Which they walked back heavily after the overwhelmingly negative reception. A company that makes mistakes isn't a bad thing as long as they listen to their customers and are willing to admit when something isn't working. Would you rather no one ever try anything new?

> In my view, the rMBP is the best "traditional PC" anybody makes. No touchscreen...

Only for the next hour or so.

> It's not the one whose flagship "PC" is a touchscreen convertible gimmick.

If you don't want that one, the OEMs will happily sell you laptops that don't have those things. Dell and HP have actually gotten their act together and are making pretty good ones.. That's what makes it an "ecosystem", something Apple can't really claim. What if you want a 17" MacBook, or one with a gaming GPU? You're SOL.

The XPS15 is the closest rMBP competitor, but even that has a smaller battery, and much worse battery life with high-DPI screen (only moderately worse battery life with 1080p screen).

The closest competitor to the rMBP is the T560. It's more than half a pound heavier with extended battery, has only a 1080p screen, and only a dual-core rather than quad-core processor.

Apologies for the rant

The X1 Carbon is a 14" laptop (Lenovo doesn't really make a flagship 15" laptop). The battery is not replaceable on the fly, which is a big problem because it's only 50 watt-hours (versus 75 on the 13" rMBP and 100 on the 15" rMBP). The screen is meh (PWM). The keyboard is good, though.

The Thinkpad's vaunted build quality is also mostly a pre-Lenovo thing. I have a T450s through work, and the backlight bleed is atrocious and the keyboard is warped and sticks up near the palm rest.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

Best 15" model I could find was the latitude 15 5000. 47 WHr batter. 4.6 lbs. Almost twice as thick.

It's been said the best Windows laptop is a Macbook and I totally agree with that.

Apple has gutted formerly excellent programs meant for professionals. I believe the photography and videography fields had controversies. But I'll speak to what I use personally.

Apple had an excellent word processor, Pages. It could be used for print publishing. Then in 2013 they rewrote Pages to sync is with iOS.

In doing so they removed most of the features professional writers needed. Many authors, such as myself, were left stranded.

The old program still runs, but eventually an OS X update will break it.

Increasingly Apple has turned away from its professional user base, and caters to mass needs. This is shortsighted, as the pro users tend to be evangelists, and also the ones that create software. Every developer apple loses to Microsoft hurts its ecosystem.

But, all that said, I find OS X is generally still great. I'm just....uneasy in a way I never was before. And I'm glad Microsoft is now a viable alternative. I never thought I would say that, and that says something about Apple.

I'd forgotten about, mostly because I don't use them, their applications. I'd used Pages ages ago in grad school, but that's before 2013 so I didn't experience that transition.

I do realize I'm probably a bit of an outlier. I primarily use Safari, Mail.app, and a terminal with tmux and emacs. Scrivener, as well, when I'm in a more creative phase. The handful of other apps I use haven't had any problems (that I've noticed) with recent OS updates.

I will concede that, regarding hardware, they're heading towards a gray area for me. I really like the idea of the MacBook, but dislike the single connector (we'll see what happens today). And the relative stagnation of their hardware is annoying for many. But the 2012 rMBP has lasted quite well for me, I've only recently begun to notice issues with the battery life and I'm pretty sure that's because I forgot to turn off Docker (wanting to understand containers/VMs better, trying to bring my current office's development workflow into the 21st century).

EDIT: Given my relatively low resource use on the laptop, the reason I don't go with Linux is (from another post the other day), I got tired of trying to make things work on laptops. Along with rayiner, the MBP is a really solid and reliable laptop, and I want the Unix-underpinnings of OS X, without the hassle I experienced in Linux. Building a new desktop soon so I'll install linux there, see if things have changed enough for me.

Back when they were struggling with relevance, they had to supply it all. Who else would? They wanted to be the "digital hub," digital hub software wasn't available, so they had to provide it themselves.

That's not the situation anymore. Adobe stuff is great and it runs on Macs. Microsoft stuff is great and it runs on Macs. Google stuff is great and it runs on Macs. Why should Apple try to compete with all them?

I disagree that Apple is turning away from professional users. They still sell great computers for professionals. They're just stepping back from trying to compete in the space of professional application software. That's not hostility, that's focus.

I know some customers really liked the Apple productivity products, and disappointed that they've been scaled back or killed. But I think it's a good move, and I hope Apple continues to focus more resources on improving their OS, developer tools, security, and services.

When I upgraded my Macbook Air to Mavericks (10.9), the Wi-fi died. I had to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch. Not good for a computer that doesn't even have an Ethernet port. When I upgraded to Yosemite (10.10), the installation process stalled for three or four days. Why? I don't know, maybe because I had LaTeX installed, that's the best I could surmise. When I upgraded to El Capitan (10.11), a bunch of my software broke. Apps breaking upon OS upgrade is classic Apple, admittedly, but it's not a good look as a third strike after the previous two upgrades. I've been using OS X since 10.1.

In general, I just don't agree with the direction they're taking with the OS. The low contrast and unreadable fonts. The constant nagging from the software updater. The way they're hiding more and more functionality behind the option button. The severe reduction of functionality in previously wonderful apps like Pages. I understand the feelings of instability mentioned elsewhere. The ship does not appear to be on a steady course, Apple is not articulating a clear vision for the future of macOS, and it's hard to get a read on where the OS is going next. Even Microsoft wins here because you can reasonably expect all your apps to continue soldiering on, and you can see how MS is striving toward an overall aesthetic, even if Windows undergoes significant changes from release to release.

And macOS cannot be considered apart from its hardware, because that's Apple's bargain with its customers. The laptops are nice, but everything else sucks. The hardware is ancient. Maybe that will change today, but how long until the next upgrade?

- tmux works

- vim works

- bash works like on a Mac

Those were my first impressions. I'm cautiously optimistic about it though, and confident they'll work out the kinks with time. But right now it's still better to be on BSD/Mac if you like a unix-like development environment without running linux.

* http://askubuntu.com/a/754951/43344

Are you needing to `init 1` or `systemctl isolate rescue.target`?

Or is it perhaps a need to `systemctl status` on services?

I might just not be that experienced with the wide use-cases for these applications, but what are your hypothetical use cases?

I don't like logging into my dev box and then manually starting one-off scripts for all of the services that I like running (docker, dnsmasq, apt-cache, foo.py, etc etc).

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416376

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/daemontools-family.html

I don't know whether the Debian-packaged nosh will install on Ubuntu as it stands.

* http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/debian-binary-packages.html

It actually works better. Since everything is completely updated. In line with Ubuntu 16.

That's the reason I'm currently working on an Android tablet, though Chrome OS is also promising.

A tiling and scriptable window manager.