"Do you use Final Cut Pro?" No, I use scikit-learn! No, I use vagrant & virtualbox to run 4 VMs No, I use Unity ...
I think we at HN are succumbing to a bit too much Omphaloskepsis[0], in that we [developers] feel that we are the 'Pro' users almost exclusively. This simply isn't the case. I do, however agree partly with your claim in that Apple is not using enough yardsticks. Apple have always defined their 'Pro' market by their pro-apps (as you and they mentioned, FCP, LCP, etc). There are a huge amount of creative professionals that need 'beefy' machines to do media-development work, and wouldn't be so bothered about losing their F-keys.
It's funny how Apple have always acknowledged their developers (in a big way) out-of-sight, but never really put them on the public pedestal that their 'artistic' users get. This is predominantly a fault of Marketing than anything else. Such thinking has clearly infiltrated top management, and I do hope they start getting their ideas inline with a more wholesome and comprehensive view of who their professional users really are.
Until this announcement, I assumed, based on the neglect of the mac pro and mac os, that Apple was basically going to just run out the mac business. I had started trying to figure out what my next computer was going to be after a decade of macs, and was pretty bummed by the options.
Hopefully they're serious about this.
If they're looking for other things they could do, may I suggest doubling down on fixing mac os quality issues. And hey, maybe even hire the homebrew folks.
It's pretty presumptuous to assume you know what John Gruber does with his Mac. I suspect he might sometimes open an app other than BBEdit.
And I know mxcl works for Apple, but not on homebrew. The lead maintainer works, I think, at GitHub?
Edit: in fact, from the commit logs, mxcl doesn't seem to have been much involved in homebrew in years. It's a poor show for github to seemingly be more interested in helping make macs work well for developers rather than Apple, imo...
I'm not sure Apple would ever give him marching orders on an open source project that he wasn't "much involved in...in years", including years before his Apple employment.
And I need a new workstation for more intensive workloads than any MacBook Pro can handle, and have been holding off on what to get.
I also don't quite get what are they going to be spending all this time on, what kind of "designing" is going into it? Picking components on NewEgg and figuring out the shape of their Apple-branded case? :)
Seriously, unlike mobile/laptops, Apple has no competitive advantage in traditional desktop computing. They don't make CPUs, chipsets, GPUs, etc. And there's no battery to fiddle with, or a case to make thinner or a keyboard to mutilate.
[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017#CustoMac_P...
I make my living off of iOS development, and I don't even want to think about the amount of time I've lost over the past few years because I had to debug my machine rather than work. Apple seems to be quietly tolerating the hackintosh community, but they need to provide real options for their developers. I'm tired of this unholy monstrosity of a computer that isn't supposed to exist. I'm not going to do it forever.
P.S. I'm one of those folks like you who spent his teens and twenties building gaming rigs, and around the time I turned 30 I realized this stuff wasn't fun for me anymore. I just wanted to plunk down some money and make "the computer problem" go away. I became more interested in what I was doing with computers than monkeying around with them in the garage. Don't dismiss developers who just want to buy a box and forget about it.
10 cores, 64GB of fast RAM, 2TB superfast SSD, a 1080Ti graphics card, and it still costs less than a trashcan Mac with a much lower spec.
I hate Windows with a passion. Given the choice I would rather stay with macOS. And I would rather just buy something than stress about whether I'm wearing enough static protection bracelets not to nuke a £1500 processor.
But when the product I need literally doesn't exist - and apparently won't exist for at least another 12 to 18 months - it was a forced decision.
2) I don't want to bother with these kinds of issues every time Apple puts out a point release:
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/macos-10-12-4-update.2171...
I don't "need" Apple to produce a Mac Pro, but I'd certainly like them to, if it's a good box.
There are plenty of fantastic motherboards, GPUs, power supplies and quiet and good looking cases to choose from, I only need a guarantee of future OSX support.
It would eat into their sales but the other side effects are worse, and they would have to look into creating a channel for being able to make money from MacOS.
There is a reason for a number of these boutique Windows workstation manufacturers as there value add is to provide a supported product out of known good tested configurations, because for someone that just wants a machine that works it’s still some effort and Microsoft still gets money for the Windows license.
And lets face it building a hackintosh is 10x the risk of building a Linux desktop for very little benefit, especially if adobe pulls a valve and decide to support Linux for all of their platforms.
The problem for Apple is that they need to be in the officials of high profile professionals if they need to keep their brand as valuable as they are and that means they need to offer a high power Unix workstation with a high level of compatibility with the Linux and Java environments that exists on servers, render farms and HPC clusters. At the same time when their consumer vision is to try and kill cross platform compatibility and move away from their Unix legacy.
If apple stays on their current path there will be a day within a decade when someone goes to a science or web dev conventions and shows images of laptop uses without a single macbook in it and thats why the "pro" market matter to apple.
The Ubuntu list is so long and has so many caveats.
I've never quite figured out the continued popularity of the ESC key for vim using developers. For a touch typing vim user on most modern keyboard layouts generating an ESC by hitting the ESC key is more movement than generating an ESC by hitting CTRL-[. This is especially so if you have a keyboard that puts the CTRL key where God intended it to be (immediately to the left of the 'A' key). With CTRL in that location, hitting CTRL-[ is just a small pinky movement on each hand away from home position.
In earlier times, ESC made a lot of sense. On the ADM-3A, for instance, CTRL was in the proper location next to 'A', and ESC was immediately above CTRL, and '[' was at the far right side of the top row (near where BACKSPACE/DELETE is on most current keyboards). On that layout ESC was way more efficient than CTRL-[.
I use an HHKB2, which has CTRL in the correct location, and the ESC key is one row lower, being next to the 1 key. It's still too far to reach and CTRL-[ is absolutely the best way to go. Reaching even further on a standard keyboard is just awful.
I am pretty sure it's still a very very small percent out of all the MacBook Pro buyers, and a lot of the vim users are quite happy with just remapping the each key and were doing that even before they got the touchbar. I think this whole buzz about missing esc key and fn row is just non relevant anymore and the vast majority of MacBook users myself included don't really care and enjoy a new great screen along with a better trackpad and battery life.
I never understood how this silence helps any company (except in cynical way - we won't tell them when they'll get new model and how good it will be so they will clear our stock of soon to be 'old' models).
They let the Mac Pro sit there for over 1200 days without a single update or price drop. It's hard to think that they weren't planning on just killing it. And they're apparently surprised that developers are buying non touch bar macbooks, which considering how many developers use vim just seems weird. It seems like it took a big outcry and actual sales numbers to make them realize their pro segment isn't happy, and considering you can't develop for iOS or in many cases macOS unless you own a mac, I just don't feel reassured.