I have some hope that Framework and AMD can fix some of those issues. Would love to try out their new desktop (because it's a simpler, more tightly integrated thing) and replace my Mac mini -- then wait for Linux power management to improve.
Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient.
The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple, skeumorphic, and robust.
Right now, the whole system feels a lot less coherent and robustness has declined. IMHO, there are not so many extra features worth adding. They should focus on making all software robust and secure. Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction. Apple can afford to invest on this due to their vertical integration.
The iron law of bureaucracy happens because humans have a finite amount of time to spend doing things. Those dedicated to bureaucratic politics spend their time doing that, so they excel at that, while those dedicated to doing the work have no time for bureaucratic politics.
It's related to why companies with great marketing and fund raising but mediocre or off-the-shelf technology often win over companies with deeper and better tech that's really innovative. Innovation and polishing takes work that subtracts from the time available for fund raising and marketing.
Great insight—thanks for sharing. It strikes me that bureaucracy is inherently self-perpetuating- once established, it rewards compliance over creativity, steadily shifting the culture until innovation becomes the exception rather than the rule.
Perhaps the real challenge isn't balancing innovation and marketing—it's creating a culture that genuinely rewards bold ideas and meaningful risk-taking.
> [Bureaucracy] rewards compliance over creativity
Imho, this is the wrong takeaway from parent's point.
Bureaucracy rewards many things that are actual work and take time. (Networking, politicking, min/max'ing OKRs)
Creativity and innovation are rarely part of the list, because by definition they're less tangible and riskier.
A couple effective methods I've seen to fight the overall trend are (a) instill a culture where people succeed but processes fail (if a risky bet fails then the process goes under the spotlight, not the person) and (b) tie rewards to results that are less min/maxable (10x vs +5%).
It seems most organizations naturally become more risk-averse as they age and grow since the business becomes more well-defined over time and there is more to lose from risky ventures. The culture has to reward meaningful risk-taking even when that risk-taking results in a loss, which can cause issues when people see the guy who lost a bunch of money getting a bonus for trying (not to mention the perverse incentives it may create).
IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me if I was a top leader of Apple.
Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
App Store was a big improvement for developers when it was new, relative to the alternatives.
The things it does may not seem important today, but back then even just my bandwidth costs were a significant percentage of my shareware revenue.
ObjC with manual reference counting wasn't much fun either; while we can blame Apple for choosing ObjC in the first place, they definitely improved things.
This is a ret-con. If you - as a user - were philosophically and inherently against the App Store, then it may seem that way, I guess?
The reality is that there was a long period of time where Apple built up lots of goodwill with a developer ecosystem that exceeded by many orders of magnitude the pre-iPhone OS X indie Mac developer scene.
There were many, many developers that hadn’t even touched a Mac before the iPhone came out, and were happy with Apple, and now are certainly not.
Another way to see it is that people who programmed for Mac OS already had reasons to be annoyed by Apple (e.g. 64bit Carbon). The iPhone let it get new people, who eventually found out why the pre-iPhone scene felt that way.
I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases then developers would hold their nose and make apps for it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read: cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.
I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front of you.
Unfortunately:
1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games.
2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest headsets for anything important for telepresence (higher resolution isn't always important, but can be sometimes).
Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot, and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because Apple doesn't even have the trademark.
3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your phone, they can't justify a €4k headset — someone would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to justify it.
I think the best argument is to remind Apple that they aren't selling the OS anymore, so they don't need a new version every year. And that macOS features is not what is pushing Mac sales. People aren't buying the M series machines because of the new macOS version, they are buying it because of the hardware. The M series chips are impressive and provide some great benefits that you can't get elsewhere.
And that hardware needs to be coupled with solid software to hook and keep people on this computer. So they can take more time to create more compelling upgrades and sand off more edges.
I think they need to desync all their OS's and focus on providing better releases. There really is no benefit to spending the day updating your Mac, phone, tablet, appletv, and HomePod. Especially when there are no good reasons to update. I feel like Apple became far to addicting to habit and routine that it's become more important to keep that than deliver product. Apple Intelligence is a good example of that.
> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities?
Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else but the decline of their software quality. We can already see that with the recent debacle which caused executive shuffling at the top of the company.
That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware.
"Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out.
It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless.
TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
A few months ago, for quite a few years, Siri (in the car) would respond correctly to "Play playlist <playlist name>". Now it interprets that as of about two months ago that it should play some songs of the genre (I have a playlist named "modern").
