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To my knowledge, nobody out there has anything approaching a realistic model of the current economy, either. It has countless variables that interact in countless ways, and producing results that have never been seen before.
Talking heads/pundits are for entertainment value only (depending on your definition of entertainment).
The only way to have confidence in a prediction for the future, at the moment, is by failing to understand the uncertainty of the situation.
You need to map your way out of this situation - demotivation (regardless of the cause) is bad for you and your employer. Persisting with it is unprofessional. If you try and 'suck it up' you will travel the path to burnout and damage to your health and career.
Try and identify the cause before you take the appropriate action - it could be boring/unsuitable work, a medical problem like depression or even something like anemia, burnout, poor diet/exercise, or a lack of fulfilment from other areas of your life.
Perhaps they are moving to case designs that are a combination of CNC machined parts and stamped pieces? I'm sure Apple's design team is a lot more imaginative than me. There are some CNC-looking parts in the current MBP like the bracket that fixes the HD in place.
But let's face facts. Steve will not rest until he is selling Cube shaped computers again. :)
Water jets and laser cutters are in common usage and one or other has probably been used to cut the blanks or trim the finished case parts since the titanium powerbook. They are also excellent for parts like the bezel on the front of the MBP screen. They are not generally used to carve 3D shapes - that is done by a CNC mill, which resembles a big drill bit that can move in three dimensions if you haven't seen one. To stamp a MBP case would take seconds - CNC machining one from solid might keep a 7-figure machine occupied for several minutes. Water jets and lasers generally blow a hole right through whatever they are pointed at, limiting their usage to cutting flat sheets or trimming the edges from stamped parts.
If this article is true, I think we are more likely to see more elaborate internal bracing or complex case designs from Apple. The innards of a MBP are fairly prosaic and complex machining could be used to improve airflow and allow components to be packed closer together. Aluminum could also be strategically placed in more complex shapes to help conduct heat out of the case. But when you manufacture parts by the million, casting the parts then finish-machining them may be more efficient, since the need to tie up expensive machines is reduced. Perhaps this is a strategy to get out of the 'just like every other laptop but with OSX' trap and maintain their competitive advantage in 'design' now that their competitors are starting to lift their game.
Also, aircraft-grade aluminum doesn't really mean anything. There are many different grades with different purposes, many of which are in common use in all kinds of relatively mundane applications. No doubt the current MacBook Pros are made from 'aircraft grade aluminum', but coke cans probably are too.
It sounds like some juicy info has unfortunately been filtered through one or two levels of people who aren't familiar with machine tool jargon. It would be very interesting to hear more details.
If you want to play with these machines yourself, check out emachineshop.com - a cool startup if ever there was one.
You can agree or not with those arguments, I'm not advocating for or against them. They don't affect my purchasing decisions (the best tool for the job in my current circumstances is a MacBook Pro so that's what I have). I make my living working for banks that no doubt finance far worse things. If Disney returns to form animation-wise I'll reward them with movie ticket purchases. It just seems to me that all the people posting "Apple is finally evil" linkbait nonsense could choose meatier targets than mistakes in developer relations, and the fact they choose not to means they're not even any good at being wrong.
It's crappy linkbait blog post pollution that irritates me, not anything that Apple's doing.
What I mean is - you would think that the kind of people who write shrill blog posts about the iPhone SDK would be at least as incensed by these two points, and it's interesting that they have not emerged as anti-Apple memes in general, regardless of their validity.
I'd have expected to see more 'OMG steve jobs makes the brains for cruise missiles and steals our culture with copyright extensions' stuff around. Surely those caused Apple to become 'finally evil' to these people?
The iPhone SDK issues are merely disappointing in comparison. You don't see two year old blog posts from the same group of people flaming Apple for not providing a wireless device of any kind for them to develop on, which is surely a bigger injustice by their logic. Where were these people when I wanted some apps for my RAZR?
I think the Venn diagram of people who are affected by Apple's iPhone development policies, and the group of people who complain about them on the internet has a very small intersection, and if you add the group of people who can actually code, you could probably buy the lot of them a round of drinks for twenty bucks.
Personally, as a veteran of the war of mendacity against common sense that is SOAP, I support anything that gets Dave Winer upset.
And those support contracts cost money, just like Sun/MS support contracts. And as soon as you start relying on software that isn't in their distro, you rapidly run into uncharted territory. The Linux meme of 'you can get support', is, I think, promoted mostly by people who haven't worked on critical IT systems, or have done so without understanding their responsibility.
