IRecognition: I am no longer Apple's Target Market
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I'm not saying it's right. But computer as an appliance? That's the dream! In the 80s we would argue on Usenet that the WIMP interface was too simplistic, and that real computer users stuck to the command line only. Now, in 2012, we argue on Blogs that the iPad is too simple, and real computer users need a mouse, keyboard, and windowed interface.
I'll leave this anecdote from 1981. over 30 years ago. To show how Apple is still Apple:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...
"Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports. "
Otherwise I agree with you, Apple has not changed a bit. Some people take longer to realize it, apparently.
It depends on how you define "you". Broadly, the term "you" means "people". It doesn't mean "every person under the sun, especially programmers".
If we correct for misinterpretations, I would say people in general can do more with simpler computing platforms that are more appliance-like than with their mostly confusing computer that more often acts in confusing manners, and that more often seems to be ridden with viruses and malware (whether it is or not), and also sports a number of features and buttons which if clicked the wrong way, can cause the computer to be broken (whether true or not).
When people talk about what "you" can do, they are not talking about you, specifically.
It is not just about programmers. It's about people who want to do more than checking email, reading websites and running a few apps here and there for convenience. When parents want to edit HD videos of their kids taken with their camcorder they will not run to their iPad to do it, because it would be too damn sluggish for that. When you need to produce something or edit something and you do not want to do a dirty job you will sooner or later have to go back to sit in front of a laptop or desktop and use a mouse unless you like wasting your time, no matter what you computer knowledge is.
That's the problem right there. I don't know many "parents" (== non-technical-people) who are able to edit HD Videos, at all, period. Most non-technical people I know have memorised how to do the few things they actually need from their computer, like check emails, compose documents, and use the software-de-jour of their workplace. But anything beyond that is massively more than they know how to do without running to a more technical user for help.
The whole argument is, iPad makes it possible whereas before it wasn't possible, forget if it's fast or not.
Personally, I haven't even bothered trying an iPad, but speaking as a previously satisfied user of the Apple's laptops, the OP's comment very much resonated with me.
I also would like to note that (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread) that Apple software's propensity to assume the Big Mommy role is hardly a new phenomena. Apple was never an "open system", it is true. But there was a golden age in the '00s that produced just the right mix of open and managed systems.
Finally, there is a political subtext to all of this. Apple clearly believes in ('benign') authoritarianism -- it is in their DNA -- and given their empowered position in the computation loop, I no longer feel it is appropriate to support their bottom line, specially given the unacceptable stated position of Jobs on matters such as free speech.
That the iPad isn't best for every task doesn't mean that it isn't overall the best device, or that it doesn't substantially enable people to do whatever it is they want to do (especially people who don't do any of the advanced computing tasks you bring up). The sales numbers indicate this. If people couldn't use iPads, they wouldn't buy them.
On the contrary, the video editors on iPhone and iPad are hugely popular, and if we expand to include photos, the iOS photo editing dominance is staggering. Hordes of users began editing and publishing photos who never had.
With iPad 1 I still traveled with my MBP17. With iPad 2 I started to wish I could leave it at home.
With iPad 3, the Logitech Ultraslim keyboard, and the extra screen resolution (with multitasking gestures enabled to slide right/left between running apps), I now leave the MBP at home and use iSSH to manage servers and network, Google Apps for business tasks, Diet Coda and Koder for code editing and review, iPhoto and iMovie for media editing (I shoot Nikon D3 and it even keeps NEF+JPG as managed pairs), and iCab for web apps needing file uploads and downloads. If I run into a task I need a desktop for, say, to build an iOS app or test a web app in Windows 8, I VNC in.
All told, the frustration of doing everyday tasks with the iPad 3 and Logitech Ultraslim Keyboard cover has gotten low enough I leave the laptop at home even on extended trips, so it's certainly viable as the main machine for people whose job isn't as computing oriented or content creation oriented as mine.
> you can do less and less with your computing devices, or that they become, in
> the end, more convoluted to use because of the design choices made.
> Like, turning a desktop computer operating OS to a tablet-like OS is just
> plain stupid and is a loss of efficiency.
Are you talking about Windows 8 or iOS, or Linux? The problem with Windows 8 was not turning desktop OS into tablet OS, it's stopping in between.Actually you can do a hell of a lot more today.
Could you do HD video, real time 3D graphics, music, use thousands of modern APIs and languages with performance of several Gazillion flops in multiple cores, connect to everywhere on the planet, etc, with an Apple II, or a Mid-nineties IIci?
Besides the 1000x more powerful graphics and soundcard, you also have 100x more powerful programs, pervasive networking, tons of peripherals, from cheap printers to linux based robots and a FULL BLOWN UNIX underneath.
When Apple tried to cater to the open source community using the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, young generations thought Apple was always more open than Microsoft, when actually they were the opposite.
Now that they are back on top with more profits than ever, they are as they always were.
Surely it's an issue with the people who tend to be Open Source advocates, complaining that Apple are no longer open?
Not that it's really an issue at all, it's just different strokes for different folks. With computers doing as much as they do now it's seems highly unlikely that a single company will ever fulfil all our computing needs. Certainly having seen the Wintel domination of the 90s it really doesn't seem that desirable so really what's the problem?
The thing is that Apple was never open.
I fought the fights and put up with the greif for being the only developer with a Mac out of the 50 in the office. I lived on the bleeding edge - even paying for access to early unstable OS builds. I watched the OS get better and better with each release.
It opened the doors to the world of Unix for me and I thought it was wonderful having all these amazing tools at my fingertips, thanks to Apple. I got the wrong end of the stick.
This whole article feels bang on the money to me, and I'll bet the reason it's at the top of HN is that there are plenty of us in the same boat.
There are plenty of Apple fan boys (I'm using the term in a non-prejorative way indicentally, I've got three Apple devices on my desk right now) who don't go back nearly that far.
Possibly we're just confirming that the term "fan boy" is entirely useless in any sort of real discussion?
People who act as consistent apologists, who's identity is made up of their allegiance to this company and who react with shock and indignation that anybody could even propose that the company they've devoted a significant part of their psyche and lives to, could in any way be flawed...are fan boys. And they bring discourse to a halt by increasing the noise in a conversation to the point entire forums become useless, and actual fans get caught up in the crossfire...it's really frustrating and annoying.
