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by makeitdouble 1099 days ago
> But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.

I really is not. Current Apple in particular has a strong vision of computers as almost commodities/appliances. The iPod might have been the defining moment, and almost all products after that were all defined by negative functional space.

The iPhone is a smartphone that was built around the idea of having neither a keyboard, nor stylus (then later nor side-loaded apps). These characteristics where heavily touted on stage. Nowadays you can plug a keyboard, but it won't help a lot.

The iPad was defined as having no advanced window management and no compiling, on top of iOS' other limitations.

The iMac was the original "only usb!" computer, and could still be defined today as the no touchscreen computer. Even as of now, the Vision Pro is the headset that's touted as having no primary controllers.

But if you look outside of the Apple ecosystem, these limits only apply to where the hardware can't do it. As many have cited, Samsung's phones can actually act as full computers, and som other android phones can too. Same way Samsung's android tablets have advanced window management, can load linux subsytems and do whatever a computer is supposed to do. Windows laptops have touch screens.

1 comments

iMacs and MacBooks are definitely not “computers as appliances", and you can absolutely run unsigned code or an independent OS (with a vendor-supported mechanism for alternative booting that has been opened up significant to help Asahi along). On Intel macs you could flatly bootcamp windows if you wanted. Is a windows PC an "appliance"?

Not having the ports you want doesn’t make them appliances either, and a touch screen is not a requirement for something to be considered a laptop. Nor, some would say, a positive thing at all.

Parasocial attachment (fanboyism) isn't just a positive thing, there is such a thing as negative parasocial attachment, and you are letting your fanboyism make you say silly things.

http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html

For context, I've exclusively used macs as daily work tools for 2 decades. The reason I did so was because I got tired of trying to make BSD work, and also burned out from windows.

I've heard many people having the same take, we wanted something that "just works".

But to step back, this also means, we don't care as much about raw perfs, we care less about new paradigms, we don't need the bleeding edge, and expect our devices to be stable and useable for 10 years, basically be "classics". And I also know if my mavbook burns down today, I can go to a store, buy the latest 13" laptop and be back where I was in 1 hour at most. They're utterly replaceable.

That's basically what we want from appliances.

I you care in any way shape or form to push the envelope, macs won't be your choice. The best GPU won't be there, the best CPU isn't (Apple's ARM is good, but not as powerful as the top of the line desktop CPU at full wattage), the best form factors aren't there, the most innovative apps didn't go there.

Some companies do crazy things with macs, but they're in a extreme minority. And Apple 100% doesn't care about markets that have no scale.

> And Apple 100% doesn't care about markets that have no scale.

The Mac Pro is an example of this.