As soon as Intel rolls out their full Kaby Lake line, the Macbook Pro will get a rev that will improve speed and permit 32GB of RAM. Counting in design and manufacturing time, that could be about a year from now.
And USB-C is clearly the future for connectors. In a year or two a lot more peripherals will be shipping with USB-C as the default cord.
This is why Apple carries a huge amount of cash around on their books: so that they can make long-term decisions even if it hurts in the short term.
Can you comment on why you think this is true? A cursory look at Kaby Lake does not seem to indicate any sort of intrinsic change that would allow the MBP to have more memory.
My biggest problem is the obsession with "Thin and Light" crippling system specs. I get that a 11-13" laptop isn't gonna have the best GPU in the world, but I'd like a decent one in my 15" 'Pro' model please...and I'll take a little less thin and light to get it.
This is even more true on desktop. I don't really care about how bulbous you make the back of my iMac or Mac Pro, just give me SLI GTX1080s.
I get it, I'm the niche, I'm a gamer with a Mac, but I still exist.
Well, thats kind of a narcissistic statement. How many people develop for Windows? How many for Linux? How many for Mac? oh.
I try to make my software as beautiful as I can, and keep a simple and usable UX. There are developers who don't care about guidelines, or design. That's not a platform fault, is just that there are developers who just want the job done, even in a ugly fashion.
"Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away."
As if all the world's high quality apps are only developed on and for the Mac.
And that is the biggest problem in software world, that's why our computers are full of half-baked, ugly, poor documented and uncompatible programs - because someone "just wanted to get job done".
Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.
> We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff.
Now that is indeed a real issue, and yes, ugh.
Edit: I've misread the original, sorry, so adding a few things: if you're using the default apps or the ones built for that specific environment only, you're good to go with GTK3, QT, whatever. The trouble comes when you mix these, but that is true even for the MacOS. Personally I really dislike the approach of Chrome, not giving a s* how it _should_ look like to look at least a little native.
It looks great in screenshots, but the feeling is much inferior, a fact I lament.
I don't know what magic MacOS does under the hood, but no other linux distro I've EVER used comes close, with the possible exception of Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome is ugly as sin.
So much so that most developers using or targeting elementaryOS integrate their design really well.[2] For those that don't but still use GTK3, they also integrate quite well out of the box.
Sure, but since last time I've started KDE, I got a ton of segfaults errors coming from all over the place (and not just nepomuk)... Well, if the desktop is fine but the wifi interface or the notification tray is segfaulting, I'm just gonna throw the whole thing.
GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.
Do I like it when things are pretty? Sure.
Do I need them to be pretty to get shit done? No
I know that is what drove me away.
Most just want a window manager for xterms.
Designers get bashed because they don't know what people want.
Performance on GUIs gets bashed, because what matters is doing xterms over remote X connections.
Glances at 2nd and 3rd monitors
Well I can't argue there.
Not much in that department, either. Nothing that beats the proprietary software staples, especially for creatives, that I happen to use: no Cubase, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Lots of apps ranging from "close but no cigar" to "why even try?".
I care about CLI tools developed for macOS and Windows in mind, that take advantage of the respective OS APIs.
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
Not to mention the related GUI tooling.
Where is Instruments on QtCreator, for example.
The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale.
Once upon a time, around 2000-2, I did some minor contributions to Gtkmm.
Qt alone exceeds the feature set, has more GUI tooling, and is multi-platform. That's just Qt, and the same could be said for GTK. I'm not slinging mud at Obj-c and the frameworks Apple maintains, but they are not unique snowflakes without equal.
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
I can find tons of entries without parity in Qt.
And their current trend to invent a different flavor of JavaScript every few releases, no thanks.
GTK+ is no competition for these APIs:
Because they don't care about stuff like GUI. And it shows.
I'm going to leave it there before the mist descends, but basically as far as I'm concerned Apple couldn't design a paper bag without fucking it up.
Where Linux sucked was in the distros' constant "improvement" of core features that weren't broken in order to be first past the post. For example PulseAudio was introduced before it actually worked with most hardware configurations, and nobody cared about the cool new features it came with. Ubuntu deciding to adopt KDE4 before it was ready for general release was another stupid decision. In fact, I'm basically talking about Ubuntu and Gnome.
Still use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and of course, some of our servers run it. Last time I used Qt in anger was 5.3, while trying to do a mobile project that I eventually ported to pure native APIs.
