Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veidr | Hacker News Reader

> "Apple should keep pushing the limits of PC performance because it’s a company that loves personal computers."

I love reading Siracusa, and want to agree with him here, but this sentence stops me.

Apple clearly doesn't 'love' personal computers anymore. How much clearer could the signs be?

They took their engineers off Mac OS X and put them on iPhone OS. Their PC OS lagged and stagnated. The 'new' Mac Pro isn't the only insult to power users; OS X 10.8 itself is, too. It is the worst update in (Mac) OS X history, not only with serious show-stopping bugs, but also with new 'features' that are ground-breaking in how dumbed-down they are[1].

Their new love is closed, power-user-hostile, quasi-disposable consumer devices. Steve Jobs himself broke up with the personal computer in his last years, and the company followed suit.

[1]: LaunchPad, newly-crippled Expose, disabling extra monitors in fullscreen mode, double clicking hidden files doesn't open them, moron open-save dialogs, by-default iCloud file storage that prevents one app from being able to open another app's docs (even to attach as mail attachment), etc etc et

Your list of minor interface tweaks made in 10.8 isn't giving me an overwhelming sense of hostility toward personal computers.

I don't think Apple is actively hostile to the 'power user' subset; they just no longer give a shit.

At any rate, they certainly don't send us flowers anymore.

Power users are inherently high-maintenance. The difference between not giving a shit and active hostility is, to a first approximation, in name only.

What's the last major OSX feature that wasn't bad? For a company known for its successes, you look at Launchpad, inverse scrolling, notification center... does anyone like those features? I've never read a single positive comment about any of them. The most positive thing I've read is that they are easy enough to ignore.

I like inverse scrolling. Old scrolling feels weird to me now. And anyway, why is a minor, optional tweak to scrolling direction anything more than a minor, optional tweak to scrolling direction? It seems like every move Apple makes, no matter how trivial, takes on apocalyptic significance to people.

Notification Center is a list of notifications you can turn off if you don't like notifications. What's the big deal?

Launchpad is a little icon you can click to see your apps. What's the big deal?

The big deal is that the nicest thing you can say about the biggest features of recent OSX versions is "at least you can turn them off".

That is clearly false. GP and others have said that they like inverse scrolling and normal scrolling feels weird now, which is nicer than "at least you can turn it off". QED. Geez.

To be fair, there are a lot. FileVault 2 is a massive improvement over the (hackass) first version. In 10.7, Mail got dramatically better at dealing with huge volumes (hundreds of GB, dozens of accounts) without crashing. Buttons finally became roughly rectangular. The OS supports Retina displays, one of the most significant general advances in recent history. Menlo beats Monaco. Resizing windows from any edge was only 20 years too late.

Most importantly to me, (since for all my bitching, I spend a lot of my work time writing Mac software) Xcode went from 'spectacularly awful bag of suck' to just 'kinda sucks', and ARC, blocks, Objc-2, non-insane literal syntax are all forces for Good.

And yes, I love inverse ('natural') scrolling and it is enabled on all my Macs. :)

It's not that Apple does nothing at all good, it's that their focus has become even more relentlessly "systems that the average shopper at walmart can use" at the expense of those users who have a stronger grasp of general computing concepts.

When they disable all the extra screens in fullscreen mode, the chances of my dad getting confused and looking at the wrong monitor are reduced. But at the same time, the amount of data I can see at once, and my ability to manipulate it, are also reduced.

Those improvements are nice and all, but I'm talking about features that would be featured on http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/.

Go look at that page real quick and count the number of things that are good. Not "not bad" or "you can turn it off". Good.

Yeah, I count one (Airplay Mirroring). Two if you include the new version of Safari.

Well I love share sheets, iCloud syncing, and AirPlay, personally. Gatekeeper is a great compromise between a fully locked down system and a fully vulnerable one. And the new Safari is the best Safari ever, as the saying goes. So I count 4.5 on my end.

