robbyx

badmonk said:

As an Apple investor, high-priest and fan-boy, I am concerned.  To make high quality media requires courage and a willness to push the envelope.

Disney is the lone-exception to this rule, but their craft is heavily scripted, produced and massaged over long periods of time.  That sounds like Apple but it is much much more difficult to do durable sanitized media well.

I think everyone here saying “it works for Disney” doesn’t know anything about Disney. They release tons of content with violence and nudity under their other brands. Touchstone Pictures. Dimension Film, which releases an endless stream of slasher movies, was owned by Disney until recently. Their old Hollywood Pictures brand released numerous violent horror and action films. They used to own Miramax. Etc. 

Disney is one of the biggest distributors of violent content and nudity in film. 

I'm not against Apple producing original content, but I don't think it's going to turn into a major revenue stream for them.  I worry the quest for content is a fool's errand.  For years I've said they should buy Nintendo and I still think that would be the best acquisition they could make.  The lion's share of App Store revenue is video games and IAP associated with video games.  Nintendo is profitable, has numerous well-established and beloved global franchises, and does good work when it comes to hardware and game controllers.  I hope the original content play works out for Apple, but I think getting serious about gaming would be a much smarter move.

I’m not a fan of the Watch UI and this just seems way too cluttered and fiddley. 

SpamSandwich said:

macplusplus said:

SpamSandwich said:

Used FileMaker for years until they screwed our business by failing to provide adequate database migration tools for previous versions of FileMaker. Finally dumped them in favor of a less involved solution.

Your databases were wrongly designed.

Thanks for the help, jackass.

I've been working with Filemaker since version 2 and have never had any serious issues moving from one version to the next.  The file format changed in version 7, when they introduced the ability to have multiple tables in a single file, then again in version 11.  If you waited a very long time to update your files, you might have run into problems.  I can't remember the exact timeline, but they eventually dropped support for pre-7 files, but I'm pretty sure that came in version 11 or 12.  So yes, if you were running Filemaker 5 and tried to upgrade your files to Filemaker 13, you were out of luck.  But I think it's completely wrong to say that Filemaker failed to provide adequate migration tools.  They supported pre-7 files for a very long time.

slurpy said:

AutigerMark said:

It is still a stupid credit card, with 15%+ interest rates!  For god’s sake don’t carry a balance.

I love Apple products, but this is just another way to make it even easier to give them your money ߘ顠 Don’t get let them reel you in.

https://youtu.be/e874AUNCJo0

Oh, and will patiently wait for your elaboration on how Apple makes money with this credit card. 

Does that mean you think Apple is getting into the credit card business to NOT make money?  I mean, come on, of course they’re making money on this card.  None of us knows how. They make money on every Apple Pay transaction, so it stands to reason they’re getting a chunk of each card transaction’s swipe fee, or something like that.

Between getting into the credit card business, that awful “if you subscribed to each of these separately, you’d pay over $8000, but with Apple News+, you get it all for $9.99” infomercial sales pitch, and a confusing product line, things are starting to look more and more like 1995 again. 

neutrino23 said:

radarthekat said:

There’s another factor not covered in this article, and that’s security and privacy.  I’d love to see an article delving into those aspects.  

My concern as well. I don’t shop Amazon at all, partly for privacy concerns. I do use Apple Pay and very much appreciate the security of it. Every year or two we’ve had our credit card compromised. It doesn’t cost anything but it is a royal PITA because of all the auto-payments we have tied to the card. 

My card gets compromised at least once a year.  I've never had to pay for anything.  No big deal.  I think a lot of people get a bit histrionic when it comes to "security and privacy" quite honestly.  Changing auto-payments is a royal PITA, I do agree, so I got a second card and use it exclusively for everything auto-pay.  It never leaves the house and has never been compromised.

StrangeDays said:

...while I’m aware Apple has changed its mind on things before, they’ve spoken to this topic specifically and so many times that I have no reason to doubt them.

That's because they are not merging the two operating systems.  They are building a new desktop iOS variant that will one day take macOS's place.  That's how I see it.  So they aren't exactly lying.  Apple has always been good at wordplay.  

Marzipan ipad apps running on Mac still have a more general UI and I don’t see them replacing the window metaphor on macOS. 

Yet.  Marzipan is brand new.  It's impossible to say what Marzipan apps will look like, much less be capable of, in a few years.  Plus iOS supports multiple windows, just not the overlapping, drag them around the screen metaphor used on the desktop today.

I think the upcoming Mac Pro is the last big hurrah for today's macOS and Intel-based Macs.  I think macOS XI is going to be when we see ARM "Macs" running iOS with a macOS-style desktop interface.  I'm thinking five years, give or take.  That's enough time to fully bake Marzipan and get the majority of developers on board.  Once iOS and macOS apps all use UIKit, the guts of the operating system become far less important.

matrix077 said:

ttollerton said:

This really is a rather dramatic and head scratching conflict.  At virtually every media event, Cook almost breaks into tears as he dramatically professes Apple’s core values around the right to privacy.  He goes so far as to fight the US government to access someone’s personal device.  

