>> The new "features" every cycle are more "lets put this phone feature on the desktop"
What is it missing? It's been a while since I really wanted a feature in the desktop OS. All of the 'phone' features (besides launchpad) have made my life a lot easier (continuity, handoff, notification centre, even Siri from time to time).
As a app developer who wanted to build an app which challenged what a mac can do with regards to productivity I had to basically leave the mac app store because they made it impossible for me to make it work in Sandbox mode.
Shipping Unix tools (like Bash) from this decade would be a start.
Trying to get modern Unix software to run on OSX is getting more and more painful. Since development is the main activity I do on a laptop, this is quite important.
It was the main reason a lot of people (myself included) moved to OSX from Linux. I honestly believe that its Unix compatibility was one of the main reasons Macs got popular with developers in the first place.
That's not what I said. I never meant to give the impression that “developers” necessarily means Unix users. A lot of them are though, definitely enough to be a noticeable fraction. The number of people in this very thread proclaiming the greatness of the Linux subsystem in Windows 10 should confirm this.
You have to admit that around 2003 or so there was a huge influx of technical users to the Mac. My proposition is that a lot of those users were developers moving from Linux (or from an unhappy Windows life, wishing they were using a Unix-based operating system).
I base this on the general sentiment at the time, and I was one of the people who made the switch. I'm sure you can find old posts from me on Slashdot talking about how great the switch was.
Now I'm on Hacker News, talking about doing the exact opposite. I'm moving away from OSX because the Unix experience has become really bad.
I agree, but on these discussions, that subset of developers just gets packaged into developers as whole, as if there wasn't anything else.
Personally I know UNIX since Xenix days, do have a vast experience across UNIX variants, use it in some form in many projects, but rather use OS X and Windows environment.
For strange as it may seem, some of us are actually happier with the GUI developer tooling culture of OS X, Windows, Android, iOS.
What is it missing? It's been a while since I really wanted a feature in the desktop OS. All of the 'phone' features (besides launchpad) have made my life a lot easier (continuity, handoff, notification centre, even Siri from time to time).