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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

A bit offtopic but I am very disappointed only Apple seems to have a clear plan, and makes continuous progress in careful iterations.

I quit Apple precisely when the iPhone 1 was released due to ideological reasons, as I realised the whole ecosystem would become a walled garden. But I concede they have good products.

I was looking forward to the new Pixel and Pixel XL. Google devices are the only ones that have a sane code/update policy within Android, and thus allow me to run Copperhead OS (which is the only free mobile OS I find realistic to run). However, they are insanely expensive, which IMHO risks making Copperhead a really niche option.

Samsung makes decent hardware, Note fiasco aside, but their Android mods are a joke. Same for most Androids. Jolla is stuck. And fringe options like Pyra are cool but inconvenient on a daily basis...

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"I quit Apple precisely when the iPhone 1 was released..."

Just so I understand, since the iPhone was the first phone Apple made, are you saying you stopped using their PCs (and music players?) because they'd made a phone? If you were happy with their other products up to that point, how does the phone change the grand scheme of things? I'd want to hear what your ideology is.

I expected iPhone to be like Newton. But it ended up being a walled garden. I realised trading a bit of my freedom for convenient user interfaces was not a good plan in the long run, so I gave up on Mac and went back to Linux.

I thought Macs would become less open and less important for Apple in the future, with their marked shift to mobile.

I think it was the right decision. Almost a decade later, Macs still lack components I think are key for a developer. For example, they don't ship with a package manager.

I understand Apple's focus on mobile, since that's what brings most earnings, but as a developer freedom is very important to me. Not just from an ideological point of view. Also for convenience reasons. E.g., I cannot imagine going back to floating window managers. Getting a tiling one running on Mac is a bit of a hack. I prefer Arch, Nix and friends.

For example, they don't ship with a package manager.

Strictly speaking they are. Of course, it doesn't help that they put most of the system in one package :) (com.apple.pkg.Essentials).

At any rate, Homebrew and MacPorts are only five minutes away. Even after 22 years of experience with various Linux distributions, I still prefer Homebrew as my package manager. (Mostly because adding your own custom formulae is so easy and new packages are in more quickly than in e.g. Debian.)

I'm glad they don't ship with a package manager. Home brew fills that need for me.

> I quit Apple precisely when the iPhone 1 was released due to ideological reasons, as I realised the whole ecosystem would become a walled garden.

And yet the Mac really hasn't. So why quit Apple?

Probably for the same reasons my current company is migrating away from anything Microsoft. Given the past actions, one just doesn't know what the pricing will be in future, and it makes sense to spend money to move to Linux now, instead in x years under deadlines.

I realize this is unrelated to the main topic, but it illustrates human foresight.

The principal problem with abandoning Apple at this point being that you can't get developer grade desktop hardware anywhere outside Apple at a reasonable price.

And if Apple ever goes back to making new laptops, those will probably be head and shoulders better than the competition at the same price, too. We don't know for certain, of course, since it's been two years since Apple has made new MacBook Pros with more than cosmetic adjustments and they may never make new ones ever again. None have been announced, anyway. The price of the two year old version, of course, is the same as it was on original release.

But there's no matching quality and features of the retina iMac for creative work, including software development, even at double or triple the price.

That reads like a comment on an Apple fansite.

1. For the same price as an iMac, you can buy a 4k display and way, way more powerful CPU, graphics and storage.

2. The superiority of the MacBook Pro is a myth, now more than ever. There are plenty of laptops today with much higher resolution and better color reproduction, and of course, Skylakes and recent GPUs. Dell XPS, Precisions, Surface Books, high-end Thinkpads, ASUS models etc etc.

The missing piece in other laptops, as always, is not raw specs, but build quality, and things like a great trackpad. No one else seems to be able to nail trackpads. I really wish I could buy a different brand of laptop, but I've been spoiled by the MBP's trackpad.

I had the same feeling for years until they started making battery and memory and harddisk changes impossible. I got the chance to buy 10 second hand x220s with a bunch of unused 6 and 9 cell batteries. They give me the same feeling as you have about the quality, I run 15+ hours on them with the 9 cell, they are very cheap (I paid $80 per piece), they have excellent keyboards, they perform well for all I need them for including the latest webgl demos I have seen and, something unexpected, I cannot do without the trackpoint anymore. What a waste of muscle movement the trackpad is once you get used to the trackpoint. All a matter of taste but it also runs well enough as hackintosh and, what I like better, I can do iOS dev using OSX on qemu including installs on iOS.

Edit: but agreed, if you need a trackpad, the mb(p) beats all. The x220 trackpad is a piece of garbage and I disabled it right away.

Yeah, used to have Thinkpads, and used the track point exclusively. I find it a bit slower to use, but that might just be my lack of skill with them. If someone brought back the trackball, though... :-)

Totally agree. I decided to get adventurous a while back on my last laptop upgrade and went with a Dell XPS 13. It had so much potential, specs were great and it felt sold but at the end of the day it won't run macOS and win10 was just not a great dev experience. Switched back to a Macbook pro after less than a month when the screen died on the XPS and it took Dell about a month to fix it.

You don't get an XPS. Or any consumer/creative/performance/whatthefever oriented laptops Dell and HP may suddenly decide to offer because of some idiotic marketing decision. Their business workstations is where it's at. Always been solid on all fronts (except design, I guess, but that's subjective).