And if you read all that and thought I was talking about Apple then you've missed the point. This exists as a kind of mixed-identification phenomenon exists across a broad spectrum of milieus. Car brands, politics, religion, etc. And it's to the benefit of these brands that they identify and recruit the people who are susceptible to fan boyism and use them as a deep pool of loyal customers and a passive defense to their organization's operations. Why try and spend time fighting off stories of negative aspects of your company when you have a million fan boys who'll do it for you?
And it's the constant noise they introduce, either in the form of an echo chamber of reinforcing good feeling but content free interactions or in the form of constant nonsensical diatribes and willfully ignorant defenses of their brand identity, that's why it's important for any on-line community to try and either turn fan boys into rational thinkers -- to separate the person's identity from the brand -- or drive them from the community.
HN is a place that needs signal, not noise. And fan boys bring only the loudest sort of static possible.
Plus being an apologist doesn't mean that you can't make a good point. Gruber could often be accurately described as an Apple apologist but I'd strongly take issue with the idea that he couldn't add to a debate on Apple. Similarly RMS when it comes to open source/freedom and others across the spectrum.
As with anything, argue with the point being made, not with the person, at least until you're absolutely sure you know them and where they're coming from far better than you're likely to through occasional interact on an internet message board.
And that's before we even get into the pejorative nature of the phrase "fan boy" and how you might as well just call someone a dick for the reaction you're likely to provoke.
Yes it's an interesting phenomenon but in terms of dealing with people who I may think are fan boys, I see no reason why there should be any reason why I should treat fan boys differently than I'd try to treat anyone else - that is take what they say at face value and engage them on that basis, or ignore them completely.
When I see a Daring Fireball post, if it's about Apple I'll read it and I find many things he says interesting and insightful (even if I may disagree with them), if it's Gruber on any other topic there's no point in even trying to scrub through his posts to find the valuable points to consider.
So I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, you are right, evaluate the points and not the person (don't go ad hominem), but sometimes the level of effort required to find the valuable points isn't worth it.
I live fairly happily with hardware tinkering restrictions in my iMacs, but the inability to upgrade RAM in the new smaller iMac may be the last straw. It's really irritating.
Which other platforms had/have non platform specific APIs for 2D and video?
By that definition, POSIX libc is a platform. X11 is a standard with one flagship implementation (currently X.org, formerly XFree86) and multiple other implementations fewer people care about.
This is where I stopped reading...
It seems to be all the rage to write up anecdotal frustrations full of hyperbole about Apple these days, that's fine, but why do they have to be on Hacker News? Why should I care some guy on the internet doesn't want a computer that isn't user serviceable, or a tablet that uses a curated app store that contains 'literally thousands upon thousands of apps I don't need'? Please just go tell your buddies on the linux forums how you built your own distro instead of trolling the internet with articles about stuff you don't like, or at the very least refrain from posting them on a site like Hacker News, which is supposed to be informational (I guess).
The information content of this article is close to zero, it's nothing more than some random rant about stuff that's irrelevant for people who just use their computers to get shit done, instead of making a statement of idealism and tech-ethics out of them. Last time I checked, Macs running OS X are still great for almost any kind of creative application.
Yes, I even have Mac OS X systems available to me.
Maybe you should also stop stereotyping whoever hurts your Mac fan feelings.
Just cut the emotional crap, it appears to impair your ability to see the point I'm trying to make.
I've been using Linux and OS X alongside each other for over a decade, and many other *nix derivatives at work. I just pick the right tool for the right job, and more often than not, a Mac running OS X turns out to be the choice that offers the best tradeoffs, and allows me to do whatever I should or want to be doing with the lowest level of frustration. My HTPC/home server isn't running OS X, and neither does the VM I use to cross-compile packages for embedded systems. What does that say about Macs and OS X? Nothing.
That said, the problem I have with articles like this hitting Hacker News is not because I can't stand the idea some people have different ideas about what a computer is to them and how it should work. I couldn't care less. The problem is that the information content of these dime-a-dozen run-of-the-mill Apple rants is close to zero. I simply don't understand their purpose, do I have to stop using Macs because some guy on the internet prefers to use something different for whatever reason that doesn't affect me, or almost anyone else who uses their computer as a tool to get shit done?
The hardware is now even more locked down than ever.
These are facts.
Does it mean you have to stop using a mac? No.
Does it mean that some people are moving away from macs? Yes.
Does it mean you need to rage because there's an article that mentions 'fan boys'? Not really. Chill out.
If you have any cognant and articulate arguments why this guys opinion (which I happen to currently share) is a stupid opinion to have, by all means, I'm interested...
Nowhere did I say his opinion was stupid, I'm not one to judge opinions. All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN.
The cognant and articulate argument (?) here is that the internet has plenty of places to go if you want to read rants about why <insert technology or technology company here> sucks and why someone decided to leave for these elusive greener pastries that other platforms supposedly offer.
Everyone knows Macs aren't the most serviceable computers on earth, and everyone knows iOS isn't intented to be an open platform for all purposes power users or developers would use regular computers for. I don't think many other arguments are required to illustrate the point this article doesn't add much -if anything- to HN as a medium for the technology startup space.
Or, maybe it's just me, and other people really feel enlightened and satisfied after reading this article... :-/
OT: Do not read the article. Furthermore, do not comment on the article, nor should yo up vote it. If you feel the article violates some aspect of HN, flag it.
However, if your reason for commenting is to just say: "I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN." then you are not contributing. You are, by admission, contributing less than the article you are commenting on.
This is not an attack. Merely an observation. You value the quality of HN. Be the quality. Don't be the problem.
On another note. You say:
"I'm not one to judge opinions."
But then you go on to judge the article, an opinion, and it's worthiness:
"All I'm saying is that I don't see any value in reading it, particularly not in the context of HN."
> Or, maybe it's just me, and other people really feel enlightened and satisfied after reading this article... :-/
People enjoy different things. You do not want to judge, so don't. =) The best thing you can do to promote what you want to see on HN is to promote those very things. Spending time contributing to things you don't enjoy does not help.