Anyway, an OS is more than the sum of its newest features. On the whole, OS X 10.8 is a stable, polished, powerful, fully-featured operating system. There might not have been a big feature like Time Machine or Exposé in a couple versions, but I'd much rather use 10.8 than 10.5.

Gatekeeper is an okay compromise. I'd feel better about it if they didn't include restrictive app policies. What if I want to run apps that are signed by a certificate from some third party CA? I'd feel great about it if it would also inform me what permissions are being granted and let me disable arbitrary permissions like internet access.

I think 10.7 and 10.8 bring more irritations than anything else. iCloud sync and Gatekeeper are the only things I think are worth upgrading for, but the Gatekeeper implementation is still lacking and unfree, and I use other services to sync my files (I also think the implementation of iCloud leaves something to be desired... and it's another form of lock-in). I'm still using 10.6 and shall use it for the foreseeable future; at least until my next computer, which will most likely be running Linux.

Enough about Launchpad. It's perfectly ignorable, and no sillier an interface than FrontRow, which shipped on most of the supposedly better earlier versions of OS X.

Remember when every Mac shipped with an IR port and a little remote? Laptops shipped with remotes. But apparently an optional app chooser interface (LaunchPad) is the most anti-PC they've ever shipped.

I honestly miss front row.

If front row still existed, I wouldn't be throwing away my 08 blackbook. It's not really powerful enough to be a server, but it would make an awesome HTPC.

Movist has a “navigation mode” that works well as a simple Front Row replacement.

I thought I would use Front Row a lot when I hooked my Mac Mini up to my TV, but it turns out that most of the video we watch is through a browser--on YouTube, Vimeo, or Hulu. And I control my iTunes library through the Remote app on my iPhone. So I don't miss Front Row.

Perhaps you'd find the change of company name in 2007 more convincing?

1977-2007 Apple computer

2007-2013 Apple inc

I very much doubt they did that just on a whim. As a user/developer of both platforms (iOS and Mac OS X) it's been clear for some time that the company has refocused on consumer gadgets - it's 'the next great thing', to quote Steve Jobs. That change might even accelerate under Tim Cook because that's where the money is.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/apple-drops-computer-from...

Re the Mac Pro, I'd love to see them sell a stackable tower of modular units like the mini in form factor, offering as much hot pluggable storage and CPU power as you want. Then they could widen the market and sell it to consumers who think of themselves as pros too, and actually make money from it. At present there just isn't enough money in mac pros for Apple inc to bother updating them, and like the server line they have languished.

The sentence in question is not an assertion about Apple's feelings towards PCs. It's recommended pairing of action and motivation. "Joe should marry Sue because he loves her, not because she's rich." Whether or not Joe loves Sue is another matter.

The point remains that if they however don't love personal computers, then both reasons stand. In other words, perhaps Joe should marry Sue because he loves her, but its moot because he doesn't (he instead loves her much younger sister). EDIT: In other words, you're both right.

If it cost 5¢ to dismiss an App Store Update notification, I'd be in more debt than the US government. Notification Center is the single most annoying (and unstoppable) OS feature I can remember.

By scrolling up in the Notification Center panel, you can suspend notifications for the day. You can also permanently disable Notification Center, if you desire: http://lifehacker.com/5942898/permanently-disable-notificati...

Yeah, meant to mention that too, but it definitely isn't an exhaustive list.

To be pedantic, 7.2 or 8.0 were pretty damn bad. 7.3.5-7.5.5 were the best. I think there were some dogs around system 5, but I'd have to get my 128k out of the dump to be sure.

It wasn't really until 7.6.1 they worked out all the teething issues with PowerPC Macs (mainly, the whole machine halting with "error type 11" requiring a reboot)

There was no System 7.2 or 7.3.5. They went from 7.1.2 to 7.5. You may be thinking of 7.1.2 (the first PowerPC release) or 7.5.3 (the last full version posted as a free download).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com