
Why are we all moving away from Apple? - akitaonrails
http://www.akitaonrails.com/2017/01/12/off-topic-why-are-we-all-moving-away-from-apple
======
overcast
Oh give me a break, "we all" are not moving away from Apple. People are pissed
off, and rightly so. But no one is running out and ditching all their
hardware. We're all sitting around to see what 2017 brings for changes, and if
there isn't any significant, we're still going to be buying the new whatever
there is. We're after the OS, that's not going to change.

~~~
teilo
My company runs 350+ Macs.

Years ago, we abandoned Macs in our datacenter when Apple neutered OS X Server
and gave us no alternative. Windows is now king there.

Now we are seriously considering abandoning Mac for, of all things, our
Prepress department. Why? Because for the last three years, macOS has been
become almost unusable with network shares with a large number of files
(anything more than a few thousand). Think minutes, at times, to open an f-ing
folder. It is a known bug. It has been around since 10.9. Apple has not even
acknowledged the problem. What takes milliseconds on Windows can take anywhere
from 30 seconds to two minutes on a Mac. The problem exists regardless of
share type. SMB and AFP are equally bad.

We are as core a user as it gets. Prepress. Graphic arts. And Apple is unable
to make a Mac work efficiently on something so obscure as a file share. They
have made it quite clear that they do not care about power users like us, and
they are never going to care again.

We have work to do. Browsing a network file system is a basic service. It
should not be difficult. It should not, as it currently is for us (and an
untold number of others), cut our productivity by half because our users spend
so much time just trying to open a file.

~~~
ajmurmann
Why did you move from OSX to Windows instead of Linux? That switch seems much
easier.

~~~
teilo
We actually began with Linux. We moved to Mac because:

Samba has serious problems with large filesystems due to the disconnect
between case sensitive and case insensitive filesystems. It incurs massive
overhead when you have thousands of files in a folder.

Netatalk has serious problems with large filesystems due to the inefficiency
of its CNID database. Perhaps they finally solved this, but we have moved on
and aren't going back.

------
yborg
"We all" aren't moving away from Apple, while I have many issues with the
current direction and product offerings, the platform still works for me. So
maybe it really is just "All - Me" but my distinct impression is that it is a
noisy cohort in the blogverse that has seized upon this as the trend du jour.

~~~
ggregoire
Yes it's a ridiculous statement.

I'm still using my MBA 11" from 2012 for everything. I have only 4GB RAM and
it's not even a problem to work (I don't have 15 VMs running in background).
:)) I have no idea when I'm going to change it and for what, but I have
absolutely no desire to move back to Windows or Ubuntu.

And there is no way I move away from iOS. It works great for me. Plus, I use
my iPhone 6 mostly for gaming and I've been buying games since the 3GS so I've
a huge collection (including a bunch of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest titles
that are quite expensive).

~~~
travisby
The last bit sounds more like stockholm's syndrome. Vendor lock-in shouldn't
be a happy thing.

------
robotjosh
The last straw for me was when osx without warning or explanation removed the
vpn technology I was using. The people waiting for me to do work asked "why in
the hell are you still trying to use that piece of crap" and I didn't have an
answer. I never really needed the super expensive ssd or the most high end
cpu. I do need more ram and am dumbfounded why apple would go 5+ years without
upgrading the ram (cue the apple fans to tell me I'm stupid and don't need
more ram). I put together a $700 system that better fits my needs than the
$4000 macbook. The awesome magic trackpad 2 I was so worried about losing has
been replaced with a mx master and I ended up liking it better. The real
surprise for me is that intel 530 graphics drives a 4k display better than the
macbook with its loud m370x.

I'm not a hater. I like apple's attitude on encryption. I like brushed
aluminum stuff and don't mind paying for it. It just doesn't work for me when
a $700 system can have better specs for my work than their $4000 system.

~~~
sbuk
They removed PPTP, which is a terrible protocol.

> _" why in the hell are you still trying to use that piece of crap"_

I'd've retorted with "Why the hell are you still using PPTP for your VPN?"

~~~
robotjosh
It wasn't the first issue I ran into being on osx and everyone else using
windows. As someone who used these machines for work, I can't control what
terrible protocols people use, I just need it to work.

