> To me, OS/X's quality has been slipping,

I'm amused to see the 'OS/X' typo still lives on, more than a decade since OS/2's been relevant :)

On topic, I've just upgraded to the latest version of OS X and it really seems rock solid. Fastest, most stable, and most secure version yet. Still a bit of an evolutionary dead end though, in that there have been no moves to add touch support beyond multitouch trackpads. I admire their vision with keeping iOS and OS X separate, but given touch is so ubiquitous elsewhere, I can't imagine it'll be long before Windows users are genuinely surprised and baffled by the lack of touch screens in Apple laptops...

Probably apple's next move is not to add touch to os x but to release an iOS laptop to replace the MacBook air, they could call it an iBook. It's pretty clear OS X is legacy tech and on the roadmap for being phased out.

The big step for that would be XCode for iOS. Currently, iOS is one of the few platforms where the platform does not let you develop for itself.

I'd buy an iPad Pro tomorrow...if only it ran Xcode. But I can't justify $1200 or more if I doesn't help me to get my work done. At that price, and admittedly for my purposes, the iPad Pro is just a very large and very expensive gadget.

The really annoying thing is that these days a late-model iPad probably has most of the horsepower needed to pull it off.

For me it's "I'd buy an iPad Pro tomorrow...if only it ran Xcode [and had a terminal]." It can be heavily sandboxed as far as I care, I just need a proper Unix terminal. The trouble with Xcode is that it just needs so much screen real estate, I just can't see it working very well on iOS.

I assume you mean a terminal for the local machine, not an SSH session to another machine, in which case Panic's Prompt is what you want for SSH.

I'm with you in that I'd like a local terminal, but I could live without if I had Xcode on the box and some sort of full-screen editing mode. Working with storyboards would indeed suck, though.

There are terminal emulators on iOS already, that's not the issue, but not having a local filesystem means it's only useful for remoting, there's nothing a terminal will let you do on the device (unless it's jailbroken)

The MBA is already replaced, that's what the "new Macbook" is, an MBA replacement. The iBook brand was replaced by the Macbook brand and isn't going to come back (the name would collide with ibooks anyway).

The whole discoveryd fiasco was the final straw for me with regards to having a Mac. Having such serious networking issues in your primary OS and not fixing them for almost a year after release tells me something is rotten in the Kingdom of Apple.

Yes, the issue was eventually fixed, but I'm done with Apple. They have lost my trust.

My girlfriend is still having networking issues on her MBP. I asked about the problems on IRC and was told that it was a regression that should be fixed in El Capitan, after updating to El Capitan the issue still persists.

I was considering buying an MBP myself but after seeing the issues she is having I am changing my mind, especially after this reveal from Microsoft.

I can't believe how few laptops get the trackpad right. It's the first and primary interaction anyone has with the laptop, how are all of them so terrible! I'd love to get a non-macbook, but the list of laptops with powerful hardware that plays nice with a Unix based OS and has a trackpad that isn't unbearable is shockingly short.

Anyone except trackpoint users!

But yeah, it's mindboggling. The internal hardware is largely the same anyway, why are companies throwing away a chance to get ahead of the competition and use the same shoddy keyboards/touchpads everyone hates?

Trackpoints are painful for me to use though. My fingers just aren't willing to go through that trauma anymore.

For me it largely depends on the cap. The soft rim cap is really easy on the fingers, while the old IBM and default Lenovo caps only seem to exist to generate callus.

> To me, OS/X's quality has been slipping

I don't understand how anyone can state that, OSX has always had shit-show releases as a rule with a few exceptions (spit and polish cycles like Mountain Lion), and "never buy a v1 of a new design" has been the community's mantra since before I bought my first Apple device 15 years ago, it's one of the first things I was told.

Can only agree about the quality slipping.

It used to be that your computer was faster with every release of OS X. It hasn't been true for a few releases now. Oh that and my niece's iPhone 5c (not even a year old) was bricked by an iOS update. And the only thing Apple offers is a discount on the purchase of a new one...

> but I haven't found any non-Apple hardware that's comparable

Thinkpad Ts series? Dell's XPS/Latitude 7000 lines?