> Defining products by the spreadsheet: A big percentage of complaints over the new MacBook Pro devices is that they ignore the needs of the “power” user. The problem? This group is fairly small and have needs living well towards the end of the bell curve.
The problem with ignoring this niche is because these users are either developers or big influencers. They help with the ongoing success of the App Store as well as with free marketing.
This is also a big reason why Apple needs to release either an iMac without a screen or a more affordable Mac Pro. The Mac Mini has never really cut it for anything but personal use.
For the 1st time in years, I'm thinking of switching back to Windows since Docker makes development easier now. I'll still get a cheap Mac for personal stuff like Photos, but it'll just be relegated for that.
My household has been Mac-only for about 20 years, but I finally gave up waiting for a decent Mac Pro or a powerful Mac Mini. Last year I put together a PC for about $1500 [1] which looks great and completely demolishes any Mac for GPU-heavy tasks, thanks to its Nvidia GTX 1070. The build was super-easy (my 10 year-old daughter did half of it) and the machine worked perfectly the first time I powered it on. And, much to my surprise, Windows 10 really isn't bad.
I still use a MacBook Pro for most of my development work, but all gaming and video stuff is now PC, and I can't see myself going back. The ability to easily upgrade individual parts on an as-needed basis is just too appealing.
I still prefer MacOS to Windows, but if MacOS is the only thing a $2500+ Mac Pro brings to the table in 2017--compared to 2017 PC hardware--it really isn't enough anymore.
I built my first gaming PC (GTX 1070 as well) not that long ago, and you're right, it wasn't too hard (though my wife did most of the work). And I use that for gaming all the time.
However, I would never dream of using it for development. One of the games I play is World of Warcraft, and I maintain a few addons, and even just trying to edit Lua files on Windows is a PITA. Atom kind of sucks, and the CLI isn't very good. I installed Windows Subsystem For Linux in order to get bash and git, but it turns out there's no way to open GUI apps from that system, so I have to independently navigate to my projects in both Explorer and the shell. Oh, and Windows doesn't implement enough of Linux so tmux can't actually remember my paths, so every time I reboot, I have to find all of my projects again. And of course Linux symlinks don't work in Windows, and Windows aliases don't work in Linux, so I have a shell script that copies a bunch of the addons into place that I have to run each time because I can't symlink it. Ultimately, it's all just very annoying.
Agreed, macOS is a far superior blend of Unix underpinnings and a graphical front-end. I love that I can have my terminal and Emacs run seamlessly on the same platform as Sketch and Photoshop. Fortunately, my MacBook Pro is still a plenty capable machine for the programming I do in my day job.
But I have to say, PC hardware has come a long way, not just in terms of performance, but also in build quality and ease of use. The aluminum case I bought looks as good as any Mac Pro tower Apple has made, it has fantastic cable routing so everything's clean and tidy, and tons of options for thermal management--I can run games on ultra quality and my PC is still silent!
It's really too bad we can't have the best of both worlds. But I don't see Apple going towards PC-standard hardware, Windows will probably never be a great Unix, and Linux never quite gets the software adoption it needs to become my desktop OS. I'd love to be proven wrong on any of those, however!
Thanks for the pointer, I may stick an extra disk in there and give Hackintosh a shot. Can you imagine how fast Apple Motion or Final Cut Pro would run with a GTX 1070 GPU behind it?
I'm torn on that. I spent years playing games exclusively on a Mac and didn't feel like I was missing that much. Given how bad the Mac gaming scene was in the 2000's, in the 2010's we've seen an explosion in the number of excellent games coming to Mac from both AAA and indie publishers. Seems like ever since Steam came to macOS, the games have followed.
If gaming is a secondary use of your computer, a Mac isn't quite as bad as people make it out to be. Especially if you enjoy indie games, it seems like all of them run on Mac, and most of them have modest hardware requirements. Example: I play a ton of Rimworld, and it runs exactly the same on my modest Mac and my killer PC. It's mostly AAA titles where you miss out.
I finally got to where I wanted a machine whose primary use would be games, and for that case you're correct, a half-decent PC crushes any Mac on any gaming metric.
Yep. They probably don't realize how big of a part "Word of Mouth" marketing plays in their sales.
At every small business I've ever worked at, everyone praised the MBP highly, and if you didn't have one, you felt like you wanted and needed one.
Especially because it Just Worked™, it was kind of this sleek and powerful tool that only people who know the value of their time had, because they weren't going to waste their time on anything lesser. It was almost a status symbol.
Word of mouth is a powerful thing. It can make and later break a product. I bet that'll happen now.
That said, how can I buy stock in Apple? I'm betting they'll look at dropping sales, realize the above, and make a huge come back with a significantly better MBP and Mac Pro in a year or two.
EDIT: The above question is not rhetorical: how can a simple developer like me with no idea about stocks, throw $100 or $200 at Apple stock in hopes it grows a good amount in the next few years?
> Yep. They probably don't realize how big of a part "Word of Mouth" marketing plays in their sales.
I'm not sure who would know better: Apple's marketing team, or a group of developers chatting on Hacker News.
Depending on the level of sophistication in Apple's marketing department, they might have a very clear, well-researched, quantitative model regarding just how much impact our word-of-mouth carries.
I wonder if some of our angst comes from the nagging fear that we (professional developers and photo/video editors) hold less clout than we thought, and that as a result, our tools in upcoming years will be more expensive and less useful.
The problem with ignoring this niche is because these users are either developers or big influencers. They help with the ongoing success of the App Store as well as with free marketing.
This is also a big reason why Apple needs to release either an iMac without a screen or a more affordable Mac Pro. The Mac Mini has never really cut it for anything but personal use.
For the 1st time in years, I'm thinking of switching back to Windows since Docker makes development easier now. I'll still get a cheap Mac for personal stuff like Photos, but it'll just be relegated for that.