~~~
sbuk
_> "It wasn't the first issue I ran into being on osx and everyone else using
windows."_

So Microsoft using outdated and insecure prototocols, as well as
propriatery[0] ones is Apple's fault?

It's perfectly fine to say "I don't like Apple/the direction they are taking,
so I'm moving to another platform." Use what works best for you. Just don't
use petty excuses for it. Sorry, you are baring the brunt of the glut of "Why
I'm switching" articles.

[0]Yes, I realise that Apple can also be a bad actor in this department too.

~~~
robotjosh
There are a lot more reasons I switched to windows than a vpn that stopped
working. I tried for over 4 years to incorporate osx into an engineering work
flow. The nominally cross platform eclipse stack I was using never became
fully compatible with osx. It was always a usb driver or something stopping
the osx version from working. Even when it did work, I would check in a
project and someone else would be like "omg this doesn't work, did you do this
in osx?". I had a total of 1 project ever where the client wanted to mess with
the code in osx and was glad I could do it in osx. Ended up using parallels
for almost all compiler toolchains. My saleae scope software is buggy in osx,
ties up a cpu at 100% while its open for some reason- had to use that in
parallels too. What DID I use native osx for? Browsers? Mac vim? Linux
commandline? It clearly has not been worth the time and money.

------
codingdave
> Anyone that is someone has been following Apple for the past couple of
> decades. Love them, or hate them, the only thing you can't do is ignore
> them.

I hate to write off a whole article based on a bad first sentence, but this
one just about makes me do so. It starts of with a judgement of a person's
worth, then shows that they seem to have completely missed the years over the
past few decades where Apple stagnated and were not really relevant outside of
creative circles and academia. And finishes off by saying they cannot be
ignored, when in reality the business/enterprise world has gotten along just
fine ignoring Apple even to this very day.

~~~
akitaonrails
I did a small change in the opening statement to make my intention clearer.

------
wpietri
Huh. From the title and the themes, I was expecting an amazing article. But
this isn't it. It struck me as confused, poorly written, and not well
supported.

Personally I think Apple is in trouble. Sustaining their dominance was never
going to be easy, and I don't think they're rising to the challenges. So I
expect too soon read something like this, but engaging, succinct, and
persuasive.

~~~
akitaonrails
I was not expecting it to reach Hackernews frontpage :-) Sorry if it was a
confusing read, I just wrote my personal thoughts. It was not the intention to
make an objective checklist. Feedback is appreciated.

------
tmaly
Maybe its not just apple. Growing up in the 90's I imagined this cool VR / AI
future right out of Gibson's Neuromancer. Instead we have these walled
gardens, the Internet has become less open, less free to the masses.
Everything has become about commercialization instead of innovation and
exploration.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
I've got tired of the walled gardens on phones especially. Stopped iOS dev and
went back to web.

~~~
equalarrow
I see this type of comment a lot. It's not just iOS, Android now has a review
process and Google will keep driving in the Apple direction because it is
successful. And if it's like the op says where everythig is in the cloud, then
walled gardens don't matter much as long as your service has a native app or
mobile web (hint, they probably have both).

What's the really big issue is privacy (which I know is gone) and what
facebook is doing to the world. Everyone likes to bash on Apple lately, but
Apple is 'acquiring' a lot less of your personalized data than the social
networks and Google are (they are also trying to take the lead in being
privacy first).

Facebook is just a big ad platform and dont forget 'free' == you are the
product.

------
larrik
Not a particularly well-written article, but some interesting points.

The constant "Linux isn't good enough shots" in all these articles is
annoying, though. I was on Linux full time in 2010, and found it far more
pleasant than OS X.

~~~
gipp
The bits about X11/Wayland made me a bit curious. The author claims we're
"only just now" moving towards Wayland -- is there a big movement towards it
lately that I've been missing?

~~~
rhodysurf
Yeah its finally shipped by default with GNOME in both Fedora and Arch (Fedora
shipped it for the first time in 25). So thats where that is coming from.

~~~
akitaonrails
Exactly! I am using GNOME 3 with Wayland in Arch and enjoying it very much.

------
blakesterz
Even after reading I still think the questions is "ARE we all moving away from
Apple?" or even "Are a significant number of people moving away from Apple"

~~~
stinos
Exactly. It's not because I and others moved away from Apple once, that it's a
trend. Unless you've got some proper data to back that up.

