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> And, IMHO, that's why Apple haven't kept Server.app up to date. There's just no demand for it any more.

This seems to be a primary driver of the software-rot found all across Apple's ecosystem. iOS is generally pretty well-maintained; macOS less-so. Apps like Music are kept in better condition than, say, Podcasts. Etc. You can almost directly correlate how unpopular a piece (or feature) of its first-party software is with how buggy it is. Which I guess makes some amount of sense, but it really tarnishes Apple's image as a company selling high-end products.

Research In Motion (RIM) later renamed to BlackBerry Ltd. 37Signals renamed to Basecamp. I wonder if at some point Apple Inc. would rename to iPhone Inc.

It wasn't long ago that they renamed from Apple Computer, Inc. to just Apple, Inc.

Yes it was, it was 13 years ago.

But did that have more to do with the Beatles agreeing to it rather than anything else? I was under the impression that Apple had wanted to make the switch much earlier.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/business/06apple.html

Apple Computer already changed its name to Apple in 2007!

That’s different. When they started out the only thing coming to mind when someone said Apple was fruit. That changed, so they dropped the now redundant “computer”.

No. When Apple Computer first started, the Beatles "business" was called Apple Corp. This has resulted in several lawsuits between the Beatles and Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

Apple has already changed their name twice. From Apple Computer Company to Apple Computer, Inc to Apple Inc.

The biggest part of their business has shifted from computers to phones but I doubt they expect the iPhone to be their biggest product in the future forever, so I don’t think they would pigeonhole themselves when their name and logo is so ubiquitous.

Research In Motion meant nothing for most people while the Blackberry brand was strong and instantly recognizable. 37Signals was also renamed after the much stronger brand of their core product. Apple and iPhone are both just as powerful.

Companies like Apple, Nike, Mercedes, Coca-Cola will never completely change the name (maybe some variations here and there, without touching the core name) simply because the brand is so recognizable. It would be throwing money and image down the drain and it would just cause confusion.

You can see that with Alphabet: most people associate the "moonshot" subsidiaries with Google.

Mercedes is a brand actually owned by Daimler AG...Daimler being the dude who had a daughter called Mercedes...

In Germany both are known. Daimler the business, Mercedes the car...

Kinda Apple and iPhone...then Mac (aka Mercedes Benz Trucks?!)

Should have said BMW :). Then again Daimler is far less known across the world than Mercedes. My point was that when you have a strong brand you don't mess with it. You go from a weak brand to a strong one, not the other way around.

I always got a kick out of RIM's career website URL. They had a .jobs domain on it.

We used to refer to them as "RIM jobs" at the University of Waterloo, where they had a significant presence given their next-door proximity to campus.

The Apple brand is one of the strongest brands in the world. Blackberry was always a bigger brand than RIM itself. Doesn't make sense to ditch an abandon a big brand.

Another interesting case is when HP decided to spin off their PC business: they gave the HP brand to that new company.

I definitely used it as a DNS server internally and a few of the other functions. I was totally bummed to see them strip effectively all useful functionality from it. :-/

Apple: We want to have full control over the hardware and software ecosystem so we can guarantee everything will be high quality.

Also Apple: We don't want to invest as much in parts of the ecosystem that have relatively low returns.

There's a lot to like about Apple, but their closed ecosystem and adversity to consumer repair rights ensure I will never buy one of their products.

To be fair, their hardware standards have held up much better over the years than their software standards. Most recent hardware problems have been design choices, like the keyboards and ports shenanigans. The execution is still rock-solid.

In software, on the other hand, the latest macOS update introduced a bug in Notes where now if I hit the Tab key (entering an actual tab character), that whole line of text becomes invisible. Just invisible. I can highlight the text and see that it's still there, but without highlighting, it's invisible. It's very reproducible, this is not an obscure corner case. And this is at a time when Apple is attempting to ramp up its online services like Notes.

Hmm. I'd written that I couldn't reproduce this, but I think I am not on the most recent Catalina build! I will have to try again later.

Okay, I just experimented a little further (I didn't bother the first time, just switched to a different text editor), and it's slightly narrower than I thought:

1) Enable dark mode

2) Open a new note

3) Tab twice, then type text which will be invisible

It appears to be any line with two or more tabs of indentation. Not two or more relative to the previous line, but two or more period.

I cannot replicate this at all. I'm running the latest version on a freshly rebuilt Mac (MacBookPro15,2).

Catalina 10.15.4?

I cannot reproduce this on 10.15.3

> the latest macOS update

Yes.

Did you file a bug report in Feedback Assistant?

Where are you drawing the line between “design” and “execution”? I would consider building keyboards that fail after a year or so to be bad execution.

They didn't fail after a year or so, they failed when dust particles got in there because it was physically impossible to make that design not do that. They reworked it and reworked it but it just couldn't be done. Finally they admitted it was a mistake to require that level of thinness from a design standpoint.

I actually don't think the problems were due to dust, ever since I read this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/bjtyaw/macbook_pro_k...

But putting that aside, I still see that as an execution flaw, or at least, it's a way in which design and execution are so intertwined that the distinction no longer makes sense. A computer with a non-replacable keyboard that breaks after a year is a badly-executed product. The way to execute it better would be a keyboard that doesn't break, whatever design decisions that entails.

The way I see it is those doing the executing were handed an impossible constraint. Immediately upon having that constraint loosened, the keyboards became pretty much perfect.

> Finally they admitted it was a mistake to require that level of thinness from a design standpoint.

So what you're saying is it was a design flaw from a design company.

