But I think Apple is coasting on its fundamentals and trying to monetize (cannibalize) a bunch of intangibles that led it to meteoric success in the first place, and that would worry me as an AAPL shareholder (I'm not one). At least in the field of package management, Linux is doing some pretty interesting things; 'snap' is pretty interesting: https://snapcraft.io/, so are AppImages: https://appimage.org/, and this is in addition to the regular updates to 'apt' or 'yum' that are officially supported by distros. Meanwhile, 'brew' still dominates the OSX landscape because Apple can't be bothered to create its own package manager. When was the last time Apple updated native UNIX-like tooling? I had heard it was around OS X Lion (basically when Steve Jobs died).
You didn't have your MacBook Pro spontaneously reboot because of the NVIDIA problem? I don't know if it was the driver or the hardware but it wasn't fun.
In fact that was why I returned the XPS 15, the OEM version of Ubuntu 18.04 (which did have correct sleep/hibernate behavior and worked well with the OEM battery) couldn't detect the NVIDIA Quadro P2000 card at all, which I wanted to run CUDA with. That persisted after about three factory resets, so I was like kthxbai.
Although IDEs seem to cause frequent reboots, but using Jupyter is far more stable.
We used to be an Apple shop, and we had a lot come in due to that issue.
But Linux has something like that now, and Apple has been staying still. It's not perfect, it's still fragmented, and a lot of fundamentals like fit+finish Linux will likely never get right. But it exists and it didn't exist before. And it's toyable/open-ish for the most part, so it'll last and won't change against your wishes without you being able to fork it or stay on an older version, and for professional users who devote a lot of time to their setup, software warts like that that I can whack with a stick without letting out the magic smoke in my computer are more bearable than things I can't fix and out of my control, like my keyboard not working because Apple likes thin laptops.
Apple fundamentally do not care about professional users. They are either ignorant or indifferent to the ways that their service model fails to meet the needs of professional users.
Next up, airpodbatterygate.
If my MacBook Pro dies, which I really hope it doesn't because it's great, and I want to back up my iPhone to local storage, I might get the cheapest Mac Mini I can and use it as a storage device. Yea, I can't move something like that to Linux as long as Linux mobile backups are not great. No, I won't pay for iCloud, and I won't use my MacBook Pro dying as an excuse to buy a new MacBook Pro or an iMac like I might have before. On the side, I may be purchasing a thousand dollars in PC parts and running Linux on desktop, and using my MacBook Pro to just SSH into my desktop using OpenVPN and dynamic DNS through AWS Route 53, and using it as a mobile battery-powered shim, which can be much more easily commoditized. Maybe my MacBook Pro dies and I use a Thinkpad as a replacement to SSH into my desktop, and I learn to love Thinkpad: https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/
I should hope Apple doesn't want that. Apple should want me purchasing the Mac Pro or the iMac Pro, and maybe complement that with the MacBook, and some AirPods and an iWatch to boot. The buying decision shouldn't be like pulling teeth, and since it is, I think Apple has lost a good deal already.
I will say my personal pain tolerance for this kind of stuff is low. I will personally invest a great deal of energy to future-proof my personal infrastructure. But I don't think others are too far behind as long as Apple keeps increasing or maintaining the cost of being an Apple customer over time.
When I owned Macs the first time between 1992 - 1998, the ecosystem around MacOS was clearly superior. The second time around when it was my secondary computer 2005-2010, there was really no differentiator.
That being said, if I were in need of a better personal computer today, I would get a Mac Mini just because.
I keep saying this, but every time I try non-Apple stuff I run screaming back. when I felt like my 2013 MacBook Pro was getting long in the tooth last year, I got a X1 Carbon 6th Gen. Now I'm just counting the days until my wife won't get cranky if I buy another computer. It's big things and little things. I had to reinstall Windows because random background crapware was causing battery life to vary wildly doing the same thing. (Not even third-party crapware, just like Windows randomly deciding to chew through your battery scanning for viruses or indexing stuff.) The screen developed a cluster of dead pixels within six months. The depot service replaced it for free, which was nice, but the new one has a uneven backlighting in the lower right corner. (Lenovo's Q&A for its LCDs is shit.) Oh, and the bezel is just a sticker that is starting to lift and peel. The LTE card has never worked right, despite repeated driver updates. At first it would just die during sleep, more recently it's started conking out while I'm using it. The touchpad is just okay. Windows is unpredictable crap these days. I replaced the stock install with LTSB which is a bit better. But random shit just won't work. The taskbar will randomly refuse to hide, then you'll have to play a game of "guess notification icon is preventing the taskbar from hiding" (it's usually Windows Defender). Edge fails in basic things like searching PDFs (and won't let you use a separate PDF plugin or set PDFs to auto-download instead). Chrome, meanwhile, eats up your battery.
Apple has a high-profile fuckup every now and then, but at least it tends to be one thing that affects some defined set of machines you can work around, not pervasive random shit Q&A that you can't avoid.
You're right though, Apple has been going downhill. I used to get a new Apple laptop every couple of years, and held off on the 2016-2018 for the reasons you mention. But at least I have hope for Apple. My iPhone XR is just about perfect, totally trouble free. I have zero hope for Lenovo, etc.
Oh, and any sort of ability to integrate or do anything with my iPhone (non-jailbroken) on my Linux machines would be a big plus.
Also, I've got some non-jailbroken iPhone for development and I have no issues with installing ipa's on it from GNU/Linux. I didn't need more though, so haven't tested anything else, but working app installer makes me think that other simpler things should work too :P
Isn’t that kind of big deal?
Software support - well, yes, but it's within the application makers and power users reach to fix it. There's a common myth that "Apple touchpads work on magic", while in fact neither hardware nor the driver is so special. It's just the apps.
Apple is still selling the Mac Pro that is unchanged from the 2013 model for full price. It's abundantly clear that they either don't know what professionals want or they don't care.
At first I loved the keyboard but it started to misbehave within the first months of use. Now it's unusable without Unshaky (key repeating blocker written specifically for this case by some other poor Apple customer). The battery never lasted very long but now it seems it's broken too. Oh, and the specs, heavily underpowered considering it's price.
I need something to do the work on so I can't just send it out to repair and wait a couple of weeks to get it back. At first I considered getting myself some cheap laptop for the interim period but once I started to look for other options I decided I'm not going back.
I'm buying a ThinkPad and selling the MacBook when it's repaired, even though it's probably not worth half of its initial price now. It got under my skin so much I just want to get rid of it.
Rant off.
This really should concern Apple. Professionals are the ones requiring the latest equipment, purchasing the highest-margin products with the highest price inelasticity (not looking for discounts), the ones most likely to advertise through word-of-mouth, and the ones contributing the most to brand value. Apple should only look at how they lost the gaming community back in the mid-2000s to Windows, and the rise of today's e-sports and streaming industries led by said professional gamers, to see what kind of impact losing just one professional community has in terms of opportunity cost.
I doubt Apple could ever be successfully commoditized because of the strength of their existing moats, but given Apple's discounts of late and inability to successfully innovate in professional hardware, they're heading more towards Wal-Mart and less towards Harrods, and that may lead to additional headaches or intangibles down the line (anti-trust worries, higher support costs and other operational expenses, decreased customer satisfaction), which all gives the impression Apple's golden age has come and gone.