------
maxharris
I'm not moving away from Apple - Apple is moving away from me.

They haven't updated the Mac Pro in years, they don't sell external displays
anymore, and they killed off their router line (I've had two Time Capsules -
best routers I've ever owned).

------
chillaxtian
> Why are we all moving away from Apple?

because it's trendy, and you can write a medium post about it.

------
akshayB
These days its very easy to get any flavor of Linux/Unix running in cloud at a
very cheap price. Back in the day folks especially developer relied on Macs as
a stable platform to work on but now that landscape has changed due to cloud.
Meanwhile this transformation was happening Apple lost its focus and doing the
right thing instead their bright idea was generate passive income by forcing
people buying connectors.

I owned an old Mac for 7+ years it worked fine and finally I decided to get a
new one. I was just amazed by amount of connectors I ended up buying.

~~~
sbuk
Yeah, that first iMac took the biscuit. No ADB or SCSI, Parallel or Serial
ports, no floppy drives and that stupid mouse! But in time most most
manufacturers turned to USB as it really was the obvious choice for the
future. Heady days!

------
analog31
I've always bristled at the idea -- prevalent in Mac Evangelism going all the
way back to the 1980s -- that I'm "corporate" and not "creative" because I
create things like electronics, optics, embedded systems, and industrial
controls, rather than newsletters and advertising.

~~~
bnolsen
It doesn't help that many of the people I personally knew who were mac
evangelists (programmers) in the late 80s and early 90s tended to be sniveling
elitists.

------
manicdee
My reason is simple: I want a desktop and a laptop capable of running
graphics-intensive games. I play games with my expensive computer. So sue me.

The previous batches of MacBook Pros were capable of running games. The
current batch is not: they are not designed for sustained use of the GPU.

This is especially damning when new number-crunching programming techniques
are starting to make more use of the GPU, and Apple has an entire API
dedicated to compute distribution.

There are two ideal MacBooks for me: an 11" MBA with SD card built in for my
photography bag, and a 15" MBP with more than enough speed in processor, GPU
and memory to run 3D intensive games. I don't care about battery life during
maximum load, since for the heavy compute I'm most likely going to be plugged
in anyway. The rest of the time it would be nice if I could spend a weekend
web browsing, checking maps, writing Arduino code, etc, without having to be
connected to a wall. Then I can come back home, plug into my TB3 dock with
monitor, Ethernet, scanner, etc attached, and continue working as if on a
"desktop" computer.

The only things keeping me on OS X in any way, shape or form are: effort free
backup with Time Machine, Alfred, Finder "tags", Spotlight, ScanSnap (for
scanning documents, then OCR to PDF), Hazel, and a significant investment in
movies and TV shows that were only available from DRM encumbered sources.

------
gcp
_Because there is at least a good Chrome browser in every platform._

Aside from iOS, you mean?

Actually, the non-Chrome browsers on every platform are good enough and Chrome
doesn't stand out. That's why the author missed this extremely obvious extra
jab at apple.

~~~
kbutler
There is a "good Chrome browser" on iOS. It syncs your passwords and bookmarks
and works as intended. The fact that it's not sharing rendering technology
with the other Chrome browsers doesn't matter at all to end users, and matters
very little to developers.

