I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco. At that point it was clear that professional users weren't the focus anymore, and I promptly left the ecosystem. I still have a iPhone (12 mini) that I only keep because it still works, but every time CarPlay tries to murder me in traffic, I get one step closer to just yeeting that phone into the sea.
iPhones have gotten so good they can barely come up with anything new to add year-over-year. Young people in the west are almost exclusively buying iPhones because people like them.
They basically own the tablet space, if you're looking for a tablet there's almost no reason to go with anything other than an iPad. Same for smart watches, they make the best selling watching in the world.
For the amount of devices they move, they're shockingly reliable and have a smoother customer support / coverage system than any other company I've had to deal with. That's why people keep coming back.
It's pretty bizarre to say they're in decline. The only area I can see active decline is how badly they let Spotify eat their lunch with music streaming when they used to basically own digital music distribution.
The 2019 16” was a step in the right direction. More ports, better cooling, better keyboard.
The M1 Pro/Max line up brought back HDMI, MagSafe, SD card slots, and are seriously fast, quiet, & cool. The M2 and M3 releases have been iterative performance improvements and haven’t made any stupid decisions.
Apple’s also invested development effort into useful tooling for developers like their virtualisation framework - this has made Docker on Mac vastly more pleasant for instance.
Nowadays though... I am stuck with a former workstation-grade hardware where Neovim needs FIVE SECONDS TO START because macOS is auditing each and every of its syscalls. I switch to my (now allegedly ancient) full-AMD laptop with 5500U CPU and the only thing that needs more than 0.5 secs to start is Firefox. I was not able to find one thing that did not react instantly. I am seriously considering just plugging my 35" gaming display to the Linux laptop and make that my main work setup.
And you are right -- pro users made Apple rich but are now undesired because they apparently demand too much ("Who needs stable software, bleeeerrrrgh! Am I right guys?"). Yeah, screw Apple. I am back on the hamster-wheel employment grind now, sadly, but once I stabilize a bit more I'll just move to 2 HiDPI display and assemble a future-proof Linux workstation to go wit them. Pretty sure that with periodical thermal paste maintenance it can easily last me 10 years and I'd only change it if there's something seriously tempting out there (about which I am very doubtful; the tech giants were only worried about becoming oligopolists and they care not about their users' needs).
Apple had its opportunities. They wasted them. Sure, many people will consider them the top for a while still and will keep buying, but their pricing policy has made it blindingly obvious that less people are buying and they are now doing their damnedest to compensate for this by either including less in the package, making the carton package itself cheaper, or just making all products except the base models outrageously overpriced. That's how they keep the profit margins. The curse of being a public-traded company and all that.
Those policies will work for them. For some time more. I wonder what happens after.
Your setup should not be taking many seconds to do those routine things. Last time I experienced something like that, I had a dying harddrive that was logging a continual series of read timeouts.
My Neovim is heavily customized (AstroNvim) but again, it starts instantly on a supposedly weaker CPU.
Any pointers on how do I find those read timeout events or any signs of dying hardware?
I don’t want to sound like “it works on my machine”, but what you’re describing is so far out of expectations that I’ve gotta wonder if it’s an error condition.
And yeah I'll do the usual checks, disk health included. Been putting it off for a while anyway.
For additional context, last weekend I went around to every old Intel Mac in a medical office to upgrade their OSes and some of the apps on them. None of them were speed demons, but they were all just proportionally slower than my much newer Mx Macs. Regular "small" apps still loaded quickly and were perfectly usable. This is in a busy office where any slowdowns that kept people from working at full speed would be fixed.
And just because it works for me doesn't automatically mean it's got to work for you, of course. I'm not going to doubt your experience. It's more that what you're describing is so very different than what I'm seeing that it feels like there's got to be something more at play here.
Software though? Not at all impressed. They still check every program you ever start and it's very noticeable by the performance.
Or they don't care about Intel Macs anymore, that's also a real possibility.
>I've been saying this since the butterfly-keyboard fiasco.
It doesn't look like it: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=aapl&ie...
If I was judging by the context I'd say it's just a good old cynical whinge which is OK but very subjective.
At one point sales drop below what executives find acceptable. It has already started for iPhones and has been like that for several years.
You should include additional factors in your analysis.