Their business workstations... which cost as much or more than a truly comparable Mac.

This. The trackpad is just about the only thing keeping me on apple hardware these days, but it's a much bigger deal to me than I'd have ever expected. It seems they are the only company that can figure out how make a mobile pointing device that doesn't make me want to throw the computer at a wall.

MS nailed it with the Surface Book btw.

Which is more expensive than a MacBook Pro...

> The principal problem with abandoning Apple at this point being that you can't get developer grade desktop hardware anywhere outside Apple at a reasonable price.

HP and Dell have all that.

I will concede the point about laptops but saying that

> you can't get developer grade desktop hardware anywhere outside Apple at a reasonable price.

is just false.

> Given the past actions, one just doesn't know what the pricing will be in future,

There's no reason to worry that Apple will resume charging for OS X updates after so many years of giving them away and after shifting to more frequent but less substantial releases.

Probably, but his point was about that ecosystem (iPhone or all?) becoming a wallet garden, and it did become one (sounds like he was referring to the phone one)

None of Apple's platforms became a walled garden. iOS is more open than it was at first release when there was no SDK and the only sanctioned development method was web apps. OS X/macOS has acquired an optional walled garden app store but has otherwise only become more restricted for security reasons, and those restrictions can be disabled by the user.

None of the predictions of doom have come to pass. Users have come to accept new mobile computing platforms that are less open than the PC platform, but there is no "whole ecosystem" that has transitioned to being a walled garden.

Wait, doesn't the newest version of OS X remove the option to install applications that aren't from App Store or Certified developers?

You can still enable the option through console, but the UI option is gone.

I didn't realize it, but you're right, they removed the UI option. And that's probably a good idea, because anybody who isn't capable of turning that on with the Terminal probably shouldn't. It's a good bit of security. And you don't even need to change that option to run non-signed apps anyway, since you can always right-click the app and select Open and it will allow you (after a warning) to launch it anyway even though it is unsigned (and IIRC it only warns you for quarantined apps, so once you've launched it this way you can launch it normally afterwards).

I wish there would be more distinction between hardware and software. Just buy an iPhone and install Winedows 10 or buy a S7 and install Sailfish.

Why is this so hard to do? Can't a desktop OS compile the right rom and install it via USB?

Edit: I understand this is a driver issue, but it seems there isn't that much difference in hardware in the mobile world.

>Edit: I understand this is a driver issue, but it seems there isn't that much difference in hardware in the mobile world.

There are huge differences in the hardware. Go to XDA and try to build a rom for an android device. Bluetooth, wifi, GPS, HAL sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, display drivers, audio hardware, NFC sensor can all have significant differences that need to be sussed out. Most significant of all- the camera.

There is no technical difficulty. The only difficulty here is to find business plan that is not negatively affected by this feature.

Maintaining a consistent level of quality is the main technical difficulty, see: Android

Arguably the phones with open bootloader have the best Android experience out there (Nexus line), so I'm not sure if Android here is the best counterargument.

They have an open boot loader because Google sells them, and they have the best Android experience for the same reason. The open boot loader doesn't enable that experience.

In fact, I think that somewhat proves my point, it's no coincidence the hardware Google has the most influence over has the best experience.

And it's no coincidence they gave up on just influencing the phones and went as far as manufacturing a phone with the Pixel, all in chase of the perfect experience

Wouldn't it be a UX nightmare?

Is UX a nightmare on desktop right now? Nearly all desktop/laptop computers can have their OS changed to different one. There is technically nothing stopping mobiles form working in the same way.

> There is technically nothing stopping mobiles form working in the same way.

What about power consumption issues? If you load up Windows on a Mac laptop the battery drain rate is doubled. That's a pretty big user experience issue IMHO.

I wouldn't call this a UX nightmare. This is certainly an issue. On the other hand, as in case of today's laptops, users themselves decide to switch the OS and it's their responsibility in this scenario.

Does anybody really care that much about operating systems any more? The big three on the desktop - Windows, macOS, and Linux - are all good enough.

What matters (and I think this has always been true) are the applications. When friends ask for my opinion on what they should get, I almost always recommend buying from Apple (gamers probably want Windows). The two big reasons are (1) they can (legally) run more software than anything else and (2) you can walk into a store for support that's actually pretty good.

>I wish there would be more distinction between hardware and software. Just buy an iPhone and install Winedows 10 or buy a S7 and install Sailfish.

That would be the antithesis of what makes the iPhone good though -- the hardware/software limited fragmentation + lock-step iterations.

But why not have the freedom to use iOS on the iPhone because you think it works best that way?

A lot of people install Ubuntu on Macbooks for that reason. But right now it's very hard to install a different OS on your phone.

Do you mean MacBook Air or older MacBook Pro? Ubuntu or other Linux does not work on MacBook. There is no driver for track pad and keyboard.

> Google devices are the only ones that have a sane code/update policy within Android

They have 2 years update policy, the same as any other Android device. They sign it by contract.

They have 2 years update policy, the same as any other Android device.

What do you mean? There are many Android devices that never receive an update at all.

I think parent means updating the device with a new one, when the subscription contract renews every 2 years.

Which is something else entirely.

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