I agree with most of what you wrote, except this part. Maybe I'm being naive but I believe discussion about stuff you don't like about a community-driven platform like HN might actually improve it. To me, the fact that articles like this hit HN more and more often, is separate from the discussion you can have about it.
>> People enjoy different things. You do not want to judge, so don't
You are twisting my words. I don't want to judge opinions, but that doesn't mean I can't have my own, and it also doesn't mean I can't express them in relation to the stuff that gets upvoted on HN. In everything I wrote about this article don't think I've passed any judgement on the author's opinion itself. You say 'people enjoy different things' as if that justifies anything that gets posted on HN. Lots of people enjoy reading about ponies, but you don't see a lot of articles about ponies on HN, and I don't think many people think that's a bad thing.
All I'm saying is that in the time I've been visiting HN, the information value of the articles upvoted on HN is going down. If this continues, before you know it HN will be like Gizmodo with a really crappy layout. Telling me to 'just don't read the articles' or 'just don't upvote them' is a pretty negative conclusion to draw from this discussion don't you think?
In context. But when out of context, it won't. If anything, one could argue that if your comment does provide any value toward improving HN, then the article served a greater purpose, and as a result, was of value.
Regardless, actions speak louder than words.
> All I'm saying is that in the time I've been visiting HN, the information value of the articles upvoted on HN is going down.
That's the natural state of things. I've seen people say this for years now. It's a reoccurring theme. I do not know how long you've been visiting HN, but going just by your profile, I can assure you, 444 days ago, people were discussing how HN had gone down hill.
I believe a portion of that complaint is that when you first get here, it's new, and you haven't seen the articles being presented. After a while, you start to read the same thing over and over again. It becomes dull. And things start to stand out that you might not have noticed your first day.
> You are twisting my words.
No. It's just a misunderstanding. No twisting was intended.
> You say 'people enjoy different things' as if that justifies anything that gets posted on HN.
Actually, it does. HN is based on voting, and the members of HN enjoy reading many types of articles here. If something gets voted up, it's because a segment of the members want to read these types of things on HN. That you are uninterested in this specific topic does not mean it's outside of HN's accepted role.
> Lots of people enjoy reading about ponies, but you don't see a lot of articles about ponies on HN, and I don't think many people think that's a bad thing.
Don't be silly, the context is HN, making that point moot. The argument isn't about general wants and desires, but what people want to read here on HN.
Anyways, my point is, and was, you can either be a part of the problem, or part of the solution. If you want to see different articles, submit them! Ignore the ones that you aren't interested in. Flag articles that don't belong. You can either be a positive force, or a negative one.
"Case" in point, I had the MBP17 just before change to unibody, and now the unibody. To replace the HD in the older model involved a half dozen more steps including removing the keyboard and various components. In the current model, just open the bottom and swap the drive.
I had the white Mac Mini (last model with DVD) and needed a metal spatula to get into it to upgrade RAM. With the current model, I needed... my fingertips.
And of course the Mac Pro (tower) is as open as ever.
Take apart a new Mac with Fusion Drive - as far as anyone has been able to determine, the pinouts are exactly the same as SATA, but the connector has been modified enough that it's proprietary now.
iPhone 5's new connector is actually what pushed me to abandon the Apple ecosystem:
I have a in dash GPS/HD radio/Pandora unit that until now required an iDevice for Pandora remote control. I considered upgrading from my 4S to a 5... I need a new connector. No problem, there's an adapter - $30 or $40 with a chip in it that serves in large part the purpose of ensuring I get an Apple adapter/cable.
Great, so now I get the adapter, plug it into the head unit, only to find, guess what, it still won't work - why? Because (and finding anything official on this is nigh on impossible, only outside reviewers) the adapter doesn't pass on the iPod Out control signals.
Screw that. I will wait for a firmware update for my head unit.
I sold my iPhone 4S, my iPad 3, and am now very happy with a Nokia Lumia 920, and a Samsung 700E tablet running Windows 8.
1. Recent releases of OSX have sucked more than earlier releases? Can't agree with that. I've used OSX since the beta days, and both Lion and ML are far more polished and usable. OSX was like a breath of fresh air compared to OS9, so of course it "felt" better. But there were tons of bugs that have slowly been stomped out. You may not like some of the current features of OSX ML, but the previous versions aren't unequivocally better.
2. Hardware lockdown. I have fond memories of using a kitchen knife to open up a Mac mini to replace memory. Yesterday I bumped my 2012 mini to 16GB with a simple twist. The Mac Pro is the same as it was when released. Some of the notebooks are more accessible, some less so. Replacing the hard drive on my wife's G4 powerbook involved something like 30 screws, and hoping that I didn't bend anything out of tolerance. Today that's far different; even the MacBook air has fewer parts and steps involved.
You mean, as opposed to all the news praising every minor thing Apple does and banning all articles critical of Apple, which historically has always been the way things was here on HN?
I think it's about time the tide changed, and it's probably a good reality check to the people stuck in the valley still believing that Apple "defines" the market.
It's really sad to see how every.single.time community driven websites devolve into ideological crusades between people who can't seem to just accept different people have different preferences when it comes to computers (I'm being polite here). There's a meme in here somewhere, maybe I should try to coin it.
Apple began inching into the OMG WTF EVIL category awhile back for some and others eventually tagged along. That herd mentality that many sites develop does happen here too.
Face it, HN is a community within each community are cliques that rise and fall in their influence and that comes out in how stories and comments are views and voted on
you shouldn't. And what you probably should also not do, is first write stuff like this and then do the opposite namely caring about it anyway (even though you seem to claim you don't) and then express that by posting your feelings about it on HN.
"The information content of this article is close to zero, nothing more than some random rant"
strrep( 'article', 'post' ); //The pot, the kettle, yadayada.
Likewise graphics APIs. (Which platform has non-proprietary 2D APIs?) QuickDraw 3D's problem wasn't that it was proprietary, it was that it sucked.
Likewise QuickTime video. You do realize (a) it was first, and (b) Apple licensed the architecture to the MPEG folk (MP4's container format is QuickTime) and this predates OSX.
I actually had a "discussion" about the whole connector thing with a colleague recently. Eg. In its history The Mac has used three kinds of connectors for mice and keyboards -- a serial connector for the very first Mac, ADB (same cabling as S-Video, so not actually proprietary at all) from 1985 to 1997 or so, and then USB. How's that compare with PC? Go on, I'll let you go Google.
