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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Sitting here, still using a Mac as a dev/everything machine. I know Lion is supposed to suck and all, but my 2010 MBA still gets insane battery life under OS X, the tool chain is top-notch (Clang, LLVM, etc), there have been a ton of improvements under the hood (TLS support being a big one), and I actually appreciate full-screen XCode or Emacs given the 13" screen. Even Xcode seems to, in 4.6, be getting back to the stability levels of 3.x.

I'm not seeing it. This "Apple doesn't care about the Mac" "OS X is going downhill" griping is lost on me. Was 10.4 -> 10.5 really a much bigger change? Or 10.5 -> 10.6? OS X has always had very incremental, gradual changes, and now that it's pushing more than a decade old it's pretty mature and doesn't need to be revamped every other day. At the same time, for all the teeth gnashing about walled gardens, Apple still ships the thing with a terminal, there is XCode in the App Store, etc.

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"Apple doesn't care about the Mac"

There are two different arguments here:

1) Apple axed xserve and basically made it a risk to depend on osx servers (they may decide to axe the mac pro without warning). This is a legitimate argument.

2) The OS feels more consumer based and buggy. I think osx coasted on the lack of popularity for years (if you are writing malware, are you going to target a small mac population or the wide windows population?) and the market penetration is improving. So what we are seeing now is the world adjusting to the idea that osx is a more popular OS.

If OS X hasn't advanced as much as people would like, I suspect that has a lot to do with iOS sucking up a large portion of Apple's developer resources.

However they are over that hump and over the past 2 years with Mountain Lion they're moving faster on OS X than they have in the past.

IF they keep to what they said they intended to do, we'll have the follow on to Mountain Lion announced pretty soon.

Yeah, this is a really weak set of complaints to sail to the number one HN spot on a Saturday.

None of the problems seem like real problems.

Even the concern that Apple is post-Steve is insubstantial. I'm watching for signs of that eventual decline as much as the next Apple user, but there isn't any product degradation evidence... yet.

I've never managed to get the advertised battery life out of an MBA, even when straight out of the box. What kind of battery life are you getting? What is your battery cycle count?

Not an OSX user, but many of the complaints seem to stem from Apples crusade on filesystems. For many (even not power users) this can lead to data loss; you open a file and sketch out some changes, and everything was magically written to the disk without you ever noticing so now you can't get the old data back.

This perspective is inaccurate. The auto-save feature is versioned, so if you want to go back to an eariler version, you can, and in fact, it's much easier. In the past if you made changes and saved the file, only the latest save was on the filesystme, now you can go back in history even past the last save.

You're able to get old data back now in a way that you couldn't before... and can't on other systems.

Whoever represented it as some sort of data loss was confused or lying.

> You're able to get old data back now in a way that you couldn't before... and can't on other systems.

VMS would like a word with you. :-)

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