome to Firefox before I made the switch to Linux). I use Visual Studio Code as my primary editor. I use Krita for my very few photo editing needs - simple stuff really like cropping or color picking. That's about it. Everything else happens in the Browser or on the command line.
As Netrunner is a derivative of Manjaro and thus Arch it's very simple to access a plethora of packages from their AUR system. It's like Brew on steroids.
Have been really happy with the switch!
Another sign that a lot of innovation comes from China currently... The Matebook Pro X looks great also.
Seriously, there's nothing that comes close to Windows - it just works great and the manufacturer doesn't pull the rug out from under your feet every 5 years like Apple does. If there were something better I'd switch to that too, but there's not.
I'm sure glad that my ancestors decided to move out of their caves.
Retina screens are great. Disabling the better font-rendering tech is stupid.
And doubling the resolution doesn't make subpixel AA obsolete either.
The actual reason is that switching to hardware-accelerated font compositing means that you lose out on subpixel antialiasing, because of complications related to blending. The classic way of doing subpixel text rendering means you need three distinct alpha channels, and most hardware only lets you supply just one. There are ways of hacking around this with dual-source blending, but such a feature was not supported at the time of Vista. In Windows 8 and up, DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default.
But what was this crazy obsession with hardware-acceleration of every rendered character and its grandmother? While you're busy Flippin' 3D I get it, you can temporarily render aliased Wingdings if that makes your life easier, but at least for Pete's sake I just want to enjoy not tearing my eyes out the other 99.99999% of the time. If there was anything slow or poorly implemented in XP it honestly wasn't the taskbar font rendering.
(Not angry at you; just annoyed at the situation they caused.)
> DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default.
No, it (still) doesn't. This is my taskbar: https://i.imgur.com/zzIusQD.png
Market context: Microsoft yearned to implement the Metro UI they'd been researching for a long time (Zune was its public appearance) — and Vista kind of soured people on Aero by osmosis; third-party Android applications always had consistency issues, so Google wanted to mandate something that would be generic enough to work (and be easily implemented) for all apps but also look distinctly specific to Android; Apple wanted to signal some shift to upscale high fashion (parallel to "everything is black glossy glass and aluminum" in its industrial design) and understood fashion-minded upscale as a mix of modernist typography with neon bright contemporary color schemes.
To make up for the boring visual aesthetic that often resulted, they recommended adding animations throughout apps. Most of these animations aren't very helpful, but they keep the user distracted for a moment.
What? ClearType was basically introduced in Vista and refined in Win 7.
Win 8 is when they start to remove it for various applications (UWP, and some others) due to its poor performance on retatable devices (tablets mainly).
I love my magsafe charge + 2 thunder + 2 USB + HDMI ports and can't imagine life with fewer.
The main reason is that when I have to move somewhere, it is only one thing to remove (and then add back in) compared to the 5 minute shuffle I used to do.
There have only been one or two situations in a year where it caused a slight annoyance.
I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but they've been pulling this stuff for ages, and it doesn't look like people are going anywhere.
People complaining about their Macs type posts constantly top HN. Usually the comments are filled with further moaning about how things have been so bad for so long with Apple etc., usually accompanied by threats of moving to another platform.
In particular, with OS X I never need to worry about video drivers, switching dGPU on/off, etc. just to use my laptop in typical ways.
Interestingly, it drove me to buy three maxed-out 11" MBAs before they were discontinued.
So I have not left the Apple computer platform but I won't be buying another laptop until I burn through these three - which could be as late as 2022-2023 ...
As for fonts/aliasing - I just won't upgrade past Sierra (or whatever ... I use Mavericks now ...)
Legacy is technical debt. You have to move on eventually; for many, the pain is worth doing it early.