~~~
gcp
_matters very little to developers._

This was a joke, right? It's doing more to hold back usage of new web
standards than pretty much anything out there.

~~~
kbutler
Developers have to support safari on iOS.

Chrome's implementation on iOS doesn't help development, but it doesn't
appreciably hinder development either.

------
pdog
Sorry, but visit an Apple Store sometime and look around you. You'll realize
that 99% of Apple customers don't know or even care what CPU is in their
laptop.

------
heavymark
Lol, "we all", is probably only appropriate if the author has multiple
personalities. Was interested to see what dataset the author was using to
support their belief that "we all" are leaving Apple for presumably competing
companies as I'm not aware of any such movement or data.

I imagine rather they chose a sensational title and choose to speak on behalf
of all humans rather than saying more appropriately, "Why I am moving away
from Apple" or at most, "Why some are moving away from Apple".

------
simonh
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." \- Yogi Berra

------
toodlebunions
We aren't.

There is concern that apple is moving away from us, the pro user.

------
rayiner
I'm ready to leave Apple (at least on the laptop side). Almost all my work
these days is on some Windows terminal over RDP. But where am I going to go?
After years of seeing PC manufacturers churn out crap, _I simply don 't trust
them._

Dell has a nifty XPS 15 update that actually increases the size of the battery
by 15%.[1] But my last Dell had annoying coil whine, shoddy construction, and
plastic palm rest portions that (unlike aluminum) showed wear spots over time.
Do I want to roll that dice again?

[1] The new XPS likely will be a downgrade from my 2013 rMBP. There's no
option for a power-efficient high-DPI display. Your choices are 10+ hours with
the 1080p, or 5-6 hours with the 4k. But at least it's a path forward.

------
greenspot
While I prefer an 12.5" ultrabook with Arch + a tiling window manager (i3) as
my daily driver. There're still moments I need my Macbook Pro:

\- Sketch (this is macOS' killer app, there is no other app on any OS where
you can create mockups that fast and accurate)

\- Support of multiple 27" screens with 5K (5K makes a difference and the new
15" MBP can drive 2 (!) of them at the same time)

\- Xcode (and if it's sometimes just for using the iOS simulator)

\- Word (for contracts) and Excel (rarely)

\- And of course the trackpad: sometimes I have to deliver and when in panic
mode, the touchpad must work 100%

But when I look myself at the list above, it's not much left to migrate fully
to another OS.

Edit: Thanks for the downvote but why?

------
leecarraher
the authors understanding of X11 seems flawed. Or at least i don't agree with
X11 being the thing holding linux back. There have been many proposed
replacement, and finally it appears wayland may make some headway, but from a
user experience, the windowing system has very little influence. Perhaps the
author means desktop environments, gnome/kde/xfce... those certainly effect
the user experience, and the fragmented culture of the user experience can be
frustrating. However from my vantage that is by design, the classic make it
whatever you want it to be. All-in-all a disappointing article.

~~~
akitaonrails
I really meant X11. The desktop manager fragmentation is an issue but not so
much. It doesn't help for the end user if the system is difficult to maintain,
if out of the box it's easy to break, it stutters, crashes, doesn't draw
correctly, and overall is difficult to make fluid. Latency is high, one app
can hang the windowing drawing, etc. So yes, it's a lot to blame on X11.

~~~
BuuQu9hu
Except that that's not why Apple avoided X11. Apple decided to build their own
thing because they wanted to avoid also-ran cross-compatibility with other
UNIX clones, and additionally they wanted fancy antialiased font rendering
which X11 didn't support at the time.

Apple built Quartz while Xorg developed Xft. A couple years in and Quartz
didn't have any compelling features over Xorg, just an alien API.

It's true that X11 is terrible but nearly all of its competitors have shown
themselves to be worse. Wayland wasn't practical until recently (like 2014?)
when GPU memory and latency has dropped to the point where actually running a
full compositor is no longer expensive. And most people using Wayland will
just host an Xorg inside for X11 backwards compatibility anyway...

~~~
akitaonrails
You're right about that. I didn't want to extend too much on that part and I
can see how it can be misinterpreted. I didn't mean that Apple's direct reason
to build Quartz was because of X. But it is true that X didn't have any
reasons to be used back then in the mid-90's as well, specially coming from
NEXT with it's Display Postscript compositing manager.

------
erikpukinskis
We're still in the overture to the computer era. The most powerful software
tool ever built is the function call, and that's been stuck in a developer-
only release for 50 years. It's still early days.

------
rocky1138
This is probably one of the most revisionist and poorly-written articles I've
read in a while.

"Wearables and VR are good gimmicks, but even if they become ubiquitous, it's
not a revolution, just an extension of the use cases that the iPhone
revolution bootstrapped."

This took the cake. Apple has nothing to do with VR. Nothing they've done has
helped that industry at all, except maybe cheaper LCD screens (which likely
would have happened anyway). Apple has no hardware or software which is VR
capable. To claim they built the VR ecosystem is, at best, delusional.

------
msabalau
"Wearables and VR are good gimmicks, but even if they become ubiquitous, it's
not a revolution, just an extension of the use cases that the iPhone
revolution bootstrapped."

Smartphones seem a heck of a lot more derivative of earlier computing use
cases.

Wearables and VR owe a debt to smartphones because of the cheap components
from the mobile supply chain finally make them possible. The debt is not in
the realm of ideas. Conceptually both VR and ubiquitous computing predate
smartphones by decades.

