
The Future of the Mac After Lion | The Mac Observer - digiwizard
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the_future_of_the_mac_after_lion/
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ethank
I dont' get the fear that because some elements of iOS are added to Lion, it
means its getting dumbed down.

I've used Lion for a bit over a month now (in beta and release), and beyond
some changes for the better in terms of my workflow (gestures for spaces,
etc), nothing really changed. Ruby runs fine, autotest, Spork, git, etc.

The things that are great, like Spaces and Mission Control (nearly) have made
things easier. The system is a bit faster than it was before, and I don't have
to install a bunch of mods to get rid of Aqua.

But really, nothing got dumber or smarter. It changed, and mostly for the
better. My wife likes it better, as do my parents. It makes more sense to
them. My dad for instance never got the hang of the Applications folder, so he
loves Launchpad.

Until you can write iOS apps on an iOS device, OSX as we know it and use it
isn't going anywhere, but I welcome it getting easier on the surface for
others.

~~~
djacobs
I would agree, except when such ease of use comes at the expense of your
standard (or more experienced than standard) techie.

It's my opinion that the Mac platform has been able to succeed because of its
developers, and its developers flocked to the platform because it made coding
so fun (and full of Unix goodness). (For more thoughts along those lines, see
_The Art of Unix Programming_.)

Hiding the Library & System folders isn't terrible, because it's easy for me
to undo. However, requiring me to type in my password every time I move an
application tells me that Apple is going in the _wrong_ direction here, a
direction that only hurts developers and, by extension, its own platform.

~~~
ethank
How? Protection against something for 99% of users causes inconvenience to 1%.
Maybe. But it makes the platform more useful for those 99% who make up the
economic ecosystem for the 1% using osx for profit.

Protection of the apps folder is great.

~~~
djacobs
As I say, taking steps that make life harder for engineers & techies will
eventually drive us away. I'm pretty sure that Apple has been successful
because it's fostered a developer community, and if it stops fostering that,
it's success could be a very reversible phenomenon.

~~~
ethank
But again: how is it driving you away? Apple dogfoods everything they do
internally and evidence points to their 5000+ engineers being more picky than
anyone. Marble (Xcode 4) is evidence of this.

If anything, making an Os more suited for the average user is better for the
dev community at large. Not worse.

~~~
djacobs
I don't see how most of the changes help the end user. I only see how it
simplifies and constrains the user interface. Those two metrics are
orthogonal.

~~~
ethank
Which end user? You or someone like my mom and dad and wife?

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pnathan
This makes a lot of sense. Well, the _author_ makes a lot of sense. I suppose
this is a more consumer-friendly way for Apple.

As someone who lives in Emacs and the Terminal, I'm not sure I'm happy about
this. I like my MBP with Snow Leopard. The Apple OSX Experience rocks my socks
off - today. But I sure don't like the iOS experience... at _all_. It's _not_
geek friendly.

I'm afraid that the Apple train is leaving me behind, and I regret that - I
like having a reliable & professional operating system that isn't
weird^H^H^H^H^H Windows.

~~~
jaxn
None of his changes affect Terminal. Who needs a GUI for these tasks anyway?
Not us.

I have had Lion for a few months and I haven't seen felt limited by any iOS-
like features.

Maybe the Mac Pro will go away, but with Thunderbolt allowing additional
monitors on the iMac, I bet most pro users don't even mind.

~~~
watmough
I would think that the MacPro isn't so much about more monitors, though it can
do that, but about sheer horsepower.

Running Photoshop filters, rendering. Stuff that needs 12 cores isn't going to
run so well on an iMac.

------
pstuart
One observation that really bugged me:

> The burden is now on technically-skilled users to find out how to get where
> they want to go. It’s hard to argue with this logic.

There should be no burden. Good UI should be scalable to let the 95% in to do
their thing with no thought and no worries, but "expert mode" should follow
that same mindset while exposing details.

~~~
mmariani
For those who want to have ~/Library where it always has been on Finder:

chflags nohidden ~/Library

~~~
djacobs
An alternative is to use the SetFile command, which can alter all kinds of
file attributes on HFS+ and non-HFS+ volumes.

I have the following in my bash profile:

    
    
      alias see='SetFile -a v'
      alias hide='SetFile -a V'

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wriq
I understand certain pro users being skeptical on the whole 'Back to Mac' iOS-
ification of OSX, me included but i'm already loving the Lion terminal. Nice
implementation of full screen, 256 colors , no distractions and just one swipe
away from all the 'consumer' things I want to do. There's a lot of fluff in
this release, but the new Terminal alone made the $30 upgrade worth it for me.
As for the Mac Pro disappearing, I couldn't care less. I would think this
would impact high res image/video guys more since that seems like the Pro's
target market. Developers seem fine on laptops with an external display.

