On 2/28/14, 8:39 AM, Ted Roche wrote:
On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Alan Bourke <[email protected]>wrote:
I don't think Apple are much different from Microsoft in their attitude
to users. Look what they did to iWork for example.
I'm not a daily OS X user. What's the iWork story?
I'm a daily OS X user but I don't know the iWork story either. (What's
iWork?)
I'm very ambivalent on Apple. I think their hardware is, simply, beautiful.
I think their service and that of their top-tier retailers is excellent. I
think their prices are competitive, side-by-side, with equivalent top-tier
hardware and OS and software prices. Their top-of-the-line is higher than
others, and their prices for their top items are always very high. People
willing to pay those kind of prices get great stuff.
Spot-on, again.
DRM is bad, but they have made it palatable to the tune (pun intended) of
ten billion sales or something. I don't support a rental design for songs
and video; I think it violates the principles of copyright.
I don't like it either, but my wife and our kids sure do.
Their proprietary desktop on top of BSD has issues as any closed software
does.
iPod, iPad, iPhone are all closed, proprietary devices Their stores are a
jail. They don't allow some competing software, they don't allow products
they feel violate some social norms, and they screw up and allow malware
every once in a while.
But I don't think they intend to make the kind of computers most people
here want. They make consumer goods. Friends and family love their Apples
and will not give them up. Service experiences don't change that attitude.
The high cost is not a deterrent, in fact, there's likely a little
conspicuous consumption going on there.
These are not machines made for Windows developers, however.
I just bought a top-tier macbook pro and I think it is the best
development machine I've ever owned. I'd even do pure-Windows
development on it if I were of that breed, using virtual machines.
Ruby on Rails developers, on the other hand, have flocked to OS X. In a
large conference I attended a few years ago, I was accutely aware that
there was one HP laptop, one Dell laptop, and my Lenovo laptop in a sea of
MacBooks. I was impressed, though not swayed.
I'm no representative user, either: I spend my life toggling between
browser windows and color terminals.
I write desktop and web applications. My "IDE" is Ubuntu and a dozen or
so terminal windows, git, vim, and a bunch of unix tools like grep, sed,
wc, etc and Python and supporting libraries. I run virtual machines on
Mac for the Ubuntu development environment and several Windows flavors
for testing my stuff there and also occasional maintenance of my
lingering VFP application.
I run the virtual environments on top of Mac OS X because it's proven to
be a great host for virtual machines, plus it gives me a test
environment for Mac and great user experience for the more personal
applications I also run such as iTunes, iPhoto, syncing with my iPhone, etc.
Oh and like you said, the hardware is beautiful. My retina display and
backlit keyboard and multitouch pad, 16 GB RAM, 8 hour battery life, and
sane but overrideable defaults just make this a great base to build on.
And from prior experience I can expect to be developing 10 hours a day
on this machine with no external mouse or monitor for 4-5 years until
I'll do a big multi-month analysis of the current Linux laptop offerings
and conclude I'm better off sticking with a top-tier Apple laptop,
because it just works reliably and is also a work of art.
Paul
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