Video is definitely the worst, I'll give you that, but even there it's mainly been a case of sticking to an early standard too long (D25 or whatever it was), the horrific octopus thing (which they tried a second time) and the problems with DVI which aren't unique to Apple.
There was a period when Apple had a weird Ethernet socket that required an adapter for 10BT or RJ45 or Token Ring, but this was because a standard hasn't emerged and competitors generally didn't support networking without an expansion card.
No question Apple has been more proprietary than, say, commodity pc clone makers, but they compare very well to everyone else (Sun, SGI, Commodore, IBM, etc.)
I can understand hating iTunes and Safari for windows (both of which were, at some point, foisted on people installing QuickTime) but the basic QuickTime libraries, container format, etc. were top notch and remain the best option for working with time-based media.
I guess this is another consequence of the filter bubble. As all we read on the internet is the opinion of other geeks, we forget that geeks are hopelessly outnumbered by normals and they are the ones Apple is targeting and reaping the rewards.
This was always Steve Jobs vision and it's not like it was a secret.
However, the most ludicrous part of this post is the suggestion that Apple would be best served as a company making servers again and trying its best to grab back that lucrative desktop linux market.
This, in a nutshell, is why Apple was revolutionary. The geeks just simply didn't see normal people and made hardware and software that suited their own needs and behold, it sucked mightily. Apple made the step of putting the normal person first and, shockingly, normal people decided to pay good money for their products.
All of this should be obvious to anyone who reads HN and witnessed Apples meteoric rise. It's a bit disconcerting to discover that apparently it isn't.
I will however contend that MY main issue with Apple now a-days is that its actually becoming worse on the "normal person front" (at least when it comes to OS X). Messages for example is a complete disaster. I regularly have to help family members with their Macs (many of which originally moved to the Mac on my insistence ages ago), and I can tell you that they are still quite confused (increasingly so) about how to use these machines. Here is an article that touches on this: http://blog.davidchartier.com/post/36634783567/im-getting-si...
However, I am still pretty happy with iOS/iDevices. I have not been as happy with an Apple product as with the iPad mini in a LONG time. I do agree with others though that if they don't get their act together with "services" (Maps, Sync, basically anything that isn't judged on a purely client side "niceness" scale), it may be an issue for them. However my opinion is that they just shouldn't be bothering with this at all, but that's a whole other story.
Those days are long gone it seems.
I wonder how many people worrying about iOS-ification are:
a) running Lion, where the transition was still in mid-course, or
b) using a desktop, where the design decisions aren't so obviously right (my Mac Mini for example has a huge monitor, hence I'm less inclined to use full-screen apps)
In case a), there were definite weakness in Lion. Full-screen apps hadn't yet made their near-global appearance, and Spaces was ... weird. These problems have been shaken out in Mountain Lion. For b) it seems to me that OSX has been optimised for the laptop environment, where screen real-estate is limited. If you aren't using full-screen as your standard app config, you're missing out on some of what makes Mountain Lion a great experience).
When I compare all of this to the laptop I use at work, a Dell running Fedora, there is no comparison. My Mac is a far, far better development machine (well, aside from the fact that brew is weak sauce compared to a full-blown yum, but then this is not news). It's not a question of there being pros and cons on each side, my Mac is simply better for pretty much any metric I care to imagine.
Which is not to say that some people may not have genuine grievances with the current Mac platform. I just wanted to add my own personal experience - going from being mildly disappointed by Lion to completely wowed by Mountain Lion.
- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people.
- The whole-screen app stuff is a good idea, but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors, which many geeks use (the problem is: when you go full screen on one monitor, the other no longer shows anything by gray linen)
- Many features were removed for what seems to be no good reason, e.g. RSS feeds.
- Some iPad-like behaviors make little sense on a desktop, e.g. automatically closing Safari if idle for a while. It takes several seconds to open a web link just because it has to relaunch the application.
- Annoying for my company, Taodyne (3D presentations): stereoscopy used to be perfectly stable on 10.6, unstable since 10.7, to the point of causing kernel panics or system freezes regularly.
- Memory management has been a weak point since Rhapsody. In Rhapsody, you could crash the system simply by zooming in Preview. Today, you can still halt your top-of-the-line system to a crawl simply by running a process that eats all available memory. I'd much rather have an easy quota system where I can say "unless otherwise specified, no app can take more than 1/4th of available RAM". Or a paging system that makes smarter decisions and keeps the "interactive" stuff resident enough that I can still kill the offending process.
- Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears. Or the keyboard that sometimes forgets half the keys you type. Or Safari that stops refreshing part of the screen. Or moving a window across monitors that now causes the window and background icons to blink. And so on. Lion does not feel as polished as Snow Leopard.
Overall, I still like Apple products, but I definitely see them losing their edge on the software quality front. I think that Maps on iOS is just the most glaring example, but it's not the only one.
I'd like to see this backed up by numbers. Sure, Lion and Mountain Lion are quite slow on spinning platters, but OS X feels almost an order of magnitude faster since I had an SSD. Much faster than Snow Leopard with a hard disk. The numbers are also on my side, an SSD completely blows away hard disks both in access times and read/write speed.
but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors
Indeed. Big time. It works ok on the road, but when I have an external screen connected I never use full screen support. It would be easy to make things better: allow users to put another full-screen application (or desktop) on the secondary screen.
Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears.
I really disliked Lion for all its bugs. But things have been steadily improving since Mountain Lion, to the point where even iMessage works most of the time in 10.8.2 ;).
Computer/tech savvy is obviously a continuum. Lumping people into binary categories doesn't help the conversation much.
Do you accept that those with enough proficiency to be creating commercial software have different modes of computer usage to the majority that don't?
Your question is also a non sequiter. Computer usage patterns aren't always correlated to either proficiency in programming or computer experience. For example, I know many commercial programmers who have the most simplistic understanding of their OS, be it Linux, OSX or Windows. They don't understand the difference between CISC/RISC, nor do they exhibit a greater facility with various application than non-programmers. As I've said before, computer knowledge is a continuum, and trying to pigeonhole users into neat categories is foolish. There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't. Neither are better than the other, and calling some normal with the subtext that they're inferior to computer geeks is elitist.