> I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
I have almost the opposite problem this year. I tell the HomePod to turn the office lights on, it sometimes interprets this as a request to play music even though my library is actually empty, and the response is therefore to tell me that rather than turn on the lights.
Back in the pandemic, same problem with Alexa. Except it was in the kichen, so it said (the German equivalent of) "I can't find 'Kitchen' in your Spotify playlist" even though we didn't even have Spotify.
I’m pretty sure the touch target only covers the text label. Tap anywhere other than the text labels and it does nothing but close the menu. Really bizarre.
Apple is addicted to growth. It is as big as it should be, but it acts like an early stage startup always trying to build some new flashy thing to attract the next customer.
It's not Apple, it's capitalism. "Unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell", yet for Apple (or any corporation), it's not good enough to sell 100,000,000 phones. Next year you must sell 105,000,000. And the year after 112,000,000 (not even 110 or your growth is stagnating).
So you get rid of removable batteries so customers have to toss their phones away more often, you gimp other feature, you spend more money on advertising than you did actually developing the product (read this bit several times until it sinks in how crazy it is, yet that's how we are with every major phone, every major movie, etc), and so on.
In 2016 RedLetterMedia did a breakdown of the movies that year, like top and bottom ten grossing movies. They stated that the advertising budget was the same as the production budget, unless they had knowledge of a different number.
I don't doubt that after 2020 the advertising budgets far outstripped the production budgets - multiple times; I am curious if that trend continues now, now that production isn't hamstrung by covid restrictions.
I'm sure everyone has seen this 100 times already but it really fits given modern advertising practice of every major company, especially in designing products to fit advertising plans.
There are also entire "industries" designed to shield people who want to find quality content from big 'A' advertising.
I love how he uses the word “craftsmanship”, something that he understood quite well (considering how close he was working with people like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, etc).
Today engineers have to put up a fight to do anything resembling craftsmanship.
Capitalism works this way because its customers, the investors, want it to work this way, because growth is how you get compound interest. Investors include anyone with an interest bearing bank deposit, a 401k, stocks, bonds, etc.
No growth means it would no longer be possible for an investment to appreciate.
I think of a similar thing when I see people complaining about how companies don't want to pay good wages. When you go shopping do you buy the $10 product or the $5 essentially equivalent alternative? Most people will buy the $5 one. If you do that, you're putting downward pressure on wages.
It's in your (purely economic) best interest for your wages to be high but everyone else's to be low. That's because when you're a worker you are a seller of labor, while when you're a customer you are an (indirect) buyer of labor.
Everything in economics is like this. Everything is a paradox. Everything is a feedback loop. Every transaction has two parties, and in some cases you are both parties depending on what "hat" you are wearing at the moment.
Growth isn’t necessary for high returns on equity. And it isn’t necessary for the investment to provide a return.
Equity returns ultimately come from risk premiums. (Which are small now in US equities BTW).
I’m invested in a microcap private equity fund that has returned >20-25% for years. They have high returns because they buy firms at 3-4x cashflow. You will get the high returns even with no growth. And with no increase in valuation. The returns are a function of an illiquidity premium.
With Apple explicitly, growth is expected given the valuation level. If it doesn’t grow, the share price will decline. So yes, in their case, firm is certainly under pressure to grow.
I also don’t agree with your “best interest for wages to be high and everyone else’s lower”. That is one aspect. It is more complicated. Consider Baumol Effect for starters.
I'm talking about macroeconomics, not micro. Risk premium means there is risk; not everyone gets a return at all. The entire society, as a whole, cannot experience consistent returns unless there is macroeconomic growth. If the pie is not getting bigger, someone has to be losing for someone else to gain.
Things like retirement, 401ks, etc., are society-wide institutions subject to macroeconomic rules.
The actual argument would be people voting with their wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but this something impossible at least in the USA due to these bullshit "blue bubbles"
For most of the people here they don't. In popular culture and especially among teens and non-technical twenty-somethings there's this absurd "eww green text!" thing. A blue bubble is a status symbol for some reason, even though there's lots of Android phones that cost as much as iPhones.
At this point this is not an argument anymore, it’s just a thought terminating cliche.
Expecting users to change their daily habits in order to marginally improve the operating system of a trillion dollar company feels naive and a bit disrespectful to people who actually use these machines for work.
Even developers… the vast majority of developers ignored Apple for decades (and Apple was also hostile) and it managed to grow despite that.
Might as well ask people to contribute to Gnome or whatever so in the future everyone can go somewhere better. Feels way more feasible.
