Invest in R&D you fools! Make a laptop to appease power users, many of whom work for you! Capture our imagination instead of kowtowing to mainstream desire for each product design!
Apple was great because they had a unified vision for computing and they did the entire tech stack "correctly". Time machines were never going to be more than a round off error on the balance sheet, but they did it because it was the correct thing to do. An apple laptop connected to an LG or Dell monitor looks and feels wrong, regardless of how technically impressive the monitor is, because LG and Dell don't have the design sensibilities that apple has.
I hope Apple rediscovers and recovers that lebensphilosophie.
The majority of professional devs use apple laptops because they are a great selection of tools and nice ui with unix tools. They can't build off that?
Back in the day, a company with a money-printing machine like the iPhone, e.g. Ma Bell with telephone service, would create a world-class R&D division inventing all sorts of stuff with no regard for short-term profit. Google X may have aspired to this at some point, but they seem to have backed off. Sadly, the modern company has eliminated this drag on quarterly profits.
And somehow they only sold $6B in Apple Watches it's first year, not only making it the most successful watch launch in history but the best selling watch in the world by revenues.
Imagine if they'd only invest more!
Q1/17: 80M iphones, 10M+ ipads, 5M Macs. And margins on phones and pads are higher than on PCs too.
But again, Apple's Mac sales are over $25B a year,and it's profit margins on those sales are far higher (15% vs. 2-3%) than the other PC makers. It will never be as big as iPhone or iPad, but it's still one of the largest businesses in the entire world (it would just miss the Fortune 100 list on its own). It's sad they aren't doing a better job of updating the hardware, but so far it hasn't shown up in their sales.
No they're not; they're the most profitable mobile phone manufacturer who also happens to make PC's.
I do all my development in a Linux VM, and it's definitely a wide decision, seeing how many hours my colleagues waste setting up Postgres or Docker or even just Golang on their Macs. (Before you ask, I cannot boot into Linux directly because company policy.)
Even so, a Mac is closer to Linux than windows is, it's a full unix under the hood after all.
Having the same environment on my workstation as on my servers always appealed to me (since my SGI days, when I would develop stuff on an indy and deploy on a challenge, basically a headless indy).
But I can't imagine using OS/X as a server environment and windows seems just wrong as a server.
So that leaves me with Linux, but I don't mind and I like the whole concept of open-source software.
Well, that's the issue. If you're used to a certain way things work, one week is not enough time to get used to another workflow. Even when you switch from google docs to microsoft office, or vice versa, you'll be very frustrated and confused for a lot longer than a week.
I have the same exact reaction to you when using windows. When I try to use a program on my high res display I can barely read the text, when I zoom in and increase the text size the entire program is distorted. The terminal is a backwards windows shell that is useless for any development. There is no ssh installed by default, swiping the trackpad is horrible and generally battery does not last longer than 3 hours.
Also I have to pay for things I never wanted such as touch screens that only encourage people to comes and put finger prints on my display.
With apple I can install homebrew and via the terminal just install whichever packages I need for development with sane defaults. I have no had to mess with environment variables once, something I painfully remember from windows.
I would hate my life if I had to develop on windows honestly
Sorry, power users are very small # of users. Making a laptop to appease power users will do very little to the bottom line.
We are moving to Chromebooks next year and I fully expect to teach every student how to build a simple app, on the device, and shared with their friends in the first 30 minutes. You simply cannot do that on iOS.
Oh, for fuck's sake. Have you even used the 2016 MBPs, at all? What's your current machine, and what do you run on it?
Ever since the launch of the new MBPs, it has become sort of a meme to rag on them, and it's almost always by people who haven't even used one. Nobody seems to be able to really come up with a reason WHY they're not good. When pressed, those people just resort to inane hyperboles and grasp at flimsy straws, like "emoji keyboard" and "over 9000 dongles!" When offered the fact that the new MBPs have outsold everything else out there [0], they pooh-pooh it with "That's only because of the long delay between releases!" pff.
Other than the fact that you may need at most 1-2 extra pieces of equipment to plug in your legacy devices, the 2016 MBP can do everything your 2014 can.
I'm a power user and consider myself an inspired person who likes to build things; I have the 2016 15" MBP, and it appeases me. So your point in the original comment is invalid, unless you want to play the "I'm more of a power user than you!" game.
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-20...
So while most of us criticizing are more than happy to use and purchase a 2016 MBP - I won't speak for anyone else - but I hesitate to invest further in a product I will use daily for many years, and that has such a potential influence.