dysamoria

As a former IT support person of over 15 years who now refuses to use Windows (and almost refuses to support friends & family using it), these results aren’t remotely surprising to me.

One of my “favorite” pastimes was watching a room full of identical PCs, with identical hardware & identical drive images, boot up at entirely inconsistent speeds, showing entirely different behaviors every time we started up the room. I’d start machines a pair at a time just to showcase this voodoo.

And that’s one of the harmless observations. I HATE supporting PCs and Windows.

“He didn't reveal how much Apple spent to develop those apps—millions of dollars on top of the opportunity cost of investing the software expertise of teams of the best people Apple could find.“

What does this pile of words really mean? Where is your citation of source on “millions of dollars”?

Your articles could be excellent computer history educations if they weren’t blown up in size by verbosity, attempted cleverness, and Apple worship. The bare facts would do nicely.

Nothing to argue against in there, aside from the length and the compulsion to do free marketing for the company who’s products are the core news topic of this site.

One thing that is absent from the article is the statement of fact about dominant-positioned companies becoming complacent ALSO includes Apple. Apple was complacent and slow to advance Classic Mac OS, which handed the win to Microsoft (it wasn’t just their anticompetitive business practices).

Once again, Apple is behaving the same way: several products are priced continuously higher without an actual value proposition to match, some products that were staples of consumer satisfaction are gutted or dropped (iWork was gutted, Aperture and AirPort discontinued, and I’d offer the argument that iPhone’s usability was gutted at iOS 7’s GUI reskin, but the majority of Apple fanatics would rather support anti-intellectualism and slam GUI design specialists as “arrogant know it alls” than accept that there’s actual science to GUI design).

Some products are having their market potential reduced to a tiny fraction of their original scope by being priced into the realm of impossible access for most of the customers who used to buy them (Mac Pro). The iPhone isn’t far behind. Aiming for luxury sales is self destructive when luxury is far more fad driven than value driven. 

Worst of all is the complacency with iOS releases, where pushing out questionable-value new bullet-point features is prioritized over fixing existing bugs (while introducing new ones). I’ve listed the bugs here on countless occasions, most of which were introduced by iOS 7 and still not fixed as of iOS 12 (I’m still waiting on 13, but I have zero trust in it “being the one”). iOS developers are continuing to be pushed around by iOS API changes at excessive speed, causing 3rd-party apps to be abandoned because it apparently costs them too much to maintain existing apps.

iOS isn’t quite as flaky as Droid variants that I still witness here and there, but it’s also not as accessible or consistent (or reliable) as it used to be. iCloud-relying cross-platform services don’t work half the time (Reminder statuses are never synched any more between my devices, and Universal Clipboard has not worked for me beyond the first few months of the feature being extant).

Compared to when iPhone won its dominance via being the superior product, it has lost considerable ground in these areas, and Apple seem utterly unaware or to not care at all (as to be expected under an MBA-type leadership, focusing on Wall Street, rather than excellence). iPhones aren’t superior any more; they’re simply the less irritating choice compared to the competition.

Mac OS isn’t exactly doing brilliantly either. Each release causes regressions in daily functionality (I see this with Finder and Quicklook all the time, as well as basic performance decreases). The last time it was properly optimized was Snow Leopard, which was really just a positive side-effect of optimizing the core OS to run on the then-new (and extremely constrained hardware) iPhone. That needs to be done again, on all of Apple’s now fragmented platforms.

The biggest threat to any dominant company is its own success.

This matters not at all to me because Apple has decided I’m no longer part of the market for their workstations.

As a side note, since I seem to have jump-started this thread into talking about gaming, I ideally would like to stop using PCs entirely. At this point, I only have a PC (an old one) for games. I’m not a hard-core gamer, but I would like to have some fun with games published after 2008! I hate Windows with a passion, and I hate the voodoo of PC builds and troubleshooting.

I did networked 3D rendering across multiple machines, years back, including a MacBook Pro, and I played most of Half-Life 2 on a MacBook Pro, but I gave up doing anything other than music on my Macs after the thermals caused a MacBook Pro to die. I’ve waited since before the 2013 Mac Pro for an Apple machine that I could use for desktop-level gaming in Windows, while doing everything else in Mac OS. The only reason I didn’t buy the 2013 Mac Pro was Apple’s refusal to sell a retina-class display of their own making. I kept waiting. I really REALLY never want to do a PC again. However, in 2019, Apple announced that they’re kicking me (and many others) out of their Mac Pro market by pricing it at TWICE as much as the last model.

There’s no other machine from Apple that will serve this function, since the rest of Apple’s computers are too compact to run at 100% for extended periods of time. I also have no interest in the treadmill of replacing a machine every three years in order to pretend thermal stress isn’t an issue with the rest of Apple’s expensive computers. It’s really weird that Apple has no mid-range workstation; from Apple, it’s either too little or too much. This is a mistake. Verbose editorials that prop up Apple’s all-seeing and all-knowing godliness wont change facts.