Re: Is it time to put Apple Computer on suicide watch?by E. L. Koba 11/28/2016, 4:40pm PST
blackwater wrote:
Maybe it's just the Hacker News filter bubble, but I keep hearing a steady drumbeat of news about Apple exiting one market after another. Supposedly, they just killed their wireless router, the AirPort.. A little while ago they killed their Apple monitors.
Yeah, it seems a little insane to keep relying more and more on just the iPhone for a larger and larger percentage of your profits.
blackwater wrote:
Now the MacBook Pro is out, and it's one big "fuck you" to professional users. The amount of RAM is still 16GB, the same as three years ago. This alone would be a deal breaker for anyone using Macs for content creation, like Photoshop or movie editing, etc. (Of course, they already gimped Final Cut Pro, so at least they're being consistent!) The only ports are USB-C, so if you have to give a business presentation on HDMI, DisplayPort, or VGA, then fuck you! If you need a modern GPU to run CAD software, deep learning, or 3D modeling, then fuck you! This thing has an embarrassingly bad AMD GPU.
I have no love of for apple, but for the work I do now (ruby on rails, now some android) macs are still the default go to tool. I need to get a new one because I'm starting up my own consulting firm, and these new macs just about pushed me to bite the bullet and start using linux. But, I just don't want to deal with the hassles that go along with linux, and the environmental differences with the rest of the "community". But I'm sure there are plenty of developers who will, and that will start tipping the balance - and I'll jump ship.
Bonus - I already own something that I can plug into the new macbook pro without a dongle: my Nexus
A lot of (bad) people are willing to pay extra for macs, because that's what the "real pros" use. But once the pros don't actually use them, that incentive is gone.
blackwater wrote:
It's just baffling to me that Apple is exiting so many markets at once. There is so little work required for them to keep this stuff running, in most cases. In the case of the Mac Pro, all they have to do is take the old product, and put a faster CPU and more memory in it. That's all they have to do! They couldn't get some junior-level supply chain guy from Dell to go replace part X with part Y so that they could issue a 2016 refresh? An Apple monitor should be a no-brainer. Just get a mid or high-level monitor, do compatibility testing on it, and then slap an Apple logo on it. It's like they don't want to take people's money.
Yeah, it was crazy - the last place I worked was totally willing to pay $1000 for the official apple monitors, knowing full well that they were the exact same displays from the same factories that you can get for $300.
It's hard to see this and not just think "hubris":
(also interesting is that "R&D" is not in the main building? What the fuck are all the people in that huge UFO doing if it isn't R&D?)