------
joebadmo
As a Windows user, I get more tempted to switch with each new hardware release
from Apple. But Apple's historical and maybe just now truly culminating
priveleging of 'consumers' over power users scares me off in equal proportion.
I'm very conflicted. It seems more and more likely that I'll just break down
and get an Air and maybe run Windows on boot camp.

Edit: Any veteran Mac users have misgivings about the issue? If not, what
gives you confidence about the future of power users on Apple platforms?

~~~
cageface
As a longtime Mac user I'm concerned about this as well as what appears to be
a waning interest at Apple in supporting the professional creative market.
However, Windows is much less friendly still to the command-line user and none
of the apps I depend on are available on Linux so I'm not sure what to do.

~~~
sliverstorm
Windows on the desktop, Linux on the server in your basement

~~~
jaxn
I.e. go back to 1998? No thanks.

~~~
sliverstorm
You have a better solution?

~~~
jaxn
Well, having used Lion for the past few months, I can say that Terminal is
unaffected by the changes they are talking about. Running open source
development stacks hasn't been affected. So, I don't think a solution is
needed.

I still believe that no one makes better hardware than Apple and their OS is
the best possible system for a developer that also needs to run things like MS
Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc.

Do you have needs that are not met by Lion?

~~~
sliverstorm
Closed-source development tools, which are non-negotiable.

~~~
jaxn
What changed in Lion? Are we talking about tools that worked on Snow Leopard
and these changes to Lion break them? Or are you just not able to use Mac OS?

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junklight
Do you know what - in my house I have a number of machines. They do things
like cleaning clothes and dishes and making food hotter. They all have
microprocessors in them and can do quite sophisticated stuff - but their
interface - almost always a single dial. And that's great because I don't
actually care how they do it I just want the job done. Yes I am technically
capable of getting in their and reprograming the chips but why would I?

And this is the thing - there is no reason why half the things on my computer
should be hard. When I am working with documents (text , video , music , etc)
then I just want to easily open the document and work on it. I want backups to
be trivial etc. etc. And what is more 99% of users want this and only this.

But the great thing about the mac is that if you look at the SDKs there is
ever more sophistiation and "cool" stuff for us developers. Terminal had a lot
of love this time round, Xcode might not have the greatest UI but it also gets
a lot of attention - Apple take developers seriously

It doesn't bother me that my computer is powerful and easy to use. I don't
think this is a bad thing and I also think all the people reading into this
"oh the mac is going to just be for idiots" are idiots themselves: go and
download the SDKs and XCode and then tell me that Apple are dumbing down

I do think that Apple are moving away from the "pro" market BTW - they have
their sights on something much more interesting - the pervasive computing
future when most of our computing needs are met by a cloud of little machines.
I already love that I can walk into a room in my house and flick up stuff from
my phone or ipad onto my TV or walk into another room and make music appear
from said phone or iPad. There will come a day when your "computer" is a
coming together of screen , processor unit and keyboard and when you get up
taking the processor with you that computer is no longer physically there
until next time you come past. We are going to see this in the video game
world too - we aren't far from an ipad or iphone that is your portable gaming
device and when you are near your TV is your console and when you are with
your mates is your lan party (with or without screens and speakers) - and if
Microsoft and Sony aren't paying attention they will loose the entire market
overnight

~~~
icebraining
The gap between turning a simple dial and having to code something up (even a
bash script - and are the Mac APIs bash accessible?) is very deep, though, and
lots of people don't have neither the time nor inclination to cross that gap.
And frankly, why should them?

On the other hand, my washing machine does have about twenty buttons, so I may
be the wrong person to talk about that.

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malkia
I had minor problems since using Developer Preview 4 of it, and since I moved
to GM, I haven't seen any significant.

There is something strange with NVIDIA's CUDA driver (keep asking me to
update).

There was an issue with MacPorts due to Mono.Framework installed (might've
been not related to Lion at all, MacPorts is now at 2.00, so who knows).

I'm aquamacs (emacs clone) user, and it works pretty good.

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r00fus
Well reasoned article that follows along with the current trend (stop selling
xserve, FCPX, Lion).

I wonder what this implies for Apple if they've not only ditched the server
and compute-farms, but are now ditching professional A/V as well (or at least
pushing towards enthusiasts and "prosumers")... not sure I am convinced they
are going to go that far and ditch the MacPro.

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dreamdu5t
Lion is the same OS X with some interface changes. Everything for the power
user is still there...

Today I learned "power user" means someone who changes the Finder preferences
and knows some shortcut keys.

~~~
rkudeshi
I think that's actually a pretty apt, if trite, description of a power user.

I think you may be confusing power users with developers (one is a very small
subset of the other).