This was always Steve Jobs vision and it's not like it was a secret.
Nah, Steve Jobs' vision wasn't to make computers for "normals." That was Jef Raskin's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin) vision. Steve Jobs' vision was to make computers for Steve Jobs.
This, I predict, is going to turn out to be Apple's achilles heel. They make great hardware and their software is good enough but they just don't get services.
Google does services better than anybody and they're quickly closing the other gaps.
The App Store and iTunes Store are pretty damned successful services, whether you like them or not.
iCloud is not a joke, it does it's job well for the 99%. I turn on my new phone, enter my apple id, and I have all my settings, apps, etc synced and ready to go.
The other interesting data point is the bidding for the new TLDs in summer 2012 (http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/rss/1136468/Amazon-G...). Amazon and Google bidded on 150+ new TLDs between them. Apple? With $120bn in the bank, they applied for... .apple. Even Microsoft understood the potential importance of this more than Apple (they applied for 5 or so - .live, .docs, .bing etc).
Yeah this is the thing exactly. Amazon and Google are essentially content plays in mobile. Devices can come and go but as long as people are using their services they're making money.
Apple is a hardware play and that gave them a big first-mover advantage but unless they can keep coming up with iPhone/iPad level home runs that advantage deteriorates quickly. I will never buy anything in iBooks, for example, because I don't want to be limited to Apple's devices to read my books, even if I do currently have an iPhone, iPad and MBA.
They do have some platform tie-in with iTunes Music but the writing is on the wall there. Subscription models are the way forward.
Same for magazines and book. I keep a few subscriptions but mainly consume the content once. When I find a good book, one I will read again I put it on my library shelf and come back to it later. Subscriptions for media lock me into a singe channel if I ever want to go back. And like Netflix, who has to negotiate with the content providers for their content, with subscriptions there is no guarantee the 5-10% of quality content I like will be there when I come back.
You must not have used iTunes Match on a daily basis. Very often some songs do not play at all, no matter how often you retry. Every week or so I cannot connect to the 'iTunes Cloud' at all, reducing my music library to what I have downloaded. Match and iTunes in the cloud are terribly broken.
Maybe people try to use it for more than this?
Go ahead, make a keynote deck, or numbers spreadsheet. Save it to "the cloud," now go look at your ipad or iphone. Where the hell is it? So much for magic.
Sharing is a royal pain in the ass with iOS. The gyrations I have to go through to move data from an ios app to the desktop is ridiculous and often impossible.
I'm hopeful they will get iCloud up to spec eventually, but for now it just sucks.
Has the situation changed and 'nerds' are no longer Apple's target market? Kind of. A bit. If you cared about upgradability and taking that machine and using it for 6 years and it being awesome then sure, Apple's changed. It's not for you. If like me you came to Apple as you had no interest in upgrading a machine, ever, at all, then they've not changed.
I still have: a built in, relatively decent Terminal. I have command line build tools (and yes we can argue about the quality, and whether Apple should be forking their own versions, but that's a topic for another day). Apple ships their own IDE & SDK for the system, to anyone, and they've done that for as long as I've been using them as well.
Apple reducing upgradability isn't them thumbing their noses at us. When they release a version of the OS without a Terminal we can all go "Well, Apple has moved on from us developers", or if they pull XCode from the App Store. Until then, it's Apple improving their products inline with what a large portion of people want.
Not true; at some point in time versions of OS X kind of stop working (no new version of Firefox or Chrome for you if you're running anything prior to 10.5 for example).
I just upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6.8 for that very reason.
But over the past few weeks I keep seeing vapid, information-less articles like this make it to the front page, and it's pretty disappointing to see happen. The knee-jerk anti-Apple sentiments seem to have infected even this (mostly) austere and considerate site.
I hope this is a temporary thing.
I don't think that you are going to change Apple's mind, but this is the only way they'll listen.
Personally, I think they are to far gone by now. The money pouring in has simply been to much to ignore. It's not the computer for the rest of us any more...It's the computer for the rest of them...
(I am one of them, I just understand your argument and your frustration)
But then how will people know I have Taste?
It's not like they didn't try, it's more like they just gave up.
Despite plunking down a pretty penny for premium brands or product lines, Dell and Sony would still nickel and dime you with LOADS of pre-installed crapware. (No experience with other manufacturers' 'premium' lines..)
Of course they gave up -- it is bloody annoying to buy an expensive piece of hardware and then spend loads of time simply fighting with it; the market just couldn't stand it any more and jumped ship when a crap-free out-of-the-box experience presented itself.
Personally, because I have more time and skills than money, I use cheapo Dells and Lenovos which I wipe and set up from scratch. But for my parents and other relatives who really couldn't care less, I'd recommend an Apple laptop in a flash and not have to waste hours upon hours as tech support. (Now that they're more easily available, I'm cautiously considering moving this recommendation to a Dellbuntu...)
/rant.
They failed, and to be fair, most have failed. The fact of the matter is that is hard to dominate your market, everybody will downplay your success. And nobody will ever give credit to your product, or to your strategy, or to your business. It's always luck, customers with more money than brains, deception.
The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. They were all flukes in history that are going to be corrected when the market corrects itself. Excuse me?
The truth is, Apple, and Audi and BMW, must be doing something right. It's just not something for you.
I like the fact that we can identify those types of people via a single brand. Let's not change that.
He states a bunch of things he doesnt like, but gives no reasons why they're bad.
At the end he still says he's running a Mac Book and it's the happiest he's ever been (albeit with Ubuntu but still). Makes no sense.
I'm absolutely orthogonal to Apple's services and devices - just never used them, and article does not seem to shed almost any lights on whether I should or shouldn't try to. Actually, it confuses me even more: author dislikes Apple's services (or does he? he's been so enthusiastic in the past!), makes some unclear points about Apple being a 'consumer electronics company now', and then suddenly wraps up with him being perfectly happy with his MacBook Pro today. Now throw in a pathetic iTitle and prepare your WordPress to be hit by the frontpages of the Internet. Am I missing something?
What the article does show clearly though is that we're in urgent need of some nagging/whining detector, if not for the whole Internet then at least for HN's frontpage.