But the opposite is assuming that Apple has a "responsibility" towards its existing users and has to acknowledge their expectations from them.
A sentiment which famously led Steve Jobs to respond that he doesn't understand this, because "people pay us to make that decision for them" and "If people like our products they will buy them; if they don't, they won't" [0]
So according to Steve Jobs himself, the only Apple-acknowledged way to disagree with Apple is to NOT buy their products, and by extend into the services-world of today it means STOP USING their products.
Now Steve Jobs doesn't officially run this company anymore, but I don't see any indication that this philosophy has changed in any way.
I don't think that's the opposite. The opposite is admitting that people have more than one reason to choose computers, and "voting with your wallet" only works for easily replaceable items, like groceries, clothing, etc.
Most people are not going to migrate to Android, Windows, Linux or whatever else just to make macOS marginally better.
And it's fine: marginal quality improvements of a product are not the "responsibility" of consumers.
I don't think you're taking their argument in good faith. At least my read on what's being said here is that the psyops lock-in effects that Apple uses are too strong.
It's not just "blue bubbles," but "blue bubbles" seems like a good shorthand to me. It's also things like Hand-off, or Universal Control, or getting Messages on both iPhone and Mac seamlessly, or being on the same WiFi network allowing your iPhone/Watch to work as a tv remote for the Apple TV even if you're just visiting a friend. Features that any platform can and does enable, but that do to Apples vertical can work seamlessly out of the box, across all the product lines, while securing network access in the ways most users will want, creating a continuous buy-in loop wherein the more Apple products you buy, the more incentive there is to buy exclusively Apple.
And it's a collective "you." If your entire family uses exclusively Apple products, then you'll be the only person who can't easily use eg the Apple TV in the living room, or the person "messing up" the group chats with "User reacted with Emoji Heart to [3 paragraph text message]," or the one trying to decide between competing network KVM software platforms so that you can use your tablet when your 12-yo can just set their tablet next to their laptop and get a second screen without any setup. Nevermind that these are all social engineering techniques that only exist BECAUSE Apple chose not to play nice with others, they still socially reinforce a deeper commitment to Apple products with each additional Apple product in the ecosystem.
I say this as someone "stuck in the blue bubble" with eyes open about what's going on. I'll keep picking Apple as long as they're a hardware-oriented company, because their incentives are best aligned with mine for the consumer features they are delivering (for now): consumer integration that sells hardware. It's insidious in its own way, but not like "hardware that sells eyeballs" (Google/Meta) or "business integration that sells compliance" (Microsoft).
> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities?
That their own products depend on it because they developer their products in Mac. And that the professional people they pretend they cater to depend on Macs, and steadily move away.
> Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction.
Nahh, robustness comes from the time you can spend refining the product not from some magic property of a language. That can help but just a bit. There was no Swift in Snow Leopard. Nor there is not much Rust in Linux (often none) and even less (none) in one of the most stable OS available, FreeBSD.
They should just release a new version when the product is ready and not when the marketing says to release it.
Desktops are in S3 half the day consuming ~0 power. During use, electricity costs are so much lower than hardware costs that approximately nobody cares about or even measures the former. Servers have background tasks running at idle priority all day so the power consumption is effectively constant. Laptop and phone are the only platforms where the concept of "Linux power management" makes any sense.
My Mac mini (M1) sips ~6W idle and is completely inaudible. It acts as a desktop whenever I need it to, and as a server 24/7. I only power up my NAS (WoL) for daily backups. The rest of the homelab is for fun and experiments, but mostly gone.
"Idle" x86-64 SOHO servers still eat ~30W with carefully selected parts and when correctly tuned, >60W if you just put together random junk. "Cloud" works because of economies of scale. If there's a future where people own their stuff, minimising power draw is a key step.
Does the mini PC go from zero to eleven though? Can I play BG3, Factorio, or Minecraft on the same hardware? Can I saturate a TB3 port? Transcode video? Run an LLM or text2img? Any of that while remaining responsive, having a video call?
If I already need a powerful machine for a desktop, why would I need a second one just so it can stay up 24/7 to run Miniflux or Syncthing? Less is more.
I want Mac hardware but Linux software. The other makers build quality is horrendous. Especially in the 13inch segment which is my favorite.
Using a pretty old laptop because there is no replacement right now.
The new Ryzen AI looks really interesting!
Sadly there is no Framework shop for me to look at it and they not ship to Japan..
