[klelatti]

Apple is the ‘Personal IBM’: a premium systems integrator where ‘you never blame yourself for buying Apple’ in the era when everyone has a handheld computer.

Edit - just to add that IBM dominated computing for a long time with this model. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Apple has become so big in what is a much bigger market.

[mdoms]

> you never blame yourself for buying Apple

How quickly we forget that Apple just had 2 generations of complete dogshit laptops.

[smoldesu]

It was more than that, pretty much everything between late 2014 and late 2018 is just... not really usable as a daily driver. Luckily they fixed the keyboard and quit stringing Intel along under the pretense that they could "make things work" by modifying ACPI tables, but I don't think I'll ever be truly comfortable using a Mac until I can drop one at waist-height and not be down $2000. Different strokes for different folks though, of course.

[nicbou]

I carried my MacBook in my motorcycle luggage for over 40,000km, and I dropped it from waist height at the airport. It's still running smoothly.

The only issue is the keyboard, which is now on its third replacement. The extended replacement program ran out last year, but they still replace keys for free.

This is a 2017 MacBook. They upgraded my 2012 model for the price of a battery swap because the 2012 parts were out of stock. In other words, I've been going for 10 years on the same laptop purchase.

They're not perfect laptops, but they're still the best ROI I've had on a laptop, and far better than any laptop I've had before.

[tonyedgecombe]

>It was more than that, pretty much everything between late 2014 and late 2018

I don't know, the 2015 MacBook Pro was well regarded.

[teitoklien]

> you never blame yourself for buying Apple

I do, latest macs have terrible linux compatibility for now, with apple not doing much to help in providing support for it (M1)

They keep fixing and breaking their keyboards, the latest macs are better in this aspect but until even 2 yrs ago, they used to break quite frequently

Apple making it so hard to develop ios apps on a non apple device, definitely brings additional pain, I don’t want to use apple for my computer.

Saying it as someone who really enjoys using the iphone.

I get why people like macbooks so much, but saying “You never blame yourself for buying Apple” is untrue

For me, that would stand for thinkpads and even then primarily for the older ones.

[cassianoleal]

> apple not doing much to help in providing support for it (M1)

marcan (lead dev of Asahi Linux) seems to disagree:

    Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they *also* added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os.

    And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994

[smoldesu]

It's funny how people come out to celebrate in droves when Apple does the bare minimum to not break their own tooling. Another equally likely scenario is that their changes broke internal tooling, and so they added the raw image mode to give Mac engineers a more reliable entry point for prototyping and testing on the new devices.

Regardless, when my mail carrier changes their route to get to my house 30 minutes faster I don't take it as some sort of sign that the UPS cares about me more than the others. It seems more likely to me that Apple saw the logistical value in not breaking their own kernel requirements with every release, and that happens to be serendipitous with the greater development community as a whole. If Apple wanted to help the Linux community, we would know because they'd be releasing UNIX kernel blobs so people wouldn't be forced to spend years re-writing code that already exists. But of course, that's not how their industry works. If Torvalds gave Nvidia just one middle finger for their treatment of Linux, it's hard to imagine how many he'd like to give Apple these days.

[cassianoleal]

> Another equally likely scenario is that their changes broke internal tooling, and so they added the raw image mode to give Mac engineers a more reliable entry point

The second tweet in the thread reads:

    Seriously, I can't think of a single reason why they'd add that for themselves. They build real Mach-Os with their own process. They have no use for raw images. 

    They are saying "hey, use this, it's easier and we won't break it in the future". This is for Asahi.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799767068188672

[smoldesu]

MacOS has no use for it, I'll buy that much. But what about the automated calibration tools or QA software for displays and peripherals? I have a hard time believing that Apple doesn't have some level of internal testing firmware, because it certainly doesn't show up in MacOS. Much smaller companies do this regularly to test batches of production units for defects, it's part of the reason why custom firmware is possible to load on the Nintendo Switch. And Nintendo certainly didn't say "hey, use this", so I really, really have a hard time believing Apple did.

[messe]

I think a lot of people are seriously overestimating the amount of work non-apple hardware manufacturers put into linux support, and have also become far too accustomed to 30+ years of IBM PC backwards compatibility.

[wtallis]

Also, people are underestimating how much Microsoft and Intel keep doing to break core features of their platforms. They've shipped some truly awful breakage in storage interfaces and power management in recent years: poorly thought-out incompatible changes with little or no public documentation, shipped by OEMs in a state that doesn't even work well enough with Windows to justify all the trouble.

[klelatti]

I was making a general point about an analogy with ‘never get fired for buying IBM’ - which of course wasn’t 100% true either. I get it that Apple products aren’t perfect but in general for most consumers it’s a safe bet.

[lotsofpulp]

And IBM lost that status after they decided to tank the relative quality of their product. I presume Apple will suffer the same fate.

[klelatti]

IBM lost their status because the centre of gravity of the computing world moved on, not because of any product quality issues.

[lotsofpulp]

Not selling what people want is a better way to phrase it.

[klelatti]

Right and the think it’s very likely that Apple will remain a very big player in smartphones for a long time - even today IBM dominates mainframes even if no one really cares.

[danaris]

People have been presuming this very loudly for basically Apple's entire lifetime.

I'm not saying I think they'll keep going forever, but I really don't think you should hold your breath.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, I did not mean to imply that Apple is or will be on a downward trajectory soon, just that as IBM was once seem infallible and now not, Apple will be too.

[nomel]

> I presume Apple will suffer the same fate.

Why? Has there been any trend to indicate they're headed in this direction?

[teitoklien]

The quality of ios has been reducing a lot recently,

Sure it has been getting a whole lot of very nice features, but ios has been visibly buggy recently to the point where if I don’t reboot my phone atleast once every 5-6 weeks, bugs start appearing constantly,

From glitching of settings app to outright daily crashes of the settings app , to safari acting weirdly, to the home screen’s app drawer vanishing suddenly or the search function vanishing.

Etc, etc.

(I’m on a stable modern ios version)

[lotsofpulp]

I didn’t write that properly. I meant I expect Apple to eventually get dethroned, just like IBM was. Not that it is currently on a downward trajectory.

[smoldesu]

Their software quality has kinda been tanking over the past few years. Pretty much everything after Mojave has started to slide in the "please don't do this" direction (at least for me), and with Apple Silicon I really no longer have any need for a Mac.

I do get where the parent comment is coming from. Commodification of technology can only go so far, and Apple is walking down the same path IBM (or even Microsoft, for that matter) did to learn that lesson.