The problem is that teenagers are quick to jump ship to the coolest new thing. Apple has been making "coolest new thing" for a while, but they're getting really popular now, which seems to be inversely proportional to "cool".
For RIM, they moved away from targeting hardcore, email-addicted business people, and it made them vulnerable enough to get killed.
Apple is doing the same thing.
And I think it's because of the fact they thought their 'hard-core fans' would stick with them put them where they are today , not the other way around.
And now they have $80 billion dollars in the bank.
They saw erosion in their enterprise sales, but missed the fact that the superior web browsing experience and eventually applications on the iPhone was driving folks away. They honestly thought that their keyboard was still a key differentiator that folks cared about.
So they stuffed the channel in the low end of the market, and pushed the cheap text messaging of BBM as the core offering. Suddenly sketchy cell phone kiosks are pushing BlackBerries, and they became the new T-Mobile Sidekick. Just like with Nextel, that low end push tainted the brand, as thugs and drug dealers learned quickly that BBM (like DirectConnect) was initially not interceptable.
Maybe my experience is warped, but if I had to stereotype I'd say it's younger people walking around with Android phones and older well-off businesspeople walking around with iPhones. I'm not sure "targeting teenagers" really holds.
The people I know who still use Blackberries? Both of them are hardcore fans. Back in the 90s, every Mac user I knew was a hardcore fan… all five or so of them.
Apple is what it is today because it started selling to everyone else. RIM is what it is today because it hasn't yet figured out how to do that.
If you don't know any crackheads, then the iPhone seems like the phone of the wealthy entrepreneur. If you don't know any people who are successful in business, then the iPhone looks like the choice of the crackheads. Your experience is warped, but no more so than those who say its the phone of teenagers.
And even if Apple is treating power users badly - I certainly think they are - there is still nobody who treats them better. The BlackBerry was killed by more practical smartphones. Who will kill the Mac?
What is a RIM "hardcore fan" these days, and how many of them still buy RIM products? How profitable is the demographic who wants a smartphone but needs a full keyboard?
Even if you hate the software and all things iOS, it's hard to find a better designed laptop.
That leaves the disk drive as the one non-upgradable part. I imagine part of the reason for this is the (relative) bulkiness of the 2.5" SSD form factor. Are there any other standardized sizes that could work in a rMBP form factor? 1.8" maybe? The 11" MBA may have problems fitting it, but a swappable 1.8" SSD on the larger models would be quite nice.
I had a Lenovo T60 for quite a while and, while it looked like a cheap piece of plastic, it was wonderfully durable, keyboard was placed in a good spot, the positioning of the buttons/touchpad were all just right. Just because it looks nice does not make something well-designed, and I have yet to use an Apple device that I would consider anywhere close to ergonomic friendly (the iPod nano being the closest as you only really used 2 "buttons" on the circle, pause/play and next).
Its keyboard is reason alone that it beats the MacBook Pro.
On top of that, I bought it back in 2011 for around 960 USD (converted). The configuration included an i5-2520M, 8GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, an 80GB m-SATA SSD and an upgrade to a 3-year on-site warranty.
FWIW, specs say 8gb max but I've got 16gb ticking away in it nicely. You're probably aware of that but worth posting here for others if they are interested. One of the best laptop keyboards I've used.
The Thinkpad T400 I got is still a good machine, 3 years later. So good, that my brother bought himself Thinkpad X230 and is satisfied as well.
I'm very attached to really good, big touchpads though - losing gesture support is hard!
So, in my effort to stay true to my Unix'ish roots, I've gotten a Motorola Lapdock real cheap, its at least as comfy as a macbook Air, and I'm plugging in things like .. raspberryPi, MK802/808 Android or Ubuntu sticks, my desktop 'slab PC', and so on. I think I'm close to kicking the habit - they /really/ lost me at the drop of the MacbookPro17" .. my existing one will run into the ground, and I will soon put Linux on it.
In the meantime, I would suggest that those looking for an alternative to the sexy nature of the hardware aspect, albeit with a little extra effort, switching to Ubuntu-on-a-Stick is really a pleasant treat.
I feel your pain! It was the only laptop with enough screen real estate and power to work as a desktop on the road.
But lately with the increasingly draconian carry-on restrictions I've downsized my luggage, and turns out my MPB17 just barely doesn't fit in a 16x13x7 bag (that fits in the new commuter jet regs). The MBPr15 fits, has more screen res, and is lighter. So I had been planning an upgrade. If the new MBPr13 had dual graphics I'd be willing to even go with that as it would fit in my puddle jumper bag's outside pocket.
But... This past year the outsized MBP17 had me trying out my iPad 3 instead, and now I'm not sure I need a laptop for travel at all.
>I really think Lapdock+PC-On-Stick is my new direction
Ideally an ARM-based PC-On-Stick or one with a beefier Intel or AMD processor?
(I am aware that the second option cannot be powered over the USB connection.)
Also, how does the video get from the PC-On-Stick to the Lapdock's display? does it go over a USB connection and then through DisplayLink hardware?
Most PC-on-Sticks' use HDMI video output. I have a small dodgy cable rig to go from HDMI out to Lapdock HDMI in, but thats just because: Motorola. It could be quite feasible that Lapdock clones will arrive soon, with standard connectors..
As much as I love the idea behind Ubuntu, it really cannot compare to OS X (or, for development, a more nerd-centric Linux distro like Arch)
Every corner of the MBP is rounded except the edge that your wrists actually come into contact with, which are sharp and leave painful marks. The trackpad lacked actual "mouse buttons" which made a simple task like highlighting and right clicking on text a finger dexterity test. The keyboard feels cheap and slow. Most of all, I miss my trackpoint. :)
For actual usability, it seems to me ThinkPad is a close to laptop perfection as you can get. I replaced my 2007 TP (Windows XP) with a new one this year (Ubuntu). If apple sold OSX for non-apple hardware I'd probably be running that instead of linux.
Or to quote Steve Jobs, "you're holding it wrong." ;-)
I think this was the case for most of the 2000's, and a big reason my last few laptops have been Macs -- but I'm not so sure it's that way any more. For a long time, the big PC OEM's seemed to view hardware specs as the main difference people would buy a $1500 laptop over a $500 one, so they just stuck better hardware inside the $500 shell. Nowadays I think they've caught on that people pay attention to design and overall build quality.