Apple: "let it rot until it dies" Google: "just kill it and put it out of its misery"

I wonder what results in these dissimilar approaches? Are these cultural? are these youthful company versus decades-old bureaucracy?

Aren't google products services they have to pay to keep alive? Apple apps like this likely cost less to leave alone.

Also, I wouldn't call Google a youthful company, even if Apple is 44 years old.

Podcasts are the fastest growing category of content at the moment. I do agree Apple could do a better job.

> and can't be messed up by employees who think it'd be neat to run local native apps on it, "since it's a computer just sitting there."

Synology actually encourage this. In particular, the Docker package is great and all sorts of uses have cropped up. There are some gnarly rough edges that I have encountered but that package and others make the unit very useful. I’m a home user so it’s a different use case, but my 918+ is probably my favourite machine ever.

It's our digital Swiss army knife! Need somewhere to run homebridge or pihole and don't want a pile of raspberry pis sitting around? Get the docker containers for these. Ditto for Plex and Roon servers. I even found a container that works as a replacement for the deprecated software that my ancient multifunction printer needs for its "one button" scan functionality.

Ditto for this. I have the 916+ (I think) with the 8Gb ram upgrade, and it’s a very nice Docker container runner indeed.

I put an 8gb stick into mine, giving it 12gb. Officially it only supports 8gb but it seems to use more just fine, 10+ containers can be taxing at times.

That and people have completely switched to MDMs to provide a lot of the old functionality that macOS Server used to provide.

The popular ones for macOS are Jamf and Mosyle. There are some other ones as well that are more cross-platform oriented, but both Jamf and Mosyle more or less cover the features that macOS Server provided for administration of a set of devices.

Tbh, I don't think Server was popular as a NAS service ever. The only thing I've ever used Server for was managing devices.

Yeah this. We have a Synology NAS and it's been running for four years trouble-free. It's a little sketchy for use cases other than its core purpose, but if you only try to use it as a smart reliable RAID disk with an Ethernet port you are going to have a great time.

Their Synology Drive app is a drop-in Dropbox/GDrive replacement too. Works great on Mac at least. Haven't tried Windows yet.

We maintain an official ZeroTier package for it too, so it works anywhere.

Synology's set of first-party OS packages has 1:1 feature parity (and then some) with every function Server.app either has, or used to have.

We've seen this a number of times with macOS, and some other Apple adventures. Apple will put out something, then if a third-party offering comes along that is equal or better, it cancels the Apple product expecting everyone to switch to the third-party solution.

Off the top of my head, Aperture comes to mind. But I've had this thought before and came with several other examples at the time.

Apple also works the opposite way. If third-party offerings for a particular function are OK, but not great, it will make its own version. Stocks, and several other apps for iPad come to mind.

When the first happens, people complain that Apple is fickle and abandons its customers. When the second happens, people complain that Apple is stifling competition.

Apple is either more schizophrenic, or less predictable, than other big tech companies.

I feel like Apple has done the same thing to Safari and web-based Apple stuff, just always banging my head when developing for Safari browsers especially in a production environment when everything counts.

It really pains me that Safari has become the new MSIE 6.

I’ve taken to downvoting anyone who says this, not because in certain ways it’s not true, but because it’s just such a lazy comment that adds nothing to the conversation.

I use Safari for two reasons:

1) Way better battery life. Until the other browsers give a damn about battery life I won’t even touch them!

2) Cross-device syncing. My passwords and my tabs are always available on both my iPhone and my MacBook. Everything is synced through iCloud. I go back and forth so often every day that I could not see myself using a different browser on my Mac.

I use Safari too, but I know what it used to be. That's what saddens me. It's still convenient, but the bugs in Mobile Safari of late are just... unacceptable. Particularly there is a bug, acknowledged by many others now, over many iOS versions, where the zoom freaks out in Mobile Safari and the renderer just seems to give up or something. How is that regression even possible? Ah, man. Everything goes to crap after a while, huh.

> Plus, since a NAS isn't going to be doing any desktop-OS things, the software for it can be slimmed down enough to run on lower-specced hardware, making the appliance itself much cheaper than the sort of machine required to run Server.app smoothly.

Really Server.app would run fine on the same slimmed down hardware, but Apple doesn't make that. The cheapest Mac is what, $800 for a Mini? $250 in PC hardware would more than suffice.

If you're on an even tighter budget you hardly need to buy new hardware at all, just set aside one of the old machines the next time you do a desktop hardware refresh and install any of a dozen free Linux or BSD NAS solutions on it.

> A NAS is a standalone box that receives automatic updates, is 100% remote-management enabled by default, can be easily reset to factory settings,

Most NAS fail at one or more of these.

In addition 90% of them are very bad about security, and putting these kinds of devices on your company or office network transforms it from an internet access network into a garden for insecure appliances to be coddled, a stepping stone that must be vigorously firewalled, scanned, and monitored.

TrueNAS (was FreeNAS) is pretty decent:

https://www.ixsystems.com/truenas

Also, it's Open Source.

> Synology's set of first-party OS packages has 1:1 feature parity (and then some) with every function Server.app either has, or used to have.

That’s a strong statement. Care to articulate? Server.app used to have services for Calendar, Email, Contacts, Wikis, a profile manager (basically an MDM server), Open Directory, VPN, DNS, DHCP and, well, a web server. Would a Sinology really cover all these features?

Yup, pretty much. See for yourself the list of packages they offer: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages

Qnap isn't far behind neither: https://www.qnap.com/en/app_center/?top_place=1&qts=4.4.1

Amazing. Thanks.