So maybe it's accurate to say they do understand tooling, and that negates the need to understand software as long as they stick to a world they control.
Safari is quite ok.
Nothing replaces Excel however - literally nothing.
As has been said before, its the world most widely deployed programing environment.
It’s curious to note, then, how utterly peculiar of a programming environment it is: it is a first-order (pre-LAMBDA) purely functional array dataflow language with a sometimes-graphical interface and little to no capacity for any kind of abstraction.
Because of the last point, I would perhaps call it half a programming environment (if programming = make a computer do stuff + assemble simple doings into larger ones, Excel only does the first part). This is alleviated by a clever choice of basic datatype: a two-dimensional array of crufties over which scalar operations (usually) propagate automatically; this affords a rich set of operations that are not so low-level that the absence of abstractions or side effects would be crippling and at the same time not so high-level that you’d have an impulse to drill down into their inner workings and change something. In particular, you can’t store these arrays as elements inside other arrays: the layering is impermeable.
That this is a clever choice of datatype has been noticed elsewhere: witness APL, MATLAB, or even in some sense SQL. Among of all of these, though, Excel is distinguished by how very little it can actually do from a programming perspective (as opposed to a practical perspective or even a primitive-counting perspective). It’s almost like someone sat down and decided to see how little programming functionality a practical tool could contain to still qualify as programming, ditched everything else, then slashed half of the result.
But if it’s a shamelessly minimal programming language (if it qualifies as one at all), it’s quite striking to consider how rich of a programming environment it is. You get intermediate results. You get visual indication of where the values used in the computation came from. You get help for every function as you type it in. You get to change the inputs, or any other detail, and be dropped into an impeccably updated state of your program. You get to see your changes propagate, live, without messing around with REPLs, reloading notebook cells, or restarting hung servers. You get more IDE for your money than CLion and Mathematica combined. On a computer from 1997.
I mean, of course Excel is cheating. If you read papers on “visual programming”, and “differentiable computation”, and “provenance”, and “incremental recompilation”, and all the official names for all that jazz I just described—you’ll see that Excel avoids all the hard problems the academics are struggling with by not having the respective features. (It’s well known that everything gets easier in a purely functional language or without first-class functions, for example.) It even insulates the programmer from the problems of naming and of factoring (and thus avoids having to provide attendant features) by not allowing names or factoring.
Now, I’m not saying that Excel is somehow lacking in features or that it is a pleasant programming environment—it both has a tremendous amount of features and is a pretty miserable programming environment past a very low complexity ceiling. But, for all that is holy, why isn’t everybody trying to figure out how to cheat even harder?
The 1st-party software quality is a big part of what keeps me around. Possibly the main thing.
[EDIT] Oh, and the Terminal is one of the best there is. It's very good. Others may have more features, but it's far from minimal, yet manages to have lower input latency than most (which tells me Apple's got their priorities straight)
The only thing that I loved, but has become slow and buggy is Grapher. Grapher is a hidden gem, very few applications come close for quickly visualizing a function.
I should probably take the time to RTFM for that stuff, after more than a decade on the platform. Every time I find another little Apple utility, I end up getting something out of it.
And Xcode. It's always been bad. Messages on Mac? An embarrassment which gets worse with every MacOS update. Spotlight? A meme-level failure of a software product, which can single-handedly consume hours of CPU time to "index" files after every update, then fail to find an application, not even some crazy-hidden file, matching an exact string text search.
Safari is ok, but in the scope of how reliably fantastic modern browsers are, it's still the worst. Not just in standards support & standards correctness, but the application itself.
The most impressive part is that itunes was absolute garbage, and music managed to be worse. Quite a feat really.
It’s blended spreadsheeting with presentation in a free infinite canvas is the best notebook app I’ve met.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
>Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player -
(and same continues today. My wife has recognized the sound coming from my office when, every few months , I try to copy photos from my work-mandated iPhone to my windows pc. It's a few hours of screaming, then I give up)
It's tricky. If they don't provide key software for Windows to work with their hardware devices, they'll be blamed for it and called an evil proprietary company (which, fair enough. Just let me plug it as USB storage if you want to avoid that particular reputation :).
On the other hand, if they make their crucial software on Windows half assed, some people like myself at least, will be wary of touching anything Apple with 10ft pole. It May be that working strictly in Apple ecosystem makes for better experience, but that's not my world so I'm not tempted to dip my toes in any more than I have to).
It was not. Though at least it did the job, which was rare enough (then again I’ve had to use sonicstage, now that was some bottom-tier irredeemable garbage).
I’m pretty sure iTunes was at its best when it was SoundJam and got worse every time it got touched afterwards, until Apple managed to declare software bankruptcy… and replace it by something worse than it’d ever been.