And yet, in China, a communist nation that oppresses individual rights, including privacy, Cook is more than willing to sway to the will of the oppressive government.  

I like Apple products, but I don’t want to hear about Apple’s values.   If they’re not universally applied, they’re not values.  They’re sales tactics.

So you propose Apple to get out of China market? How does that benefit Chinese consumers?

Who cares if it benefits the Chinese consumer?  Why does that even matter?  If you have values and principles, you live them. You don’t bend them to make a buck.  Like @ttollerton said, values are absolute.  If you don’t apply them universally, they aren’t values. 

MacPro said:

robbyx said:

genovelle said:

wood1208 said:

I doubt it. If Apple wants to make a sizable dent and expand MAC user base, eco-system than keep expanding bottom user base. Offer GoTo systems for bottom huge user base and rest to professionals,enterprises,

Sizable market share doesn’t make any money. The companies who are selling those computers are not making profit on them. Profit means you can continue to develop new things while others suffer or die. 

On the other hand, you need marketshare to attract third party developers, something Apple has done quite well on iOS, but never particularly well on macOS.  The Mac is withering on the vine at Apple anyway. They’re going to keep it alive until iOS can replace it, but it’s clear that computers, at least in the traditional desktop sense of the word, haven’t been Apple’s passion for a while now.

There are quite a few Macs out there and unlike the buyers of low-end PCs, they do have the ability to buy lots of stuff.  Don't get me wrong there are great high-end PCs out there from the likes of Dell but the vast majority are low-end crap.

When I read comments like this, I just sort of marvel at how Apple fans have changed over the years.  It never used to be about which company was the most profitable or which users did or did not have the means to buy things (in other words, naked classism).  It was always about which platform was better.

Today Apple fans routinely point out how Apple takes the lion's share of profit in a market or how buyers of low-end, non-Apple products are cheap and don't spend any money, or can't (because they are poor and some cheap low-end Android or crap PC is the best they can do).  And we wonder why so many non-Apple fans think so poorly of Apple fans...

When it comes to developer support, the reason we don't see more developers embrace the Mac is marketshare.  Mac marketshare has more or less climbed as high as it's going to climb as long as Apple stays the course.  Apple might very well be the fourth or fifth largest computer manufacturer, but when it comes to total marketshare, they are a drop in the bucket compared to Windows.  So most developers don't care - and never will care - about the Mac.

While Apple massively gouges its customers with a 40% profit margin, something Apple fans on these forums routinely celebrate (which I've always found very strange considering that we're the ones being gouged!), Dell and others sell you better hardware at sometimes half the price.  There's a thriving third party software market for Windows.  Those low-end PC customers must be buying lots of third party software, contrary to your suggestion, or the vast majority of developers wouldn't be supporting Windows.  If all the money was in Mac development, we'd be spoiled for choice in the Mac world.  Unfortunately, the opposite is true.  So I think you're pretty much flat wrong that low-end PCs don't translate into third party software sales.

With a ~40% profit margin and more cash in the bank than most governments, Apple could compete on price if they wanted to.  Like I said earlier, and have said many times before, I don't believe that Apple is particularly invested in the Mac these days.  Apple is clearly much more enthusiastic about iOS than macOS.  If Apple really wanted to grow Mac marketshare, there are many approaches it could take.  Instead, the Mac withers on the vine, with the occasional underwhelming, and increasingly overpriced, update for each model.  

cgWerks said:

chasm said:

DAalseth said:

Sadly nothing about mouse support on the iPad. I've come around to liking the idea of attaching an iPad to an external monitor and using a mouse.

I don't see that happening, but having said that if you were running a VPN to a Mac or Windows machine, in that circumstance it would be cool to plug a USB-C mouse into your iPad Pro for ease of environment navigation.

Well, or just using a text editor/word processor, or many other things where you have it setup in a 'laptop' like configuration. Text selection and navigation is a pain on iOS, especially when you're using a real keyboard. And, hitting touch targets when the iPad is standing up in front of you is ergonomically difficult. I actually don't see the iPad succeeding as a laptop replacement without some kind of trackpad/mouse input.

The iPad “mouse” already exists. It’s called the Apple Pencil.  I don’t see Apple adding a mouse and a cursor to the iPad. The iPhone and iPad are different from the traditional mouse-driven GUI because we actually touch the physical device. That’s the whole point.  It’s more “personal”. Apple hasn’t been this focused on touch to now dirty up the iPad screen with a cursor. The Pencil is the new mouse. It allows for more precision without breaking the touch paradigm. You still touch the screen, whether it’s with your finger or the Pencil.