
Wherefore art thou Macintosh? - tambourine_man
http://www.asymco.com/2016/11/02/wherefore-art-thou-macintosh/
======
bshimmin
Not that it really matters, but "wherefore" means "why", not "where". Juliet
wasn't wondering where Romeo was, she was lamenting that he was born a
Montague.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
This is the shibboleth of having taken high school English

~~~
conistonwater
No it's not! There are _tons_ of places in Shakespeare where he uses
_wherefore_ , and that one place in Romeo and Juliet is literally the only
usage that's somewhat ambiguous.

> Beatrice: _Why, how now, cousin! wherefore sink you down?_
> ([http://shakespeare.mit.edu/much_ado/full.html](http://shakespeare.mit.edu/much_ado/full.html))

When your cousin faints, would anybody ask _where_ they have just fainted?

~~~
schoen
"Shibboleth" doesn't mean "mistake", it means "way to check whether someone
belongs to a group". "The shibboleth of having taken high school English"
means "you can tell if someone took high school English by whether they
know/say this". (It also happens that if they know/say this, they are
correct.)

~~~
conistonwater
I know that. It's still not a shibboleth: on the contrary, the meaning is so
clear from the usage (except that one place in Romeo and Juliet), that any
fluent speaker will recognize the meaning quickly even if they'd never seen it
before. At best, it's a shibboleth for having watched any Shakespeare, but
that's not what they meant to say.

There are many places in Shakespeare that are unreadable to a modern-English
speaker without explanatory footnotes, but this isn't one of them.

~~~
wtbob
I think you'll find that many, _many_ English-speakers think that Juliet is
asking where Romeo is. Thus, knowing that she's asking why he's a Montague
indicates that one is not one of those many people — it's a shibboleth for
having had a minimally decent education.

------
kryptiskt
Apple should make the Mac business a separate business unit (they could call
it Apple Computer...). Then that unit can concentrate on making the best
computers they can do. As it is now, the Macs is secondary in importance for
Apple's management, and it also takes their attention away from their core
phone business at times. Why not just spin it off? Apple can still own 100% of
it, the important part to get a management that is completely focused on that
business.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think Apple's interest in the Mac is mainly as a platform for iOS
development these days. I wonder if there will be a point when they will open
up iOS development to other platforms and totally abandon the Mac.

~~~
grzm
Interesting take that I've heard elsewhere. What is this based on? If I
understand what you're saying correctly (and please correct me if I'm wrong),
can we infer that most people who buy Macs are iOS devs?

~~~
maxxxxx
I don't know if most people who buy Macs are iOS devs but I think for Apple
they are the ones that count. As far as I understand most Apple profits come
from iOS devices so that's probably what their focus is on. It used to be that
Macs were for graphics people but they just don't deliver much in that area
anymore.

~~~
grzm
There's no doubt that Apple makes significantly more revenue and profit from
iPhone than from the Mac. However, I think Apple's interest in the Mac is much
broader than just iOS devs. They of course have an interest in ensuring the
iOS development experience is good. However, I think their market is much more
the everyday computer _user_ , not developer. Admittedly I don't have numbers
of how many iOS developers are out there. I'm sure it's less than 20% of the
total number of Mac users.

Apple needs to make sure the iOS dev experience is good. I do think that they
consider that a much greater audience counts as well.

------
marricks
This piece seemed kind of interesting and then lost me when it just lead to
multi-pargraph heavy handed metaphor,

> But Apple’s immune system was suppressed. It allowed a disruptor to emerge
> from within. Apple gave birth to its future by suppressing the reaction to
> that new seemingly parasitic organism. It took an immense willpower to allow
> this to happen.

It's strange that they're criticizing Apple for successfully making a product,
the iPhone, that can take off a lot of your PC work, browse/emails/basic
things.

Clearly Apple is trying forge a distinctly Macbook Pro path for themselves
without diving into phone/tablet territory. Until we have more reviews and
impressions from the touch bar out in the wild it's a bit early to write off
that effort.

~~~
na85
>Until we have more reviews and impressions from the touch bar out in the wild
it's a bit early to write off that effort.

