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by dithering 2992 days ago
Developers recommend friends and family on computer hardware purchases. We've seen it before: a company starts out (over)designing for a market segment that includes influencers, gets successful off the back of proselytization, decides to shift focus to the larger, more lucrative consumer market, and takes a big hit as the influencers move elsewhere.
1 comments

Except, again, as far as I'm aware Apple has never marketed the MacBook Pro by running around Ballmer-style and screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

They just made a good laptop, and developers used it because it was a good laptop. If anything, developers bought and used Apple's laptops in spite of shortcomings (as developer machines) which have been present for at least the twelve years that have elapsed since I first used one.

Meanwhile, I'm writing this comment on a 15" MBP with Touch Bar, and I use it as my primary dev laptop. And... well, it's still a good laptop. I would be less happy and less productive using one of the "equivalent" PC builds (regardless of whether running Windows or Linux) people always recommend. And I know that because I switched to Macs from one of those "equivalents" (a Thinkpad running Linux).

Add in that the people who are complaining about how this is the death of Apple are almost always posting while clearly indicating they've never actually used a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and I don't put this down to Apple somehow "shifting away" from "influencers". I put it down as the same kind of foaming-at-the-mouth hate that every Apple product in history has attracted, due to those products committing the unforgivable sin of being Apple products. Company seems to've survived that.

And for what it's worth, the Touch Bar took some getting used to, but now it's fine. Some apps do useful things with it. Some apps don't. About what I expected.