------
dreamcompiler
Off-topic public service announcement: There is no "g" in the word "reins" in
the context of "...left the reins to..."

~~~
akitaonrails
thanks, corrected :-)

~~~
dreamcompiler
YW. Enjoyed reading the article.

------
dccoolgai
Apple's pattern seems to be small "bursts" of innovation followed by long
periods of "dormancy" where they just make smaller/bigger screens. Their
"walled garden" cow is just about milked out as the Open Web is enters its new
rennaisance. They'll be back in 10-15 years with somethinh that looks like
real innovation again.

~~~
bnolsen
Without Jobs I king of doubt that it will be them doing it. They might stumble
onto some gem and use their vast hordes of cash to buy their way into an
emerging market this time around.

------
sirwitti
Hm, X11 is not an operating system. Stopped reading there - doesn't seem worth
reading to me. (Btw, I was never an Apple user)

~~~
akitaonrails
Did you know that at one point X had a freaking printer server? These are all
complaints from the maintainers of X themselves. I am not making that up.

------
sndean
Assuming there's movement away from Apple, how much of that movement, if any,
can be attributed to more polished macOS-like linux options that are
available? Not that Mint, Elementary OS, Ubuntu, etc. are exactly new...

------
arrow64
s/reigns/reins

[http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/03/rein-or-
reign/](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/03/rein-or-reign/)

------
alphabettsy
These bandwagon articles are getting really old… A minority of people choosing
to try Linux again does not represent a massive shift.

------
fritzw
I agree completely with this essay.

Here is my tip to Apple. I always felt I understood Apple's Gestapo-like
tactics in the past, regarding their rigid methodologies. Eliminating ports
and features, removable batteries, etc. I don't understand Apples moves in the
past 5 years. They have spread out and complicated everything that Jobs' made
simple and attractive.

Heres my advice.

Apple is way too spread out, it should kill off the dead ends.

* Kill iTunes split it in to 5 functional media apps, and design a good simple music player. Stop trying to make me sign up for reoccurring-billing services. Makes me feel like I'm dealing with Comcast.

* Merge the App store with the Apple media store.

* Kill the watch and the car.

* Merge the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, Macbook to one product with 5 sizes each with a pro series all with a touch or keyboard interface and an appropriate OS interface depending on if a keyboard is attached. Yes, merge MacOS and iOS.

* Simplify product and Apple services pricing, two tiers, basic and unlimited.

* Bring back a pro series products and software even if it was a revenue loser.

* And simply password protections with a API service offered and incentivized like SSL certs are.

* I sort of get Apple Health, but what is Apple Home? What is Apple Music Match, or Apple Music and why isn't it included with iCloud? Merge them all.

There are plenty of IT sectors to fix and disrupt. They seem like they just
think there's isn't anything work on. Cars? Watches? Movie/TV? WTF

How about

There’s just one more thing... Apple home audio video equipment and media
services and amps. Compete with the big boys in home audio video. The industry
is a mess with protocols, encryption, DRM, AV encoding, bit-rates, streaming
services. I need my IT degree, not for computers but for my audio system.
Erode cable's power grip not from the network production and delivery end from
the home equipment end. Remake Apple TV as a prosumer product series called
Apple Home. Hardware that works with Apple amplifiers, Apple speakers, Apple
record players? etc. Introduce Apple TV an actual TV. Let's face it the only
good thing about TVs these days is the actual screen, the software sucks.
Everyone is tired of having 5 remote controls. My husband can’t turn on the
TV! Apple is perfectly set up to do it. It’s constant and consistent market
that will only grow as home entertainment improves in quality.

~~~
simonh
* Kill the watch and the car.

Killing the watch would be insane. Apple is now the Number 2 watch maker in
the world by revenue (just for watches), second only to Rolex. We don't know
their actual revenue, but Fossil at no.3 raked in over $3bn. You'd really
cancel a multi-billion dollar revenue stream?

~~~
fritzw
3 billion dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A cool product that
actually innovates and 50 billion dollars.

------
quotha
> I have no idea where we are going from here

Mars, we are going to Mars!

~~~
thebiglebrewski
I'm with you on that

------
it
How did this rambling article make it to the front page of HN?