Disagree. There is much we can surmise and deduce from what we already know.

It runs the WatchOS, which to me seems like a singularly bone-headed decision.
Why on earth would they choose to segregate it from the laptop in such a
fashion, and use the OS from one of their worst products, to boot? To me these
things clearly indicate bad management or lack of vision at the helm.

~~~
marricks
It's short sighted to say "using something from their worst product is a
terrible decision."

Reasons why it'd make sense to use that processor

* it's their lowest power chip with the capabilities

* it's already optimized for touch interactions

* it has security enclave built in, which is processor specific

* it allows for a secure separation between the touch id & the web cam from the processor

The last point especially resonates with me. So many web cams get hacked, and
getting a wall between the internet and my webcam sounds like a good thing.

~~~
na85
A company with as many resources as Apple could have integrated the secure
enclave into their motherboard design rather than go for this half-baked
solution of just slapping an i Watch into the laptop.

So much for Apple's vaunted innovation.

~~~
toasterlovin
Have you ever considered that a company with world class processor and system
on a chip expertise might understand this problem space and it's design trade
offs better than you?

~~~
Chyzwar
Have you ever considered that Apple can make mistake. iWatch analogy is
correct, touch bar is the same idea for Mac as iWatch to iPhone. We know that
iWatch is flop and there is not much enthusiasms for new Mac.

~~~
grzm
_" We know that iWatch is flop and there is not much enthusiasms for new
Mac."_

What gives you this impression? Looking at the metrics available, it looks
like the Apple Watch is doing well, as is the newest MacBook Pro.

 _" Apple Watch revenue totaled $6 billion in its first 12 months of
availability."_[0]

 _" Apple Inc. sold twice as many Watches as iPhones in each device’s debut
year."_[1]

 _" And we are proud to tell you that so far our online store has had more
orders for the new MacBook Pro than any other pro notebook before."_ \-- Phil
Schiller [2]

 _" The new MacBook Pro has only been available for purchase for about six
hours, but shipping estimates on the machine have already slipped from two to
three weeks to three to four weeks,"_[3]

This last could be interpreted as Apple having drastically underestimated the
stock they needed to have on hand, purposely limited stock so they could make
these kinds of quotes, had supply chain issues that prevented them from having
the stock they wanted, or didn't want to have large stock on hand, in
preference to more JIT delivery.

Happy to be corrected if you have other information.

[0]: [http://bgr.com/2016/04/26/apple-watch-sales-vs-
rolex/](http://bgr.com/2016/04/26/apple-watch-sales-vs-rolex/)

[1]: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-watch-with-sizable-
sales-c...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-watch-with-sizable-sales-cant-
shake-its-critics-1461524901)

[2]: [http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/02/phil-schiller-new-
macboo...](http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/02/phil-schiller-new-macbook-pro-
interview/)

[3]: [http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/27/macbook-pro-shipping-
est...](http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/27/macbook-pro-shipping-estimates-
begin-slipping/)

~~~
Chyzwar
iWatch is not a flop why Apple do not publish sales figures[0], It
fundamentaly flawed product like tablet with stylus :P Apple wanted to sell 50
milion of iWatches maybe 12-30mil was actually sold.

Sure that people are buying MacBook Pro after waiting for so many years.....
Your reference from macrumors may be not most objective. Just on HackerNews
there was multiple articles with less than enthusiastic views.

Apple became iPhone company, they relase new versions every year. Dell can
release like 20 new laptops models but apple need 4 years to relase one ????

[0]
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3152514/Apple...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3152514/Apple-
Watch-FLOP-Sales-gadget-fallen-90-April-report-claims.html)

~~~
toasterlovin
If selling 12-30 million watches at $250+ each is a flop, I would love to know
what you consider a success.

~~~
Chyzwar
It billions worth development and marketing effort to create market for
wearable that failed. It is now clear that with current tech it is difficult
to sell wearable devices that you need to charge every day by connecting cable
to wall.