That's not to say Sun's engineering is better than OSS (after all, we got their compiler to segfault as well as gcc, and my BSD/Apache shared hosting has had better uptime than my landline and TV for the last few years, and I'm sure many people want to set fire to the source code for NFS). Linux and other OSS provide the bulk of features that most people use. And you're probably better off with an unsupported apache server than some of the hideous commercial webservers that used to be around.
The bottom line is Sun charges a lot of money to mitigate somewhat nebulous risks that are hard to understand and communicate, and their OS has no killer features. They have also mastered the art of alienating potential enthusiasts. All of which put them on shaky ground. It is a shame, because platform diversity is one of the best defences of the internet as a whole.
(If you have access to dtrace, learn it. Understanding what it does and being able to use it will make you a better and probably richer developer).
Linux: Seg-fault in the gcc toolchain. After casting about for several days, we couldn't even find someone willing to take our money to fix it. Digging into the code (ld), it's so cryptic it may as well be written in undocumented assembler. Responses from mailing lists and forums: "Go back to Windows" "Restructure your project to avoid that problem" "Why are you complaining, fix it yourself, it's open source" etc. We couldn't submit a test case, because it would have required making public a lot of code containing trade secrets.
Solaris: Seg-fault in the Solaris compiler toolchain. We called Sun, and were talking directly to dev tools engineers within minutes. They put the case on 24 hour support and had a patch for us to test a day later. We could submit a reproducible case because Sun accepted the code under NDA.
Not the kind of thing that shows up in feature bullet point comparisons, but when you have 30 developers held up on one side and the clients need the code to calculate their bid for an eleven-figure project (as in this case), it makes a difference.
In other words, Sun is at a disadvantage, since one of their main selling points requires an understanding of IT risks that most people, unfortunately, do not have. IT guys may think linux is 'cheaper' but they don't have their end-users' acute desire to minimise the already-remote chances of some random problem costing them millions in commission. Edit - it is also an unfortunate reality that being able to pin the problem on Sun (or Microsoft, etc) can save your career in a situation like this. There's no-one to blame if you are using open source and it goes wrong. The buck stops with you not just for your code, but for the code of any free tools you are using. I wish that wasn't how it worked, but there it is.
Plus, if you stay 'on piste' doing stuff that has been proven to work (you could hardly argue against Linux + apache for example), you have a relatively small chance of stepping on these engineering landmines.
You have to do exceptionally well to receive the grand salaries and bonuses, as these are heavily skewed towards the minority of top-ranked employees. Plus, for every 'master of the universe' there are 10 people in compliance, legal, audit, helpdesk, facilities, hr, IT, back office, etc slaving away.
Going into wall st is an aggressive career choice.
Anecdotes are not data, but let me tell you - by any measure of personality types I have ever seen, hackers and painters are as close to different species as you can get that can still produce offspring. 'Painters' thought processes and modes of creativity are so alien to those of a 'hacker' that I have no idea how the world does not descend into chaos with so many of those types populating it. I say this after spending many endless days in the company of 'painters' (especially if you include the tutors, many of whom had painting careers).
In fact the experience was shaking enough to make me reconsider my once strongly-held belief in universal suffrage. I gave it a year of full time effort and then threw in the towel. Of course, I am assuming that 'painting students' don't change dramatically by the time they become 'painters'.
Also, regarding the marvellous statement about spending all day with women who aren't wearing any pants - I'll leave what that en'tails' every 28 days up to you to figure out - if that doesn't get through to you then let's just say the novelty wears off.
Paul, if you are reading this, your thesis is bollocks. Thanks for nothing.
It is safer but less effective than good old fashioned amphetamine for actually getting stuff done.
If you're just a regular person trying to live a semblance of a balanced lifestyle (for this purpose I will include working a regular 8-to-6 job) the biggest effect of provigil is likely to be to make you say 'so what?'
If you are used to the caffeine-shakes and twitches that come at the rough end of an all-nighter, Provigil can take that away to some extent. The psychological price you pay for doing this too often is unknown, though.
Having said that, it is useful to get you out of a jam if you stay up partying all night and need to drag yourself to work the next morning.
And best of all, if you are in the UK, the NHS pays for it all. In other countries you often have to pay up to several USD per pill and it can take up to 4 pills to be effective.
Edit: Based on my experience, I would consider use of Provigil during a true work crunch or crisis that can only be solved by a burst of long work hours. However, if your masters get used to your performance at that level under those conditions, you might learn more about the expression 'burning the candle at both ends' than you want to know.