Thinkpad line from Lenovo. Amazing build quality, and you can order them with Linux.
I have a P1 Gen 7 and it’s fantastic. It feels premium, and it’s thin, light, powerful, has good connectivity and 4K OLED touch screen. I’d take it over Mac hardware any day.
Aren't the only Thinkpads with displays in the 4k neighborhood 16-inches? The 14-inch Macbooks are 3024*1964 and have all been like that for a while. I don't know why the PC world (and Linux ready by extension) undervalues high DPI so much, because it makes it hard to consider going back.
The screen keeps me on macbooks as well (well, and the touchpad, the speakers, and the lack of fan noise).
But it is baffling how 1920x1080 (or 1200p) are still the "standard" elsewhere. If I want an X1 carbon, the best screen you can get at 14" right now is 2880x1800 (2.8k). Spec it with 32GB of RAM and it's clocking in at $2700, for a laptop that still has a worse trackpad, worse sound, and worse screen than a 14" MBP at $2399. And the Ultra7 in the thinkpad still doesn't beat the Mac, and it'll be loud with worse battery life.
There truly is nothing else out there with the same experience as an Apple Silicon MBP or Air.
So, my only options for the foreseeable future is wait for Asahi Linux, or suck it up and deal with macOS because at this rate I don't think there will ever be a laptop with the same quality (across all components) of the mac that can run Linux. The only one that came remotely close is the Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon elite, but no Linux on that.
Non-Thinkpad Lenovos have some standouts too. I'm running Debian Stable on an AMD Yoga Slim 7 from a couple of years ago and sure, it's not an Apple, but for the £800 or so I paid for it, it's a really polished machine. Loads of ports, and it's approximately performance-competitive with a Dell XPS13 from about the same time that cost literally twice as much.
The one snag I ran into was that when it was new, supporting the power modes properly needed a mainline kernel rather than the distro default. But in the grand scheme of things that's relatively trivial.
I have an M1 Macbook Pro from work and honestly I'm not tempted to get one for myself. I am tempted by the M3 and M4 beasts as AI machines, but as form factors go I'm just not sold.
The biggest issue Framework have right now is shipping. I can order a ThinkPad practically anywhere. No so with Framework - they are literally leaving money on the table from what I would assume their core segment: affluent tech savvy users trying to get off the planned obsolescence cycle.
Tell me you're from the US without telling me you're from the US.
Jokes aside, I had to wait years for Framework to finally allow shipping via a friend in Berlin. I think they ship to Sweden now—they seemed to have an unfortunate misunderstanding that they needed to produce a Swedish keyboard and translate their website before shipping here, which of course is poppycocks.
I am pretty sure that if you have reached the point that you are ordering a laptop online from a brand unknown to the general public, it means you are past the point you need the actual physical keys to match your keyboard layout on your OS settings. You could just have blank keys.
To be fair, some international keyboard layouts actually have variations of key shapes and locations. The shape of the Enter key and the cluster around it is the main example. So it's more than just the labels.
I own both ISO and ANSI keyboards on different laptops and use the same software keymap. I don't think it is such an important factor as I switch from one to another without thinking about it.
Out of curiosity, what are you basing this on? From having spoken to people who manage IT fleets, and being the person regular people ask for advice for what device to get, with the occasional exception (which Apple also had plenty of, cf. the butterfly keyboard), you get what you pay for. A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you decent and good build quality.
> A 1k-1.5k+ Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo will get you decent and good build quality.
And it still won't be on par with a $999 apple silicon air, or a MBP.
I've deployed latitudes, precisions, and thinkpads. They all still make tradeoffs that you don't have to deal with on the mac.
The X1 carbon is probably the "best" but, even with that - you are still getting a 1920x1200 screen unless you spend more than a MBP for the 2.8k display (which is still less than the 14" MBP, and costs more than an equivalent specced M4 pro). The trackpad is worse, the speakers are worse, battery life is worse, and they're loud under load.
They're all fine for a fleet where the end user isn't the purchaser, which is why they exist, but for an individual that doesn't want tradeoffs (outside of the tradeoff of having to use macOS), there's no other option on the market that comes remotely close to the mac. For someone that wants Apple silicon MBP level hardware but wants to run Linux, there are zero options.
The screen is the most egregious tradeoff though, the PC world is still adverse to HiDPI displays and even on high end models 1080p or 1200p is still the standard. I can excuse poor speakers, it is a laptop after all, if I really had to I can deal with fan noise, but I shouldn't have to spend more than a MBP to get a decent 120hz HiDPI screen with sufficient brightness and color accuracy.