It might still be hard to find a better designed laptop, but I think the PC OEM's are finally starting to make some that can at least compete.
This author seems personally hurt by the fact that Apple rapidly releasing new devices, as if he feels that he is being obligated to purchase the latest products as soon as they come out and doesn't want to.
Is there a small, vocal minority of the Apple fanbase that has to have the latest thing? Certainly. But the average user does not, and has no need to upgrade their Macbook Air just because a new one comes out a year later. In fact, I've had mine for a year and a half, and I have no need or desire to upgrade anytime soon.
> I didn’t jump at the iPhone 5. I wasn’t in-line on day one like I was with the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4. I am unsure why I just didn’t care anymore.
Great, you don't need to care! Before the iPhone was released, would you have stood in line for a phone at all? I know people who still use the iPhone 3G and have no issues, because they don't need a retina display or the ability to run intense games, they just want a phone that works.
Either this author:
(1) Wants to have bleeding-technology all the time but is offended by the fact that he would have to pay for it often, or (2) Is so brainwashed by the blogomania surrounding Apple that he is unsatisfied with the fact that the company keeps fairly rapid release cycles, therefore causing his products to technically be "older versions".
Apple makes damn good multi-purpose machines for the most common purposes of most people - which they have consistently explained is their company's goal forever. Just look at their general-purpose tools (XServe, Mac Pro, Developer Tools) being neglected, and single-purpose machines being cannibalized (iPod) or taken lightly (Apple TV).
All of Apple's lineup is of respectable quality, but it is obvious where the focus is converging. Now there is an opening for others to explore new general-purpose and single-purpose machines.
If you ever thought Apple's primary target market was uber-geeks, you were seriously deluding yourself. The reason so many of us were drawn to OSX was that it runs Mach BSD under the hood - so yay, we all get a nice convenient UNIX(TM) workstation that also runs commercial software and games.
I've got to admit I'm getting awfully sick of this kind of meaningless hand wringing. You want commodity hardware and the ability to tinker with everything* then by all means go buy a Linux box, just don't get all high and mighty and act as if Apple has betrayed you, because from their perspective exactly nothing has changed.
For me, I tend to look at changes in terms of their effect on the ecosystem as whole. From that perspective, I'm very glad that Apple exist, as they are.
I like that Apple is fanatically adherent to its ideologies. Taking things to extremes is also a good way of discovering principles and the uncovering the costs of compromises. In any case, I think
An ipad is extremely simple. The pool of people who can become completely comfortable with it in a few days is larger then for any other computer. It's metaphors are tidiest. An iOS app is a more clearly defined concept, for example, then it is on Android.
A fanatic trying to prove that a simple life on $500 per person per month is the ideal way of living probably isn't right, but she is useful to have in your life. She will probably make all sorts of discoveries that will enhance your life, even if you don't buy her entire ideology. In your life you will be making all sorts of compromises. These have tradeoffs. Inevitably you will be wrong about the pros & cons of some choices.
Maybe glued together hardware is not worth the tradeoff. Maybe it is. Maybe it is sometimes. Now we get to find out.
At the end of 2012, things look better than they did 1 year ago from this perspective. We have several viable operating systems from three very different companies. It seems likely & possible that new entrants will appear if those three don't cover all needs.
GateKeeper, to Mac developers, is playing by Apple's rules. I don't think it's a conspiracy to say that it will tilt the favor towards those who utilize the very closed (in multiple senses of the word) App Store over regular applications.
People who don't want/like the walled garden can disable it trivially from the settings. For people like my mom, who clicks on any ad/link/attachment without a second thought, this will save a ton of headaches.
I don't necessarily disagree (I have a mom too ;)), but: (1) there are many trustable open source programs that are unsigned because their developers cannot afford or do not want to pay $99 per year for an Apple developer account; (2) OS X could display a warning that the user can override.
What happens now is that people will Google for the error to install some legitimate software, find a blog post that describes how to disable Gatekeeper, and switch of Gatekeeper permanently.
If it had an overridable dialog straight from double-click, people will just see this as an annoyance and end up clicking the "Yeah, whatever!" button without skipping a beat.
The way it is, it's actually overridable per application with "right click->open" which gives you the overridable warning you wish for, with OSX actually remembering the overriding and you can subsequently double-click on the now whitelisted app. This whitelisting apparently survives even Sparkle updating.
It appears that it's just convoluted enough for people dangerous to themselves not to shoot themselves in the foot, yet convenient enough for the informed user to act easily. And ironically the solution is actually written in the non-overridable dialog, yet the kind of people not reading dialogs is precisely the risky kind. I'd venture it's made so on purpose.
As I said in my original comment ;).
This whitelisting apparently survives even Sparkle updating.
Sparkle probably never sets the com.apple.quarantine attribute and if the application does not have LSFileQuarantineEnabled set in its Info.plist, its downloaded files are not put in quarantaine. Applications that do not have that extended attribute are never checked.
None of the devs has an Apple Developer account and not one of them, understandably, is prepared to churn out the 99 USD just to be able to sign the OS X flavor of their app: http://goo.gl/gzFZO
Shouldn't a kick-ass app like Darktable be easily deployable by anyone, not just those who know how to circumvent the 'walled garden'?
Reading the link, it seems like (some of) the devs have philosophical objections to doing that; fine. But philosophical objections aren't the same as "it can't be done".
Much of the unsigned software is perfectly useful valid stuff, much of it safe, much of it open source but that action to run downloaded code puts a lot of trust in the developer and the source. Even run as a non-root user it can still do things that cause real problems including steal confidential information.
By the way, I don't think the author is really criticizing Apple much. He just recognizes that Apple's vision is no longer in line with his own.
If you reverse all his points then it seems like in his mind Apple provided ultra customisable hardware and software with great options for the enterprise. I don't remember that Apple.
Try it you might be surprised.
Also, when you start playing with tiling window managers you'll be glad you don't have a mac.
On some other points I do agree, like the gluing down and lack of expandability/repairability.
Sure the Mac is becoming more of an appliance but with stagnant hardware speeds is it that big of a deal? Also, Apple has been hostile to DIY repairs and add-ons since forever. I remember being 12 years old arguing on the 1-800-APPL-SOS help line that 3rd party RAM was not causing my problem and no I wouldn't uninstall it to get help.