Do you know of any other frameworks, besides those that cover all of these ones?
well... no. Speaking as long-time Linux user who tried all of this and in the end using i3 to avoid constant stream of bugs from DE.
This may be one of the most pretentious things I've ever read on HN.
I can see how having a simple UI with few controls on it can sometimes be translated as "pretty" in certain circles, but simply having few features and few controls doesn't magically mean your app is top of the pile on the entire Earth regarding "prettiness". It is quite an assertion to make.
EDIT: Again, this is not meant offensively but was more of a response to the assertion that the app is prettier than ANY others.
Furthermore, I certainly agree with the rest of the comment where they state that more attention is paid to UI etc. on MacOS than other platforms, typically.
Really this is just what users have been telling me last 6 months. "I bought it because it looks good."
Guess they're just used to worse.
Out of interest, how did you market it / raise awareness of it?
Worse yet, is if i pick a stable variety of Linux, it's likely to not be pretty. The pretty Linux OSs (in my experience) tend to be at least as unstable as OSX. Ugh.
(Note: I upgraded to Sierra, crash or have weird crap happen ~4times a week)
edit: Why the downvote? Note that i explicitly stated this was my experience. Furthermore, i had the same experience when my Macbook Pro Retina was new, and came with OSX Mavericks. Both Mavericks and Sierra have gave me the impression that Apple releases unstable OSs for major versions, and need time to make it stable again.
I'm not complaining/etc, just saying i'm not getting a crash report on the last two items - and i'm unsure about if i received one the times the OS actually crashed.
For me, even as a Mac user, I avoid Mac-only apps as much as I possibly can because I want the freedom to switch platforms in the future. I will happily have all my apps be slightly less pretty if it means they work on any OS.
Times are changing
Times are always changing. Markets grow rapidly, and then they mature and growth gets flatter.
Specifically looking at Apple, while I agree that their focus has shifted away from the Mac platform somewhat and towards iOS, wasn't that to be expected with the huge growth in mobile and tablets over the last 10 years? Now, mobile growth is slowing[0] and tablet sales are flat/dropping[1].
Laptops aren't going anywhere... the vast majority of white collar workers use a laptop or desktop everyday. And while I can't predict what Apple is going to do (who can?), it seems unlikely that they'd completely drop a market that generated $5.7B in revenue in Q4 of 2016 [2].
[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-growth-is-slowing-... [1]: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/tablet-decline-q2-2016/ [2]: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-q4-2016-financial...
ETA: Btw, macOS Server is over here: http://www.apple.com/macos/server/
The issue is that Apple is alienating early adopters by removing ports, charging double for obsolete hardware and introducing gimmicks instead of real innovation. And there is a decrease in OS quality from Apple.
Questions to ask when deciding what platforms to support:
Of Android and iOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than $0.99?
Of Windows, Linux, and macOS, which has the users willing to spend money on apps? More than a few dollars?
But yeah, not everyone's using Macs. It's the biggest vendor, but there are more non-Macs than Macs.
But yeah, many other variables to consider. Age as well, it's mostly younger people in coffee shops.
For me and a lot of others what I really want is a UNIX that just works.
Meaning it just works with its hardware in all ways... audio and video playing, recording, editing and everything else all work very well, without having to recompile the kernel or hunt down and install alpha drivers without source hosted on sketchy sites, which is what drove me away from other UNIXes.
Also macOS is a good platform for developing native iOS apps. Why iOS and not Android? Mostly because the version adoption curve of Android is pretty bad.
The point is it's more about functionality and getting stuff done than it is about pretty. With other UNIXes there was always too much fighting with the system.
Unfortunately that doesn't exist apart from macOS right now.
I'm a multi-plat guy who has a Macbook and a Windows machine. This makes me want to get a real open source initiative going on Windows to enable better UI assembly. Xaml is great but it has a ways to go.
Because there's some price spike? If anything things are as cheap or expensive as ever.
Right now everybody is using Macs. Walk into the Bay Area coffee shop, you see Macs everywhere. I love that.
I build desktop software for Macs (focuslist.co). My apps are prettier than any others. They are easier and faster to use. This is the reason why people pay me $5 while they can get the job done with paper and pen.
This is thanks to Mac as a platform. Mac developers don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done while winning an Apple Design Award. That's why Mac apps are the best.
Take Mac away and high quality desktop apps will go away. We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff. Ugh.