If Apple keep releasing new versions of Macs in last three years, put more
effort in operating system they would make more money than on iWatch. Just
look on sales of new MacBook...

Instead of focusing in core business like personal computers now they have
platform that is widely inconsistent. They now lose PC market to Windows,
iPhone is losing emerging markets and they are behind in innovation: VR, AR,
AI...

------
addicted
"It remains indirect, a defining characteristic of the second wave. Indirect
inputs are powerful and lend themselves to muscle memory with practice"

It's not indirectness that lends itself to muscle memory but rather
staticness. To illustrate this, consider a keyboard that randomly switched
between Dvorak and QWERTY. This keyboard would not lend itself to muscle
memory at all, despite being as indirect as a normal keyboard.

I think the touchbar could be beneficial in the muscle memory sense if it
remains static within an application. At that point it simply becomes a more
easily looked up version of Fn key shortcuts (but with potentially poorer
tactile feel).

------
tempodox
I think the article has some good points but I disagree on calling the
keyboard an “indirect” input method wrt text. Until touchscreen keyboards
_feel_ like a physical keyboard, I don't see them holding a torch when it
comes to entering more than a few characters. There's a good reason you can
connect a physical Bluetooth keyboard to the iDevices. And while a keyboard /
touchscreen combination is certainly possible, it's also not as ergonomic as
moving your hand just a little bit to reach a trackpad or mouse from the
keyboard. Excitement about new tech is not a good long-term replacement for
ergonomics.

------
imron
Without the mac there is no iPhone.

Before disagreeing, ask yourself what every single piece of iPhone software
was written on.

Someone has to make the software and you ignore developers at your peril.

~~~
pjmlp
The developers agry at Apple aren't the ones doing iOS apps, rather the ones
using a UNIX with pretty UI, which contribute zero to the amount of iPhone
apps.

So it doesn't matter that Apple ignores them.

~~~
imron
It does matter, just not in the short term.

As people leave the platform, the amount of revenue it makes the company
diminishes.

As the revenue earned from Macs diminishes, its importance to the company
diminishes and they put less resources towards it.

As its importance to the company diminishes and it gets less resources, the
quality diminishes.

As the quality diminishes, they lose other developers also.

It's a slow decline that will take maybe 5-10 years.

------
morsch
_This is a leap forward and a big deal. For 32 years the UX model of the Mac
has been two-handed typing with one handed gesturing. Now we have the option
of two-handed indirect manipulation: one hand on the touchbar and one hand on
the touchpad. Imagine you’ve been playing guitar with one hand for years and
then someone lets you use your left hand. Holy cow._

I'm trying to keep an open mind here, and I'm really hoping people come with
revolutionary input experiences, but at this point in time that paragraph
sounds completely ludicrous to me.

------
mturmon
An article on the MBP hardware evolution with some vision and intellectual
substance instead of ankle biting. Well done.

------
jerf
The future is not touch. The future is mobile. Mobile is constrained to using
touch interfaces, or even more precisely, mobile is constrained to using
_touch interface on the active screen_ (as opposed to the touch interface of a
trackpad or something). Mobile did not choose this, it was forced on it
because there is no other choice. There's no room to put any other input
devices on the phone itself, and nobody is going to carry around extra mice or
something. (We could _barely_ get some people to use styluses that fit in the
device itself.)

It's weird to hear people waxing poetic about touch nowadays, because now that
we've all been using touch interfaces for several years, we all should be
realizing that they aren't necessarily that awesome. We've all by now used a
map app that, as nice as the touch interface was, just didn't quite gel in
terms of whether we were zooming, panning, twisting, or trying to select a
single location. We should all be able to observe that the act of using a
touch interface also means that we must block the line-of-sight to that same
interface, meaning both that the touch thing we are interacting with can't
feed back in the most natural place to do so, and that touch interfaces must
be very large to accommodate the lack of precision. We must all have dealt
with the accidental dialing brought on by the touch interface that can't
distinguish between fingers and buttocks, or the stray emails we deleted in
the act of simply picking up our phone, or the accidental order placed when we
tried to clean a drop of water or a speck of dust off the screen. And I don't
care how good you are with that touch keyboard, you'd be better on something
that could have custom-built haptic feedback, and ideally, haptic feedback you
can "feel" without triggering inputs, too. Touch screens are still the best
solution for mobile, but they are clearly not "all that".