Apple relies on its developers to power the App Store. They (hopefully) won't forget that. I'm not worried.
You don't hear anyone ever talking about how awesome Apple Logic is for making music or how easy Final Cut Pro is for video. They still make them and they're great quality. Just because the masses of Apple reporters aren't focused on your baby doesn't mean Apple doesn't care about it. Apple is just selling their profit vision to investors.
Well, I'm sure they won't forget the 25 [1]. They may forget about everyone else though.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/04/analyst-just-25-developers-...
OS X is better and faster than it has ever been. It's not any more locked down than it has ever been. It has more features than it ever has. Apple's laptops are less upgradable, but since when have laptops been particularly upgradable?
You can do "real work" on an iPad. It's a phenomenal machine for consuming and producing text. As a lawyer I spend my life reading or writing text. The retina screen is an absolute revelation for that. I can't run CAD programs on it, but then again I never did on my Mac either.
[1]http://www.ifixit.com/Apple-Parts/Mac-Mini-Dual-Hard-Drive-K...
It's doable, but it's far more complicated than the current (non-retina) MacBook Pro or any desktop I've ever worked in.
"Lloyd Chambers (MacPerformance Guide) thinks it may be August 2013 before Apple releases a new Mac Pro because of remarks Steve made two or three years ago, brought to his attention by a reader of his site, that Apple would not release a Mac Pro until USB 3 was natively supported. The Ivy Bridge Xeon is supposed to support USB 3 natively." (http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/152825/future-of-mac-pro)
Only one vendor, OWC (MacSales), ships a compatible SSD, but of course you can't use it in non-Apple laptops which have a standard SATA connector.
Picture in article here: http://www.mactrast.com/2012/11/apple-ssds-and-the-fusion-dr...
It is the one big thing that makes me hesitate about buying an rMBP. SSD's are prone to failure according to many articles I've read and they also have a limited life span even if it doesn't have any defects. Once the thing gives up there is no way to easily swap it out and just insert a new one.
Also, sometimes I need to swap out hard drives (or SSD drives in this case). With the rMBP that is not possible. The rMBP is a nice computer but I really hope they see the error in their ways and add a replaceable standard SATA SSD.
This article (at least the first half) comes down to:
Apple makes products that don't suit me (okay, so don't buy an iPad).
Apple has glued their new screens to the metal (Is this really that big of a deal?).
Apple uses proprietary screws (This has been done for years)
There are lots of things in the curated Mac App Store that are of no use to him (So don't use the App Store or don't buy apps that are useless to you)
In the comments, the OP admits that he will continue to use Apple hardware because it is the best but will run Linux (Apple makes their money off hardware sales, so its of no loss to them).
There are many reasons to criticize Apple lately, I just don't see these reasons as having merit.
But another note - how come no one can throw in a bit of analysis to back up these kind of argument? Otherwise it just seems like typical disillusionment (as products and companies inevitably evolve). As such it doesn't mean anything, it just means one person with a blog decided to use Ubuntu. There is a guy with a blog for every product that has ever changed. Throw in some analysis, and it may make a bigger difference.
Using svbtle theme does not make you smarter.
Knowing he is not in svbtle does not make you smarter.
What's hilarious to me is that only Apple draws this kind of posturing and absurdity.
You don't see blog posts like this about Dell or Sony. But you DID see posts like this about Microsoft in the '90s.
It's really more about standing up and decrying whatever company is on top than anything else. People feel like by slagging on the top tech company they are taking a stance as an independent, righteous, thoughtful person.
When in reality they are taking the most obvious, boring position available.
What's also strange to me is that these posts get the up votes they do. is this REALLY news to anyone?
Now of course you can still use Linux and build your own PC, but you will, and have always been, a minority in the market.
I've paid my dues, physically building servers, installing various BSDs from stacks of CDs, fighting with compilers on Solaris x86, queuing my jobs on my university's PDP11. Now I'm content to just use OSX, or RHEL, or even AIX if required. But I continually try to avoid transferring my own preferences into a jeremiad against whatever's popular.
Apple will continue to do well as long as it serves its customers. It's gone from being Apple Computers Inc. to Apple. That's a hint of where they see their focus being.
Predicting this guy just needs to wait to see the next Mac Pro.
I'm still delighted with Apple.
Both iOS and OSX are prime for some rethinking (beyond a few licks of paint). But I do think Apple is in a far better position to do this well and in their own time now the Windows 8 threat has imploded on itself (somewhat ... well, at least it's not found huge momentum yet).
Use what you like, embrace change, stop complaining.
But I refuse to be a partisan anymore. I remember when Apple was ... well, remember Mac OS 8? Remember the time before the iMac? Those computers made me wonder how newspapers ever got published. So I'm happy the Mac people have (mostly) usable (by their standards) hardware and software now, as long as I'm not forced to use it.
Edit: I am referring to this http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/09/22/1319216/ubuntu-will-n...
I haven't seen them first hand, but I was hoping someone might give their opinion here.
Aside from that, I'm pretty disappointed with the desktop environment. It's pretty but managing windows is a pain (can't easily alt-tab into a specific terminal window, for instance; it also hijacks Alt key to enable menu item search). I'm looking to replace it soon, but then again I'm probably not the user Ubuntu is primarily targeting these days.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...
To be honest, I found the ads to be quite annoying, I usually start applications by pressing the Super key and then typing the name. I don't see how showing Amazon search results for "terminal" or "chrome" are relevant.
I am happy that they accept donations on the download page now. Hopefully this will reduce the need for such experiments.
So lets please cut the straw man arguments. You want to be cool for hating on Apple, and decided that ignominious post would do it. The problem, you just look like a fool. Apple has never made an easily upgradeable all in one, And yet, if you want to customize a Mac, you still have that option with the MacPro.
Lets call out the real reason; you want to feel cool. You felt Apple made you cool when they had a tiny market share, but now has too many users for you to feel exclusive.
5 years ago, Apple was seemingly "light years" ahead of everyone. Kowtowing wasn't really even a thought because so much more was being provided than elsewhere that there was no real compromise to choose Apple.
That's not true and is increasingly more than just untrue...