At work, our Windows devs use expensive XPSs that are complete crap failing constantly, both hardware and software. As someone who used Latitudes and Precisions when these were the reliable workhorses you seem to describe, the new stuff is just outrageous. (My personal laptop is still an e6440).
My work machine is an M2 Pro MBP and except the shitty input HW (compared to the golden era of Thinkpads/Latitudes without chiclet keyboards) and MacOS being quite bad compared to Linux, it completely trounces the neighbouring Dells that constantly need repairs (mostly the USB-C ports and wireless cards failing).
Maybe if you run a fleet that's statistically true. If you're a regular person you can have incredible bad luck with specific models.
Got two "2k" Lenovos at 4 year intervals.
The first one worked fine but that model was known to have a weak hinge. Had to replace it three times.
The second one had a known problem that some units simply stop working with the internal display and the only solution is replacing the motherboard. My unit worked about a week for me. Seller refunded me instead of repairing because it was end of the line and they didn't have replacements.
Got a "2k" Asus ordered now, let's see how that goes :)
Compared to that, even the one emoji keyboard macbook pro that i had worked for years. The keyboard on those models is defective by design and kept degrading, and I still think Cook should take his dried frog pills more regularly, but the rest of the laptop is still working. Not to mention my other, older apple laptops that are still just fine(tm), just obsolete.
I think price isn't the only thing. PC gaming/consumer laptops lean pretty heavily on price to performance ratios and I think they cut build quality to do it. Business lines like Thinkpad/EliteBook tend to offer worse performance dollar for dollar but they are built better.
Consider a thinkpad or lenovog yoga pro. I don't think the difference is is that pronounced anymore, maybe it never was, but you always need to look at the premium segment. Somehow people end up comparing budget pc laptops and macbooks.
Yeah, I heard good things about it. I do a lot of gamey development stuff and x64 makes that easier. But Asahi seems to be catching up a lot recently, maybe I should look at it again! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068
Asahi is an adventure. I am in the same camp where I got a MacBook for the hardware, but am really a Linux guy. I got really excited when the fex/muvm patches came out for Asahi, and switched to mainly booting it for a couple months. 80% of what I needed to do worked, but that 20% still wasn't there. It was mainly the little things too:
1. Display output from USB-C didn't work
2. Couldn't run Zotero
3. Couldn't compile Java bioinformatics tools
4. Container architecture mismatches led to catastrophic and hard-to-diagnose bugs
There were things that worked better, too (better task management apps, and working gamepad support come to mind). Overall, even though I only needed those things once or twice a week, the blockers added up and I erased my Asahi partition in the end.
I really appreciate the strides the Asahi project has made (no really, it's tremendous!), and while I would love to say that Linux lets me be most productive, features like Rosetta2 are really integrated that much better into MacOS so that I can't help but feel that Asahi is getting the worst of both worlds right now. I'll probably try again this summer and see what has developed.
What dou you mean with more integrated? It is a regular desktop PC with an apu (like is totally common for office PCs, just bigger) and soldered instead of upgradeable ram.
It would be kind of funny, but also very sad, if Apple guys mistook the copying of apple's worst behaviour - producing throwaway devices - as a sign of quality. Though I think we are there for years now with phones, I wouldn't expect such thinking here.
It is "integrated" in the way that the processor is an APU that has specific memory bus requirements. That's all. It is not an integrated software-hardware system that is finetuned, and that board is not any better than a a generic motherboard would be for a regular processor.
My point is that this system is not integrated in the way apple fans usually define the word. I'd claim it is not integrated at all. It is a regular PC (but with soldered ram), which is exactly like framework announced it.
There should be no need to sprinkle some apple marketing bs on that to make it attractive.
I really wish everyone would stop entertaining these borderline crackpot hypotheticals that all rely on the notion of “those damn Apple dummies not getting it!”
As someone who actually studied human computer interaction, and since I had to work with borderline unuseable macs multiple times in my career now, plus as someone seeing the utter failure of relatives in just using an iPhone (bought since "it is so much easier", now not even able to call from the car system since it is so buggy), the Apple popularity is absolutely a case where you have to look at external factors like social status. And if that translates to "the users are dummies" to you, then that's your interpretation. Plus yes, translating marketing/status concepts like a bogus "integrated" status absolutely is interesting, thus my intent to clarify whether that is really happening here (plus some criticism, admittedly).
Probably not worth it going further into this though, it will only derail.