From this point of view, where mobile is the future but touch just happens to
be along for that ride, bodging touch on to a laptop isn't that impressive and
there's no reason to believe it's the wave of the future. I've actually _got_
"touch" on my laptop, in the form of my trackpad, and for a 2D slab, I get
rather a lot of distinct inputs out of it. Remember that everything I can use
that for comfortably is one more opportunity that I don't need a "touchbar"
for. (That's been my real criticism of the touchbar; it's not necessarily
intrinsically a bad idea or fundamentally useless, it's that the list of
things for which it is the _best solution_ is rather short. And I'm not saying
it's _empty_... just _short_. In particular, it's much shorter than the list
of things that it _could_ be used for, but for which it's not the best
solution.)

Further, despite not particularly wanting it the laptop I'm typing this on has
a full touchscreen. Mostly I remember this when I go to clean the screen of
some bit of dust and my mouse cursor starts jumping around. I don't need it
for much. Even when acquiring a button on the screen, the touchpad is faster
than removing my hand from the keyboard and clicking. My touchpad already has
several useful gestures, draining away the marginal utility of other touch
interfaces. It's not that useful, even though it's sitting right in front of
me. Now, it's not a 2-in-1, where I can at least see the use case, but,
neither is the new Mac, right? It's just not _that_ useful. Not _useless_ ,
but not very useful.

It's not touch that's the future, it's mobile. The still-not-yet-mature-but-
still-inevitable "mobile phone that docks to a desktop and provides its guts"
will be a hybrid device, and the "touchiness" is irrelevant.

(Actually, now that I think of it this way, the Nintendo Switch may be the
closest thing to a successful implementation of that I've seen in a while.
Perhaps if that succeeds, it'll open the doors to computer versions of that
idea.)

~~~
nkurz
_Mobile is constrained to using touch interfaces_

Currently, but do you think this is the end game? Why not voice, gesture, eye
tracking, or some as yet unachievable brain interface? The seemingly
insurmountable defects you point out (lack of feedback without activation,
hand obscuring the screen) would seem to imply that touch is never going to be
the best universal interface.

 _My touchpad already has several useful gestures, draining away the marginal
utility of other touch interfaces._

I'm surprised that I haven't seen built-in touchpads that integrate a screen,
maybe modal between the displayed screen in miniature, a zoom of the cursor,
and a menu space. Might it make more sense to integrate a display into the
existing touch interface rather than adding a new (hard to reach) one? On the
other hand, I've been surprised that my friends who use tablet interfaces for
graphics work don't find the integrated screen approach
([http://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-displays](http://www.wacom.com/en-
us/products/pen-displays)) to be compelling.

~~~
lostlogin
Voice was my immediate thought too. While I hate the idea of it (people are
already bad enough in confined public spaces) it is great for specific tasks
at appropriate times "call John Doe" is far faster than navigating to his
number.

------
kleigenfreude
Three things that could have been better about this post:

1\. Too long.

2\. That graph with the unlabelled red line was really distracting; I had no
idea what to make of it. Similarly, the "Percent of Time Spent" had the key
cut off on the right for me, so I just saw: Deskt, Mobile, Mobile. Be sure to
adjust your browser width to see how you post looks at different widths, and
use good graphs.

3\. One thing that has to be helping Mac sales is this, yet it wasn't
mentioned. IBM's had a lot of press about switching from Windows to macOS:

[https://9to5mac.com/2015/10/15/ibm-mac-
support/](https://9to5mac.com/2015/10/15/ibm-mac-support/)

~~~
supercoder
Yeah this guy is bad at his graphs

------
Paperweight
iPhone = notepad

iPad = clipboard

Mac = desk

------
auggierose
> capturing over 60% of the available PC hardware profits

These profits are not available, they are MADE. Mostly by Apple.

